YaKoMoS

Welcome To CSBD And Have fun

In a shanty town of tarpaulin and corrugated steel, a drunk is telling me a story about how he slipped and fell on his arse. I pick the cocky conversational response: “I would’ve landed on my feet. I have feline reflexes.” Turns out this is a hidden skill check against my sense of Savoir Faire, which replies: “No, you don’t.” I just got burned by my own psyche. The drunk continues with a peremptory “whatever”, and there’s no discernible gameplay impact. But I laugh out loud, despite being a little hurt on my character’s behalf. I feel like I understand him better, and that I sympathise with him more. The drunk rambles on, and a story that began as a light hearted, relatable tale of alcohol-induced misfortune takes a tragic turn as the consequences escalate: he loses his comfy house, his glamorous girlfriend, his lucrative job. The drunk blames all his current misery on that one heavy night. Guilt stings at having been so blasé in my initial reply, but there’s just a touch of ambiguity about his story, an attitude of backward-looking self-pity, and a hint that he had options to explore – and perhaps still does – which make him not unalloyedly sympathetic. This is what Disco Elysium is like. You play a detective who wakes up after a night of obliterative drinking with a purged memory and a shattered psyche. As a player knowing nothing about Disco Elysium’s weird and imaginative world, you learn about its history, politics, and unique physics (ooh) alongside your character. You emerge with an apocalyptic hangover into the Martinaise district of the city of Revachol, where a dockworkers’ strike is only the most obvious of many simmering local disputes. You have to solve a complicated murder case while navigating them all, despite your condition. The fragments of your mind try their best to help you along the way, offering an endearing cacophony of advice – sometimes unreliable, sometimes conflicting, always well-meaning. They are a cast of characters in their own right. Volition is the determined grown-up in the room, Electrochemistry a slice of id forever seeking altered states, while histrionic Drama addresses you as “sire” or “my liege”. These fragments are also skills into which you can invest points, the main purpose of which is to interact more successfully with the world. You might need to check against your Endurance to examine a rotting corpse without vomiting, or your Physical Instrument to beat up a racist security guard. If you hit certain skill thresholds, the corresponding voice will analyse someone’s statement for factual accuracy, hinting at, and sometimes unlocking, new directions in the conversation. So these checks combine with your own diligence and judgement – how thoroughly you search a room, how deftly you navigate an interrogation – in getting Revachol and its citizens to give up their secrets. Disco Elysium does a decent job of making such secrets available to all builds so no approach is materially better than another: multiple skills may apply to a given situation, and many problems can be resolved in multiple ways (pry open a rubbish compactor or convince the hostel manager to give you the key, for example). Your efforts are tested in several story-critical conversations with witnesses and suspects. It is magnificently satisfying to succeed in these inflection points because you did the groundwork. People will lie, deflect, and employ sophistry, charm, and ommission to make you doubt your case against them or their friends, and you may or may not be able to shoot them down with logic, evidence, and rhetorical tactics of your own. You need to not only ask the right questions, but resist the common RPG temptation of asking every question you can, in order to keep a witness compliant. This is an RPG without combat, but which takes exploration and conversation to genre-pushing new heights. As you might imagine, you spend a lot of time navigating dialogue trees as they unspool on a backdrop of cassette tape, so the writing has to do a lot of work. Fortunately, it’s consistently superlative. It is among the very, very best writing I’ve ever seen in games. Your shattered psyche and total ignorance of absolutely everything, even the axioms of reality, is a unique premise of which Estonian indie ZA/UM takes full advantage: no one’s told your sense of Rhetoric that you can’t persuade a shipping container to open its doors, or your Savoir Faire that you can’t teleport up a ladder. On a less abstract level, you can exhibit a range of personality traits – or ‘copotypes’ – and take a range of political positions. Judge Dredd fans can go around saying “I am the law”, while apologising for your character’s many, many screw-ups can get you branded a ‘sorry cop’. You are invited to opine on political and cultural issues, beginning with the dockworkers’ strike in the very earliest dialogues. Whichever position you take – even if you take none, which you can – ZA/UM isn’t content to let it sit comfortably. There’s sometimes a touch of South Park in the way that every perspective is criticised and ridiculed. When advocating the moralist centre