shinymcshine

Inside No. 9 will return on BBC Two and iPlayer on Wednesday 8th May at 10pm.

The earlier seasons were definitely my favourite, so here's to the final series.

Bit of a weird story given the uncertainty around the future of German CRPG developer Piranha Bytes...

German government wants games like Baldur's Gate 3 to 'also go on to be developed in Germany'

Well Ep 3 & 4 were much worse (in terms of uncomfortable viewing) than 1 & 2 were, if that helps.....

Is there any way of setting a party formation (i.e. who stands where, how your team move, set who is at what position when combat triggers etc) ?

This is such a fundamental thing is CRPGs but can't see anyway of doing it here.

It's even more annoying when walking in an open world environment with identified traps / area effects that unless you split the party and guide each through individually, on a group walk they'll just amble along setting off identified traps etc (the route finding algorithm not accounting that you don't want to do this) - even if I could put them in a single file line it might help.

My missus suggested we watch 'Baby Reindeer' on Netflix.

Watched 4 episodes so far - bloody hell it's grim - the show itself fine, but what a horrendous true story.

So I'm in the Underdark, and just freed Nere from the rockslide, and then, after a choice driven battle it drops even more poor gaming BS on me - really bad:

Fortunately there's a number of good things in the game too !

"Copper box" "Bags of Silver"

Oh come on, at least pretend you bought 'The Secret of Monkey Island'.... 😆

Really enjoyed Fallout, and there's so much more too that they haven't yet explored, so Season 2 could be great.

My brother had a 48k Spectrum, but don't actually recall buying anything for it (in the days of tape to tape copying with other kids in school) so that was just a bunch of blank C15 tapes from Boots or WH Smith.

First actual one I recall buying was around 1986 when my parents bought a new TV & Video from Comet and got a free Tatung Einstein thrown it.

So it was probably Le Mans on the Einstein:

Having bought the original & Dark Arisen versions across different platforms I'm looking forward to this one - but happy to wait a year or so to see what they do with it (patches, additional content etc).

Think I'm coming towards the end of Act 1 - got a pop up message when I went to head out on the Mountain Pass road that I needed to level up before continuing that way.

So it was back to merciless slaughter the remains of the Goblin Camp for exp (as I'd previously taken the fight at the Druid Grove Gate) - again it's super weird that the Goblins are just plain aggressive rather than "Oh no you killed the leader, you must be a mighty powerful Drow" but I'll just have to roll with that nonsense.

Then it'll be back to the Underdark.

KCD was alright - definitely a bit closer to Witcher than ES games (in terms of playing set protagonist) but also has that janky roughness of Risen (and the early game toughness of that and Elex - for a good while you are pretty poor at combat and can die easily).

The whole realism thing is often more a hindrance than bonus though - you need to actually master real hard skills (how controller & game mechanic works) in order to lockpick and use archery successfully - and the learning curve can be pretty painful (lockpicks & arrows are pretty scarce and expensive relative to your wealth, at the beginning, and it's really heartbreaking to break or lose them when you're getting to grips with the gameplay).

Even Alchemy skills meant carefully following a set recipe in specific order to make your concoctions (this isn't just chucking things into a pot BotW style, but it's mashing, mixing, boiling etc) - nothing here is given without making you work a bit for it.

Not really sure it delivers on its expectations and ambitions - but certainly worth a run through (if you've got the patience).

Whoa whoa whoa - let's backtrack a bit on that one....

....doesn't that film also feature Kristen Stewart......!?!?

SteamWorld Heist was pretty fabulous - look forward to playing a sequel on GP.

FFS this game makes no sense at times.

I'm doing the Goblin Camp in Act 1 and because my MC is a Drow the goblins all act with a certain reverence and respect - which gives a Drow specific dialogue option to order the goblins to do things - all well and good.

Until (potential spoilers):

It's mostly the under 25s that I know who play online FIFA / EA FC etc

Really liked some of Alex Garland's recent stuff - Ex Machina and Annihilation were great, the TV series Devs was fantastic, albeit Men was pretty so so.

Oppenheimer 

Seen a cross section of views from previous posts about this, and think I'm aligned with those akin to it being a bit of a boring mess.

The lack of signposting the timelines was bizarre (esp. in the beginning when it was clearly going between two different periods, but not actually putting a frame on when).

It felt like a good 90 mins worth of content stretched into almost double that - and whilst there was no doubt a reasonable story to be told it still didn't go into much about any of the other characters aside from the lead - so it was difficult to empathise too much with anyone.

Lae'zel in BG3 was very forward - I'd barely had any direct dialogue with her, then following one fight she just initiated a dialogue along the lines of "I like the way you do things, let's hook up next time we're in camp !"

And that was it, and away we went....

Can't recall any other game that put it out there quite so easily (esp. after the laborious pursuit of Rank 10 Social Links in P3 Reloaded).

OMG what an unholy mess the camera makes of trying to manage combat when it's split over different floors/levels.

Other games simply base this thing on a cube like grid, simply allowing you to move up & down floors/levels to select target areas, but here you just seemingly have to try to zoom in/out/rotate in order to try to hit the sweet spot..... bleh !

It's more that you have no idea of the difficulty level until you commit to making a 'dialogue driven' skill test (R3 tooltips just give you your modifiers) - whilst for combat it shows you the % chance before you commit to an attack etc : so the game's own logic (in showing it for one thing and not the other) is somewhat illogical.

i.e. I've had a couple of skill checks that were difficulty 2 and others that are difficulty 15 and there's no indication, before you commit to taking the test, of what that difficulty level might be - and it doesn't seem to let to go back & avoid a test once you've picked it.

Played FF Tactics Advanced so much on the GBA SP !!!!

@Maryokutai You do seem to have some sort of Kristen Stewart season running.....!?!?

I'm about 8 hrs in now, and whilst I'm really quite enjoying it, the universal acclaim (and sweeping the board at the BAFTA Awards) is utterly baffling.

There's just so many poor interface decisions (maybe exacerbated by me playing on a console) and odd / poor gameplay mechanics - when compared to things like the Pathfinder, Pillars of Eternity, Solasta, Wartales or even D:OS. Feels to have got a bit of a free ride due to the popularity of the official licence and how really nice it looks.

The hidden skill check thing makes absolutely no sense when in battle you are clearly shown a hit % (why would you know that if you don't know the likelihood of passing other (non-combat) checks before committing to them !?!?).

Definitely not a bad game, but I do wonder how many people bigging it up have played many other CRPGs (albeit if they hadn't I don't think BG3 is particularly welcoming, with it's lack of clear system introduction). Notable perhaps that both Pathfinder games got 34 Critic Reviews on Metacritic, D:OS 39, D:OS2 46 whilst BG3 has 119.....

Well I loved that first episode of Fallout (albeit I'm pretty sure anyone who hasn't played the game will have no idea whatsoever what's occurring....)