What have you been playing recently?

Yeah I need to look into that - I maxed out my handgun and armor with Tinkering and am now nearly broke lol (luckily I already paid Gladys for the nav-doodad).

There doesn't seem much incentive to wear light or medium armor unless you REALLY need to be stealthy or have subpar tech stats (easily boosted by bringing Ellie or Parvati along). Only time it was ever an issue was when trying to hack the door of the security office on Groundbreaker to get Max's info... the armor I was wearing was making me take a hit to Hacking but simply popping it off was enough.

The game's a bit odd as to when it locks you into bad choices - I didn't immediately go talk to Parvati about her romance subplot at one point and she DIED. Guess she got so anxious about the situation she fried herself on a loose cable not paying attention? Or got so down she topped herself? Seems a bit fucking dark. Anyhoo, I reloaded - I'd literally just gone to see what Max and Ellie were arguing about as ADA had piped up about it when we got back to the ship, and then Parvati's quest logs as failed. She met the woman 10 minutes of gametime ago!!!

Then later, I'm in a standoff between some security and bandits, and the security guy knows I spoke to the bandits rather than killing them. There was no "good" option available at the time so I figured I was going to have to kill the security guys, but he let me leave the conversation peacefully. I did a bit more exploring and leveled up, and boosted my Persuasion stat to the point needed to convince him to let the bandits go.

It seems to be the only point at which that can happen, so might be a bug. Every other fetch quest for the crew can be left alone until you're ready (Max's in particular needs you to go to several places that aren't available right at the start).

Combat has gotten much easier - I take down marauder goons with 1-2 shots now (I favor handguns) and I use heavy armor so I don't take a lot of incoming hurt. Companions do if we face mantiqueens etc although I finally got my Inspiration stat up to the point they can use their special abilities in battle, so we'll see.

About to hit Byzantium for the first time.

mATT HAVE YOU EVER PLAYED LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINe a

just for shits and giggles, I reloaded Star Wars: Force Commander (1999).

Early RTS with camera controls.

Once you get past the deficient crash detection/routing and graphics that have aged about as well as anything from that era has, it's actually pretty good. I like the command points rather than resource harvesting to purchase new units which then arrive by drop ship rather than being constructed. Play tends to be a little simple... there's not a lot to manage and there's rarely more than one thing going on on the map at a time to split your attention.

That said, I'd love it if they remade this game. Take the story script, fix the bugs, modernize the look, and you've got an RTS worth playing again.

Shadows of war is a good game.
decent enigine I can play it at 4k.
Fun with cheats

Wuppo continues to entertain. I thought I was probably just about done with the game and a few more plot wrinkles popped up.

Steam is advertising a bunch of demos for the weekend and I downloaded a couple.

Chicory is a cute cross between adult coloring book, Animal Crossing, and RPG platformer. I'd buy it for cheap.

Quench is a hex-based puzzle story about using elemental powers to get herds of animals safely across Africa to the Great Eastern Tree or whatever. Oh, and there's going to be Shadow Animals to worry about later. It's pretty and I'm sure it gets deep past the first few levels, but I feel like it's not something I would spend money on. Also a little laggy on our computer.

No, baba, I'm not interested in lotro, eso, or ogo-pogo.

Upper left audio on subwoofer died so repacing them o wil be playig swtor and sith lords with head phones. When I get a new surround sound speakers. I will be pleaying swkotor with eax tor and a mass effect run with srrround sound speakers.

Ori and the Blind Forest -- finally got a chance at this. Love it. The environmental hazards are, so far, present enough to feel like a challenge without requiring pinpoint platforming just to get on to the next part of the map that's actually fun. Take note, indies. Unfortunately I think I trapped myself in Black Root without a necessary upgrade to get back out, or I just forgot how to wall jump. Still a gorgeous aesthetic and a game I intend to complete someday.

Breath of the Wild -- fun! Getting to the shrines were too involving to figure out over the course of less than a weekend though, so I'm still on the initial plateau. There's such goofy joy in the cooking animation. The hitboxes for standing on things are much more nuanced than I'm used to, so it looks much more natural. Will get back to it eventually but I don't expect to ever be good at it.

