Btw, I’ve got one of these on my desk. With a shorter pole, unfortunately. It’s great and I’ve been using it for over a decade.
https://www.ergotron.com/en-us/products/product-details/45-295#
It’s not just useful because of the monitor positioning, although that’s the main draw, but also because it makes your desk much larger than it would otherwise be.
Not bad actually. When shopping for my current monitor, I was looking for one whose height could be adjusted and that greatly limited the options. Almost any monitor provides a VESA mount, however. Oh well, too late now …
I finished a playthrough of The Council. People say it’s more different when you make different choices than Telltale games; I’m vaguely curious. It was a game in the Telltale tradition, but with much harder puzzles. Somehow it got glitchier from episode 3 or so onward, and the things that made it stand out in the first episodes were tossed by the wayside a bit. I’d recommend it, but I wouldn’t call it a classic.
My wife bought an LG 27UD59P-B to replace her cracking old monitor. It’s definitely quite good and I’d recommend it over my own screen. It’s better yet cheaper. I don’t think that size-wise they come across very different,
My only quibble would be that the cables go straight on the back instead of downward, and perhaps that it doesn’t have a USB3 hub like mine but I prefer the one on my keyboard and the connectors at the front of my computer anyway.
Some people complain it only does FreeSync from 40-60 fps, but I don’t really see the problem. At least for me that’s exactly the range I’d want. Sometimes the framerate drops under 60, not by too much, and then you see a bit of a line on the screen. If you get dips so extreme that the framerate goes under 40 imo you should just lower the settings, although I suppose as far down as 30 would remain mostly playable.
I’ve read that the display is glossy. Is that true?
No, not at all. It has a matte coating. O-o
I just finished A Plague Tale. It had some merit, but I enjoyed it an awful lot less than The Council. I will for sure not be replaying this one. The graphics are mostly outstanding, but I found the gameplay ranging from somewhat boring to downward frustrating at times, except for the first hour or two when it was very promising. It’s a bit of a mixed bag and I wouldn’t really recommend getting it except to gape at the visuals. The voice acting is also good, in French (in which I played it) as well as in English.
The game reminds me of Alan Wake, by which I mean a game I kind of wanted to like but didn’t. I have nothing against games that aren’t all that much of a game (Life is Strange is one of my recent favorites), but when most of the game feels like filler in between the story there’s something not quite right.
After a while you become painfully aware that the game will randomly prevent you from jumping down a ledge or something because climbing up on it advanced the story, so bye bye collectible or fuel that you needed. Sometimes this is done slightly more elegantly with the equivalent of a randomly collapsing or closing doorway instead of an invisible wall, but it’s annoying all the same.
There’s a very contrived mechanic around torches. A torch is vital to our survival? And there are multiple people in our party but we have to put down the torch for a second to climb a ledge? Well blimey, I guess that torch will be lost now forever. Without this continuous torch losing those occasionally interesting puzzle aspects wouldn’t work but I’m actually surprised I stuck with it. I suppose I wanted to see more pretty churches & castles & Roman ruins.
Then there was an “emotional” moment near the end that felt incredibly contrived. It was very annoying to boot because there wasn’t a save prior to it, yet a bunch of materials and the ability to upgrade your stuff. And it’s very easy to die during this contrived sequence. The checkpoint was at the start of the area rather than at the start of the contrived semi-cutscene! This kind of thing happens all too frequently in the game. So there you go, collecting all the things and upgrading your equipment just to do it all over again when you accidentally die on the linear path.
For the €20-something I paid it was okay, mainly for the occasionally gorgeous art & graphics. But it’s repetitive, completely on rails, and the story is so-so.
Completed Still There. Once I picked it up again yesterday, it didn’t take that long to finish. Puzzles mostly revolved around the many knobs and switches of the space station, with diagrams in the manual “explaining” their function, then having to figure out how to manipulate them for the given situation. The game does a pretty good job at steering you towards the right set of controls, so after the initial shock, the insane amount of hotspots was actually manageable. There are a few object puzzles too, but nothing too demanding. Overall, most of the puzzles were quite fun and the solution logical, but there was also one that I eventually had to bruteforce (luckily, there weren’t too many possible combinations).
In between I also played Pilgrims. Finished it in two short sessions. I had never played any of the Amanita Design games so fa, since I did not like their particular style. But the art of Pilgrims was nice, and it turned out to also be masterfully animated. Short but sweet! Or rather, amusing. There might be some replay value in trying to unlock all ways specific puzzles can be solved, but since I’m not into this achievements thing, I’m content with completing it once.
