All great tips. (I’m currently at 73 hours of XCOM 2 [”XC2"], myself). Here are a few additional observations:

Quiet, Bradford!

Nothing — my wife & I drove out to Reno to visit our daughter, her husband, and their three sons.

Let me add a few suggestions for those just diving into XCOM 2:

I’ve got...(checks Steam)...44 hours into XCOM-2 (XC2) so far, and I’ll say it’s significantly better than XCOM:EU/EW (XC1)— and I’m a tremendous fan of the latter (I won’t say how many hours I’ve spent playing XC1, but it’s over 3 digits).

All great suggestions. A few additional thoughts:

There is something uniquely enjoyable about watching an all-time defense successfully crack an elite offense, or a pass rush so intimidating that it affects every other facet of the game.

Actually, there’s an enhancement — I can’t remember if it’s a gun add-on or a character add-on — that’s a kind of ‘critical hit’ equivalent: with it, you have a (IIRC) 5% chance of immediately killing the target, regardless of how much damage you actually do (or could do). Thus, you fire your gun that does 4-7 damage…

Yes. My couple-of-years-old PC that plays XCOM:EU/EW just fine was choking badly on XCOM2. I navigated (very slowly) to options/graphics, and there is a button for “Auto-detect graphics settings”, which I clicked on. The game still stutters a bit at times, and I’m going to have to buy a new PC (or graphics card) with…

I spent today playing XCOM2 for the first time (my wife kept coming into my office, puzzled that I had been sitting in front of my computer, playing a game since, oh, 9 am this morning), and I think you really nailed it.

I could have written the comment above almost verbatim. HD football — particularly HD college football — is pretty much what keeps me from cutting the cord. And, yes, my wife is also addicted to HGTV. :-)

I predict an early XCOM 2 mod....

Y’know, for all the carping about Kylo Ren, it’s fascinating how quickly he’s become a pop culture icon. And I absolutely loved this video; I’ve been holding off buying F4 because, you know, I have actual work to get done, but almost this persuades me.

I enjoyed having the CFP semi-finals on New Year’s Eve, but I’m also 62, an empty-nester (with my wife), and self-employed. Not sure I’m the target demo for all those commercials. Also, the Alabama beat-down of Michigan State got bad enough that — at the recommendation of a friend on Facebook — I switched over to…

My favorite is still Dishonored. Nothing fancy, just scrolling credits, but the song playing at the end (“Honor for All”) is just a perfect coda to the game itself.

I’m really not an RTS fan, but I enjoyed the heck out of BFME 1 and 2, and this mod looks great. Unfortunately, I gave away my CD copies years ago.

Nope, not illegal. I was part of a software firm a few decades back that simply shut its doors when it ran out of money, with no paychecks paid the last few weeks. We were trying to raise venture funding for a new product, but the firm’s bank account hit $0 before that happened. The CFO told us to take whatever…

Heartbreaking, but not uncommon. I traveled to Beirut in 1998 to speak at a conference there, and a good chunk of the city still looked like this, even though the Lebanese Civil War had (mostly) ended years earlier and a major reconstruction effort had started.

Actually, the “Episode IV: A New Hope” showed up as early as 1979 in the wonderful book The Art of Star Wars. This book contained both films stills and concept art for Star Wars, as well as a version of the script that still included Luke’s early interactions with Biggs on Tatooine. The title at the start of the…

I have no plans to watch the prequels — life’s too short, though I watched the first half of the ‘anti-cheese’ Phantom Menace and found the edited version a vast improvement.