This reminds me of the old way of thinking regarding animals. Into the 19th century, people claimed that they had no inner mentality or emotions, and did not actually feel pain in any real way — it was all just an instinctive surface response.

Civ 6, most likely, with a smattering of whatever.

I don't remember any body of water large enough to have an island in Toluca Lake, and I grew up in the Valley. That wasn't the lake with the original El Torito, was it? I think that was a bit far west to be in Toluca Lake, but my grasp of the geography over there is quite old.

Blah gaming recently. I got around to installing Convoy, which I had Kickstarted a long time ago. Fun little game, but that final boss fight felt cheap and unbalanced, compared to my prior battles, in a matter far worse than I felt in FTL. Not sure if I will play again.

I am largely plowing through the two-fisted bounty of "stuff I bought on the Steam summer sale months ago" and "stuff I get from the Origin vault for free."

Like I said above, play XCOM2 on rookie, enjoy the learning experience, and then replay it at a "real" difficulty level. It is totally worth replaying, and you can always add mods or the DLC to mix it up a bit if you want something new.

Oh, and FYI, the game DOES NOT reroll anything on load/save. You have to restart the missions entirely to get a new random number seed. I love that decision, personally, but it's good to know.

Stop XCOM2 right now, restart, and play on Rookie. I know, I know … but you will learn the game properly that way, and then be able to enjoy it. Don't learn it while beating your head against the hard wall of failure. It's okay. The game is still fun on rookie. Just do it.

Good luck sticking with Sunless Sea. It was after I had a "did nearly everything" run and died that I just had to give up. Then again, as a KS backer I now have Zubmariner, so maybe I'll go and try it again.

Man, I loved Zaeed. I played the game super late, and he was a freeby included in my version, and he became my favorite character of the game, despite lacking proper dialog.

I played it with the controller, as it really seemed like the M/K interface was an afterthought. The games didn't come to PC until years after their original release, after all - this being the era when it seemed MS and the big boys were dead set on making sure the PC stayed dead as a gaming platform.

Basketball season is starting soon, and I finally installed the copy of NBA2K16 I got for cheap on the summer sale. I am a big basketball fan, having been raised with the Showtime Lakers and followed most every Lakers game during the Kobe/Shaq era. Despite all that, I have always avoided basketball games. I was…

I thought the planet scanning was the highlight of that game. It felt like something a ship's science 3rd mate might do, which still vastly more "space duty like" than pretty much anything else in the game. The little planet descriptions were really well written as well. What can I say?

I haven't played any of these, but the approach sounds fascinating. I have always appreciated novels which take the time to portray a little bit of downtime, and which pace out the plot with the little moments of people going about their lives. Martha Wells is an author I always noted for doing a good job of this -…

Yeah, I talked my way past that one. I tried it once, and got beat badly. Same with the Crystal Dragon. I got through the whole game without ever feeling anywhere close to overpowered, which was rather nice.

It's been a while, of course, but I remember that the biggest problem was the the end-game items you need to accumulate, like Dawn Fragments and whatnot, cannot be passed on. Inheritance may help a bit, by allowing one to preserve a difficult-to-get crewmember (engineer from the prison, for example), or giving a…

This week I have been playing RimWorld. Enough has been said about the game elsewhere that I have little to add, other than a quick observation that the maker of the game seems to understand very little of agriculture, or small-group dynamics, and is instead convinced that everyone is an atomized individualistic…

I really liked Sunless Sea, but I just can't stomach the mid-game grinding. There is a ton of story content you can unlock more or less as soon as you find it, but then the ending of most stories requires an absolutely insane quantity of high-level items that would just require bloody forever to actually get.

Wait a minute, are you saying that you don't find vacuuming a source of great personal satisfaction in real life? How about when you suck up a big wad of sand that has accumulated on the stairs, and hear it traveling up the tube to the cannister? Or when you get that crap in the corner that the broom would not…

Is that the crystal dragon? Because if it is, I am not sure if it is even supposed to be beatable … at least not at first.