I didn't post here in a while:
Finished Titanfall 2 (PC) thanks to the Steam free weekend.
Bland protagonist that wall runs with a robot sidekick that's more interesting, which is it: this or Jedi: Fallen Order?
Though the robot in this case has a voice actor doing their damndest to sound like Peter Cullen and is a humungous mecha.
It was fun, looked pretty and didn't overstay its welcome.
I had tried the demo back when I had my old video card and screen, I remember it playing a bit slow with most settings turned down and a 1280x1024 resolution but with a RX 580 it was a really smooth 1080p all settings maxed experience.
Finished The Cat Lady (PC)
I had it on hold for years because at the time I had found it a bit too depressing.
I still don't really like the kayboard interface, there is really no reason why this couldn't have been point & click.
Apparently I got the good canon ending, there is a non-canon golden ending apparently but is impossible to get on first try.
Finished Still Life (PC)
The game was stupidly easy bar the cookie puzzle (I have even found a page that lays down the "reasoning" to deduce the ingredients and basically assumes you know how to make the cookies in the first place. What the hell they were thinking?) and the lockpicking puzzle that both led me to check a walkthrough.
The lockpicking puzzle is technically doable but the way it resets a few steps everytime you make a mistake made me lose my patience.
It's not even that inspired either and the ending feels rushed.
Hardware-wise I had to use DGvoodoo2 to make it work properly because it doesn't deal well with modern GPUs.
I finished Still Life 2 (PC)
I tried to play it properly but at about two-thirds of the game I finally got fed up with this slow-as-molasses, pixel-hunting, solve-this-puzzle-in-time-or-die mess and solved the last third/quarter of the game with a walkthrough.
Walking doesn't feel responsive, clicking on stuff doesn't feel responsive, the puzzles are either stupidly easy, stupidly difficult or reliant on pixel-hunting. The story and atmosphere are also inferior to both Still Life and Post Mortem which weren't exactly masterpieces (especially Post Mortem with its clumsy attempts at non-linear puzzles with multiple solutions) but they felt at least competent to an extent.
I know kids back then apparently liked the Saw movies but I don't see why wedge one into a series that usually dealt with classic Jack the Ripper style serial killers with occult motifs and least of all trying to tie puzzles to a game over timer and put in a limited inventory that only makes you walk around more in the end which is the activity that the developers went out of their way to make as tedious as possible due to the crappy pathfinding and ever-so-slightly overlong animations.
Oh, well, another one off the backlog I guess.
I then had to migrate to Joystick Gremlin due to Windows 10 finally managing to kill CH Control Manager (the virtual peripheral driver caused BSODs on startup if the HOTAS was plugged in and it often refused to swtich profiles even with USB energy-saving protocols disabled).
It took me a while to figure things out, and it adds a few steps to make things work for games that don't allow to select devices manually, namely the inability to to hide the physical devices means that you need to make sure vJoy has priority in the control panel, or doesn't have it in a few cases.
Also the click on the ministick on the CH Pro Throttle without software is recognized as multiple buttons, each press corresponding to a different one, and the numbering is different which scrambled the mappings even in the games that have native HOTAS support.
At the moment I have rewritten for JG the profiles for X-wing, X-wing vs Tie Fighter, Tie Fighter, Freespace Open and Rogue Squadron 3D, only about 20+ profiles to go!
Then I got a new PC, same GPU and peripherals but everything else including the case is brand new. Mostly so that I could hand down my old one to my family activity so my brothers would finally stop buying crappy laptops that they never move away from the office and can't even alt-tab between thunderbird and firefox without thermal throttling.
Star Wars Squadrons is much more pleasant to play without crashes. Of course by now finding players for fleet battles has become problematic and there's lots of waiting. Dogfight mode instead seems to be still going strong, I was even able to do a faction-specific challenge (win 3 with the new republic) rather easily which means there are enough player that choosing a specific faction won't give issues when trying to find a game (I usually set it to random).
Unfortunately I did burn out on it a bit, the ranked fleet battles can be extremely frustrating at times as the way the game evaluates your losses seem influenced by your team mates performances and often you lose a bunch of points for being the only one in the team that knew what they were doing even if the match was actually neck-toneck rather than a catastrophic loss.
I'll probably try to raise to the ranks anyway as the current ladder will last for another 40+ days but not right now.
Halo: Reach (PC) reminds me a bit of ODST which means that I'll probably end up liking it more than the main installments.
I tried the Sleeping Dogs steam demo again because apart from performance issues my mind drew a blank from the last time I tried it and the remastered is only 3 Euros on GOG.
No performance issues this time but I had trouble convincing the game to use mouse and keyboard properly.
First it took my HOTAS as a gamepad with only gamepad prompts and keyboard was only partially mapped, then I plugged in a real Xinput gamepad but the buttons were scrambled, then I unplugged everything and the game refused to use even the few keyboard keys that workled altogether prompting me to plug in a gamepad. I had to use CTRL-ALT-DEL to recall the task manager and force-colse the game because it refused to alt-tab. And yes, steam input was disabled.
I had to unplug everything before launching it to get it working with mouse and keyboard.
Does anyone know if the remastered version sold on GOG has the same issues?