to a eurotrance DJ who recalls Scooter’s HP Baxxter, I’m gratified that the impressionable dude adopts my position until he characterises it in these terms: “I’m swiftly moving toward a solution which pleases nobody!” Ouch. These personal and political traits add wonderful flavour to dialogues, but they also have a gameplay impact in that they can unlock ‘Thoughts’ (as can many other interactions). You can equip Thoughts to boost your skills and gain a range of other bonuses, as well as maluses. Defend ultraliberal economics often enough and you’ll get the chance to consider Indirect Modes of Taxation, which will cause further ultraliberal dialogue choices to generate money, but cost you a point of your Empathy skill to equip. Again, every position gets ridiculed. Disco Elysium tries and succeeds in striking a number of different moods. One of those moods is humour, which got in the way of my role-playing a bit, because it’s so hard not to pick the funny option. In my first playthrough I put points into intellect and psyche skills, intent on role-playing a quick-witted rhetoritician. That all goes to piss when I’m able to request a handout from a rich lady by simply screaming “MONEY!!!” at her in capital letters. I won’t spoil the rest of the conversation, but I can’t remember the last time a game made me laugh so hard. But Disco Elysium is so much more than just funny. It is angry. A missing person’s case in an impoverished fishing village concludes with some of the game’s iciest social commentary and its deepest humanity – yes, every position is criticised, but one senses that ZA/UM is more animated by some than others. If not that, then at least I was more animated by certain criticisms than others. Either way, it’s welcome. There needs to be room in this medium for games that are willing to provoke. Disco Elysium is also bittersweet. My alcoholic amnesia has erased the feeling of missing someone, so I ask a chilled yet melancholic truck driver about his family after bonding with him over poetry. He says it feels: “Good. And bad. An ache that brings you joy. I think of them a lot. I dream up these silly scenarios, in great detail. Of living with them. It comforts me.” I once thought that isometric RPGs struggle to evoke a sense of atmosphere compared with games that take a more immersive first- or third-person perspective, but Disco Elysium has done it. Haunting, crystalline music and carefully deployed ambient sounds, like lapping waves and rustling reeds, brilliantly support your sensory voices when they invite you to stop and drink in a scene, as they often will. Perception tells you what you hear in different directions, while Shivers can attune to the thrum of the city, flying across its frigid bay to bring you stories of its people. Revachol isn’t a traditionally pretty place – it’s all boarded-up businesses, broken masonry, and reinforced concrete – but it has more character and authenticity than most gaming locales. I love it, because I feel like I know it. My first (fairly completionist) playthrough – that of the intellectual centrist who imagines himself a rock star – took me a solid 35 hours. I’ve started a second, focusing on physical and motorics skills and championing ultraliberalism. A few key conversations and interactions have gone more differently than I had expected, and while the major story beats haven’t changed, my knowledge of what happens is actually keeping me engaged because I know how to do things better or differently. Enough has changed for me to happily finish a second run. Criticisms? I guess I have a few. Some signposting in the late-game is lacking – there are quests you’ll think you can advance, but which are actually dependent on something else. Disco Elysium doesn’t welcome min-maxers, either; you can’t see what a Thought will do until you’ve fully ‘internalised’ it, and if you don’t like its effects, you have to spend a skill point unequipping it. Expect to fail many skill checks. Annoying as this may be for those who like to ‘win’, this is one of those RPGs where role-playing and storytelling is the goal. The odd malus and the odd failure makes things more interesting. ‘Winning’ isn’t really the point, but you can always reload saves to retry failed skill checks if you want. And these are trivial imperfections in a shining gem of a game. There’s so much more I want to say about Disco Elysium, but a lot of it risks spoilers, and hey, you get it by now: This is one of the best games of the year. Please play it. Here are the Disco Elysium System Requirements (Minimum) CPU: Intel i5-7500 or AMD 1500 equivalent CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 4 GB OS: Windows 7/8/10 VIDEO CARD: Integrated Intel HD620 or equivalent PIXEL SHADER: 5.0 VERTEX SHADER: 5.0 FREE DISK SPACE: 22 GB Disco Elysium Recommended Requirements CPU: Intel Core i7 or AMD 1800 equivalent CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 8 GB OS: Windows 7/8/10 VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA Geforce 1060 or equivalent PIXEL SHADER: 5.1 VERTEX SHADER: 5.1 FREE DISK SPACE: 22 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 3072 MB.

