Keyrock

Looks sort of Romancing the Stone-esque.

I don't know if this is the type of game I will enjoy, but the concept of a Taopunk setting very much appeals to me.

You can count me as one of the few other weirdos that liked the spirit meter.

For me, if the story has a ticking clock then the gameplay should have a ticking clock. Ideally, it's an option so that people can play the way they want, which I think was patched into Fallout eventually, or maybe it was a community made patch or something.

Is that Gabe Newell 2nd from the right?

To be clear, I think you can have a ticking clock element in an open world game, it can work really well, in fact, but it needs to be a real ticking clock integrated into the gameplay and not just a "ticking clock". A good example of this is Fallout. You have 100 days I think (it's been a while) to get the part you need. You can go wherever you want and do whatever you want, but if you waste too much time ****ing around then Vault 13 is ****ed. Conversely, in TW3 you can spend a month in some random town drinking, playing Gwent, and getting to know the local wenches. This won't impact the main story. The game won't suddenly tell you that Eredin has caught Ciri, you are a terrible father, and you lose.

I think the open world, especially given how large it is, does TW3 a disservice. Giant open worlds full of icons are fine when there isn't a ticking clock, but TW3, in theory, always has a ticking clock to (in theory) drive you forward. In the prologue I am tracking Yennefer, I'm only a couple days behind, there are signs of a battle, she could be injured or in trouble, WE NEED TO FIND HER QUICKLY! Gameplay wise, I'm going to go ahead and **** around in the boondocks for a few days. It doesn't make any sense. Later on it's, in theory, a race against The Wild Hunt to get to Ciri. THE FATE OF THE WORLD IS AT STAKE! We need to hurry and track her down as quickly as possible... But first I'm going to make some coin doung a Kikimore contract for some backwater yokels. Monster contracts would make sense, I am a Witcher, after all, it's my job, if the ticking clock wasn't there. But narratively the ticking clock is there. What I'm trying to say is that the narrative and the gameplay are at odds with each other. If you are the type that can tunnel vision on the main quest and then this isn't really an issue. For a lot of people like myself, we can't help but get distracted by all the side content, especially given how well written much of it is, and this completely ruins the pacing of the story and the narrative as a whole. Sometimes a more linear game is better suited for a given story.

I resigned my job, I'll be starting a new driving job in January. 3 1/2 years of over the road trucking has me really burned out. The new job will be southeast regional, I will never have to drive further north than Virginia and Kentucky nor further west than Tennessee and Mississippi. I'll miss driving to Texas, I always liked going there, not having to venture into the north, specifically the northeast, is a huge plus, though. This won't completely eliminate winter conditions driving, but it will seriously reduce it. More importantly, with a 5 on 2 off schedule I'll be home every weekend, so I can have something remotely resembling a life again.

I might be the only person on the planet that likes The Witcher 2 the best of the trilogy. TW1 has the best narrative and collectible nudie cards to boot, but the rhythym game combat is SUPER GARBAGE and the swamp area is worse than cancer. TW3 is very good but suffers from too much of everything. I have tried to replay TW1 multiple times. Every time I get to the swamp my brain immediately says "Oh hell no" and that's where it ends. I'm not even going to attempt to replay TW3 because I ain't about to invest another 120 hours in a game I already beat. I've beaten TW2 3 times.

Methinks that's the point. Humans are the real monsters and all that jazz.

I really like the look of parts of the Taito area: There are giant rectangular prisms made up of disjointed moving cubes that form into a solid surface with weird gear patterns as you near them. A still picture doesn't do it justice. While exploring I found the Aogami Type-0 essence. The last few Aogami essences I found had some great skills, but more suited for a magic build rather than my physical build. This, however, was the mother lode for a physical build like mine. I almost soiled myself when I saw the skills. Murakumo is an absolutely perfect fit for a physical, high luck build, like mine. It hits stoopid hard. My current team:

Multiverse-hopping Michelle Yeoh? Sign me up!