Animal Crossing -- play it in the mornings with a baby in my lap because that's the game KJ has in the Switch. Avoiding getting too sucked into it. The toddler loves walking around and talking to animals.

kngdom come deliverance is a good game!

Back into playing / modding X-Wing Alliance. Amazing things have been done with that game engine in the past 20 years.

Here's a link to a 'then and now' video made by one of the cats responsible for a lot of the engine upgrades:

My current project is a revamp of my old Buck Rogers / TOS Battlestar Galactica total conversion. Just recently got the thunderfighter up, running, and shooting yellow lasers with BR/BSG sound effects!

Ever played witcher trilogy marso?

Square Enix shipped FF7R early due to Covid19 concerns, so...








I'm about 5 hours in, Remake doesn't mean what you think it means...
But i'm liking it...

But they left in the humongous sword. So important to reassure fans that that was still in, they gave it pride of place on the cover.

eso love the music

Not thrilled with the loose momentum in Super Mario Brothers U. Also disappointed that it isn't a goofy little title about everyone going to university to learn how to stomp goombas and eat fireflowers.

Been playing the FF7 Remake. Enjoying it so far, I think I'm about 2/3rds through it. Got a few gripes but its been an overall great game.

New save in Ori, turns out you're supposed to climb up the disgusting thing, so, I have done that and am proceeding again.

Really enjoying Ori, it's in that sweet spot where you go "Oh what is the game making me go through now, this is so tough" and then you can do it with a little focus and practice, and then you feel good about crossing that bit and like you're really improving. Not easy, but not off-puttingly hard.

Got a couple more shrines done in Breath of the Wild, one more to go and I'm off the starting plateau!

Big update for Animal Crossing. We'll finally have roses so I can make the flower wagon.

Game of Thrones: Winter is Coming is my current addiction I must admit. I also play Diggy's Adventure because I'm an FB addict.

Been playing Far Cry V.

Got it on sale for the X-Box.

I find myself bored. It literally seems like every mission is the same. Go to X, kill the bad guys, and you're done. There is a story but it's sparse.

Red Dead II was far better because the story tied into the missions. Missions in Red Dead didn't repeat themselves.

Still working on models for a possible Total Conversion of X-wing Alliance. Spent the past month learning a whole new skillset. Angling for SAAB. Some screenshots below; some of these models are as done as they are going to be, while others are will a WIP. The only thing I modeled from scratch is the big space flat top, everything else was a downloaded model that I converted to lo-poly (where necessary) did textures for and converted to an XWA .opt file. Sound editing is soon to follow (music and FX), and then I'll dive into the mission editor.

The big flattop is as close as I could get to doing the Retribution from C.O.D. Infinite Warfare. Sort of a U.S. Navy battlestar. You can see the launch tubes amidships. When I started, those were ACTUAL launch tubes that went into the ship but in the final version I wound up painting them on to keep the poly count under control. I was doing 32 launch tubes using an array modifier in blender. 32 x the number of polys in a single launch tube added up to too much!

Chiggy von Richtofen is definitely a WIP. Those textures are basically a color-scheme experiment.

Been working on a launch tube for the game as well- that's something I've been tinkering with since the mid 2000's when I did my first BSG TC. The bottom one is the one I like best. I've got the thing set up in game as an untargetable ship; you start going one way and it is going the other hella fast, giving you the full on 'launch tube' effect with the appropriate sound effect thrown in. Then it immediately hypers out. It's a bit of a hack but it works great. The bottom one is inspired by nuBSG and it's definitely the one I like best, both modelling-wise and texturing. I modelled all these myself, but some of the textures come from a cheapo sci-fi texture pack I bought online for 20 bucks.

Anyone who ever watched 1979 Buck Rogers will recognize the top one. BIDDY BIDDY BIDDY BIDDY...Cheesy neon, Buck!

Some detailed closeups of some of the textures on the carrier. Most of this stuff I do using Paint and Gimp.

Chig mothership. The model itself only took about ten minutes to build in Blender. Texturing it took a while longer, and then converting it to an .opt file that XWA can use. The ease of that ship to make belies the fast/cheap route the studio went with for the Chigs back when they were producing the series. The 'vertical ship' concept was neat, though. Not often used in sci-fi.