An equivalent electric version is also planned. We are patiently waiting for Mercedes to unveil the all-new S-Class flagship, but in the meantime, work will well underway at the next installment of what used to be the company’s entry-level car. The C-Class in W206 guise has been spotted multiple times already, and rumor has it the lineup will be expanded to include an Audi A4 Allroad-rivaling All-Terrain serving as an SUV-inspired variant of the conventional wagon. Now, a new report published by Motoring alleges we will see the revamped C-Class in about a year from today as Mercedes is allegedly planning to unveil the premium sedan at the Paris Motor Show. If the report is to be believed, the first public outing of the BMW 3 Series rival will be on September 29, 2020 during the first press day of the show. Of course, an online reveal could occur a few weeks sooner. What to expect? Well, the Daimler company will likely push the W206 further upmarket now that the A-Class Sedan serves as the base sedan in the company’s range and the CLA is much fancier than before. The Audi A4 competitor will apparently get some S-Class-sourced technologies, an inline-six powering the C53 model, better electric range for the plug-in hybrids, and a pure EV derivative. The report goes on to mention it will be lighter than today’s car thanks to a more generous use of aluminum while providing increased torsional rigidity and support for a 48-volt electrical system. Once again, an air suspension will be optional on some versions and standard on the high-end ones to set the C-Class apart from its rivals. Some of the other advanced tech coming to the W206 will include a level 3 autonomous driving system providing hands-free driving at speeds of up to 81 mph (130 kph). A massive touchscreen in the same vein as the new S is apparently on the menu, and so is a plug-in hybrid powertrain for the AMG C63. Like it or not, these traditional sports sedans and wagons are about to be electrified as Audi has already confirmed the next RS4 Avant will also be a PHEV. The sedan will be out first, with the wagon likely to follow shortly and eventually be joined by the coupe and convertible. The EQ-branded electric model is expected at some point in 2022.

Welcome

Works : V1- V2-

> Opponent's nickname: @Mark-x > Theme (must be an image): Here > Work Type: Avatar > Size & Texts: Battle - CSBD > How many votes?: 7 Votes > Work time: 24H

V1 effects - light

Welcome To CSBD Have Fun

Name Game: Transport Fever Price: $34.99 - $ 7.00 The Discount Rate: -80% Link Store: Steam Offer Ends Up After : Nov,7 At 19:00

Captain’s log: the crew are getting sick of hardtack. They think I don’t know, but I can see their morale stat slipping away with every day we’re at sea, dining on flavourless biscuits and water. But I really did need that Ring of Boundless Stars that Una was selling back at Serpent’s Crown, and at his prices I could hardly afford 50 servings of Mariner’s Porridge (+5 morale) on top. I’m sure they understand – I’m a tank. Tanks need that constitution bonus. I suspect Maia’s keeping something from me. Call me paranoid, but it’s the way she keeps saying, “I haven’t been entirely honest with you…” And the fact she’s a Vailian Trading Company spy, who I recruited as part of a deal with the suits at Neketaka so that they could keep tabs on me. But it just… it just doesn’t quite seem on the level. Ah well – it’ll probably come to nothing. Tomorrow, we arrive at Fort Deadlight, and I exact my revenge on Captain Benweth. Tonight we sleep. Pillars of Eternity II plays the way you remember Infinity Engine RPGs playing. That is to say, not the obtuse nature you’d discover if you were to revisit them today, but how they sit lovingly in your memories without any of the blemishes. With its blend of merciless AD&D combat, isometric environments, and reams of descriptive text, Pillars II creates a portal back to a bygone age of PC gaming circa 2000ish, when Robbie Williams was the most bankable star in music and people who publicly admitted to playing games were a niche group. We read the manuals in those days, because if we didn’t we’d never figure out how to play the damn game. Perhaps that’s the most relevant point of reference if we’re going to talk about how much things have changed from Baldur’s Gate to Pillars II. Yes, it feels nostalgic in all the ways you’d want. Yes, it offers a mind-bending learning curve on higher difficulty levels for the 17 people who actually play these RPGs in that way. But Obsidian’s ambitions for this sequel extend far beyond recapturing the time and place in game design they strove for with the first Pillars of Eternity. One of several directions that ambition takes is in the game’s piratical theme. There’s a surprising amount of Sid Meier’s Pirates! here – from the way you navigate between the islands of the Deadfire Archipelago by ship, to the naval battles that crop up when you sail near hostile vessels, conducted via a text-adventure-style interface. Reprising your role as the Watcher of Caed Nua from the first game, you’re brought back to the realm of mortals by Berath, the god of death and rebirth, because she’s a bit worried about Eothas, the god of renewal and light. He’s just not himself lately; stomping around in physical form and wreaking chaos as he goes. She’d like you to