Bartimaeus

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:

I'm not sure that's ever established one way or another, and Baldur's Gate 2 doesn't illuminate the matter any further, as far as I remember. I think the Harper leadership, seeing as Elminster and Gorion both knew, were aware of it, but who knows whether that info was passed down to all the other members. As I recall, Harpers ascribed to the "we tell you only what you need to know" philosophy in regards to its general members, so I would personally say they probably do not know*. It's hard to say for sure, though, because NPCs in BG1 are more or less totally silent: when your lineage is finally revealed, there's no reaction from any party members, but I wouldn't necessary assume that a lack of a reaction meant that they knew, given that nobody else reacted, either. *Although I suppose Gorion could've very well told them...but I don't know - with what little they said in BG1, I never really got the impression that they knew. Still, impossible to say for sure if there's nothing concrete.

I've been waiting for Vega for forever. I usually go with the brand that's doing worse at the time in regards to market share, which seems to almost always be AMD, and this will be a very hard buy for me if the worst-case scenario comes to fruition.

no good reason for ignoring our later comments. *shrug* your whole point were 'bout this kinda thing biting folks in the keister. is a smallish chance o' this kinda thing coming back to haunt the republicans anytime soon. to bite in the arse, need have opposition in control of the senate during a Presidential election year when a Justice dies or becomes incapacitated. should be obvious why mcconnell and other republicans weren't worried seeing as how they had nothing to lose. even then, five times in 100 years would still be extreme rare, no? with medical tech being what it is nowadays, the complete unexpected death o' a Justice is actual becoming less likely. kennedy and ginsburg is the folks most likely to retire or die soonish. am suspecting ginsburg will hold onto the bench with cold dead hands for as long as possible. any similar scenario involving antagonistic President and senate is at least three years remote. "it often comes back to bite you in the butt later on." nope. chances is possible but pretty darn slim for any current serving senator to need face a butt mangling. HA! Good Fun! "no good reason for ignoring our later comments." Well, uh, isn't that kind of exactly what you're doing to me? From the rest of my post, it was clear that I understood what you were getting at and agreed, right? "It is pretty unlikely, though, that the Democrats will ever make them pay for it, that I'll agree to." After that, I even said things were more likely to get worse for the dems in this area than anything else (as I also mentioned, as you just did, that Ginsburg and Kennedy are the most likely to go, either of which would hurt the dems, Ginsburg especially). I mean, I didn't know if you knew off-hand that it had happened five times over the past hundred years, which is why I mentioned it when you said it hadn't...and then I proceeded to agree with you in the rest of my post.

I agreed to that already - your original statement did not include the "opposing party" bit, which is what I was replying to with that: "the likelihood o' a Court Justice dying or becoming incapacitated during an election year is smallish."