He is indeed, no longer with the Yogs on account of some allegations which I have not actually confirmed if they were valid etc, but he's off on his own, doing primarily Minecraft stuffs.
Last of US part 2 dropped this week, been quite busy so not played many games recently, nice to get back in, appears to be a much better port than part 1, It's playing lovely on my machines big gaming machine and small handheld, whilst I have always been a bit basher of these scaling techs DLSS/FSR the fact you can run such big games on an APU with pretty decent image quality and framerate is a shocker, sure there is some noticeable artifacting when handheld is played on a big screen due to how low these have to go for a 60 framerate but on the small screen its less noticeable and games look and play amazing.. It does have a steam deck setting but as I have an 890M I can run Very high with a few bits knocked back, using FSR and framegen.
Working my way through the XCOM games again. Played Enemy Within not too long ago, it turns out that I still know that game like the back of my hand and I can still roflstomp my way through it easily. So I’m on to XCOM 2 and I forgot just relentless it is… Like Enemy Unknown/Within, it does become much easier in the late game, but getting to that point is pretty brutal. I bought XCOM: Chimera Squad and played no more than about an hour of it. I do want to play that properly, so it’s as good an excuse as any to go back through the first two games. Spoiler It still bugs be that the canon for XCOM 2 is that you lost against the aliens, no matter how good you might have been in the first game. I do try and play most games via the Steam Deck these days, but there have been a couple that just don’t work well. Not always for performance reasons, either. XCOM 2, for example, I can get to “decent enough” performance, but the UI text is quite difficult to read on the Deck’s screen. So much so that Steam flags this as being an issue and prompts you about the screen magnifier when you launch it.
More of a problem with older titles where support different screen sizes and dpis is not there, had similar issues with I think Anno 2070 when I moved to a big 4k screen and it did not have support for this, it assumed I was running a 27" 4K and wanted to quadruple my text size so I could see it which in fact ruined the benefit of 4k on such a game as the GUI elements took up all the screen making my 4k look like I was running 1080p (though that is the sort of solution you want in the Steam deck for XCOM ) Always worth checking so see if there may be a config file where you can tweak gui elements, some times its in the engine and not in the game menus. Some of this is just bad eyes though, I have to use my old man readers these days on the little screens, booo
Really struggling to work out what to play next... having just "completed" Borderlands 3 (well completed the story, and the remaining missions arent engaging my enjoyment) Not fussed by the genre per se, but want something that is easy to pick up/put down... and doenst require me to have to sink long hours, as my gaming time comes in dribs and drabs...
Battlefield 3 / 4 Seriously, what went wrong with the Battlefield series? I remember BF4 quite uncharitably, but it's actually still amazing. The DLC maps with the hover tanks, railguns and drop pods are gloriously loopy. Starfox 64 Best game ever made. Battletech Advanced 3062 I'm torn between Advanced and Extended, but BtA is definitely much easier than Bex, Clanners aren't quite the horror show they are in Bex. Plus on this run I have entire Trinary of Timber Wolves, which may as well be God mode.
I have now reached that point, and it can indeed be a bit of a cakewalk. The “chain kill” abilities when Sharpshooters and Rangers make it all the way to Colonel are pretty comical; Sharpshooters nailing target after target, or Rangers belting around the map with their sword swinging around like lawnmower blades, all in a single turn. Your favourite soldier can still very quickly get absolutely wrecked by a lucky shot, and I still utterly dread Sectopod encounters. But I am at least absolutely rinsing the game for all its worth - I could complete it fairly easily at this point, but I want to get as many countries linked up as possible and complete all the research I can.
Humanity It's currently on sale. It's Lemmings if it was in 3D and there was a metaphor attached. The puzzles are quite good. At least one optional level took my a long time to get right. I'm not quite finished with the main game yet, but I've been addicted. It's very good.
I haven't played in VR yet, despite having an Index. It's been all Steamdeck for me. I'll have to give it a try.
Blue Prince, with the youngest. Loving it. I mean, I had more fun with Chants of Senaar when we played that together, but there's a lot more to this one - though it's also luck based, unlike the pure puzzling of CoS. So close to having unlocked the 46th room now, but nowhere near having uncovered all the secrets!
Just been playing a bit of the Indiana Jones game on the A750. Despite having only 8GB of RAM and this apparently being a problem for the game it seems to run pretty fine at a nigh on locked 60 (adaptive vsync enabled) at mostly high settings (including textures) 1440p with XeSS on Quality. Game warns that there isn't enough VRAM but only noticed a couple of stutters in the ~ hour I played. Can't see anything obvious in the game which suggests it is running some sort of Texture LoD like Hogwarts will do so *shrugs*.
Got bored it grinding out XCOM2, so did the last mission and finished it. Started XCOM: Chimera Squad… again… but I just didn’t grab me… again… Moved on to Tactical Breach Wizards instead and it is just an absolute riot. Definitely scratches that XCOM itch, but each encounter is more like a puzzle. It never feels too punishingly difficult, and, far from being a "whoops, I should not have done that" save-scum mechanic, the game actively encourages you to use the 'rewind' function to try different outcomes. The dialogue and skits between the characters is by far the best part about it, I look forward to that more than the missions.
Did you play Phoenix Point? I liked it although I never finished it. I did finish the modern Xcom games though.
