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Shorty

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Posts posted by Shorty

  1. Posted

    I've only played this for a few hours but I'm really liking it so far. At the moment I'm just enjoying an RPG that's not too silly but not too serious? Tired of grimdark or over-dark humour in my sci-fi games and this seems to be having a bit more fun. Ultimately it just feels like more Skyrim but on planets. I do agree with some complaints that a lot of traveling has been reduced down to menu navigation, but when you do choose to float around space it feels very cool.

    I'm only playing on a gamepass free trial but fairly sure I'll buy the Steam version when that runs out (would've stuck with gamepass if it could be modded....)

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    I've been playing this entirely in co-op and having a great time. I've been playing D&D for years so it's great fun to see the lore, recognise the races, to create facsimilies of players we've been in the past. Also the choices you get to pick in conversation, especially for difficult deception checks etc, feel exactly like the kind of laughable ideas a player would come up with that you all find hilarious when you actually land a 20 and it works.

    That said, I'm not 100% convinced the game benefits that much from D&D as a play structure, especially in combat. It already changed a lot of fundamentals because they knew D&D is pretty flawed in combat. And I miss some of the great aspects of Divinity like all the mixing of elemental effects.

    Still an awesome game though, despite that.

    • Like 2

  4. Posted

    On 21/02/2023 at 11:39 AM, bob said:

    The Legend of Vox Machina is very similar to many other fantasy cartoons, but their USP is that their characters are allowed to say Fuck. Anyway, season 2 starts off slowly, but just about gets into a swing around episode 6 or 7, when it suddenly ends because they've only released half a season!? Bullshit. I wish Amazon would stop doing this. Either release them all at once, or one at a time. i hate getting into a binge of a series, and then finding out it's only half there.

    Actually they were releasing 3 episodes a week which is pretty reasonable I think, and they're all out now. I personally prefer a slower release of shows so I can fight the temptation to binge watch and won't go very long gaps with nothing to watch (which is what I'm experiencing now)

    Also not sure if you're aware of it, but the whole thing is an adaptation of a popular podcast/video series called Critical Role - a group of famous voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons, the campaign written and DM'd by Matt Mercer, another big name in VA. They have a lot of laughs and act occasionally and typically childish for a D&D party, hence the general tone/swearing/violence. The players reprise their characters' roles for the cartoon too.

    • Like 1

  6. Posted

    I really need another super low stakes TV series that you're always happy to stick on, especially while you're eating your evening meal.

    Two past examples of this that I think you'll agree are basically identical, are Star Trek Next Gen or Masterchef: The Professionals.

     

  7. Posted

    I bought myself a guitar, yes I'm hitting my midlife crisis a little bit early. I had an electric guitar when I was a teenager but I never wanted to take lessons, I just wanted to learn the tabs of my favourite riffs from my favourite songs, but I never got any good at it. I always thought I'd be able to just follow video lessons, but the internet was also still fairly young then and YouTube was barely off the ground. Such a thing didn't really exist then... but it does now.

    I sold my guitar and sold my amp when I moved house 2.5 years ago....... hell I didn't even keep my strap, and I gave my cool pedal to a friend. And so now I decide I want to pick it back up... I have to buy everything again.

    Along with a discount yearly sub of the "Justin Guitar" app -- I'm putting some effort in for 2023, so far I've practiced 20-60 mins every day for the 31 days since it was delivered.

    Also if you know guitars, don't ask me which guitar I got, cos you'll shake your head at me for spending so much as a beginner (but I did get 20% off)

    I'm posting about this here because I want to be held accountable for this and check back on my progress in 2024.

    • Thanks 1

  9. Posted

    If you have a Switch but you've never had any other means/inclination to play a Persona game - I really, really advise that you check out Persona 4 Golden.

    It's one of the greatest RPGs ever made and I don't think you'll be disappointed. An incredible experience start to finish.

     

    I am however a bit disappointed in the version of Persona 3 that they chose to release, they could've done so much more with it. It's well suited for the Switch though and still an amazing game.

