solitaire

I actually caught up on S4 recently, but unfortunately did not like it. S3 was actually the one I enjoyed the most of the two, if only because I thought it was really amusing that they just decided to do Andromeda.

It reminded me a lot of Stargate Universe, a complete tonal whiplash that was clearly imitating other popular shows rather than a continuation of the franchise. I was pretty kind to it in the beginning because SGU got pretty good after I got over it not being Stargate as well, but Discovery S2 completely killed any hope I had.

Anson Mount as Geralt but only if they promise to recreate Witcher 3's opening scene 👀

It Takes Two would be my introduction for a partner who doesn't game very much. Co-op, easy to play, fun in a really low stakes way with a great story. I had tons of fun with the game playing with an ex.

Raft is another I played with an ex that was a lot of fun. It's a very chill co-op survival game where you build up your boat.

I disagree with most of this thread. Microsoft must maintain market share at all costs, any additional monetization from tracking or ad revenue is a very distant third to that. It lives based on being the default option. A new launch will bring in new users and help keep existing ones, but it must be seen as successful. So Microsoft needs to port as many of it's current users over as possible.

Second I think is pruning the nightmare of legacy support. A "new" operating system lets you set a more modern baseline and tell people to buy new hardware in a much more user intelligible way. No having to explain why Windows 7 no longer works on someone's 2007 laptop that came with it, or come up with a maze of partial support and having to work out what the last usable update was.

I've been looking for rentals lately. Every inspection has dozens upon dozens of people show up. Rental vacancies are at a tiny fraction of a percent. No landlord will take someone if the rent will cost more than 30% of their income. To qualify for a studio apartment it takes almost double the median wage.

I hate it so much. I've budgeted so that I know I can afford these places on my income, I have a significant pile of savings and a stable job. I have been looking for a place for six months and been rejected from them all.

I've given up. Even if I could get a place it'd be cheaper to pay a fucking mortgage.

That's interesting, when I learned to touch type in school we weren't taught to use the right shift. Likely an oversight rather than intentional, but I just use my pinky to hit the left shift while using the left hand side of the keyboard.

If you aren't going to find a new job, document any inappropriate behavior. Talk to the other women and get them onboard. Let them know who he is. It wont take much to have him out on his ass if he does anything. Bring up his conviction when you report misconduct as well.

There are plenty of jobs he can work that aren't with the best friend of his victim.

I was really hoping for the link to be Let's Lynch the Landlord tbh

I thought after playing Star Trek: Resurgence, which I adored, that I'd follow up with The Expanse: A Telltale Series. I'm a fan of both series and The Expanse seems just as well suited to the format, I've enjoyed the other Telltale games I've played and I really like Camina Drummer. Recipe for a slam dunk.

Off the bat, The Expanse has a lot of advantages over Resurgence. It's far better on a technical level - it never crashed, I didn't have any visual bugs, I didn't have any performance problems and there were no input issues. All things Resurgence was rife with.

But here's where the problems start. The Expanse, in a technical sense, is better graphically. It doesn't look better though. It's just creatively kind of dull. This is going to be a running theme with the game - it suffers any time an artistic choice had to be made.

There's only a brief moment in the first episode - of five - where we escape the uninspired industrial corridors. You might point out those industrial corridors are part of the show's aesthetic, but they don't convey the same details about how these machines work and how the people live in them. They miss details like how the decks are laid out in relation to the direction of thrust, and are weirdly wide rather than that utilitarian claustrophobia. The show also had no problem finding spectacular space vistas that are largely absent here.

But visuals are not why we are here. It's the story, right? But for the first time in any Expanse media - from the books, novellas, show, etc - I was incredibly bored. None of these characters are remotely interesting. The Camina I know is intense, driven and decisive. This Camina is unsure, anxious and just all around unimpressive. The politics are gone - not that the faction don't get a lot of lip service, but everything said is incredibly surface level and dull.

The game is blatantly obvious in how it forces outcomes regardless of choice. I was particularly frustrated when I shot a mutinous crew member multiple times, saw him floating limp in space, only for him to teleport mere moments later and have a gun pointed at another crew member again. I had these whiplash moments pretty often, where it felt like there needed to be an intermediary set up scene but instead we just awkwardly jump to something.

More important than decisions in story outcomes is stuff you find while exploring. People live or die based on these. Except you have no idea whether clicking something or walking somewhere is going to trigger a cutscene that'll push you past a threshold where you can't return to find something. Locations of items rely on moon logic - you don't find meds in any of the med bays you go through, you them on a random crate floating in space. The result is an anxiety over whether you'll miss something, and butchered pacing as you aimlessly walk around trying to find these things that could be anywhere.

The voice acting is sadly sub par. I really liked Camina's actress in the show, but she sounds like she is phoning it in here. The others aren't any better. The belter accents were particularly awkward.

It feels weird to talk about game play in this genre, but with dialogue choices this weak I couldn't help but notice how much worse The Expanse's were. There is a lot of tedious filler walking, jarring video game-y avoiding patrolling "drones" with comical red laser beam search lights and holding a button until a thing is collected. Resurgence had plenty of issues in this regard but, to it's credit, it mostly just cut to the next scene (at least in the first half).

The one puzzle I remember was moon logic. You need to work out a password, which is connecting a series of shapes, and are encouraged to look around the environment for shapes that might have been important to the previous inhabitants. Is it any of the pseudo-religious iconography? Anything of sentimental importance? No, it's the path of the silly connect the power lines chore you did earlier.

Ugh, I could go on. This is already way longer than anyone should read. The TL;DR is The Expanse gets a 3/10 for me, compared to Resurgence at a 9/10. It should have been an easy passing grade given my investment in the series and it's suitability for this format but it's just so creatively bankrupt.

Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) is my favourite pirate game. No, it's nothing like what you think a licensed tie in game from 2003 would be like.

It's a real oddity. This was made by a Russian studio and originally meant to be a sequel to their previous age of sail game, Sea Dogs. In Russia it was still marketed as a sequel, without the Pirates of the Carribean branding. It has basically nothing to do with the movies in reality. I have no idea how or why this ended up being a tie in.

I don't really have a short hand for describing the genre. It most reminds me of space sims - where you control a vessel which you can replace, has an economy/trade system, management mechanics, factional reputation systems and an open world. It's not a simplified as Freelancer, but not a spreadsheet game like the X series.

The sailing is great, a happy medium between completely arcade stuff where you just point your ship where you want to go and sims. Wind and weather play an important role without being tedious or overwhelming.

You also control a character for ship environments, like boarding, and exploring towns and islands (with swashbuckling combat, of course). It's pretty bare bones but the variety is appreciated. There are lite-RPG dialogue/story mechanics and quests, though I do not want to give the impression this narrative heavy game. It's an RPG style that used to be relatively common but not so much anymore.

But the real highlight is the New Horizons mod which greatly overhauls the game. It's been developed for almost 20 years. I don't recommend playing the vanilla game - I enjoyed it at the time, but it's just an inferior experience to the mod.

Best yet, it's free. The game is abandonware.

I'm unironically disappointed. I'd take any new direction at the moment, I've already been pushed past the point where it wouldn't make a meaningful difference to me if it got worse. Even a change with a low chance of getting better is worth it over a guarantee of remaining shit.