The game reminds me of Alan Wake, by which I mean a game I kind of wanted to like but didn’t
What in particular didn’t you like about Alan Wake? I know that the gameplay/action tends to get a little repetitive, but I thought the story and atmosphere/setting are stunning and really carry it 
Precisely, I thought Alan Wake was repetitive and boring but I wanted to like it because I liked the story and setting. Actually it felt a bit like a miniseries akin to The Haunting of Hill House with a mediocre game forced in. Tomb Raider (2013) is a somewhat comparable horror game that overall does a much better job of joining game and story, except when it thinks it needs to be some stupid action game instead of Tomb Raider.
What somehow feels similar in Plague Tale and Alan Wake is that light is a weapon/defense even if the mechanics are quite different. In A Plague Tale I suppose I mainly liked the setting. The difference with Alan Wake is that I don’t think I ever cared for the game part of Alan Wake, not even in the beginning, while I thought A Plague Tale started out as a pretty decent or at least promising game.
With Christmas preparations complete, I’ve started playing the first title from that Animation Arts Collection: Lost Horizon. It blends nice 2D backgrounds with 3D characters (and some 3D objects) and mostly looks pretty good, even if the 3D models show their age. The puzzles are okay so far, if perhaps a bit contrived. Locations are sufficiently exotic, from Hong Kong to Tibet to Marrakesh to Berlin (oh, well …). Haven’t made it further yet, but so far, so good.
Where it is a bit disappointing is in the writing. It looks like they took plenty of inspiration from Indiana Jones, but without reaching its class (unless you include that Crystal Skull thing into the reckoning).
The biggest failure is that neither the male protagonist nor the female sidekick come across as very likable. I can somewhat sympathize with her, given how she’s being treated, but instead of giving the guy the hiding he deserves she’s just sulking most of the time. There isn’t any funny banter or any other sign of chemistry between the two (but we can already guess where this will surely end) and dialogue in general is pretty cringeworthy, too. I mean, B-movie cringeworthy, and it’s not helped by the lackluster and/or unfitting voice overs either.
The plot itself could be considered good, but unfortunately is a bit at odds with the adventure gameplay. Like “action” scenes that allow puzzling out the solution under no pressure whatsoever, or the fact that we’re permanently in need of cash to buy items or make a phone call, yet at the same time travel across the globe using public transportation with no apparent problem (though no idea how we got onto that plane in the middle of the Himalaya). All in all, it just doesn’t add up.
It’s also the first old Windows title I had trouble getting to run in wine (hardly the game’s fault, though!). It ended up consistently crashing in a very early (Monkey-Islandesque) scene, until I installed the actual 2010 DirectX runtime instead of relying on wine’s own implementation. No issues since.
Guess it’s no big loss I haven’t played this earlier. Still enjoying the puzzles and artwork, just not so much the rest.
I think the Tunguska one I’m (allegedly) playing is the first though? 
Technically correct. I meant the first game of that collection I started playing is Lost Horizon. (Which still isn’t entirely true, as I’ve already played Tunguska long, long ago, just not on the PC). Since Secret Files and Lost Horizon are two different series, either one makes for a good starting point 
.
Guess I might eventually play them all, though. Even with the aforementioned flaws, they’re good representatives of beautifully drawn, hi-res 2D adventures. With games like Beyond a Steel Sky or Technobabylon 2 moving to 3D, and others going for a more cartoon-y look or pixel art, that’s a style I’ve been missing lately. And as I’ve said, the visuals don’t disappoint!
Completed Lost Horizon. Not too memorable, but I really liked the endgame puzzle(s), where you had one character in the present and one in the past, who had to make sure that areas and objects were accessible in the future.
Now I’ve started Lost Horizon 2. The first disappointment: it’s entirely modeled in 3D and looks noticeably worse than the first part. The writing and acting on the other hand are better (or my expectations sufficiently lowered) but with a worse overall plot.
The devs must also have anticipated my criticism of the “action-puzzles”, because now they have included (awkward) QTEs and timed puzzles. While this somewhat disturbs my sit-back-and-relax approach to P&C adventure gameplay, neither of those were overly taxing (so far). Though it took some figuring out that not only did you have to click as fast as possible, no, you also had to hit the right spot! As long as they don’t go overboard with that kind of stuff in later chapters, it’s actually a decent way to add a sense of urgency where needed.
Another novelty I found interesting are object-object combinations with three objects or more. While this is perhaps not entirely new, it’s usually done by first combining two objects, then another one with the result and so on. In LH2, once you do the first combination, a new view opens that shows the required objects (or an indicator that some are still missing) and then you have to assemble them in a specific order. Has the potential for some nice macgyvering!
It’s a shame they abandoned the 2D backgrounds, otherwise it would be pretty much on par with the first installment. The puzzles certainly are.
Sidekick high! That was the game!
@ZakPhoenixMcKracken this was the game I tried to remember after our Escape room.
You mean this one?
Yes, that one.