    • Like 3

  10. Posted

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    25, that's crazy! I wish we had a bit of a write-up somewhere of where it all began, it's becoming a blur for me in my old age....

    Thanks to everyone for their hard work contributing over the years, and thanks to all the Nintendo fans for sticking around :D

     

    • Like 3
    • Thanks 1

  11. Posted

    I’m struggling to decide how I feel about this game overall. I don’t think I’ve ever thought a game was simultaneously amazing and terrible before but I think that’s what this is…

    All the wackiness, the Nier-like variety to gameplay, the stylish and pinpoint combat, it’s in a class of its own. But all that is wrapped in this bizarre package of bland backdrops, clunky platforming, horrendously cringy cutscenes and really frustrating decisions around things like menus, animations and challenges. For example, there’s no no way I’m going to suffer my way to 100% on a game that makes rewatch a slow clip of where the 5 boxes you need to grab are, every single time you retry to grab them.

    I find myself just wanting to get back to the action which is sublime enough that I’m still having a good time, and I can see a point in time soon where I start skipping cutscenes and sidequests altogether…

    • Thanks 1

  12. Posted

    The fact that you can just watch Bleach on Disney+ in the UK on the day it airs really goes to show how far things have changed. Back in that ^ era of Naruto the only way to watch the latest episode was to wait for the fans to rip it, subtitle it and share it online. Pretty crazy really! And that's nothing compared to the generation before that had to get pirate VHS at the market!

    Great to support the creators directly, but a bit of me still misses fansubs with their karaoke animations etc and the anticipation of waiting for the release to drop each week!

     

    • Thanks 1
    • Haha 1

  14. Posted

    Congrats Cube! Glad to hear he's doing well.

    I recently had a neice born into the world also crazily early (just barely 27 weeks) - she's got a long road ahead of her but it's incredible what the hospitals can do for them these days.

  16. Posted

    No worries! I've been building websites for 20 years, you get used to accepting that everything has to be the American way....

    So I suppose that should be my contribution to this thread :p Picked it up as a hobby as a teenager, dabbled a lot (often with some old names from these forums) in learning to build websites for bands and video games in the past. At one point, even built an N-Europe competitor! I also built the current iteration of N-Europe and its predecessor. Back then I used to do design as well, but I'm strictly code now. (I know, the site desperately needs a refresh, but it's funny how much less viable that becomes when it's your day job).

    I've been doing it professionally now for... 13 years-ish. Since the day I made a thread on these very forums complaining about the horrors of going 9-5 (hey, at least I got the WFH part from the third paragraph, thanks Covid!). I'm a senior full stack developer, I work mostly with PHP (don't believe the bad rep it gets! It's come leaps and bounds in the last couple of versions), Laravel, Javascript, Sass, Vue, SQL & Docker... to name a few.

    I'm transitioning more towards management now though, tomorrow I'll be doing my first job interview from the other side of the table.

     

    • Like 2

  18. Posted

    I don't know any Python, but I'm guessing that European-style comma isn't going to cut it for a decimal place. So I think what you've done there is make "Kelvin" into an array where the first part is your sum, and the second part is just the number 15

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1

  21. Posted

    Hey yeah, I'm a big fan of bouldering actually! Lucky to live in Sheffield, home of the world's oldest bouldering-only gym The Climbing Works (and for a long time, Europe's largest) started by Percy Bishton who set some of the olympic routes last year. If you watch Bouldering Bobat on YouTube, they were there for the CWIF a couple of months ago setting fun problems and they bumped into a pro Alex Megos while they were there.

    We also have about 4 other awesome climbing gyms - a couple of them being absolutely enormous. Not to mention we are right next to the Peak District national park which has loads of bouldering and lead climbing locations, so it's really popular here. It's not too unusual to bump shoulders with Team GB climbers and other pros.

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    Not sure if the above pic will work but it's me on a pretty steep overhang a couple of years ago. I first got into it about 2018-2019 I think, and was going quite regularly. I was just about getting to the point of climbing font 5-5+/V1-V2 pretty comfortably when covid hit which reaaaally set me back as all the gyms were closed for over a year and I stopped all strength training and put on weight! I'm only just about getting back to that point now.

