Vaeliorin

I get it sometimes, like when Ark got review bombed because they released paid DLC while still in early access. So I get it for a specific game, but not really for anything a developer may put out.

Steam needs to fix their stupid algorithm that decides what to advertise to you. The biggest advertisement on the front page for me was for the XCOM franchise, but I already own every single XCOM (and X-Com) game on Steam.

You know, I'd really like a way to play some of these missions in Starcraft 2 with other factions. For example, I'd like to try the "End of the Universe" mission from Wings of Liberty with Terrans instead of Protoss. Heck, I'd like to try it with Legacy of the Void protoss instead of Wing of Liberty protoss. Anyway, I finished Heart of the Swarm (which was less horrible than I was expecting. I hated playing Zerg in Starcraft 1 (and never finished the campaign because there were zerg missions I just couldn't beat) but the changes in Starcraft 2 make them much more playable to me (mostly roaches...the roaches that spawn roachlings are awesome. Never will I have to use another zergling again!) I did make one evolution choice which kind of came back to bite me in the butt, which was the flying locusts for swarm hosts (but I picked all the left hand upgrades like I did in Wing of Liberty, and next playthrough shall be all right hand upgrades, with third playthrough being pick the best) because it means that units that can only attack ground units ignore the locusts and go straight for the swarm host. I do wish that there had been some story choices like in Wings of Liberty (regardless of how small the difference it makes) just so the next playthrough would be a little bit different in terms of missions. Legacy of the Void looks like it's going to be even worse in terms of choices, because it seems like none of the choices are permanent (neither units nor the spending of solarite.)

The risk of getting wood alcohol is pretty small, since you have to distill booze from wood to actually get it. Those problems come from a-holes selling moonshine that has been diluted with other things, methylated spirits for instance. You'd have to be pretty callous to do that. So yeah, it's a bit about safety aswell. But you don't get methanol from regular distilling. Yeah, I realize that. Hence the part about unscrupulous a-holes doing it. There are enough people who do horrible things that I'd think there'd be pretty regular cases of people selling contaminated booze. Or maybe I'm just a terrible cynic.

I'm kind of torn about those laws, I can see both the good and the bad in it, but I'm pretty biased against it since my family would be drinking even more if they could make their own booze. Well making booze isn't hard. Making booze anyone would want to drink is another thing entirely. I am a fan of good bourbon. But good bourbon is aged in a charred oak barrel for at least seven years. Preferably 9 or more. That is ho it gets it color and flavor. Fresh made bourbon is clear and tastes just like moonshine. Because that's what it is. Being able to store the whiskey in a temperature controlled environment for the time it takes to age properly is the hard part. The making is easy. As for why moonshine is illegal, it's all about money. Excise taxes on liquor in the US is around $3 a liter. Beer is less than $0.50 per liter. So it doesn't hurt the government so much when you brew your own beer because most home brewers can only produce less than 5 gallons at a time. So at roughly 3.5 liters the total tax lost would be $1.25 give or take. Now five gallon of booze is a loss of $10 in uncollected taxes and that much 'shine goes a lot farther than the same amount of home brew beer. Isn't at least a little bit of it about safety? If people were just allowed to distill and sell unregulated, there would without a doubt be some unscrupulous a-holes selling wood alcohol as something fit for human consumption.

Just a touch? It turns it into some kind of weird platformer that requires jumping off of places you'd normally never even consider jumping off of (and I honestly don't know how you'd realize some of them were there unless you were looking for them and had your gamma ridiculously high). Honestly, while I thought the areas were visually amazing, that platforming really bothered me (admittedly, I hate platformers and platforming in general. Oddly, I still love Mirror's Edge.) It was just so out of line with everything else in the game, that despite me thinking I'd explored everything had me going to a wiki because I couldn't figure out for the life of me how I'd missed so many gears. Sorry if that came off as overly vehement, but that just really annoyed me, and makes me worry that Bioware will add more of that to their games in the future (though I probably won't buy any of them until they're deeply discounted game of the year editions.)

