Keyrock

Facial animations by the Mass Effect: Andromeda team, I see. On the bright side, I didn't see a single stupid ***hole with a laser sword in the entire trailer. I'm not naive enough to think that they could make an entire Star Wars game without any stupid ***holes with laser swords showing up, but at least there's hope that they will keep the stupid ***holes with laser swords to a minimum. Out of curiosity, as a guy whose inner Star Wars fan died a long time ago (in this specific galaxy), does nostalgia bait still work on Star Wars fans (we have some here, right?)? It hasn't on me in decades. Like, do y'all still instantly splooge in your pants when you catch a glimpse of a star destroyer?

Whatever was wrong with me went away and my appetite returned. I wound up going from 198 lbs to 191 lbs in the process, now the goal is to keep the weight off and not overeat and immediately rebound to 198 (or higher). Earlier this year in January I got sick, but like really sick, for about 2 1/2 days, lost 5 lbs, then gained it all back (and then some) almost immediately afterward. If I can stabilize at 191 that will make my next round of planned carnivore diet in about a month that much easier, since the goal I had set for myself was to get down to 185, I might even go for my ultimate goal of 180 if I'm still at 191 when I start the diet. 180 has been the ultimate goal since I did my first round of carnivore a couple of years ago when I hit my heaviest around 216 or 217. I won't have a 6-pack or anything at 180, but it's what I consider my ideal weight. I'd have to get down to 170 to have a 6-pack, but I don't think I could maintain that weight even if I managed to get there. 180 I think I can maintain once I reach it; it will be challenging but doable. First I have to get there, though.

You forgot the most important reason of all, Austria's greatest contribution to the world, Falco.

For one, whatever people think of him now, the man did a lot good as a trial lawyer in his past. For example, he's the man that took Monsanto, multi-time winner of the prestigious Most Evil Company in the World Award, to task. Also, I agree with many of his stances, definitely not all, but more than the alternatives, that's for sure. Granted, candidates often make promises they have no intention of keeping on the campaign trail, that's politics. Still, at least there's a chance, however small, that he fulfills his campaign promises, whereas I already know for certain that Biden and The Donald are blowing smoke up our asses. However, my support for Bobby has as much to do with what the alternatives are as the man himself. The other choices are Biden and The Donald, 2 of the most evil, vile, loathsome, disgusting, dishonest, pieces of garbage that this planet has ever produced. Would Bobby Kennedy make a good president? Perhaps, perhaps not; we won't know for sure until it happens. I know with absolute certainty that Biden and The Donald are AWFUL presidents, because I've experienced both of their terms already. I know exactly what I'm going to get with either of the 2 main party candidates and the thought of either is enough to make me want to vomit, not to mention move back to Poland.

I unlocked the Trickster vocation, I've been itching to try it out since I heard about it. It's an entirely support vocation, I mean you can technically smack enemies with your censer, but it does little damage. It's effectively an illusionist class that causes enemies to focus on it then screws with their minds to distract, disorient, and even turn them against each other. I don't know yet if I like it, but, if nothing else, it's VERY different from all the other vocations, which makes it interesting. Edit: According to Steam only 18.6% of players have unlocked the Trickster vocation. I didn't think it was particularly hidden.

I love rye bread but I'm also not a fan of caraway seeds. I can handle a little bit, but even then I'd rather they were just not present.

I'm 47 and I had a blast playing it last year... Okay, I was 46 back then. It's a fun game that can be enjoyed by a person of any age.

@melkathi's Stockholm Syndrome Simulator 2024

Yeah, I interpret my relationships with random minor characters I've raised to maximum affinity as we're really good friends because there's no kiss or sexy time scene. However they do blush and they act really really friendly toward you at max affinity so interpreting that as a romance is not unreasonable, you can read as much or as little into it as you like. With Wilhelmina there is no ambiguity, it's absolutely a romance that ends with a steamy night of passion.

I completed the Wilhelmina romance quest in DD2, it's called Every Rose Has It's Thorn. It wasn't what I expected... I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't that. It was a fun quest chain and I got a sexy time scene at the end, albeit a short one. I'm not going to post any pictures of it, though.

^ What game is that? It looks like a metroidvania of some sort.

