Executor Akamia

Honestly, probably some more productive hobbies. Reading books, writing, building robots with LEGO... maybe learn a musical instrument... Most of which I do anyways, but not nearly as much as I used to.

Unfortunately, I am no help here. This might surprise you, but I don’t own this game. Wish I did, though; I’ve heard it’s really good!

Team Fortress 2

It’s usually not hard for me to avoid spoilers for games I’m interested in but haven’t played yet; most of my favorite games are pretty niche to begin with, and I don’t usually have a lot of friends who play them.

Hooo boy, I was out for a while. 😂 Hold on... Probably, but I don’t remember what it was. This was weeks ago. But today today, yes. Played some Team Fortress 2 and got to put some time in as some classes I wanted to improve at. I have no idea! Fallout in space. That’s about it. Particularly, it plays a lot like games in the series from Fallout 3 onward. Jupiter. It’s closer. Used to be Stellaris, but some of the recent patches have been rife with bugs that made the game almost unplayable for me, so I’m holding off on that until they’re fixed. I’m putting more time into Team Fortress 2 in the interim.

Because I can't currently afford the parts to build a better computer for gaming. 😛

SP's the one with the clamshell design that would later go to the DS/3DS families of handhelds, right? It's been a while since I've played on either version, and I've never owned either myself, but I think I'd go with the SP. It's more compact, so it's easier to fit in a pocket.

For most genres of game, I guess PC, but there are some games I prefer to play on handhelds such as the Nintendo 3DS.

Stellaris I finally was able to synth-ascend the Blorg Commonality in a game with a friend of mine. My economy is about to explode. I also reformed my government into a dictatorship so that I don't have to spend Influence on elections every 20 years (Blorg Commonality starts the game as an oligarchy, which has elections every 20 years) and renamed it the Roblorg Contingency. Now all I have to do is colonize a bunch of planets and build huge fleets of warships, and the galaxy will be powerless to stop anything I do. I'm hoping there's a Determined Exterminator hiding around that I can vassalize. There's a huge chunk of space I haven't explored yet, maybe I can look there. It's blocked by a space amoeba for now, but I can take it out easy.

I don’t even remember. Whatever it was, it wasn’t particularly memorable to me.

Synthetic ascension in Stellaris is one of my favorite things in any strategy game, ever, especially if a given playthrough has been particularly rough on me. Not only does the main species (who starts the game organic) become robotic, your empire gains a significant boost to production, planet habitability becomes practically a non-issue to the point that you can even take over machine worlds from midgame Machine Intelligence empires with no issues – though hive worlds from organic Hive Mind empires might still need to be terraformed – and you are no longer considered a target by Determined Exterminator-type Machine Intelligences, removing their total war casus belli against you and enabling diplomacy. That last bit in particular is something I aim to take advantage of during a playthrough one day; by vassalizing a Determined Exterminator as a synth empire, I can make them fight for me as defenders of the organics they so badly want to destroy whether they like it or not.

Yoku Blocks in Mega Man games. They annoy the hell out of me, and the noise they make in the NES entries of the series doesn't do them any favors. I just find them obnoxious. I'm glad the Mega Man X and Mega Man Zero series mostly went without them. Beyond that? I dunno, I'm fairly easy to please otherwise. Either I love a game or find it boring. The reasoning for either varies from game to game, of course.

I can't think of a single game I played on DOS. I think it's a bit too old for me; the oldest games I ever played all ran on Windows 95.

Most of my games for Xbox One/360 or Wii/U, I keep on a shelf in the room. My DS/3DS games on the other hand, I keep in my room, a small selection of which – that is, about 8, plus one inside the 3DS itself – end up in my 3DS travel case.

Monster Hunter World: Iceborne Hunted Brachydios. I think I made the right call going from HR Lunastra armor to MR Dodogama armor. The armor skills of that set makes his slime mostly harmless to me. I mean, I'll still take a good chunk of damage if it explodes, but at least I'm not getting blastblight. I really like the armor set; I think I'm gonna farm Brachydios to get it and a few of its weapons, and hold on to them until I have MR Lunastra gear.

Stellaris Played a session with a friend. Actually, it was three sessions. Something went horribly wrong pretty early on the first two times that cut us short. First time, he got curbstomped by a Determined Exterminator that had just moments ago tore me a new one. Second run, he got curbstomped by a Fanatical Purifier that spawned next to him. We're on our third attempt. Actually, it's our fourth technically, but the very first attempt started over a week ago and went south after I dramatically underestimated the Great Khan's reaction to my rebelling against them after originally surrendering to them. The first three times, I was playing the Blorg Commonality, one of the game's preset empires, and swapped to one of my custom empires for the fourth run. My friend had been running his favorite custom empire all four playthroughs.

Titanfall 2 A friend of mine wanted to play Frontier Defense with me. I myself was quite rusty at the game, although I was never particularly good at it to begin with. Anyway, we played two rounds and won both. As a Ronin main, I played Ronin in both rounds, while my friend played Tone. Ronin's role in Frontier Defense is "Roamer", so I had to go roam around the field and take care of various enemies, at times even going out of my way to hunt down Mortar Titans, since I was the fastest Titan in the field at that moment.

Different strokes I suppose. For my part, I played MechAssault and it felt too much like an arcade game for my taste, whereas MechWarrior felt more immersive for me. Make no mistake, though; MW can definitely be fast-paced, especially when you're in a firefight against many 'Mechs at once. I kinda miss the rush of urban 'Mech combat (not to be confused with UrbanMech combat. 😜) where I'm moving from cover to cover in my Timber Wolf or Marauder, taking shots at the enemy Assault 'Mechs who think they're the kings of the battlefield. And yeah, that was great. 😂

I grew up on MechWarrior, the predecessor to the MechAssault games, both of which are BattleTech products. I've been a fan of mech-related media pretty much my whole life since. My favorite of these games is MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, particularly the MekTek release (now discontinued) which had the widest selection of mechs to play with in any of the games yet, with the possible exception of MechWarrior Online with enough content updates. I wouldn't consider Transformers to be mech media since the Transformers themselves are not piloted, and I hesitate to even call them robots, but if they count as mechs, then Transformers: Fall of Cybertron is an honorable mention. It's my all-time favorite Transformers game. I wish the Xbox One port was still available. I want to play it again...

Digital Extremes is pretty good about this, at least with regard to how they handle Warframe. Their practices don’t come across as predatory at all to me. Even their closest analogue to loot boxes, Relics, is rendered relatively harmless with in-game trading and the option to pick someone else’s reward if multiple relics are opened in the same party. I once heard a story where someone bought like $200 worth of Platinum, the game’s premium currency. Maybe more than that, maybe less, I dunno. Either way, it was a wakeup call. I don’t remember what they were buying with the Platinum, think it was something to do with Kubrows, but after DE realized they screwed up at some point, they refunded the guy and reworked whatever it was that motivated it in the first place.

Certain megastructures in Stellaris come out too late in most games for them to be particularly useful in a multiplayer run and, to a lesser extent, even a regular single-player run. Particularly, I’m referring to the “Galactic Wonders”, which are megastructures locked behind the ascension perk of the same name. Before 2.3, this was every megastructure in the game that wasn’t Gateways or Habitats – the latter being locked behind the Voidborne ascension perk instead at the time – but from 2.3 onward this is only the Dyson Sphere, Matter Decompressor, and Ring Worlds, with the rest of the megastructures, including Habitats, becoming regular technologies. Dyson Spheres and Matter Decompressors in particular are huge boons on someone’s economy, providing 4000 Energy Credits and 2000 Minerals per month at completion, respectively, which is useful for industrial purposes such as alloy or consumer good production. A Dyson Sphere alone will provide enough energy that you will find yourself with more income than you’ll know what to do with, and you’ll likely find yourself actively trying to find ways to spend it all, in or out of wartime. The problem is that these things are lategame techs that, when researched, still take a lot of time to build, even with bonuses to megastructure build speed. You’re likely to have defeated the endgame crisis already before you’ve finished any of these. Now, to be fair, they are actually quite useful in the postgame if you’re someone who likes to play even after the endgame crisis is defeated. After all, you’re likely to want to do such things as kicking over the local Awakened Empires (because most of them are colossal jerks anyway) and there are also various Leviathans floating around that you might be looking to hunt down. But in regular game settings, they aren’t really worth the time investment.

It’s probably true in the US that employers strongly frown on gamers regardless of the skills one can pick up from video games, but in other countries, gaming’s benefits have been recognized for years. In South Korea, their air force actually had their own StarCraft esports team at one point. For all I know, they still do.

White tail deer, methinks. They're my favorite animal, and I find them absolutely adorable. I mean, they can also be absolutely disgusting sometimes, but that's true of every animal on some level, humans included. But I kinda wanted to care for a deer ever since watching Bambi as a child.

Yes.

I think you asked me that already. 😜 Green Lantern.