Bartimaeus

it ain't sodding censored, innit?

Oh boy, will you ever! Ever so simple to deal with as soon as you know what to do, it may be a highly frustrating experience when you meet them for the first time. I actually ran straight past them the first time I met them, but on a subsequent playthrough was not so lucky, and died way too many times.

Yeah, as I understand it, sorceries are considered to be the "easy" mode for Souls games, because there's a lot less technical mastering of the gameplay mechanics required. I've never played a sorceries build (the style of combat is just not really for me...even on my NG7 run, I still stayed at around level 100 instead of leveling up any further so that I could still play PVP)...so I can't really confirm that for sure, but that is my understanding.

It's not meant to change anything, perhaps besides myself. First and foremost, it's a warning to myself not to bother reading their posts, for the most part, particularly if it's in the thread (or other threads like it) that originally made me want to ignore them to begin with. For example, someone I put on ignore due to some ridiculous things that they said in a political thread, I might instead be willing to look at their posts in a gaming-related thread, until/unless they demonstrate that those shouldn't be read, either. Secondly, if I do read their post, it's meant to serve as a warning to not reply to them unless I think it'll be a totally non-argumentative discussion and I actually want to. In other words, some people on my ignore list are essentially "partial" ignores, while others are "total" ignores, if that makes sense. Them being on my ignore list helps remind myself *why* I put them there to begin with, and puts me in a better position to go about my day without giving another thought to their posts after seeing that they are there or even after reading them.

I don't think I have ever seen those people. I take it they only post in the sections dedicated to obsidian games I don't play (anything other than Alpha Protocol) ? I don't frequent the game forums, so no. A couple were because they only post in political threads and make my eyes roll every time I read something by them, while most of the rest were because they can't string together sentences in anything even remotely approaching coherence (note: generally not related to any language barriers, because while everyone may not know English all too well, basic ideas still generally translate O.K., even if all the details don't). I think most of them are inactive these days, though, hence why you probably don't remember them (some of them were only around for a couple of months before disappearing). I'm pretty trigger-happy (i.e. impatient) with new users who immediately make poor impressions, sadly. *Also, I should clarify: the above only applied to the ones I actually made visible in the video (as you may have noticed, the top and middle of the list were not visible in the video, and nevermind the second page).

It sure would be nice if we could get politics out of our "funny things" thread. I'm here to see funny things, folks! (e): and this is not directed specifically at you, Volourn, but rather just the types of things that people - and not just Raithe, I'm not trying to single you out, either, especially seeing as you do post other non-political stuff in here - have been posting more and more of lately.

For PC parts (including mouses and keyboards and headphones), when in doubt, check PCPartPicker's price history. For example, the Razer Naga Chroma mouse is a currently highlighted "Prime Day Deal" for $40, so you can check its page on PCPP, and see that BestBuy recently dropped their price for it to $40, and Amazon seems to have matched it for today. You can also set the price history to go back 2 years, and you can see that $40 is the lowest it's ever been. So not too bad of a deal if that's what you wanted (...although Razer mice are pretty infamous for being more marketing than actual decent products, and I have a pretty low opinion of their mice for being pretty unreliable), but it's probably a good idea to check stuff, if you can, before you assume it's actually a sale. There used to be a more general tracker that outside of just PC parts, called PriceZombie, but it's no longer extant. PCPP also doesn't do video games, .

Yeah, Prime Day is pretty noted for being more of a marketing event rather than an actual sales event. That's not to say there won't be a couple of things you're interested in, but on the whole, it's really not much of a sale. It's certainly no Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Hey, it's the only way to stay sane when you decide to post 10-15 single sentence posts all at once.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/r123qm0207nb4z9/2017-07-11_14-45-09.mp4

In DS1, Pyromancer is the preferred "universal" class, due to it having the best stats vs. level. Additionally, pyromancy itself is stat-free outside of attunement slots, so the fact that you start out with a pyromancer hand right at the beginning makes it even more powerful. Realistically, you can build your pyromancer any way you want - combat or magic, it's still all around best option to play, particularly as a beginner. How fortuitous that Katphood chose to start with it. In regards to the weapons, what that actually is is called "poisebreak". Different types of armors, and different types of creatures, have different poise levels - if you have so much poise, you can resist so much poise-breaking, which basically means you resist getting staggered. Larger weapons, and crushing weapons, tend to have more poise-break than smaller and edged weapons, though it varies from weapon to weapon.

Yeah, not sure. In other news, there will apparently be no more Viagra or Cialis commercials during football games! Hoorah! Not for the NFL's lack of trying, though - it was decided by those companies themselves. http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2017/07/10/nfl-broadcasts-lose-viagra-cialis-as-major-advertisers/

Verisimilitude is a good word to use. When I first played it, Stalker worked for me. It did not work for other people that I know, though - with various complaints of the damage of weapons and especially accuracy being off. I understood why: trying to use a knife to stealth-kill everyone in the first bandit park is quite possibly more enjoyable than trying to use the vanilla Makarov to do it instead (...and stealth, and the knife, are both quite wonky in Stalker). God help you if you try to use the sawn-off shotgun instead - the gun that makes you think the AI is cheating every time they hit you with it because there's no way you could ever hit them. It's painful to use early weapons, and it's only once you start getting into the higher end weapons that they start approaching how you might expect a gun to actually perform (...and even then, bullet velocity and drop is still much worse than it should be). As for the names of weapons, as I understand it, that's for licensing purposes (devs did not want to pay for the rights to use the real weapon names). As for the sense of progression...I think having decent gunplay that the player can enjoy is more important than any sense of progression, personally. Don't want people to quit your game because you made your MP5, a tried-and-true powerful (and historic!) submachine gun, a ridiculous inaccurate pea-shooting piece of garbage. If you want to use an AK or an Abakan (the Abakan is usually my favorite gun in so-called 'realistic weapon' mods for the Stalker series, alongside the SIG 550), then I think you should able to. The vanilla Stalker versions are just awful, though.