keep an eye on him. It’s not like you have a say in the matter: it’s that, or return to the wheel with all the other lost souls. Captain’s log: I killed a lot – a LOT – of Naga today, and I feel pretty bad about it, to be honest. Most of them attacked on sight – I can handle that. They made a good excuse for the gang and I got to try out our new party formation, and a couple of sweet abilities we’ve gained since we last levelled up. Eder’s getting really good at knocking people over and leaving them dazed, incidentally. But it was the Naga in the lighthouse who plays on my conscience. He conversed with me, and in that moment I understood that he saw Eothas’s path of destruction as a warning from the gods, not to be interfered with. He wasn’t just a meatbag with a HP number. I think I could have got through to him, if I’d just found a Naga soul to bring to him and show him I really am a Watcher. Except there were none around, so… So Eder got a bit more practise at knocking folk over and dazing them. And I have to live with it. Depending on your disposition, combat was either the best asset of Pillars of Eternity or an absolutely baffling mess that killed you just for looking at a level 1 Sporeling the wrong way. Pillars II remains absolutely brutal on anything but the lowest difficulty level, which is presumably a great strength for some, but a few systems have been changed around in the name of clarity. Ditching the separate health and endurance stats is the most significant: now characters have just one number keeping them alive, and when it’s depleted in combat they’re knocked down. If they’re knocked down four times in a row without resting, that’s them dead. It’s much more forgiving than the first game’s system, but we are talking about the permanent removal of voiced party members and their associated questlines from the game, after all. It’s good to have a little room for manoeuvre there. Party banter is also governed by a transparent system that tells you when particular companions align or disagree with your decisions and comments, and those of other companions. They might form romantic relationships or grow to hate each other. Along the way, their conversations are impressive for their contextual awareness. But, look, I could write 50,000 words about the systems and mechanics underpinning everything in Pillars of Eternity II and still not get to the heart of the matter. What makes this worth playing, if you have the slightest fondness for Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, or Planescape: Torment, is the worldbuilding. The Principi, Vailian Trading Company, Huana, and Royal Deadfire Company are locked in a kind of cold war over luminous adra. The native Huana are sick of being raided by Principi, so they made a deal with the Vailians giving them license to mine adra on their land. It hasn’t eased their struggle. For their part, the Vailians are getting deep into dangerous experiments. Their animancers are wielding the adra without any real knowledge of its true power, and their research is attracting the ire of the gods. Not to mention landing you in numerous tight spots. The Royal Deadfire Company want to lure you away from their Vailian rivals, promising limitless coin if you align with them. The Principi are happy as long as the grog’s flowing. But that’s not really the plot of the game. It’s a political backdrop, one of several that you find yourself getting embroiled in now and then, while you’re trying to pursue your real objective: spying on Eothas for Berath. Backdrop or not, this facet of Pillars II’s story alone is more enjoyable to immerse yourself in than most RPG’s main questlines. It must come with experience, I suppose, that ability to weave quest and narrative together so closely that the ‘go there, pick up the thing, come back here’ artifice is all but invisible. It hasn’t always been true of Obsidian games, but quests of all shapes and sizes here feel part of the world, full of weighty consequence. I’ve completed bounties on desolate islands not because I needed the coin, but because I felt sorry for poor Abocco back in Neketaka. He was having no luck issuing bounties, and I suspected he was being voiced by Jim Cummings (aka Minsc from Baldur’s Gate) so I threw him a bone. So it goes with nearly every quest – there’s usually a sense of meaning to what you’re doing beyond monetary reward or XP. The mechanics underpinning everything in Pillars II have shifted marginally towards accessibility, but that still leaves a huge amount of room for brutal challenge levels to its combat – and, crucially, it’s scalable enough that you can whack down the challenge, ignore your party composition, leave the pause key unpressed, and enjoy the adventure. That’s what this is, in a very real sense: an adventure. Captain’s log: spent the afternoon playing dice with a very nice chap by the dock of Fort Deadlight. He didn’t take too kindly to me winning all that money, though, so after a while I thought it best to depart in case he blew my cover. It took a lot of hassle, and the lives of two good sailors, to get that Principi flag we hoisted up the mast and sail here undetected. All very cloak and dagger. Now I’d best see that Cookie Maina’s special spiced stew makes it up to the tavern, so that my devilish assassination plan might be put to action.

Corporations have taken us beyond the bounds of our solar system, but the enterprises that built life on the galactic frontier have charged a heavy price. Business is now both god and king, as middle managers take on the roles of regional governors and a new religion preaches your place among the corporate gears. You’re going to do your job until you can afford the rental fees on your grave site, or you’re going to come out branded an outlaw. In The Outer Worlds, you are very much one of those outlaws. Obsidian’s grimly satirical RPG puts you in the boots of a prospective colonist who’s freshly unfrozen after decades in suspended animation. But you’re the only one who’s awake. The Board – a bickering cabal of corporations that runs things in the colony – has left your colony ship to die, and you’ve only come through thanks to the somewhat-mad science of one Phineas Welles. The Board’s got secrets and Welles needs resources to awaken the rest of the frozen colonists, which leaves you to hop between the colonies in search of both answers and chemicals. While The Outer Worlds has been compared to Fallout ever since its debut – a combination of retro-futuristic aesthetics, first-person roleplaying, and involvement from the series’ original creators will do that – in action it feels almost nothing like the Black Isle classics or the post-Bethesda open worlds. Instead, this comes across more like a lost mid-2000s BioWare game. Most of the locations to which the main story points you are embroiled in some sort of conflict between a corporation and group living outside of the established rules. Your goals will usually intersect with those rivalries, leading you through a spiral of intertwining side-quests until you finally get to pick a side in a grand moral choice at the end of that chapter of your adventure. In other words, in the Obsidian pantheon this follows Knights of the Old Republic II much more closely than Fallout: New Vegas. The first big decision leaves you stuck between the Spacer’s Choice corporate colony and a group of rebels who’ve chosen to live at an outpost outside the city walls. You need a power drive to get off the planet, and you can only get it by sneaking into a power plant and shutting down the, err, power to one side or the other. There’s a bit of lip service paid to the idea that this is a tough choice, since shutting down the corporation’s energy source will leave a whole bunch of people out of jobs – but then you’ve also just spent hours watching Spacer’s Choice bear down and exploit its employees as only a hilariously corrupt megacorp can. It ends up being a decision between good with a bit of hardship, or absolute moustache-twirling evil (but at least the trains run on time). Other choices offer more nuance, but the writing is often at odds with itself – sometimes you’re in an intricately detailed, serious sci-fi world where everyone will suffer profound consequences as a result of your actions, while other moments put you in the midst of a bleak-but-ridiculous anti-corporate comedy. There are great moments at either end of The Outer Worlds’ tonal spectrum, and the payoffs are usually fantastic. There’s the loyal corporate salesman whose reward for service is a silly moon mask and a lifetime of spouting half-hearted slogans. There’s the philosophical war between an idealist rebel captain, his pragmatic compatriot who just wants to keep the people fed, and their counterpart inside the city walls who wants to build change under the Board’s rule. There are bits that are laugh-out-loud funny – like when you’ve got to collect grave rental fees from somebody who’s already dead – and others that are earnestly heartwarming, such as when you facilitate the first date of one of your party members. There are fantastic pieces throughout, certainly, but the tonal confusion makes it tough to stay invested in the story and characters through all of the resultant connective tissue. These portions tend to be the least interesting parts outside of the dialogue trees, too. The bigger worlds where you’ll spend most of your time are made up of densely packed points of interest like cities, outposts, and hideouts, spread out across the wilderness of a big, mostly open-ended map. These wilderness areas are where the game most feels like modern Fallout, but since your objectives are predominantly dictated by the quests you find, they don’t have the same sense of discovery – it’s just a bunch of the same few collections of bandits and wild beasts to wade through until you reach the next interesting location. A generous fast travel system at least means you don’t have to hike through the same area twice. Combat puts you in that awkward middle ground between FPS and RPG, but there’s just enough depth to your roleplaying abilities to make up for the fact that the game doesn’t feel like a dedicated shooter. You can slow down time at the press of a button – amusingly, the result of head trauma you suffer in the tutorial – which lets you examine enemies to see their strengths and weaknesses. The meter that governs this ability is basically frozen until you move, so you can sit for a moment, consider your actions, then line up a couple of headshots or crippling leg shots before returning