Ah, but I'm a weirdo who doesn't care about multi-player, and replays campaigns (I've played the DoW 1 campaign at least a half dozen times.) Heck, I haven't even finished the regular campaigns (I just bought the Battle Chest a couple days ago) and I already want to play through at least once more to see the opposite tech/story choices, and then maybe a third time to pick optimal choices, and possibly on Brutal (I'll have to see how hard is, normal has been really easy so far.) Honestly, I'm kind of annoyed that I have to choose multi-player just to play a skirmish versus AI. It's not a huge deal, but skirmish should be one of the front page choices, not hidden under multi-player.

Apocalypse is actually my favorite of the original X-Coms, but always played turn-based. I honestly think it would be neat if Firaxis took some inspiration from it for XCOM 3 (assuming there will be an XCOM 3, of course.)

Just out of curiosity, with all this Starcraft 2 talk, I was wondering if any of you have played the Nova missions? Are they worth the $15? That seems like a lot to me for 9 missions, but if it's good content I could be tempted.

So I've been playing more XCOM2 with A Better Advent 2, and wow does the difficulty ramp up. Pods are all at least 6 enemies now, and their are enough of them on the maps that it's really difficult to keep a second pod from becoming involved in any fight. Also, a pod of 5 berserkers and a firestarter prime (a souped-up berserker that breathes fire) is freaking hard to kill in a single turn, even with 8 soldiers with plasma weapons (it might be easier if I was using the Long War Perk Pack classes instead of the Shadows Ops Long War classes or had some psionics trained.) It also seems like there are 2 pods parked around the objectives now too, and I don't know if the civilian AI has been changed, but I just had one move to spot my scout, then go through a door to the objective, activating the pods there. 5 Muton Captains, an Andromedon, and 6 elite Advent troops is a lot of enemies to have to deal with. It's glorious! (I should mention, this is on Veteran difficulty...I imagine it's much worse on Commander and Legendary.)

Truth be told, when you get to the higher level maps, you only find the odd small patch of elfroot. My biggest frustration was trying to find the fade-touched materials I wanted for a couple items. Fade-touched stormheart is freaking awful to find (of course, the only area with massive amounts of stormheart to farm is the second to last area of the game.) Really, other than wanting fade-touched stormheart that I could have easily used something else for (I just thought it appropriate for my tank to have Shield Bash on hit) the only thing I really farmed for was fade-touched Silverite because guard on hit is basically necessary for any melee characters, and I was playing a duel-wield rogue.

What kind of blasphemy is this!? This is an RPG! If there's any elfroot, you're going to need that elfroot and therefore, such elfroot needs to be elfrooted... Err, gathered. Hey, I spent 60+ hours spamming the search key, and picking up every single thing that got highlighted. At some point, I point really need 300+ iron...

You can probably skip the vast majority of the elfroot. I had several hundred extra when I finished the game, and I stopped going out of my way to gather it probably halfway through the game (admittedly, it took me 130 hours to finish with all the DLC.) I didn't even pick up the bonus herb perk until I'd pretty much stopped gathering herbs (it was the only semi-useful one left.) Playing XCom 2 with a slew of mods. A Better Advent 2 makes the game so much better (and harder.....lots harder.) Recently finished my first retaliation mission of the campaign (it was a Haven defense from Additional Mission Types) and ended up killing 51 enemies on that mission (and the final reinforcement pod was all captain variants....) Only had two minor injuries as well, so all in all a good mission.

As a Browns fan, I was kind of hoping for 0-16. If we're going to be this bad, at least we could be historically bad. Still, if we were going to win a game, the only better team to beat would have been the Cowboys (sorry Manifested, I just hate Philip Rivers. I've never been able to shake the idea that he's a massive a-hole.)

As soon as RtWP comes up with a way to actually punish you for your mistakes, as opposed to letting you scatter your party as soon as you see somebody casting an AoE or the like, I'll be okay with RtWP combat. Until then, give me turn-based, preferably with turns based on some sort of initiative or character speed system. I go, you go is tolerable, but I much prefer some sort of initiative system.

If Undertale didn't have that terrible style of combat, I might give it a try, but I hate bullet hell games, and that's what the combat (even the peaceful kind) reminds me of. For me, I'd probably say XCom 2. With mods, it's pretty amazing, and A Better Advent 2 makes the game really, really difficult, which I like. It might be possible to beat it without an expanded squad size, but I wouldn't want to make any bets (and I feel the game plays a bit better with an 8 man squad as opposed to 6.) I was enjoying Tyranny until I went to Lethian's Crossing and there was literally nothing to do there, and no way for me to access the third rubbing to get into the spire. Actually, all of act 2 (I got up to the point where I was supposed to go after the Scarlet Chorus after siding with the Disfavored) was kind of underwhelming, given that every conversation pretty much literally left me no choice beyond killing everyone. There should never be a conversation that doesn't give you any option other than attacking (being attacked is okay, but I shouldn't be forced to go on the offensive.) I also kind of have the feeling that character diversity is somewhat lacking, because it seems that I'm always going to end up using magic unless I want to make a character who's just terrible and has almost nothing to do in combat.

I did the same. The first couple hours were fun, but once you get to the point that you're mostly just doing side missions and encounters, it's so freaking repetitive and dull. I quit playing it after just a few hours.

Actually the Sith Inquisitor gets a different name for being dark, grey or light side. Sure he gets the Darth title and a seat on the Dark Council (what else would there be for such a powerful Sith) but the actual name varies. Nox for the dark side, Occlus for grey and Imperius for light side inquisitors, along with different spheres of influence. Of course, afterwards it only comes up once afterwards when Darth Marr calls you about the crisis on Makeb but the basis was there. It just remained unused. You didn't at launch, which was pretty much the last time I played TOR (Darth Keaira sounds really silly, btw. I'd have chosen a different name if I knew that was going to end up my title.) Well, I did go back for a couple hours when it went F2P, but as soon as I saw they were selling UI elements (are they still selling action bars?) I uninstalled it and haven't looked back.

Yep, players are the worst. I'm actually enjoying playing through the expansions with more than one character because of all the dialogue options. My trooper is a pretty typical good guy soldier, while my Jedi Knight is arrogant and power hungry. The game gives me a good deal of control over that development. Sometimes the conflict over light and dark side choices is actually pretty good too. Example: Of course, you also end up with weird things like a totally light side Sith Inquisitor being granted the title of Darth and being on the Sith Council or whatever it's called. The stories only seem to work well if you play to stereotype.

Am I missing a "speed up combat" option somewhere? I've hardly gotten anywhere in the game, but my character taking 5 seconds to swing his sword (yes, shield and armor make you slower, I get it, but it's a bit ridiculous) and having to recast a 45 second buff in a fight against 3 generic mooks which was only the second fight of the game is...less than exciting. I know rounds in D&D were 6 seconds, but I've honestly sat there wondering if I'd told my character to attack because he was standing there so long doing nothing. Also, being able to get Verse up to 4 loyalty within 30 minutes of starting the game is...weird.

The only place I'm completely opposed to voice acting is for the PC. Other than that, I can take it or leave it for the most part. I find in subsequent playthroughs I tend to skip over a lot of the voiced dialogue because I always play with subtitles on, and I can read much, much faster than they speak. But yes, if you're going to have voiced characters, make sure they're well done.

Wait...are you me? I don't think I've ever seen anyone else who didn't mind the copy-paste in DA2. Anyway, I'm playing DA:I, and I think the game is better than I expected given what I'd heard about it. The combat isn't exactly great (and the camera sucks) but it's unobjectionable for the most part. The quests aren't as bad as I expected (most of the "MMO" ones that people complain about are completely optional, and I usually end up completing just doing other stuff) and the characters are a lot more likeable than I thought they would be. There's even been moments that had me chuckling. My biggest complaint about the game is that it's kind of overstaying it's welcome. I think I'm about 2/3rds through the game, and I'm already at 100 hours. I still want to try at least two more playthroughs, but the length is kind of making me rethink it.

WTF...people on Twitter comparing Trump getting elected and 9/11. Seriously, people?

Economic Left/Right: -0.13 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.64 This is why there are never any candidates that I can support.

I honestly don't know how they'd manage to do that and deal with heating issues. It's not like there's room for any significant fans, and I wouldn't want to hold a device that gets as hot as a gaming laptop for any extended period of time. It also seems like not many games would support the co-op feature, as coming up with a control scheme that works with just one of those little controller things would be extremely limiting. as it appears to just have an analog stick and 4 buttons. Honestly, it seems like something that would appeal to existing Nintendo fans, but I'm not sure how much it would expand their market, and I think that's something they really need to do if they want to keep making non-handheld consoles.