deanb

Yeah it looks kinda neatish, but not really FF, not really a stealth game, not really an action game. I'll probably pick it up regardless, but at least there's the release of FFIX to tide me over with a proper Final Fantasy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35459054 UK scientists given approval for genetic modification of embryos to research miscarriage risks. Won't be implanted.

They're still tweaking the UI, which I guess is cool (compare with the above video). Though, doesn't seem very "Final Fantasy".

http://i.imgur.com/nDrxL85.gifv

I too have being playing some board games. First up: Tsuro You each have 3 tiles (pick up new tile at end of turn) and you start at an edge of the border (not super clear but there's little white "pegs" along the side of the grid) and place down tiles each turn to move your piece (mine is the golden one up near top, I lost this round) along a path, while trying to divert someone else off the edge. Got to make sure that you don't stick yourself in tight spot, so it's sort of trying to unravel all the paths in your mind while place each tile. Start of game it's fairly safe, but a couple turns around and the board is soon super complicated. It's pretty neat game and over fairly quickly. Might pick up a copy for myself (assuming we don't have it, have gained so many boardgames since I last properly delved in). Next up we played Funemployed In this game it's essentially Cards Against Humanity, with a wee story telling twist to it. Each turn someone takes a job advert out, and you use your four cards (which you can briefly trade with those in the middle) to go to the "interview" and explain, using your cards, why you should get the job. Here I was going for the position of "School Nurse": I was in the top 1% of my class at school nursing school, I've a utility belt full of helpful cures n remedies for anything that may happen, be it a scrape or the school pyromaniac, I'll sit them down on a stool and find out what's wrong soon enough! The game ends when someone draws the "My Job" card, they say what their job is and everyone else interviews for it. It's a more SFW themed version of CAH. Neat, though not overly compelling and tbh the Job Adverts list seems fairly short so you'd soon run out of roles. Codenames So for this one what we did is scroll up and read Hot Hearts description. I was one of the first Spymasters and housemate (owned the game) was the other sides. He went first. "Drinks 4". Turns out that a lot of mine were also drink related. Sure made it fun for the rest of the game. I will say it gets a bit harder if one of your team mates has...I don't know but sort of dyslexia related. Reminds me a bit of some of the word games we used to play in English lessons (we used to play Taboo, Just a Minute n similar). I managed to stupidly jab one of the pieces while guessing, was the Assassin right out of the gate. Zombicide: Black Plagues A medieval/LotR themed version of Zombicide. Need I say more? One of my favourite tweaks to this though is that there's new card holders which I wish more games would come with. The main major change is that this is a necromantic curse, so occasionally a Necromancer appears (bottom corner there's a all black, slightly billowing cape figure (housemate is in process of painting the models) which'll add a new spawn point, which if it can reach another spawn point will become permanent so there's a rush to kill him. My wee annoyance, since I know from regular Zombicide it's an expansion heavy game, is that there's no weapons in-game capable of taking on an Abomnination, you need to find "Dragon Bile" and a "Torch" instead to coat it and set it alight. But no doubt future expansions will include a "Heavy Crossbow" or something along those lines). And finally we wrapped up with Secret Hitler This is a PnP copy my housemate got, which you can't tell cos it's black n white is actually done on quite nice card. If you've played Resistance/Avalon then this is very much that kind of game. One of you is hitler, some of you are Fascists and the rest are all Liberals. Your aim is to either get Hitler into power as Chancellor or to pass all your Liberal laws depending on side. The Fascist track is kind of neat cos it can have either half swapped out to change early n end game play with different powers granted as progresses (the symbol you can see up next is the power to kill another player (so if you're a Liberal you can use that to kill Hitler, or a fascist to kill a Liberal)). For the most part though we're joking about being Merlin n Lancelot n such cos yeah it plays so close to it, with the whole voting on a team (we had two guys we called "team incompetent" cos one of them as Chancellor managed to bing a Liberal card, the last one to win, and put down a Fascist card cos he'd not realised we were one off winning). There's more Fascist that Liberal "laws" so there's many a time where a Liberal will have to put down a fascist law. I was bummed that in like 5 games of it I was a Liberal every time. Oh cos of complaints about using "Hitler" despite the fact it actually being pretty spot on thematically and not just for shits n giggles, the creators have put out a slight tweak: Secret Santa and Secret Trump. @HH: Coup is neat, we actually seem to have a rather large box of Coup appeared on the shelf so I'm not sure what that is. I kinda hate bluff games like that myself, though I usually do alright mainly through not bluffing and instead having the cards I'm claiming to have (being Duke a lot helps). Spyfall I've only played the once (and was brought up while playing Codenames) and I didn't really enjoy it much, mainly cos of a heated argument (well, as much as one gets with boardgamers) over if the Sainsburies outside, which is only a small one, counted as a "supermarket" or not (I'd said something implying no, which got the "he's a spy" target on me) Anywho, hopefully I shall be more active in this thread in coming months, and as always my photos n such are here: http://imgur.com/a/y50vJ/layout/undefined#0

It's a really good bundle, but I already have 90% of the games(cos it's a good bundle)

Don't look up nails of survivors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki then.

This is pretty well done....oh and with the video ending it turns out it's from the same guys above.

Yeah this is quite a big leap because it isn't brute forcing a problem, which is the usual method we make computers work out a problem: throw a lot of CPUs at it. This can work at chess cos you "just" calculate all the possible moves, and sift through them as each move is made, which in chess gets easier and easier as each move limits the amount of possible next moves. Go is the opposite, it's a lot harder as the game goes on. Having a lot more positions doesn't help things either. So it's using pattern matching instead of just brute forcing all the moves. Oh and this is somewhat bigger news in long run purely cos it's been a bit of a dickwaving PR contest between FB n Google yesterday (FB announced they're working on a Go AI, then Google announced there's already works pretty damn well). Google being that company that crawls through all the pages on the internet and Facebook being that crawls through all the people on the planet. Applying Go AI to their two databases can likely lead to interesting things (Google's tools are already becoming common place without folks even really noticing the gradual shift in the results you get, from the "Knowledge Box" in the right hand of searches, to direct answers and more recently "People also asked". The Auto-suggest is just dumb number crunching of what people already typed in, the "People also asked" is understanding what people are putting into Google, what they're asking for, and other queries it's related to that don't contain the exact same search terms.

Also on the no hair front I'm increasingly having less choice on that anyway Would you rather have President Trump, or President Palin

I'm fine, only time I disconnect is when I go into the kitchen/utility room but that's cos it's way at the back of the house and router doesn't stretch that far (there's also nowhere to plug-in an extender as it's all work-top plug-ins, including two next to cooker). Recent Android versions did change how it connects to Wi-Fi though, I'm not sure off the top of the head what the change was but I know it sort of makes wi-fi a permanent-ish thing even if you turn it "off". I think mainly for the location data.

I'm currently playing DDDA still. Recently became a Knight, I'm taking my time with this game but much faster now I've acquired several Port Crystals. tbh the lack of "proper" fast travel is what drags it out, and without the Eternal Ferrystone this version has I reckon I'd have chucked it in. Got 5 escort quests lined up to go to Bloodwater Beach (or whatever it is, sounds like that) which is in the furthest South-West point, and the capital is in the North-East so it'd be insane to have to walk that, while protecting your charge, 5 times over. Instead I can plop a port crystal down (which I did last night) then just teleport between capital n beach in a near instant and get several quests out the way. On my mobile I'm on Pokemon Shuffle and to my shame I kinda installed Simpsons Tapped Out again. I am a sucker for skinner boxes but eventually I kinda burn out on them. Kinda crap cos I have proper decent games on my mobile to play too.

https://youtu.be/Y9j9RWkPstc I don't know what's going on any more and Pikachu has a scary voice.

But that's the FFX-2 opening, this is the FFX opening: On the upgrade front I think I like FFIX over others. Though yeah FFX had pretty enjoyable and straight forward combat, always recommend it as a "my first FFX" just cos the combat doesn't take much to wrap your head around (apart from knowing to fight zombie evyra you should use cure magic). And yeah, thought it super annoying at the time that folks hated on XII for the gambit system but then stroke DA:Os shaft with it having the tactics system and they're exactly the same thing apart from needing to find advanced "gambits" as items.

Dead of Winter is pretty sweet.

I think Pokemon in general? I dunno. Obviously not a new game or anything, but not even like GO, which it could sorta tie itself in with.

I dunno, I feel could have been a bit more "Pokemon-ey"(the pokemon look a bit poopy quality tbh too). It's cool they're doing a superbowl commercial and all, but maybe better quality?

Yeah, this is more like "I spent 90 minutes of my time watching this, I don't regret it, but I wouldn't recommend it to others either".

Yeah I've kinda massively scaled down my Destiny play time, though partly a mix of other games to play and not wanting to super burn out. Did enjoy SRL. But yeah kinda feel atm progress is the very slow gain of light level and not much else to it, patrolling the Cosmodrome gets pretty samey over n over. I've a few story missions to do, though I'm kinda sucking at them (especially given one you've got to take on a bunch of taken and you die once you've got to restart the whole thing all over since it's not a strike with match making). From what I'm to understand they'll be doing Iron Banner/SRL/this valentines day stuff instead of proper expansions/DLC like Taken King n such which kind of sucks. Probably got Destiny 2 on the go which is probably why, though given it's a MMO kind of thing I'm confused on the current model cos it does make more sense to do it all expansion style such as ...well nearly all other MMOs (I guess Guild Wars n FFXI did get sequels many years down the line, though both have expansions too). The PvP maps imply there's other planets to go exploring, and plenty of lore to dive into. Can't quite do that with PvP leagues.

I kinda like the recommended blogs, usually leads to stuff I like. But yeah, no idea where the whole "tumblr = SJW" trope came from.

I'm kind of amazed none of the jackbox games have come to Chromecast given the console equivalents work in pretty much the same way. I know Hasbro have a Chromecast version of Monopoly n Game of Life n such, with the slight snag that each user needs a copy of the app, which all told for 4 players makes it cost more than the physical game.

It's "Bollocks". sorta pronounced "baw-looks" but quite quickly. Bear in mind Season 4, which saw it shift from RTD to Moffat, also had a delay with just 4 "specials" running that year instead. I imagine there's a lot of things to suddenly reorganise that would delay filming a fair bit. Also BBC do have their shit together, the people that hold the purse strings don't (lot of crappy politics going on). I imagine that doesn't help much and likely would have been no new Who this year regardless. They've got the new Chris Evans Top Gear this year too which I imagine being their other tentpole title is likely to be drawing on funds a fair bit.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-01-22/doctor-who-showrunner-steven-moffat-quits-to-be-replaced-by-broadchurch-creator-chris-chibnall Steven Moffat is quitting to be taken over by guy who did Broadchurch, and there will only be the Xmas special this year, no Doctor Who until 2017.

There's King of New York out now too. But generally some starter games are Monopoly, Cluedo, Catan and the like. On a more serious note, there's plenty of smaller cheaper games to start with. Munchkin isn't for everyone but it's a good starter game. Likes of Coup are pretty nifty for small groups. I've found Saboteur to be a good starter game and scales really well from 3 to ..I think 12, if you have the Saboteur 2 expansion. TFG has the good idea though, most will have either regularly scheduled gaming nights, or infrequently scheduled demo days. If they have neither it's always something you could suggest, it's a good way for them to get in more folk gaming n get some pennies. Here's a bunch of board games I've played with relevant forum link to my write up: http://imgur.com/a/y50vJ#0 Oh Betrayal is maybe a tad pricey to pick up at times, but it's also pretty great. Some occasionally fucked up broken outcomes, but otherwise it's quite neat and the horror story tropes are a theme everyone should be somewhat familiar with. XCOM is cool, though frantic and good if you have gaming friends. Epic Spell Wars is also kinda small, simple and super fun too. Breaks friendships though, but it's all tactical.