I only recently played the first game an absolutely loved it. I didn’t realize the second was so close to coming out. Can’t wait. I know review scores tend to be inflated messes but this overwhelming positivity has me even more hyped.
yeah the director’s cut seems to make the progression much smoother. I am just like maybe 1/3 into it, maxed out connections so far each for new stations I get to. (5 stars on my leg so far.)
I do understand the need for those forced encounters, now I got gears to handle I need to remember to turn off the slow mo when encounter them. XD
I have been losing interest in Blue Prince. (This is spoiler free.) Many of the late game puzzles are beginning to feel grindy. I need to get specific rooms but it’s random chance if I do, and then when I get them it’s not guaranteed I’ll even know how to solve what’s going on. It’s been very enjoyable up until now but it’s lost some appeal in the end.
I have been playing a little Animal Crossing because my spouse got back into it. I have been playing a little Luigi’s Mansion 3 and Mario + Rabbids because I’ve been using my switch more.
I’m right there with ya on Blue Prince. The late game seems more like tricks than actual puzzles. That being said, it also makes it so I feel less bad about looking things up.
There was one puzzle I looked up the answer to and I was furious.
Office safe spoilerYou’re supposed to count the counts but there are four fucking statues?? Not three?? So why the fuck is the code 0303 and not 0304??
ResponseAhhhhhhh, okay. I retract my comment then, but that’s still stupid to me. I was missing a few letters and thought it said something like “GAINS”. I guess I got a few wrong on that row.
Oh, don’t retract it. It is a bad way to indicate the solution since it requires the Foyer and to have finished the grid message accurately. IMO anything that can be foiled by RNG is a bad way to do it.
I’ve had similar but they were all Raising Canes menu items with matching picture. Canes Tenders, Canes Crinkle Fries, Canes Toast, Canes Sauce, Canes Coleslaw.
I am amazed at how well this game is reviewing. It felt like half the critics were dunking on Death Stranding 1 upon release, and then there was this slow reappraisal where a bunch of people changed their tune over the course of the past 5 years. Now DS2 (Seek King Vendrick?) comes out, and with just a little refinement, the critics are all singing its praises. Would the review scores be as high if the general public had not come around on DS1?
Enjoying KOTOR2 at the moment. A More Civilized Age (AKA my favorite podcast ever) is doing a playalong of the game right now, so that has been motivating me through all the clunky combat scenarios. I’m really loving the juicy dialogue and top-tier voice acting. The Exile is so much more interesting than any other protagonist i’ve ever seen in a BioWare game - I feel like I really have a lot of room to interpret what kind of grey Jedi i want to be. I am shocked that Obsidian (and notorious POS Chris Avellone) pumped out this much amazing writing in 10 months.
I never finished all the time trials in Mario Kart 8, and I don’t have the budget to grab a Switch 2, so i’ve been plugging away at those trials to satiate my hunger for MKWorld.
Only just started Pentiment. And by that I mean I got through the background selection, and I’m now trying to decide if I’m happy with my choices or want to go with something else. The game looks really good so far, I’ve heard good things and I’m excited to see how it plays out.
Outlook 2000 was magic, even if it had more security warnings than a trip to Yemen. The current iteration of Outlook that they’re pushing with Office 365 is an absolute disaster, as if they’ve dragged it down to Teams’ level and let it rot away.
The big problems is outlook like every mail client from the early 2000s collected tons of features during the mail client wars where every client needed to do a billion different things, so now there’s dozens of random little features baked in that very few people use but those who do have built entire business processes around.
For example I observed while working at a bank that the backend finance people would use the voting feature to vote on whether to bundle certain loans together. I’ve never before or since seen anyone in any business actively use that feature. There’s lots of other little features and tunables buried deep in Outlook and it’s a royal pain as an IT person to quickly learn about whatever obscure feature a user is complaining stopped working and of course figure out what the intended workflow for the feature is to begin with before I can even start troubleshooting how to fix it
I can’t blame Microsoft for wanting to greenfield Outlook development to a new standard base that’s shared between webmail and the application, but holy crap the amount of technical debt Outlook accumulated is going to take ages to escape from.
Personally, I don’t mind Outlook (new). It sends and receives emails, it shows my Teams meetings on the calendar, and it lets me easily schedule calendar events and Teams meetings, which is all I really need. Most importantly it bypasses a ton of annoying quirks of Outlook (classic)'s license verification and M365 authentication so I generally encourage my users to use it if they don’t otherwise have a strong preference, because it saves me tickets (especially the dreaded “outlook lost teams integration” complaints where Outlook (classic) misplaced its own extension for communicating with Teams (new) and usually involves uninstalling all versions of Teams then installing Teams (Classic) and upgrading it in-place 3x to resolve)
I prefer the new color.