I've been working my charms on Wilhelmina and, judging by how she's blushing, it certainly seems to be paying off: She's perhaps the only character you can romance in the game, the only one I know of for sure. You can befriend just about anybody and get them to really like you and they will act differently toward you, greet you differently, instead of a neutral generic greeting they may say something like "Hey, great seeing you again, I hope you're doing well." It's not a huge deal but I love that kind of reactivity in games. They'll even sometimes give you gifts and if they're shopkeepers they'll give you a discount. You can also go to the brothel and hook up with one of the ladies or gentlemen of the night there and get a really short sexy time cutscene. It will cost you 20K gold, though, so that better be some incredible sex for that kind of money. With Wilhelmina you can have a full-fledged romance, though. There's an entire quest chain for it. I don't know what the quest chain involves I only read up on it as far as knowing when to start the quest chain because there is a narrow window of "time" (in between a couple of specific main story missions) in the game when you can initiate the romance, so once I got that information I stopped reading to avoid spoilers. I haven't quite reached that point yet because I've been doing a lot of side content, but I'm close and in the meantime I worked my charms on her to get her affinity up to maximum. The blushing is this game's indicator of maximum affinity. At the end of the quest chain is presumably some hot steamy sex, eat your heart out @BruceVC

That's exactly how I also feel about DD2 and, to a lesser degree, DD. DD2 is the party-based adventure/RPG I have been waiting for my entire life, I dreamed of stuff like this when I was younger. Climbing onto a dragon and hanging on for dear life as it takes off into the air is thrilling as ****. Having my warrior pawn hurl me high into the air above a cyclops and then I hit my downward thrust skill, come down with great force stabbing into the cyclops' neck/upper back, and then, hitting the grab button at just the right time to grab a hold of the cyclops' hide to stay on top of them and then continue to stab the cyclops with my spear is so awesome, especially since none of that was a setpiece or a scripted event, I did that dynamically. Or tackling a smaller (man-sized) enemy and pinning them to the ground and watching my thief pawn come over and stab the enemy in the face while I hold them down, that's ****ing teamwork right there. And then, as icing on the cake, after the battle we high five or fist bump. It's the greatest feeling. DD is a more janky version of that; the fantastic ideas are all there but the implementation is rough. Still, if you can get past the rough edges, DD is a good game.

My local sushi joint makes dragon rolls with unagi, which is perfectly fine with me since I love eel. Unagi temaki (big cone-shaped rolls) are my absolute favorite sushi. Back in the day when I lived in Connecticut we used to make the roughly 40 minute drive to New Britain and get smoked eel (among other things) from the Polish butcher. That eel would be half gone by the time we got home because I'd be devouring it on the way. Couldn't even wait to get home, not enough willpower.

I'm completely fine and normal in every other way. I'm weight lifting like I always have, going for bike rides, I have energy, I'm active. The only thing "wrong" with me is that I have no desire to eat.

I have a theory. My theory is that there is one ***hole at Capcom... Capcom is a large company, there's almost certainly more than one ***hole, but this particular ***hole is in a high enough position of power that he or she cannot be ignored. This ***hole has a hard-on for microtransactions and insists that they are present in every title. The other top execs have the devs just whip up some quick online shop, it doesn't really matter what's in it, no one will use it, slap it in the game, have the devs do all of ZERO work to balance the game to entice the player to use the shop, and shove it out the door. They're just doing this to appease that one ***hole high level exec so they are putting no effort whatsoever into it.

In that case I've had rabies my entire life. I wrote the weight loss thing as a joke, but it's also true, I've been losing weight steadily, roughly a pound a day. There's a small part of me that kind of hopes this lingers for another week. As a guy in my late 40s it's hard keeping weight off and even harder losing it, plus it gets harder every year. Another week of this, assuming I continue dropping weight at roughly the same pace, would put me at a really good weight that I haven't been at in close to a decade. Like I wrote before, silver lining.

I've been feeling kind of weird lately and barely eating anything, I pretty much have to force myself to eat. This has been like this for almost a week now. I don't think it's COVID, which supposedly makes you lose your taste. My taste is fine, things taste exactly how I would expect them to taste, I just have zero desire to, even the thought of putting food in my mouth is off-putting. I can keep the food down and it tastes fine, great even if it's something I particularly like, but at the same time the food tastes good it feels bad going into my body. I don't know how else to describe it. I haven't been to a doctor to get it checked out because I am completely normal otherwise. If it lingers for much longer I guess I'll bite the bullet to get it checked out. Silver lining: This is doing wonders for weight loss.

Of couse, I don't expect this great streak from Capcom to last, but I'm going to take advantage of it while it is happening. At the very least, I hope they're still kicking ass like they currently are until Monster Hunter 6 comes out. That said, even when Capcom are doing great, like they are now, they can't help but do some stupid things. Case in point, the whole online shop thing. Dragon's Dogma 2 is just the latest example, Capcom has been inexplicably shoehorning completely and utterly pointless microtransactions into games for a while now and creating controversies for no ****ing reason whatsoever. I've been trying to wrap my head around it and... I mean, I have to assume that somebody is spending money in these shops. Otherwise why would they keep shoehorning them into games? I just cannot figure out who the **** buys stuff from a Capcom online shop? And for what? You never ever need anything from those shops. You can just completely ignore the online shops in recent Capcom games, play the games normally, and be completely fine. You'll never hit a wall where it's like "$#!+, I'm going to have to grind for hours to get strong enough to get through this next part, or I could spend $5 and get this booster from the shop and be good to go". That just doesn't exist in these games. So why the **** even have the online shops?

