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The Forgotten City. Completed the game. It is an excellent adventure game with immersive sim elements - the investigation makes sense, the writing and dialogues are consistent and fitting, the controls and movement are comfortable, the combat is present yet non-intrusive.

Dead Space 3 is down and with that my Dead Space trilogy is complete. Final verdict: Meh. I'll never do a full trilogy run again unless 4 comes out and it's as good as Remake. I almost gave up on 3 at one point. The second to last optional mission. There's a single room, maybe half the size of your average suburban living room, where 4 waves will come at you 3 at a time. All enhanced. It's mostly those lame pickaxe guys who are hard to shoot the arms off of and you have to take out at least three limbs to kill them. I'd end up reloading after the first wave, just to get stunlocked by the next. Line gun, ripper, plasma cutter. Kept dying. Turns out the line gun is simply garbage. Complete and utter. And the chain lightning gun is the best. Just changing the head on the weapon it goes from killing nothing and walking outside for a smoke break between shots to killing the entire room and being ready for a follow up shot by the time you move your cursor. It carried me the rest of the way through the game and through Awakened. As for Awakened, it's actually pretty good. Might be the second best Dead Space (if we only count Remake and 1 as a single game). But it's not worth the slog.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-oral-history-00083757 Suggest using Reader mode, modern website design is truly terrible, but it was an interesting read, even with a lot of fluff. Although not sure that moron Truss really was worth talking to.

Three Pines 1 and 2. It's somewhat like Canadian Twin Peaks starring Doctor Octopus, but more normal and focused on mysteries than a surreal deconstruction of small town America and television. It looks like every two episodes are about Doctor Octopus solving a strange murder while also searching for a missing indigenous woman who ran off to New York or got killed. I like it, would reccomend. I don't use emojis because there are way too many combinations of them that are propositioning someone, such as 🤣 😜😏 being widely used as an invitation to [redacted]. When I do use the emojis it is almost as always as part of a bit, because I am naughty In all fairness after seeing what Swedish people eat I think calling their tastes crap is less toxic than eating ketchup on plain macaroni. This looks like one of those AI that can't comprehend hands tried to cook. Feeding this to your kids should be considered child abuse.

no wakame? dashi is extreme simple. compared to chicken noodle soup, miso is ridiculous ez and it takes less than fifteen minutes to make a nice cup/bowl o' soup. what is requiring the most time is the dashi. bring a couple squares kombu (1 oz ?) in 2qt water to a good simmer and let simmer fiveish minutes. take your pot off heat and add 1oz katsuobushi. allow the kombu and katsuobushi to steep for ~five minutes. again, this step is done off heat. strain your dashi through a fine mesh strainer. done. serious, that's it. at this point, all you do for traditional miso is add your miso paste (whisk into your dashi with a fine mesh strainer 'cause you don't want clumps and bits o' paste in your soup) wakame and tofu... and perhaps garnish with the green onions. btw, we would also recommend at least firm tofu although soft or even silk is not gonna ruin the miso, but is gonna be a tendency for the tofu to disincorporate if is on the less firm end o' the spectrum. gonna admit for our miso soup we air fry our tofu and make it crispy for a bit more depth o' flavor. sue us. HA! Good Fun!

I finished Cyberpunk. I was fairly happy with the ending I got. There was still a ton of side missions and gigs left to complete, but my vacation is almost over, and I wanted to be done. Watching the credits for a bit really makes you realize what a massive undertaking this game was. It scrolled for about 10 minutes. We are talking about thousands of hands in the pot. I played on normal difficulty and was really enjoying the swordplay in the later levels. I wouldn't say it was very challenging, but there was enough style to keep it enjoyable.

Cowboy Bebop, episode 6: Faye eats dog food, Fatty eats cake, and Giraffe eats bullets. There was a very particular musical cue in this episode that was also used for Satoshi Kon's Magnetic Rose, which threw my brain for a loop when I heard it. Turns out, the same composer, Yoko Kanno, did both movies, so I guess it's alright even if it's pretty weird to re-use music like that. Magnetic Rose used it first, . P.S. I kind of forgot I was watching this show. P.P.S. This might have been my least favorite episode so far. I seem to not particularly care for when the show tries to get more serious about anything. So far, it feels at its best when it's being purely silly. You can dislike something while still finding it enjoyable. Go with that!

I'm going to try my hand at making miso soup. I know I need dashi and I'm not yet adventurous enough to make my own from scratch, so I got concentrated dashi. There are a bunch of varieties of miso paste and I have no clue, so I just picked one. Tofu, ****ake mushrooms, sugar snap peas, and green onions (not pictured) seemed like no-brainers to add and I also got daikon I'm going to put in the soup because I love me some radishes.

It's not weird at all. If I took all your favorite things and turned them all into steaming piles of dog poop, and then it turns out you don't like dog poop, well, what the hell is wrong with you? Why don't you like your steaming piles of dog poop? These steaming piles of dog poop were committee-formulated and market-tested specifically to appeal to your dog poop tastes - there must be something very wrong with you to not like your steaming piles of dog poop! Maybe you're even an -ist or two for not liking your dog poop... Everyone else in the world loves these steaming piles of dog poop, why don't you?! It doesn't help that we're all more connected than we've ever been. Before the internet, if you didn't like something, maybe you told some of your closest friends and you all talked about it and then you usually moved on - no hard feelings, or at least there shouldn't be. Now if you frequent a forum like this or view comments on social media, you could post about how you tried but didn't enjoy something, and immediately the next person that replies talks about how GREAT it was while making sure to hit you with their imbecilic emoji spam. One doesn't really have to do with the other, but it is difficult not to unconsciously associate them nevertheless. Negative feelings about something have infinite opportunity to grow while allowing practically nothing for it to reverse course thanks to the internet.