I wouldn't say I have a lot of experience with zombie games. I played Dead Island, it was meh, I grew to dislike it. I played Zombi-U on the Wii-U (I'm one of the 5 people that bought that console), it was a mediocre game with 1 cool gimmick where inventory was on the controller touch screen so you had to take your eyes off the TV to dig something out of your pack. I played Dying Light and I liked it a lot, it was the game Dead Island should have been. Focusing on movement was a smart decision. Yes, I am excited for Dying Light 2.

Even children's fairy tales, the old skool ones, are pretty dark. They're meant to be cautionary tales and/or to scare children away from potential danger or teach them be more obedient. "Don't wander into the forest, you might get attacked by wolves." That type of stuff. When I was a little kid in Poland I got told stories about Baba Yaga. That house on chicken legs is some wild ****.

Greek salad with grilled chicken.

I killed the demon king is SMT V, afterward there was a big reveal and a lot of cards were laid on the table. It now also makes a lot more sense why Amanozako keeps being drawn to my boy Beefstik if you know anything about Japanese mythology. I won't go into any details for spoiler reasons. I'm now in what I assume is the final open-ish area of the game. There's probably a dungeon after this, but I'll find that out in due time. I'm in heavy planning mode as I'm getting into end-game demon territory and for my end-game demons I like to fuse them from several steps back and level up component demons along the way so that the final demon gets fused with really good stats and skills. I like to start this process several levels before I am able to fuse said end-game demons so that by the time I reach the level necessary the final component demons are ready for fusion. Were I playing on an easier difficulty and going for (presumably) an easier ending, I probably wouldn't need to be as anal about fusing demons (though I still likely would be), but I'm going for the true neutral ending and I assume that's the hardest path, plus I'm on hard difficulty, so I'm trying to build the most OP team possible for the brutal challenges ahead.

That part was awesome. I'm of the opinion that the less killing the better in a Tomb Raider game, but even I was pumped to go on a murder spree when Lara rose out of the water like that.

Several days ago our coach, and @Bartimaeus 's favorite ex-cheesehead, Mike McCarthy publicly guaranteed a victory today @ Washington. Some of the so-called "experts" made a big deal out of this. "Big mistake by Mike McCarty firing up a 'red hot' (their words, not mine ) Washington Football Team," they said. My reaction was "we don't deserve to go to the playoffs if we can't beat the absolute dog**** out of the Redskins in their house." *smash cut to muh Boys beating the absolute dog**** out of the Redskins in their house*

I've been going through the castle dungeon in SMT V. I'm probably pretty close to the end of it (Audience Chamber), but I'm taking a break from the castle to go through some earlier areas with a guide and rebuild my bank while hopefully finding some blue mitamas along the way. I still have 100K macca, but I had over 200K at one point. I spent a lot of macca fusing up some fairly powerful demons: Hecatoncheires, Cu Chlainn, Queen Medb, Atavaka, Titania, Loup-garou. I'm not sure if any of them will stick around for my end-game party, possibly Titania, Queen Medb, and/or Hecatoncheires, but they're a big upgrade from what I had before.

Lola Rennt aka Run Lola Run (1998). This is a German movie I had heard about many times before but never got around to watching until just now. I'm glad I finally watched it. The ticking clock is a device used it media of all types to create tension and never is it on display more prominently than here. It's the same sequence of a woman running, the titular Lola, played out 3 times, but with small differences each time that result in very different outcomes, not only for Lola and her boyfriend Manni, but also for several other people they encounter along the way. I thoroughly enjoyed Run Lola Run. It's a very fast-paced movie that only slows down briefly a few times. The running time is 80 minutes but it felt more like 60, and I mean that in the best way possible. It's amazing how much more tension and excitement a creative filmmaker on a shoestring budget can create than an office building full of CGI artists and actors in front of a green screen.

Maybe he was just wasted? I imagine a fair number of those attending the embarrassing circle jerks called award shows are getting plastered.

Kathleen Kennedy: Nobody could **** up Star Wars worse than I did. David Cage: Hold my beer. *George Lucas counts his billions in the background*

I'm hoping this is an anthology series with a more obscure character each time. The Lord of the Rings: Grima Wormtongue, TLotR: The Mouth of Sauron, TLotR: That One Hobbit Woman That Gives Gandalf the Stinkeye at the Beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. (I'm still working out the title on that last one)