to real-time combat to mop up. Skill points determine your effectiveness with various weapon types, and the more substantial perks that you get every other level let you create some pretty unusual builds. I struggled early on against armoured enemies, since I could never hang onto enough heavy ammunition to take them down, until I got a perk that let me knock off a point of an enemy’s armour rating with every ranged shot. From then on, simply dumping a light handgun clip into just about any enemy was sufficient to soften it up for the kill. There are a lot of fun little mechanics around the edges which help to add some life to combat that would otherwise be pretty familiar. Science weapons that you pick up through side-quests don’t deal the damage of their conventional counterparts, but they will let you do everything from launching marauders into the air to shrinking massive insects down to proper ant size. Each party member has a single unique ability, too. These all briefly pause the action for a cutscene, while your ally readies a weapon, deals some damage, and applies a temporary debuff to the foe you’ve sent them against. While the animations never change, they also rarely get old – at least, I never got tired of watching my world-weary preacher smite bad guys with a shotgun while reciting his holy book. Despite all the freedom to roam, The Outer Worlds is at its best in its most constrained locations – facilities, caverns, and ruins filled with powerful enemies and multiple paths. These sections feel almost like miniature Thief or Dishonored-style immersive sims, giving you a clear objective and loads of ways to go about achieving it. You can shoot your way through just about anything, sure, but you can also use stealth. You can hack computers to turn off security systems, or if you’ve got that skill high enough, you can turn the robotic defenders against their masters. You can almost always talk your way out of a boss fight. And sometimes, the optional quests you’ve done leading up to one of these locations can give you unexpected allies as you go. That’s a familiar list of options if you’ve played any open-ended RPG of the past few decades, but it’s in these de facto dungeons where the character you’ve built, the skills you’ve chosen, and the playstyle you’ve gone for really come together. It feels great, and it also helps that these sequences usually come at the conclusion of major plot arcs – so right as you’re feeling good about the choices you’ve made for your build, you’re also seeing the results of all the dialogue decisions you’ve been making over the previous few hours, and everything comes together in an often spectacular little package. The Outer Worlds falters in that there just aren’t enough of these moments. That leaves you playing hours of ‘good’ just to get to that 30-minute stretch of ‘great.’ That’s not a terrible ratio – especially as my fairly complete playthrough clocked in around 25 hours, not especially long as RPGs go – but it often feels that the game isn’t living up to its full potential. But while most of the elements that make up The Outer Worlds sit between ‘good enough’ and ‘great,’ there’s one legitimate bad point: the UI. You can only track one quest at a time, which is frustrating when you’ll often have three or four to attend to in the same location, and the only way to establish which is which is to track one, find it on the map, then go back to track the others and repeat the process. Inventory management is similarly frustrating – it’s way more difficult than it needs to be to compare equipment, the upgrade and mod systems take far too much time to sort through compared to the benefits they provide, and all of your normal sorting options for some reason disappear while you’re equipping party members. Even so, while Obsidian’s garnered quite a reputation for buggy games at launch, I didn’t run into many major technical issues during my time with the game. Well, not until the very end, at least – a single, repeatable crash during the game’s final sequence was the only bug I hit, but it was one that I could only get around by killing an NPC I’d much rather have talked to. That’ll surely get an eventual patch, and while it was disappointing in the moment, this is a much better technical showing than the studio has historically put forward. Much like the potential rewards from a life at the edge of the galaxy, then, despite some hardships along the way The Outer Worlds is a journey worth undertaking. Here are the The Outer Worlds System Requirements (Minimum) CPU: Intel Core i3-3225 or AMD Phenom II X6 1100T CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 4 GB OS: Windows 7 (SP1) 64bit VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti or AMD Radeon HD 7850 PIXEL SHADER: 5.0 VERTEX SHADER: 5.0 FREE DISK SPACE: 40 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 1024 MB The Outer Worlds Recommended Requirements CPU: Intel Core i7-7700K or Ryzen 5 1600 CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 8 GB OS: Windows 10 64bit VIDEO CARD: GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or Radeon RX 470 PIXEL SHADER: 5.1 VERTEX SHADER: 5.1 FREE DISK SPACE: 40 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 6 GB.

The Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato the Sant’Agata automaker released last week is more than just a one-off concept. The company built it, and let a select few take it for a spin. Automobile magazine’s Georg Kacher was one such lucky lad who got more than just seat time in the high-riding Lamborghini. According to the publication, the possibility of the Sterrato moving from concept to production is closer to reality than one might expect. Lamborghini’s chief technical officer Maurizio Reggiani spoke freely at how the company could not only build the Sterrato but also do it at a profit. Reggiani said the automaker would manufacture the restyled body parts using 3D printers. The body parts, made from a new lightweight synthetic material the company developed, would then be bolted onto the body. However, if Lamborghini decided to build the Sterrato, rumors suggest it would have a limited production of 500 to 1,000. It may seem strange for an iconic supercar brand to venture away from traditional supercars, but Porsche has led the way in producing unconventional brand models to great success. Plus, Lamborghini has already crossed that sacrilegious bridge with the Urus SUV, and yet the world still spins. And it’s not like the Sterrato is a complete departure for the company. Underneath the raised suspension and off-road cladding is a 640-horsepower Huracán Evo and its 5.2-liter V10. Gallery: Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato Concept To give the Sterrato its off-road prowess, Lamborghini raised the ride height, recalibrated the Lamborghini Dinamica Veicolo Integrata that controls four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, torque vectoring, and more, widened the front and rear track, and added plenty of off-road cladding to complete the look. If the Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato makes production – it has several more hurdles before getting approval – Kacher says it could allegedly cost approximately €240,000 (about $270,000 at current exchange rates). Let’s review: It has supercar power and a supercar price tag, a unique look, and a limited run. Yeah, it’ll sell.

In a recent look at Frontier’s furry new game in beta, I was left with the impression that Planet Zoo is a beast of a management sim, but one you’d still want to cuddle. Having now experienced the real deal, I can confidently say that initial reaction was spot on – the game is one hell of a meaty dish, but one I’m very glad I got my teeth into. When you fire up the game, you’re presented with multiple ways to jump into your zookeeping adventure, with options to make it as objective-led or open-ended as you like. There’s a guided Career Mode, Challenge Mode (with a full economy and various objectives to tackle offline), a Sandbox Mode in which to go wild, and an online Franchise Mode to show off your creations to players around the world. I spend the majority of my time in Career Mode, which drip-feeds you tutorial tips as you progress through various pre-made zoos. Taking your first steps, it’s difficult not to be struck by the game’s depth and scope. It seems like every factor you can think of that could have some influence – however minor or indirect – on an animal’s health and happiness has been modelled by developer Frontier. In construction terms, building a basic habitat is easy enough. Connect some barriers, add a door for the zookeeper, and you’re off – the controls and UI, for the most part, are really simple. But Planet Zoo incorporates a vast range of factors that must be considered when setting up the perfect homely habitats for your animal friends, and of course it’s in this that the real challenge of the game lies. There are the major facets to consider upfront: Are my ring-tailed lemurs fed and watered? Does my timber wolf have a pal? Are any cohabitees going to devour each other (or the guests)?. These are the big questions, but there are many lower tiers to worry about. Habitats can be optimised at the most granular level: are the plants in my panda pen matched to their native biome and continent? Do my Thomson’s gazelles have enough toy enrichment items? There’s also a terrain painting tool to ensure every inch of floor is suited to an animal’s preferred ground type, and even humidity and heating controls to tune the atmosphere to the exact degrees needed. Jurassic World: Evolution players will recognise much of this, but there’s even greater depth here. It’s a delicate challenge – especially if you fancy combining species in habitats – but there’s a supreme satisfaction in nudging my animals’ needs sliders up into the green, tracked per animal across tabs chock-full of scales and criteria. There’s also an extensive ‘Zoopedia’ offering real-world zoological information and further helpful tips for catering to my little (and big) ‘uns needs. Despite your best efforts, however, you’re often only able to give your animals so much. There’s further challenge in unlocking everything you need to be the best zookeeper you can be, including higher tier enrichment items, more knowledge of how to care for your charges, and even some new animal species. One such requirement is investing time in research, to which you can assign vets through research centres dotted about your zoo. Beyond this, there’s also the guests’ experience to consider, which is a sizeable task on its own, and – I begrudgingly acknowledge – a pretty vital one. They’ve got to have enough entertainment, education, and eateries to keep them happy and keep the bucks (both the financial and hoofed kind) coming in. Oh, and don’t forget some places to powder their noses, of course. It takes quite a bit of planning to get all of this