Bringing a gun to a waterpark, and then reaching for and displaying it just feet away from police...and without giving any warning. Not exactly the smartest move, Mr. Washington. http://www.wkbw.com/sports/bills/bills-dl-adolphus-washington-arrested-on-weapons-charge I'm just glad no-one was shot.

Sweet baby Moses, Interplay/Black Isle and BioWare were disastrously incompetent at record-keeping. None of the original assets of these games were preserved, and now they don't even have the source code anymore? There'll never be any possibility of a real sound re-mastering or a real resolution/graphical upgrade for any these games because of their total incompetency, unless one were to start over from scratch. I would've expected at least BioWare to properly preserve the BG assets, but no - at least they kept their source codes, though, unlike Interplay.

Really disagree there, though I agree with the cut bit. 'Realistic weapon' mods in Stalker are a misnomer in many ways. If it were 'realistic' to always hit where you aimed at everyone would be White Death and there would be no point having shooting medals at the Olympics or specialist snipers. You miss what you aim at all (well, a lot of) the time in reality despite thinking that you've aimed perfectly. To get an actual realistic result from shooting you need either bullet spray or gun wobble. The sort of thing you sometimes get with bullets going off at 30 degree angles or being unable to fire some guns at all due to skill limitations which come from RPG mechanics in fp perspective is stupid, but that doesn't happen in Stalker anyway. Guns in, at least Shadow of Chernobyl, were just *absurd* on the low-end of things, though. Shotguns that shot pellets at impossible (and ridiculously inaccurate) angles, bullets coming out of rifle barrels at variances just not possible (you say this didn't happen in Stalker, but I think it did in at least ShoC with the vanilla weapons), bullet velocities that just totally and utterly wrong (they were unrealistically slow by a bit, perhaps to show off the bullet physics, but it was just too much - it's silly that you can visibly track the path of every bullet, even ones you're shooting at near point blank range), RPMs that were just flat-out incorrect for some weapons, etc. If they wanted to simulate more of the difficulties of shooting, I would say they probably would've been better off using the more typical route of adding a little bit of sway* - not a lot, not nearly as ridiculous as some other games go, but just a little bit - while also making bullets a little bit erratic mid-flight. It doesn't make sense for bullets to immediately and visibly verge off in seemingly random directions right as they come out of the barrel. *I personally don't like gun swaying, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. isn't a competitive FPS, and it's too easy to, as you said, become basically the White Death in a game like this without any handicaps, and so I'd be O.K. with just a little, to at least make quick-scoping harder. An option for it, at least, for those of us pretty good at FPSes wouldn't be remiss. I already disable crosshairs and the minimap when I play, so I wouldn't mind a little more difficulty.

Yeah, Stalker's guns were a little wonky - the devs were definitely trying to "RPG"-ize them (i.e. provide different tiers of weapons by making some unrealistically weaker than others). The game only becomes better if you get a "realistic weapons" mod on top of it, and can then appreciate how well the bullet physics engine works, especially when you realize that most other shooters don't bother with bullet physics to begin with and just make almost everything hitscan.

I've heard Metro increases everyone's DPS on higher difficulty levels. Yep. You got a way better experience playing on the higher difficulties.

For most games, it usually doesn't matter, though, because the higher difficulties are terrible, and offer very little in the way of making things more difficult outside of increasing the damage sponginess of enemies. If, however, the best experience comes on one of the higher difficulties (...and for Hitman, I believe it does for at least a certain segment of its players), then you'd just be shooting yourself in the foot by locking it away. So of course, that's exactly what they did.

I hate games that lock difficulties behind other difficulties, and it's especially garbage to do it on a Hitman game, of all game series.

Whoa, whoa, hold on a second here...you have to beat all these challenges (and presumably the level) to unlock higher difficulties?

That sounds a little tedious, if I'm being honest...

Ahhhhhhh...Metacritic! The place where 13 year old kids gather around from time to time to p*ss on the single good game that they don't happen to own. What better source to use for a research when it comes to video games, eh?! It's funny because I usually end up reading the reviews that are rated 6 when I check out Metacritic, those tend to be the neutral ones, at least they let you know how the game plays... Also 2001? Seriously!!! What the hell happened to 2007 then?! Just check out ACG, EasyAllies or GiantBomb. Most of these guys have been in the video games industry since forever and based on what they say, I really don't think there will be a video games industry crash...unless Steam and its collection of games become vaporware or something. I am pretty sure they're using the actual critic reviews (aka the metascore), not the user score.

I'd say motherboard. I have a similar problem with my ASUS Maximus in regards to the "failure at boot", and always assumed it was the motherboard. Not a big enough of a deal for me to bother replacing it. The RAM problem, on the other hand, I don't have, and that would probably be a big enough of a deal for me to want to replace it.

For players getting arrested this off-season: