Skua

Only if you assume that its performance will continue improving for a good while and (at least) linearly. The companies are really struggling to give their models more compute or more training data now and frankly it doesn’t seem like there have been any big strides for a while

I’m never going to actually watch any of the live action Popeye horror films, but it is funny that we immediately got three of them

Man those games are great. I recently-ish tried out one of the decompiled versions of the original after the source code leaked. It’s still a lot of fun

What you describe is a huge part of vehicle racing in general. Getting into a flow state is fast. If you can stress an opponent out enough by threatening to overtake or even just keeping up, you can very often push them to start taking bigger risks and to drop out of that flow state

Funnily enough, if you do really well in a specific mode of some of the Wipeout games, you do indeed get a rating of “zen”

The SC kickstarter was 2012, but it started development in 2010

Star Citizen has been in development since before both GTA V and goddamn Skyrim released

!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works

Em dashes are definitely a less reliable sign in professionally written and edited articles. That’s the context where actual humans will use them most often

I haven’t played the Outer Worlds, but isn’t a whole lot of it about making fun of companies doing this kind of stupid shit?

Based on a quick look at some videos showing off the max settings, it doesn’t even look like it’s doing much with all that demand. It looks like a completely normal big budget game

I could potentially see something along the lines of giving each civ a “canon” path that sets its abilities and having the aesthetic stuff match your chosen civ the whole way through working. So if you pick the USA to start with then you get American visuals / music / names etc the whole way through, but you automatically get the English bonuses in the appropriate era for that

It’s definitely not. Whatever the flaws in the end result, Firaxis do experiment substantially with their formula. Doing that is actually what caused the complaints this article is about

The idea is that it’s split into three ages and you change your aesthetics and bonuses between each one. So you might go Romans > Spanish > Mexicans in the three eras, for example. The intention is honestly a decent one, I think: make it so that games aren’t functionally over and therefore boring by the halfway point. It’s usually clear who has won long before they actually do win, and the fact that basically nobody ever played the late game meant that late game civs and mechanics were a bit of a waste of time. I don’t have VII though, so I can’t say anything about how it feels in practice

AC Competizione is on UE4’s graphics and in-house physics, so I imagine they’re doing something similar here

This exchange just popped back into my head for some reason. Your description of the approach to the flower was spot-on! Turns out it just happens to be a similar approach to Siofra. Took me a few attempts, and fire damage is a bit of a miserable situation for my dex build with a bit of int (level 150, scadutree… 9, I think? Maybe 10?), but I got there. I found that the best thing I could do was actually just to absolutely max out my own durability and accept that I was only getting one attack off per opportunity. I was having a really rough time avoiding the thorn eruption attacks, so the crimson seed talisman basically giving me two extra flasks worth of health was great. So long as I used fire damage and hit it in the “face” I didn’t really need to do anything else to get plenty of damage

I have since gone through the specimen storehouse and found my way into Rauh, which I was absolutely delighted by because it looks exactly like Shadow of the Colossus and I’d been itching to get there ever since I found that waygate that gives you a preview of it

I suppose it makes sense for it to be tough considering that it’s intended as an endgame expansion and it’s also replicating the new character low level experience with the scadu blessing system

I have actually found that the Land of Shadow has heaps of alternate routes to places, they’re just much less obvious than before. The map is so wildly vertical and overlapping that finding a spiritspring or a tunnel or one of those cliffside staircases of protruding gravestones can take you to a whole new area

I have not seen whichever part that is, no. Although it sounds like the same experience as finding Siofra for the first time, which I think was one of my favourite moments in the entire game

Nothing wrong with that! I hit an absolute brick wall with Margit when I first played the base game because I hadn’t played a Souls game in years. I explored around until I found the secret route to Liurnia and did most of that before I even got into Stormveil

There’s one with three phases? That is so absolutely going to catch me out with no flasks left whenever I first get to it, god dammit. I can’t wait

Which one is the third? I’ve done Belurat and Castle Ensis (if it counts?), only just started poking around in Shadow Keep but it looks absolutely wild so far. I also made it to the putrescent knight’s arena but I’ve not tried actually fighting it yet, just jumped in once to see what was going on at the end of a session

The knight was pretty brutal, but fortunately this run has been my “learn to parry” one, so I came basically perfectly equipped to fight any player-model enemy that isn’t using colossal weapons

Oh hey, I grew up playing Gran Turismo as well! I actually dug out the old Playstation 1 when I was seeing family last Christmas and we had a splitscreen session racing each other on the 1997 one. It was a blast

That kind of in-depth career mode is oddly rare in modern sim racers. A lot of them are very online PvP-focussed. And I get that, but still, it’d be nice to have more. Things that come to mind are:

• The original Assetto Corsa is a bit old now and the Content Manager and Custom Shader Patch mods are basically mandatory, BUT it is extremely flexible to mod and you can make it look exactly like a Gran Turismo game if you want. It has a career mode, but it’s only a series of specific racing challenges and there’s no collecting or modifying of cars
• Assetto Corsa Evo is in very early access right now, but it might just be exactly what you’re looking for when it does fully come out. It’s due to have a single player career mode, it looks like it’s going to do some kind of car collection mechanic, and it even has honest-to-god Gran Turismo style licence tests
• Automobilista 2 does not have a career mode (yet? It’s on the main menu but greyed out), but apparently a fan decided they were going to do it themselves. AMS also comes with the advantage of having much better multiplayer than Assetto Corsa if you want to play with friends; AC’s multiplayer is quite limited and does not let you add AI to fill out the grid
• Grid Legends might be worth a look, but I can’t tell you what it’s actually like to play because I haven’t tried it. I have played Dirt Rally 2 by the same devs and it does have a very GT-esque career mode. It describes itself as simcade, though, so it may just be another Forza for you depending on how it drives
• Le Mans Ultimate is a more specialised experience, of course, but it’s due to get a proper in-depth career mode soon

It is a pretty dim time for the single player sim racing experience, but there’s fun to be had!