I think the palette is a bit too vibrant, it could use just a little softening up a la the MOTHER/EarthBound games (starting with those blue menus!), but otherwise I think it's perfectly fine. But then again, I think 3D game graphics are largely flaming dog crap and vastly prefer 2D graphics of all kinds, so you know, different strokes for different folks.

And more “anniversary” gifts to UA have been announced today.

This is what AI was created for

@Mamoulian War I liked Tales of Arise a lot, altho I did grow a little impatient with some stuff in the back 1/4 or 1/5 or so. But I had great fun tinkering around and plenty of my typical goofy hijinks. 😄 Glad you're enjoying it. Also, Hootle best owl.

Despite Ansel, this is one of those games where while I'm playing on the big screen, everything looks fantastic. So I take a picture. But when I look at them later, they seem so pedestrian/dull (or are spoilers etc). 😄 Anyway... I just liked this outfit/hat. Altho I've changed the coat again already. Someone was a little obsessive about teacups? What cha readin', Deek?

I have arrived in Tales of Arise into Niez - capital of Wind region. And the game gave me another unexpected surprise. I hesitate to write here a little bit more about it, so I would not spoil it for the few people, who are still interested in playing this game, and are avoiding spoilers at all costs, but I am enjoying the game more the more I play it. Also, I have found first Artifact in the game, and Kisara gave me first fishing rod, so I have played little bit with it as well 😛 The Hunts for Gigant Zeugles are pretty merciless, and I have burned through most of my consumables, so now, I am trying to save little bit, and avoid them for now. The price of gels in this game is crazy, compared to previous titles, and the money is as hard to earn as in previous Tales of ... games. And I think it was to force some people to buy money DLCs This is my only negative experience with the game. Although, if I would not go against these Hunts, I would not need any extra money for consumables at all, and would be able to sell some of them to earn some extra cash. The sale price of gels is very high as well.

Dead Space 2 is done. I did not like it. I see why I never had the itch to replay it now. Dead Space 3 gets off a real bad foot by throwing Necromoprhs that are just zombies with pickaxes. They're hard to dismember with their arms at their side, so you just shoot them normal. And it follows this up with... normal guys shooting at you. Bad foot after bad foot. I've actually got far enough to get into the meat of the game. I love getting to explore a pseudo-open world starship graveyard, at least on paper. But it's all for the purpose of supporting their resource system. That's all you can find, not even new story beats or cool environmental bits. I can carry two guns. I don't need a gazillion gun combinations or the resources to build a gazillion guns. Mechanically it becomes a slog. The new line rifle looks cool, but the areas are so small, and all the enemies are so fast you can't use it. Once enemies are on top of you, it can't hit them. By contrast the plasma cutter, which makes boring "pop" noises when fired, is all around useful. And with the Planet Cracker head seems to do more damage than the line rifle anyway...

Hi, I was recently looking into this same behavior while playing the game for the first time, and I thought I would share what I discovered here in the most relevant existing thread. There are also some other online discussions that mentioned how experience gain would be greatly diminished for characters further down in the list of inactive party members. I was looking at the Assembly-CSharp.dll file, according to another post I had found, and I noticed what I believe is a minor error in the code. It seems the game is intended to give inactive party members 90% experience if they are equal to or below the player's level, and 50% if they are above (based on global.gamedatabundle file). However, these adjustments are made to all of the characters in a loop without resetting the initial experience value on each iteration. Therefore, the first inactive member would get 90% xp as intended, the second would only get 90% of 90%, or about 81%, the third would get about 73%, and so on. Depending on the number of inactive members, this can result in severely reduced experience gains for the most recent members not in the active party. The post that shows this code and how to edit it is below. The poster just bypasses the loop and assigns 100% xp every time, but it would be easy to just add a new variable for reassigning a new adjusted xp value on each loop to make the code work as intended. It seems Obsidian is finished making minor patches like this one to the game, but it seems to be a simple fix in case anyone is interested.

Well, there was a massacre in that village and the Devil is a murderer. If you are not near them, you may not be invested, just like most people irl aren't affected by wars and disasters in other countries. But being there and having heard Durance talk about the purges... I think it would have a serious effect. But that doesn't mean everyone would side with the Devil. Realistically, who would risk travelling with her? In a more complex game there could be quests with no apparent consequence or npcs/companions who would turn against you (imagine the Devil attacking you at night if you didn't side with her against Harmke...). But as you said, it's just a game and we will do quests like this for experience and to find out what happens. But in my case it made sense. My character was cruel and aggressive and the Devil was her best friend. The only other person in the group that shared her tendencies. In fact, the unofficial story of my character was that she committed a murder in the Living Lands and escaped to the Eastern Raech. So of course she would side with the Devil and have a great time executing Harmke and any fools who happened to be there with him. Btw, I thought they were not involved in Cold Morn, that they were just woodcutters from Stalwart. If I had played with my first character (benevolent/diplomatic) I would not kill him though. Good idea. I Should have done that with my evil character. That is true. When I played I thought they had nothing to do with Cold Morn. They just were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think Raedric is a different case. He may have had his reasons, but he did kill his wife and was terrorizing the Vale. So why not try an alternative? My good character avoided killing the guards but killed him. My evil character was a Bleak Walker, so she had to kill everyone there (I think the priest survived though). And she wanted all their equipment to sell.

That's encouraging. I remember trying to get through IWD2 some two decades ago with a party of two, but having to yield and add two more characters midway through.