I finished Race Driver: GRID! I got all the cars, won all events and got both myself and my team to the top of the leaderboards. It was fun but I definitely need a break from this title, a LONG one.

I’m still thinking about what to tackle next. I’m leaning towards either Shantae (the original Game Boy Color one) or Shadowrun: Hong Kong but my brain is rather fickle right now so I might end up playing something completely different. So many games to choose from…

I get that, I was just wondering about whether it’s OS related or something like that since I or people I know never had such issues despite all of us playing on high settings. It’s just personal curiosity, don’t worry about it.

Thanks for the recommendations! I’ll keep them in mind if I end up sticking with the game in the future.

Yeah, I tried it vanilla during the weird middle ground where it got some improvements but was still lacking in many aspects - I’m pretty sure it got more updates since then. Do you think the base game is good enough to try on its own or are there any expansions/kits that you’d say are not necessarily required but at least strongly recommended?

Oof, that sounds rough indeed. Can’t say I had to deal with any of these issues myself though my last playthrough was a few years back so perhaps I lucked out. What system are you running it on, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m curious what could be the reason for that.

Are you playing the base game or with expansions? I never really managed to get into TS4 for some reason and I wonder how much it had to do with having only the vanilla version and how much with simply preferring the older titles. I should really give it another shot someday.

I have a few tips for the first Witcher that might help a bit. Its combat is like a (simple) rhythm game, you need to click with specific timing (signalled by the change of mouse cursor) to keep the optimal combo going. Also keep enemy weaknesses, your combat style etc in mind when fighting - not engaging with game mechanics can make things way more difficult then they really are and it’s one of the reasons many people bounce off of the game. Sure, it’s old and somewhat janky but some of the problems can be avoiding by playing properly.

Anyway, that’s just a suggestion. Good luck!

Which Sims are you going with, the original or one of the later ones?

There isn’t any real story beyond “you’re starting a race team, good luck” - it’s completely focused on gameplay. The only “cutscenes” in the game are short videos explaining certain event types but they only show up once or can be skipped (24H Le Mans).

RE6 isn’t really that bad honestly. Sure, it’s not the greatest game in the series but as long as you keep in mind it’s an action game and learn how to play (it has a surprisingly deep combat system which isn’t explained in the game itself) there’s plenty to enjoy. This guide shows a good amount of what’s possible, if you’re curious.

I’m almost done with Race Driver: GRID. I got all the cars, won all but the final 6 races and pretty much got my fill of the game. I soured on it a bit (mostly due to the amount of events I’m not a huge fan of) but I still like it overall. Not enough to grind for the first place on the career leaderboard though.

I won’t be writing a big summary of the experience as I already mentioned everything before (limited number of tracks, aggressive opponents, mostly fun driving model etc). What I can write however is: playing this title gave me a bit of insight into what I’m interested in in a racing game (in term of events). For GRID the end result looks like this:

Everything else is pretty much a toss-up depending on the event or track, varying between “this is great” and “please kill me”. It was fun but I’m kinda glad I’ll be moving to something else soon.

Does it? Disregarding some minor smoothing/simplification usual for an anime adaptation, it looks pretty close to the original manga from what I’ve seen.

Looks great. Can’t wait to see the original versions of these characters, should be fun.

Fix for VRAM leak on some AMD systems.

That’s why everything kept crashing when I tried to play anything?! Praise be, here I thought my PC is on its last legs. Looks like you’ll have to survive a bit longer old chap.

No prob, glad it was of some use.

I have some experience with that so I’ll throw in my two cents.

TL;DR for Poland:
It’s the usual case of loud minority (far-right) and silent majority (everyone else). Most people are fine with immigrants, especially if they get to interact with them. Things may change as polarisation increases though (and there’s a pretty significant push for that at the moment, unfortunately).

Long version:
Poland was a pretty multicultural country through a good chunk of its history. It had it ups and downs, plus plenty of conflict and racism (similar to what was present in other European countries at the time) but it wasn’t until WW2 that population homogenised into what you’d think of today.

After the war, immigration has been slowly but steadily increasing - starting with people from USSR and south east Asia (there’s a pretty significant number of people of Vietnamese descent for example). University cities like Warsaw, Cracow or Lublin are full of international students from all over the world. These people often find jobs and stay around integrating without issues and functioning like everyone else. Same with those who immigrate for purely monetary reasons though here integration can often depend on what kind of job they do/work environment they end up in (low pay workers often live and function together to a higher degree than blue collar ones). Even then, there’s usually some interactions between them and the local population (don’t expect any stereotypical ghettos of unwanted “invaders”).

Are things perfect? Obviously not, especially with the rise of far-right rhetoric, but most Poles in my experience either don’t care or are more than happy to interact with foreigners. Heck, many still treat it as something unusual and exotic.

As for Poles being blunt and rude, some of it has to do with how Poles are in general. There’s less “fake” friendliness you’d often see in the Anglosphere and more straightforward “what you see is what you get”. For example, if you ask a Pole “how are you” the usual response won’t be an automatic “fine” or “I’m good” but rather how they actually feel at the moment.
As always, there’s no one size fits all in this kind of thing and temperaments will differ based on person, region etc. but it’s not just people being ass-holes (usually).

Anyway, these are my observations on this. I’m sure there are people with less positive view on this topic but hopefully it’ll clear some things at least.

I decided to go for a change of pace last week and jumped into 2 racing games I haven’t touched in a while: Stunt GP and Race Driver: Grid.

Both of these titles feel quite different from my usual picks (Ridger Racer 2 for PSP and Colin McRae Rally 04) so I needed a little bit of time to adjust but after that I was ready to have some fun. Man, I love old racing games.

Finally, I got in the mood for Halo: Reach so I jumped into that for a bit. Probably won’t be playing the whole thing again this time but I’ll at least zoom through a few levels, trying to get some achievements. Oh, I also took the time to customise my spartan beyond gender and colour like before - finally feels more… “mine”.

As the other user said, it was a reboot. One that doubled down on the bad parts of the original and added some new poor ideas on top of it. Stuff like:

• Even worse story - plot of the first game wasn’t a masterpiece but it was serviceable. It also focused on a personal story rather than a huge threat like the sequel.
• More combat encounters - something that could’ve been completely skipped in the original (except for one boss fight, if I recall correctly?) now was forced whether you liked it or not. It also felt worse (to me).
• Locking movement options behind a skill tree - some of the most basic moves from the original game were unavailable for the sake of a worthless progression mechanic.
• Open world didn’t flow as well as the linear levels of the first game, it was also poorly divided into districts connected by a few specific routes you couldn’t avoid, making it feel even worse.

There’s probably more that I forgot at the moment but it was simply a bad sequel which didn’t know what made the first game good (in my opinion).

As for how this one is different? We’ll see when a public version becomes available. One thing that makes me hopeful is the complete lack of talk about combat on their store page. If they can focus on good movement mechanics and the actual delivery gameplay that in itself will be an improvement over Catalyst.

I love how unapologetically Mirror’s Edge it is and really hope it turns out well. I need my ME fix.