And hot take: I like the icons of O365 for Wort Word, Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint. And I prefer those over 2007. But I can compromise with the icons from 2013.
Agreed, the current batch of Office icons - and the updated versions rolling out soon - are excellent. I’m a big fan. But I still wish Outlook was gold.
Access let you build visual apps, usually data-entry workflows, around its internal SQL database. You could build small apps with it using Visual Basic and a visual UI editor. Plus, all your work ships as a single file, provided the user also has Access installed. In many ways, it was like Apple’s Hypercard, but also way easier to write than webpages with the same capability. Oh, and you don’t need a server anywhere to make it work; it’s 100% local. It was also the next logical step to take after the most complex things you can do in Excel.
That said, it was crippled from the start - still very useful, but not for heavyweight stuff. It’s limited to a fixed number of UI, pages, database rows, etc, so it wouldn’t compete with more expensive MS solutions (this thing came with Office). I don’t think it got a lot of love because of that, but I personally used it to solve some real problems in the workplace, without need of any (official) developer resources.
In the present day, it would actually compete with a lot of simple business cases that are served in the cloud at some cost.
Honestly Microsoft could’ve had a killer product with Access if they made an easier pipeline from Excel -> Access -> Win32 application/webpage with an SQL backend. Like there is some of that pipeline present, but if Microsoft actually followed that vision, created easy wizards for each step that your average office drone can complete and marketed the shit out of it, they could completely own business processes instead of a cottage industry of spreadsheets turned SAAS apps for every niche usecase that could’ve been handled by a common database frontend.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
Exactly. Access was a dirt-cheap rapid application design (RAD) tool in disguise, and very easily could have been shaped into a smooth on-ramp to ASP, ASPX, IIS, and SqlServer solutions. In short: a hypothetical “Access.NET” would have been really something.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
You just described most of my career, and how a lot of contracting shops get their start. Managers need reports, and someone has to program them. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve replaced Excel with custom software; a faster way to do this is usually welcome. That said, the cloud “Data” space is doing a lot right now to reduce this kind of task to Jupyter notebooks and some other proprietary solutions.
Getting ptsd flashbacks from having to work with access.
Database corruption was so common I’ve had scripts in place to run automatic recoveries.
Terrible security, performance, and SQL feature support.
I’m so glad that thing is buried deep where it belongs
Finished Xenoblade Chronicles, I’m playing the extra story now. I enjoyed it this time around. It’s nowhere close to a masterpiece, but the setting is pretty unique and the gameplay is rather satisfying. Especially since every character plays differently from the others.
Playing a bit of Mario Kart World. The new systems (rails, wall riding) seem fun, but I’m not a fan of the constant straight roads. Grand Prix is not great and Knockout Tour is fun but is starting to get stale. The most fun I’m having is in Time Trial, as it seems like the best way to play with the new mechanics.
Playing a bit of Mario Kart World. The new systems (rails, wall riding) seem fun, but I’m not a fan of the constant straight roads. Grand Prix is not great and Knockout Tour is fun but is starting to get stale. The most fun I’m having is in Time Trial, as it seems like the best way to play with the new mechanics.
God i’m so jealous of all y’all Switch 2 owners. The trick system seems so cool and satisfying. One of my favorite childhood game experiences was Sonic Adventure 2, and I played a few of the earlier stages over and over again as a kid because I needed to farm rings (money) for the Chao Garden. I got really good at blasting through City Escape and similar levels, knowing the various optional routes and shortcuts, memorizing when exactly I had to hit a button to snap to a grind rail or light dash along a ring lane. Speedrunning those stages gave me a very satisfying feeling.
After watching a lot of gameplay of MKW, I really feel like MKW is the first modern game I’ve seen that recreates that experience, in a way that modern Sonic games could never. Especially the Time Trials mode in this one seems like it would recreate my modern experience of trying to do tricks through a stage to make Sonic and Shadow go even faster. Sonic Team should be taking notes from MKW in my opinion, this kind of “arcade racing + tony hawk tricks” gameplay is exactly what I want out of a Sonic game.
That’s true! I hadn’t though about it, but it does feel a lot like when I tried optimising City Escape in Generations. Probably even faster paced since, you rarely need to slow down when driving.
exactly! I’ve felt for a while now that Sonic games should use driving game controls instead of platformer controls, and MKW shows a way they could do that and still have a platforming game in there!
If I were given carte blanche to redesign 3D Sonic gameplay, making it control like a faster-moving Tony Hawk game seems like the way to go. Sort of the middle ground between conventional platforming and vehicle control.
bin.pol.social
Gorące