    It is such a great way to make exercise interesting. I can go for hours and get exhausted but never feel bored or fed-up like I do with almost all other exercise, because there's so much room for consistent growth and improvement, so much problem solving to be done.

    It's also one of those things I kick myself constantly for not trying earlier. People suggested it to me over ten years ago, and I think about where I would've been if I started then and how much better I would've been at that age and regret not trying it sooner!

    • Like 1

  23. Posted

    When I finished my degree in 2009 it had basically killed my entire love of reading. In the gap since then I barely read anything (although - since it's been mentioned repeatedly some time ago in this thread, I did enjoy the His Dark Materials trilogy in that window, for the first time, through the medium of the very excellent BBC audiobook). I decided to force myself to change that by buying a Kobo with a light so I can read it when my better half has fallen asleep and my insomnia has taken hold. With that and a generous voucher at Christmas, my interest in reading has finally been rekindled. Or rekobo'd, I guess (heh heh)

    Before I get to the Kobo books, the only physical book I can remember even trying in that last decade or so was The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemesin - first in the "Broken Earth" trilogy. It was very highly regarded and although I thought it was good, maybe I just wasn't in the right place at the time? Mostly I found it a bit difficult to follow, and by the end of it I wasn't entirely sure what had happened. A couple of years later and I'm not sure I could tell you much of the plot at all.... I might need to give it another shot soon.

    Anyway, onto the Kobo. I've been going mostly for Sci-Fi...

    I started off needing something which comes up when you google things like "something nice to read". As in, I needed something with a real sense of feel-good comfort reading. That search lead me to the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, starting with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. And it was the perfect thing to get me back into reading, easy, lovable characters, a good mix of exploring fun new ideas about species and gender with characters that are easy to care about, and a good dose of humour and adventure. The following books in the series follow new characters and I jumped straight in with the second, and bought the third and fourth for the future. Going forward there are some places where the characters' integrity dip a bit below believable levels, but it's still enjoyable. It was generally just a shame not to be continuing with the first story.

    Continuing on the sci-fi theme, I went for a book by one of the only authors I have bothered with in the last decade - Andy Weir, reading his newest entry, Project Hail Mary. Despite a very generic stupid name, it was a good gripping book that I enjoyed nearly as much as The Martian. I love the direction it took, even if the narrator was very occasionally intolerable.

    Then I decided I wanted to scratch an itch of a genre I've always loved, time travel. For that I went with The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. A really gripping read with a great main character and a fun twist on the time loop trope. I loved this enough that I got another book by the same author, Touch - straight away. Which I'm also enjoying, but not quite as much as it spends waaaay too much time describing settings.

    Took my book on holiday and decided to pause the Sci-Fi trend with something veeeery different and my style at all, but it caught my eye on a kobo store sale. Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. It's a kind of comedy/slice of life/introspection about reality and day to day issues. I almost thought I'd made a huge mistake as one of the opening jokes was about getting a usb port in the wrong way round but I forced my way past that and had a really good time with it. I didn't laugh out loud a lot of times, but I was certianly engaged with the long character list.

    Another one that I knocked out in a single day during that holiday was Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. This was... pretty good fairly standard action fare with just barely enough turns in the story to keep you from guessing how it's all going to end. It was very by the numbers with really overly dramatic storytelling at time, I was surprised how well it was reviewed, but I was certainly interested enough to keep flipping pages til it was done.

    The next books I've bought and am ready to read are The Complete Witcher - purely because the entire set was 99p, All Systems Red - a seemingly short book which is the first in the Murderbot Diaries series, and purely because it's a book that I added to a wishlist 13 years ago just before giving up on reading for-nearly-ever, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

    • Like 1

  25. Posted

    I am surprised nobody had said 7 12 years before it was released.

    While we're necromancing threads though, I did really enjoy the Resi 4 HD Remaster recently in ultrawide 4k. A labour of love that took the dev 7 years or something. Quality work and it was great to go back to it. I was surprised to find it practically unplayable with M&K though, thankfully plays very nicely with an Xbox controller though.

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