Bartimaeus

Weirdly, he was never really that good for us, so his sudden development into an elite corner is troubling, to say the least. Either it's a fluke, or our coaches were incompetent: it's pretty unusual for guys to suddenly become *that* much better in their fifth year when on a new team unless the previous team was using them wrong.

This is actually rather interesting, because while Denuvo may not do any of those things itself, it does make any such DRM schemes baked into it much harder to remove...which I think we can safely presume that games using Denuvo are likely to do just exactly that, because otherwise, what's the bloody point of having Denuvo if it's not protecting the anti-piracy measures? Anti-modding? ...Anti-modding measures would be much more heinous to me than anti-piracy measures, anyways. Hey, wait, actually: does Denuvo make it so you can't mod your games at all? Anti-tampering and all that sounds like it should include modding...if so, most anything using it is a do-not-buy regardless of any DRM stuff.

I can't give you any exact links, but /r/games on reddit has definitely talked a bit about Denuvo over the past year or so...less so recently, though, I'd say. This is where I initially heard about it and got some understanding of what it did...and heard when it was finally cracked. What does it matter where one hears about it?

Yeah, I really thought the Panthers were going to pull one over them after Carr went out and they got two quick TDs...followed by another. But the Raiders survive their little dance with destiny.

I very, very nearly picked the Buccaneers in my pick'em league this week, due to the various injuries the Seahawks were nursing...but I decided that that would be just plain stupid. Dangit. Also, I love watching the Raiders.

I saw like ten minutes of that movie on TV once and turned it off thinking it was awful. I started watching right before a combat scene where they wasted probably literally a few thousand bullets on the monsters they were shooting at while somehow missing literally every single one it looked like, followed up by showing that only a couple of bullets were really necessary if they had an accuracy whatsoever, and then one person used a knife to cut off one of the monster's like...entire upper body clear through, and that's when I turned it off.

I'm tempted to put you on block until the end of the season just so I don't have to look at these horrifying images.

Yeah, if they had converted those FGs, or turned one of them into a touchdown...

these halftime shows today are enough to make me want to end my miserable existence

I love/hate watching the Lions. Such a mixture of total incompetence and pure perfection. The "we-have-to-make-this-final-drive-or-we-lose" Lions strike again...

or just do it manually by just moving the relevant game folder in the steamapps/common directory in addition to its appmanifest...with figuring out which appmanifest is the correct one to move (hint: go to the game's store page and figure out the gameid by looking at the URL) being the most difficult part

Pretty much the only cousin of mine that I actually like died from a random bicycle accident a few weeks ago. Life is so sudden and chaotic. Good to hear you're still kicking.

It felt like the game was very intentionally wasting my time after I got to the final floor. Clear the entire floor, see a big pentacle that's clearly something important...but nothing actually happens. Hmm. Go through the entire floor again, looking to see if there's any random quest item I missed...and finally found "Lazarus' Staff" in some random spot. Okay, bring it back to the pentacle...still nothing. Alrighty...go back to town and Deckard Cain, who's almost literally said nothing the entire game, suddenly gives me a freaking novel's worth of exposition...probably literally more text than I got in that one message than every other message from everyone else in the game combined. Alright, now I can fight Diablo...here we go...aaand I need to clear another floor again. Repeat this process again when it turns out I was actually fighting Lazarus instead of Diablo...and that I would need to clear an entire OTHER floor after that...and of course, it's all just the most annoying range-spamming enemies in the game. And then finally, FINALLY, I get to Diablo...and all he does are these retarded no-vision unlimited range fire attacks that you can't dodge...terrible design...and I still beat him pretty easily. Not the most ideal ending to a game that I've played.

I played and beat Diablo 1 for the first time. I made an autohotkey script so that I could stop clicking and could just use a keyboard button to attack instead, because boy, that crap was making my hand hurt like hell. It's not even like Diablo 2, where you can hold down left click on enemies: literally every attack requires a click. Well, no more, I say! Anyways, that game was...not that good, to be honest. Diablo 2 was better in pretty much every conceivable way besides maybe atmosphere, which Diablo 1 had admittedly the darker of the two. The walk speed, the terrible aiming and hitting system, the broken stat system, the broken inventory system, the broken buying and selling system... But hey, I got through it. (e): Oh yeah, I might've even quit, but I found an unenchanted Staff of Healing, which is ridiculously overpowered for not being worth anything, even if its healing powers can't really be used in combat. Made it so I could actually keep playing without having to go back to town for healing potions every .2 seconds. Consequently, I saved the few full healing potions I found for Diablo, and managed to beat him in one go.

I feel as though games with saving systems would benefit from a little simple innovation. You could have a primary quicksave, which is whatever save you made last...then like 10 backup quicksaves, just put a number or the time or saving at the end of the save name. Seem a bit overkill? Well, why not? You already made the backup saves to your hard drive at one point, and it's not like game saves take up that much space...so why not make use of the write cycles? Then, you could have a number of timed autosaves automatically made every so often...maybe every fifteen minutes or every half hour, except the game should make sure it's made out of combat and delay until then if necessary, of course. Then, you could have area autosaves: when you go to an area for the first time, you get a particular "first" autosave for that first time entry, so you can always revert back to a certain point in the game if necessary...and then any subsequent entries get a more generic autosave that doesn't overwrite that first entry autosave, but are nonetheless specific to that area. Overkill? One hundred percent: for an RPG like Baldur's Gate, you'd have probably a couple hundred saves by the end of the game if you went very strictly by these rules (maybe they could be just adjusted down a bit for large RPGs, I don't know). But again, why not? Your hard drive already took the effort to make those saves, so it's not like you're magically erasing the write cycles it took to make those saves in the first place: you're just deleting information and making a minuscule amount of room. Would it be useful to the player, though? Great potential for it, particularly first time players who don't know what random crap the game is going to throw at you. High cost to implement? Not really. High cost to the player to upkeep? Also not really...so why not? Have a "clear out auto/backup saves" button so the player doesn't have to manually delete all their saves, and you avoid that particular hassle for the player, too: if they're clearing out all their old saves, they click that button and then they only have to delete their latest save and a few manual saves at worst. I just don't like spending the 15-20 seconds to save manually when I can just rely on quicksaves and autosaves for the most part...except when I randomly can't for whatever reason or another, and I get totally screwed. It'd be so easy to implement a more thorough and convenient saving system, too...but for some reason, game developers just don't do it. Europa Universalis 4 has modularity in its autosave options...you have the option to have the game automatically select every so often, with I think the three options being every year, every half year, or every month of game time. Great idea! ...Except it only keeps three of those saves before it automatically deletes them. One step forward and another back... Would it kill developers to just have make a few more options for this sort of thing?

Alright, let's see... @Eagles, Texans, Seahawks, @Bears, Vikings, @Lions. Maybe we win three of those six...IF WE'RE LUCKY. Five of those six? All of them? Aaron Rodgers would have to literally become a Super Saiyan to win all six, because there's just no hope for this defense left, and the rest of the offense is either dead, old, or slow...or a combination of the two or sometimes even three. The chances of playoffs are exceedingly dim at this point.

Yeah, the Packers are donezo. We literally - literally - do not have enough cornerbacks to even play anymore: we're having to use our backup safeties as cornerbacks now. That was easily the worst defensive performance I've seen the Packers put up in the past three or so years.

Two million less than McCain, one million less than Romney, if I recall correctly. Hillary got, what, 10 or 11 million less than Obama in 2008?

Rest in peace, what.cd, the Library of Alexandria of music.

Inside...for best story? Firewatch? I don't know about Oxenfree, but I've personally played the entirety of the first and I've seen people play the second, and either this was a very poor year for storytelling in gaming, or, well, the ones deciding the nominees were a bit daft. I mean, Inside's an alright game and all...but best story? It barely HAD a story!

I have difficulty mustering up much sympathy for Obama...or the Democratic Party in general...when it was partly thanks to their efforts in trying to ensure that Hillary won the primaries that we now have Trump as president. It's not like her various scandals and flaws weren't well-known then. No, I feel bad for Bernie Sanders, who was cheated and insulted by the people who were supposed to share a similar ideology to him...and for all of us who actually tried to get him to win.

I don't think so, sadly. The Packers' organization has been loyal to a fault: I think it will take at least one more year of underperformance, if not two, before they seriously consider it.

In regards to the Packers, I think it really comes down to how stubborn McCarthy is. It's really frustrating to see him come up with excellent gameplans that work wonderfully for a couple of weeks, suited for the teams we're playing against and the players that we currently have, whether as a result of injuries or how people are playing...and then see him switch back to the vanilla gameplan that we've been trying to force for the past two seasons that has not worked one bit. Our offense is capable of playing well, but it's not capable of playing well in the same way it did in years past, and McCarthy seems to think that trying to force it to do exactly that will work, when it very patently has not for the last two years.

Yeah, that's true. And on the AFC side, it looks pretty similar there, too, with three teams from the AFCW being .700 or better, and literally only the Patriots in the entirety of the rest of the AFC being that,

My only point was that the NFC East likely produces two wild card teams, not just one. Have you seen the state of the NFC North? If the Packers are going to the playoffs, I feel very strongly that it will have to be as a division champion, not as a wild card. It's very unlikely to be anyone from the NFC South, the Giants currently have one game over anybody else for a spot, and the Redskins have another half game (tie) over anybody else as well...and then the Eagles are tied for the only other 5-4 team, the Vikings. So basically, you're looking at somebody from the NFC North or the Cardinals to get the second wildcard spot, and the chances of that are...not great, especially given that the NFC East has been mostly wrecking the NFC North.