Maluvin

@iggypoptart said:

How do you grip your mouse?

You should be basing your purchase on that primarily. I'm mostly a palm guy so I use a Mionix Naos 7000 and it's definitely my endgame mouse. Great sensor, even better ergonomics. But! It totally doesn't work if you use claw/fingertip. So figuring out your preferred grip is important imo. For claw I really like the Zowie FKs or the Mionix Castor.

That's kind of interesting. I definitely using a fingertip grip but I use a Mionix Naos 7000 and think it works just fine that way. I could definitely see a claw grip not being great with it though. Great mouse!

I'm replaying the Witcher 3 right now and I'm now of the opinion that Novigrad is really problematic from a design perspective that I didn't appreciate on my first playthrough. Novigrad is kind of a reunion area if you played the previous two games because you run into so many characters that were a part of those titles like Zoltan, Radovich, Dandelion, Vernon, Ves, and, of course Triss. If you have a familiarity with all of those characters I think those encounters have more impact and meaning. If you don't have that background it feels like more political busywork and sidequest-like errand running. I had that background and therefore had no problem enjoying Novigrad but it is bad design problem to leave new players out in the cold IMO.

Dandelion is kind of a tricky character in W3. He has more heart and depth than his exterior and mannerisms would immediately suggest but even with that caveat I do feel like his actions aren't especially compelling in W3, not enough to carry his part of Novigrad without that background familiarity. Also, I don't think they do enough to remind the player that he's the Narrator for the whole game. He's telling Geralt's story and should come across as a stronger figure than he does.

Triss is tricky too. If you had a romance history with her previously I feel like her sections in W3 are good but if you don't have that her quests have less of an impact perhaps. Also if you have Yennefer front and center in your mind (as the story kind of sets you up to do in the beginning) then Novigrad is another long period of being away from her and Triss just ends up being another sorceress Geralt runs into after Keira.

Even without the backstory and/or romance dynamics I'm just not positive that you get enough of the friendship aspects between Geralt and Triss and Dandelion in W3 and that's a shame.

On the one hand I agree it's a pretty limited number of titles. On the other hand as a Dragon Age and Dead Space fan that's an incredible price if you have the time and inclination to deep dive into those titles. If they threw in Mass Effect I'd definitely consider trying it out.

I was getting ready to head to bed and heard this news. What a punch to the gut. Such an amazing talent.

Edit: Also I want to hand it to him for making it through life in such an amazing way. Lots of "rockstars" burn out after an album or two, plenty go down with their drug and alcohol habits, or turn into really nasty people. Not saying he was perfect but it's nice to see a guy who was able to keep making interesting music right up until the end and as far as I can tell was loved and respected by just about everyone. A real inspiration.

Not really tech but I got a new computer chair to save my back from when I'm doing hours of programming and/or gaming. Also a new circular saw which is pretty sweet.

Here's the thing for me personally: I know I personally listen to just about every podcast they put out eventually, dig a lot of UPF, like Jar Time, like the first few seasons of MGS, like VinnyVania, like Playdates, and so on. Even if quite a bit of what I watch or listen to is non-premium, over the course of the year I get so many hours of entertainment that I feel pretty comfortable with the value of my subscription. Yeah, I could just get the free stuff and I'd be enjoying myself but I know my sub goes towards helping the entire enterprise and I feel good about that. If you're a cash strapped individual I could see questioning the value.

My multiplayer gaming is of a very particular type these days. Online voice chat in a lot of FPS games is pretty much dead to me (which is fine in my book) but since the kids are older these days it's fine in our house for me to hop into something like Destiny or Battlefront and play with with chat muted especially if I'm just doing some light PvP stuff (definitely refrained from even that type of thing when the kids were really young or saved it for after their bedtime). I do a lot of local coop and passing the controller back and forth (Mario Maker has been a big hit for us this year). We also play a fair number of DotA bot games as a family which is surprisingly fun especially when we do "theme teams".

BTW I said I don't raid or play MMOs anymore because of the kids but I do know people who seem to manage that successfully. Family focused guilds/groups (not necessarily the same as "casual" groups btw) can make a difference in that respect but it's something I never ended up diving too deeply into.

I will say there were moments when I definitely made mistakes. I remember once going with my son, my brother-in-law, and a friend to go and pick up some gear from the friend's house. BIL and friend had been playing Left For Dead quite a bit and they fired it up for a few moments while we were waiting on some things. I watched my very young son's eyes instaglue themselves to the screen and immediately thought to myself "I feel like this is going to bite me later." Sure enough a couple days later I'm sitting around with my wife and son and he out of nowhere starts telling her about that moment. I look at my wife, she looks at me, and I realize I've made an error. I appreciated at that moment how that content had immediately left an impression on my son and that it had probably been something he'd been thinking about for a couple days to the point he wanted to bring it up to his primary sources of knowledge (namely me and my wife). Interestingly now that he's a teenager and could play that without any sort of objection from me or my wife he really has no sort of affinity for something like LFD. His most violent titles tend to be things like Dark Souls and even then his focus is on the difficulty and challenge more so than any visceral elements.

In regards to screen time we definitely made it a point early on to have defined limits on device/screen time. That worked out fairly well when the kids were younger and we did a lot of outdoors stuff, book reading, and lego building together along with lots of things like soccer, music lessons, and such. We were also fairly cash limited at the time so the number of devices along with the need to share things was constrained in a way that actually ended up being a positive thing IMO. As work got busier, we made more money, and the kids got older I have to say our overall screen/device time individually has increased to a point within the past year or so where it makes me uneasy at times but it's kind of hard to put the genie back in the bottle at this point without being a bit of a tyrant. I also have to keep things in perspective - like my 18 year old daughter sometimes will sit there tapping on her phone a lot and while I may feel like she's choosing the phone over me the reality is I know she's often texting with her friends and boyfriend and setting up RL stuff to do later like going to a movie or setting up a D&D session or going to a dance and even without the phone I'm naturally going to be a bit more secondary in her life compared to when she was a lot younger and I just need to make a certain amount of peace with that. For us the trick has been to have the presence of mind to ask if anyone wants to do anything when it looks like people are drifting towards time wasters and not missing opportunities to do things together.

Congrats on parenthood!

I have two kids, one who will be graduating from high school this year and another who was born with life threatening health problems and a genetic anomaly but is doing well today. I could get into some of the life experiences I've had in that regards but since you asked about how parenthood affected gaming habits I'll delve into that.

First, unless you have a problem stepping away from a game to deal with things (which is a legitimate problem for some), there's no inherent reason you have to give up gaming, however, you're almost certainly going to have to adjust it in some manner at different points.

I remember when my son was particularly young I had to be really conscious about what I was playing around him. Some of this comes down to you and your wife's thoughts about certain content. It's pretty uncontroversial to stay away from really gratuitous gory violence but there all kinds of grey areas (like what to think of bloodless but violent problem solving which is actually pretty prevalent in a lot of games). The whole "hitting as a solution" mechanic starts to feel a bit different when you've spend a good deal of time during the week explaining to your kid how you should and shouldn't solve problems. That kind of led to me missing out on some games that had a lot of buzz at the time and that was a little but of a bummer but the same time it also gave me motivation to seek out and give some other games more of a chance than I may have otherwise been willing to do. Those games I passed up were obviously still there for me to try out later.

A non-content thing I had to adjust to was stepping away from games that either wouldn't let me pause or would suffer if I stepped away. That pretty much killed raiding in MMOs for me and something like DotA really wasn't viable when the kids were younger. I didn't want to be that guy interrupting everyone else's game. Ironically I think it led to me getting to enjoy Dark Souls because I was more willing to accept death as okay since I had to be willing to accept stepping away could happen at any moment even when it was a time I had agreed with my wife to set aside for relaxing. Also led to me rediscovering my love for turn based strategy games.

As the kids got older I started being able to roll certain types of games back into the fold. Content that was previously off-limits gradually become content that I could discuss with my kids. I also make it a big point to play games with them every chance I get and realizing that means I may end up playing a "bad" game occasionally in service of family fun. There're are actually a lot of days now where I'm watching them rather than them watching me play and it can be surprisingly fun.

I've also come to appreciate the insanity of device cost now that the kids are teenagers who want their own PCs. Putting together a mid-range PC for myself was already a budget concern but now having to balance things out in a way that's perceived as "fair" can be rather tricky. Obviously they're not entitled to anything but I still try my best.

Also just accept you're going to get it wrong sometimes but you probably won't break your kid and there are a lot of things that are out of your control.

Finally, none of this happens without talking to my wife about all of this stuff. When we're acting like a team it's manageable and great. When we don't it can get tough.

Pancreatic cancer can be really rough (killed my great grandmother) and the onset can be fast depending on type. Really going to miss that guy and his music but, man, what an amazing life and legacy.

KOTOR2 is my favorite for a lot of the reasons that Austin has put forth over time.

Close 2nd would be Tie Fighter.