right, and sometimes animal happiness and guest happiness clash. Planet Zoo’s creatures all have a ‘social’ well-being scale which measures their stress levels, and the game slaps me with a big red warning if one of my critters takes a bit of a nosedive in this department. Often, it’ll be because they’re feeling too watched, and unable to escape the voyeuristic gaze of curious guests. I have to respond by organising some privacy for the poor things. There are some creative ways of dealing with this, though, that achieve a happy outcome for both parties. You could opt for one-way glass that lets guests see in, but leaves creatures to chow down in peace, for example. It’s little touches like this that reflect Frontier’s focus on animal welfare and conservation – and as an animal lover, I really appreciate it. Considering all this complexity, Planet Zoo offers a pretty dexterous experience. For a start, it’s largely intuitive; I can find more or less everything in the menus where I would expect to, even as a relative newcomer to the genre, and there are often multiple ways of getting to the same option, so I don’t get stuck often. In many cases, clicking animals and zoo facilities mirrors what you can do by going through the menus. I sometimes wish that the game would remember my filters and selections a little more often as I navigate between those menus, however. For example, checking which species are compatible – i.e. won’t eat each other the second I turn my back – requires hopping between tabs in the Zoopedia and my zoo’s list of animals. Having to re-select filters frequently slows down the fun a little. What Planet Zoo captures exceptionally well is the sense that a zoo is a living, breathing creature of its own. There are any number of dynamic factors that it can throw at you, such as freak snowstorms in spring that oblige me to get some heaters plugged in for my critters ASAP, or striking my animals down with a sudden disease (organised zookeepers can preemptively put vets on researching cures, which helps avoid the frustration of random-seeming setbacks). This adds some challenge, and a little stress, but also a lot of fun – as I play I come to relish these curve balls. I have to emphasise, however, that the heroes of the game are the animals themselves. Frontier’s given each and every one of the more than 50 species in the game some serious attention in the looks department, and their animations are marvellous. I sometimes waste precious time I could spend thinking about improving the visitor experience just locking the camera onto a panda, watching it slope about and munch bamboo for a while, just because. Reflected in the attention to detail evident in bringing the animals to life is the game’s palpable sense of respect for them. Right from the get-go, zoo owner Bernard Goodwin and your tutor, Nancy Jones – who’s helpfully on-hand in Career Mode to remind you not to mix big cats with gazelles – pepper your adventure with little nuggets of trivia about the creatures in your care. This risks feeling forced, but it only builds your admiration for the creatures under your wing, inspiring you to Get. Their. Care. Right. Faced with all this pressure, constructing a zoo from scratch in Challenge Mode is a pretty exciting experience, though it’s a little overwhelming. I pick a biome, a continent, then start from what is essentially a gigantic field in that location. Comparing my fledgling enterprise to the devs’ glorious pre-made zoos is daunting, but it’s an exciting canvas for your creativity. The tools are there, so you have the scope to create basically anything you picture in your head. The game’s not without a few hitches, but they’re pretty minor. Some of the construction tools can be a little difficult to work out in places. For example, placing building ‘shells’ and then trying to slot shops and staff facilities into them is fiddly, and not particularly intuitive, which threw a couple of brief stumbling blocks my way when trying to progress through Career Mode. However, this isn’t true across the board – things like attaching staff rooms and small creature habitats to paths works seamlessly. It’s also worth noting that, while the zoos can be stunning (I particularly love the ornate Panda Park), they also feel pretty busy, especially when I’m running the game with the best specs. It can be hard to navigate the throngs of people and plants that festoon my giant enterprises sans menu, and I often have to wrestle with the camera to get a decent view of my animals, whether for functional purposes or to gaze lovingly upon them. But these are minor hiccups that briefly interrupt the fun rather than spoil it. Here are the Planet Zoo System Requirements (Minimum) CPU: Intel i5-2500 / AMD FX-6350 CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 8 GB OS: Windows 7 (SP1+)/8.1/10 64bit VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 (2GB) / AMD Radeon R9 270X (2GB) PIXEL SHADER: 5.0 VERTEX SHADER: 5.0 FREE DISK SPACE: 16 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 2048 MB Planet Zoo Recommended Requirements CPU: Intel i7-4770k / AMD Ryzen 5 1600 CPU SPEED: Info RAM: 16 GB OS: Windows 10 64bit VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB) or AMD Radeon RX 580 (8GB) PIXEL SHADER: 5.1 VERTEX SHADER: 5.1 FREE DISK SPACE: 16 GB DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 8192 MB

¤ Name[/nickname]: YaKoMoS ¤ Age: 18 ¤ Country: Algeria ¤ Occupation: Student, ¤ A short description about you: Handsome and humble And Honest Men ¤ How did you found out Csblackdevil Community: By the servers ¤ Favorite games: Cs1.6 , CS:GO ,COD MW 3 , and More ¤ Favorite server [community only]: I Don't Know ¤ A picture of you:-