What possessed you to read YouTube comments? That's a descent into madness.

I think it boils down to publisher priority. I think a lot of these live service games that have been spectacular, high-profile disasters (not necessarily financially, but definitely in reception and what they have done to the reputations of their developers) come down to the monetization model being the initial focus of the project and then the developer does what they can to make a game to fit said monetization model, which, from a creative standpoint, is completely bass ackwards. It should be make a good game AND THEN figure out how to best monetize it. But business gonna business, I guess. Maybe these businesses should look at Capcom who is selling games like gangbusters, their stock value has something like quadrupled over the last 5 years. How did Capcom do it? By releasing great games. Their success has largely been built on the strength of single player games, the types of games that ***holes in suits keep telling us are no longer profitable and live service is the future. Games like the Resi games (remakes and new) and most recently Dragon's Dogma 2, which, for all its technical problems, and believe me, as a guy who has 36.5 hours in the game according to Steam, I have experienced said technical problems more times than I'd like to admit and they are frustrating, is an AWESOME game and it has sold quite well. I'm nominating that last sentence for Run-on Sentence of the Week. I'm sure that's not the whole story. I don't know Capcom's company structure, culture, etc. However, the fact that the company has been HIGHLY profitable and successful for a sustained period of time tells me that they are well managed and efficient. The flip side... It would be easy for me to $#!+ on Ubisoft here, and Lord knows they deserve it, but I $#!+ on Ubisoft enough as it is, time for WB to take one on the chin. WB had the biggest hit of the year in 2023 with Hogwarts Legacy (coincidentally a single player game) and by a WIDE margin. That game has sold well over 20 million copies so far and was well received, a HUMONGOUS success by any measure. An yet, the entire rest of 2023 was such a disaster for WB that they STILL are bleeding money and needing to restructure their business. How ****ed up is your company when you have a MASSIVE GIGANTIC SMASHING success and still can't have even a decent year overall? Every person in upper management at that company should be fired immediately.

I didn't really think of Conan Exiles as a live service game. I suppose it might qualify, I don't know, the definitions get kind of muddled at some point. For example, would you consider The Witcher 3 to be live service? I wouldn't, but it has multiple expansions, the game was sort of a living thing for a few years. Then again, Conan Exiles did eventually add a battle pass and microtransactions, so I guess it is live service now? Back when I played it the game didn't have some of that stuff, I played it briefly since then but didn't really engage with the battle pass or the microtransactions at all, I would just collect the freebies from the battle pass whenever I got a freebie and then forgot about it until I got another freebie.

Funny you should write that because some live service games can be accused of exactly that. I mean, they have an ending; every game technically has an ending, there is a point at which you can't keep playing further or a conclusion to the main story if it's a game that you can keep playing after finishing to do side content or grind for gear or whatever. Whether that ending is satisfying is a different matter entirely and live service games can, and have been accused of having weak "endings", and this is by design, because it's not really an ending but but an end to a chapter of a story that, in theory, will keep going for many years to come. Granted, unsatisfying endings are hardly exclusive to live service games. The lie that we are fed is that we get a full-featured, complete game and then in addition we will get more game periodically. The reality is that we get a stripped down, bare minimum shell of a game and maybe that shell will be filled out over time. Obviously I'm generalizing. The Division 2 was relatively well received so it is possible to have a good live service game. I played The Crew many years ago, I didn't buy it, it was part of PS Plus or something, but I quite liked that game and it had TONS of content. Of course, I played it some 3 years after release so it had 3 years of content added to it, I can't speak to how the game was at launch. I think that's the move with live service. Wait like 2 years after launch and, assuming the game is still alive at that point, buy it then and you'll get it cheaper as a bonus.

Imagine you bought a piano for full price and when it arrived at your home parts were missing. About 40 of the keys are missing, the door on top that covers all the machinery is missing, one of the pedals is missing, the little stand for your sheet music is missing, and so on. The piano is technically functional, you can play music on it, but you are severely limited in what songs you can play on account of all the missing parts. But don't worry, those missing parts will get added later in piano expansion packs that will cost you more money and eventually, after a couple of years and spending an additional double what you paid for the piano in the first place, you might have a complete piano, assuming the piano company doesn't abandon the piano before all the planned piano expansions are actually made and shipped. Who would buy a piano like that? I sure wouldn't. I don't buy video games like that either.

I'm going to post this here for lack of a better place to put it and because it doesn't warrant its own thread. Here's the link in case it didn't embed correctly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swoIPD7EvEw As someone who previously didn't give any thought to the nitty-gritty of how media encoding and decoding work, I found this fascinating. I still don't fully know how they work, I didn't completely understand everything in this video, but I certainly have a much better idea of the process of encoding and decoding now.