Keyrock

I'm sorry, but as soon as someone starts arguing about how it's ridiculous that 2 teenage girls can wield superhuman powers because sexy powered armor their whole argument goes out the window, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, we're talking about Wolfenstein here. WOLFENSTEIN! These games aren't exactly known for being realistic. This is a series that features dual wielding assault rifles and shotguns, a woman doing action stunts straight out of Fast n Furious movies while in late term pregnancy, nazi fire skeletons, Mecha Hitler, oh, and by the way, BJ gets his ****ing head cut completely off his body and SURVIVES! 2 teenage girls doing crazy action movie stuff because sexy powered armor fits the series to a tee, as far as I'm concerned. Wolfenstein: Youngblood may have a lot of problems (bullet sponge enemies, cramming RPG elements where they aren't needed nor wanted, etc.), but the protagonists aren't one... two, I guess, of them.

I am a man of many faces. No suit only challenge this time around (that will come later), but I did get my customary silent assassin status on master difficulty.

So that's where they go... Probably not worth it to go through that pile to find the 2 or 3 dozen I've lost in my lifetime. Also, I now live in the south so I rarely wear socks any more. #FlipFlopLife

Classic Ballmer. He always was a good hype man.

I'm home for a few days and enjoying the surprisingly mild weather. Low to mid 80s with moderate humidity is about the best you can expect in July here in the Charlotte area.

Now I kind wanna replay >Observer_ for some Rutger Hauer memories.

If nothing else, we got some good memes out of Diablo Immortal.

I've been on Yes kick as of late. As a bassist, Chris Squire is one of my heroes. Even as a legend, I still feel he's underappreciated as a bassist. Not only is he a founder of one of the greatest, if not THE GREATEST prog rock bands of all time, and one if its primary song writers, he also provided some of the most unforgettable bass riffs of all time. Everyone knows about Roundabout, Yes's SUPER GIGA OMEGA hit song that propelled the band into superstardom, and that song is driven by a RIDICULOUSLY phat bassline, but Chris was the lynchpin of so much of Yes's sound. He altered his sound as the band morphed its sound throughout the 70s into the early 80s, always delivering solid backing, but I'll always best remember him for his work on Yes's seminal early 70s albums: The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge. He hit the highs as well as anyone, but what set Chris apart during this time period was when he dropped the bottom out. As a bassist, there's little in life I love more than dropping the bottom out, but even I am perplexed at hoe Chris managed to achieve such EPIC levels of phatness. He didn't even use a 5 or 6 string bass the vast majority of the time, just a standard Rickenbaker 4 string. I don't know what kind of pickups he used or what black magic tuning, but when Chris Squire dropped the bottom out of his bass, it was like he bored straight through the planet and was hitting strings on the opposite side of it... Scratch that. It's like he tapped into a different dimension and was hitting bass strings from a parallel universe. Those bass sounds were are so filthy low they make my neighbors feel dirty. Not convinced? Check this out: The slide he does around 2:06, and again later on is straight DISGUSTING. That **** drops down past my mortal shell and vibrates my friggin soul. How is he even reaching those level of bottom on a 4 string? How is that possible?

The amateur assassin murders half the town, leaving a trail of blood a mile wide on his way to the target. The master assassin waits inside a hamper in the bedroom for minutes... Sometimes hours... Until the perfect time to strike. No one saw him enter. No one saw him leave. No recording of him exist. No fingerprints. Only a dead body... discovered many hours after he was already gone... with no explanation. No one knows the true identity of the master assassin. He is but a legend, a wives tale, a fleeting memory long gone only moments after it leaves the lips. He is Agent 47, Codename: Keyrock. Pray your name is not on his list.

Turns out it was only the 1 mission I got in the HITMAN 2 freebie pack. I can't really complain because it was free. I've gone through that mission about a dozen times now, once on professional difficulty and all the other times on master difficulty. I've completed 32 of the 48 challenges, gotten 11 of 12 different possible assassinations, and have successfully silent assassin, suit only'd the mission on the hardest difficulty a bunch of times. Currently I'm doing all the shinobi challenges (I've done 2 of 4 so far). Hopefully the later missions are much more difficulty than this one. Maybe I'm just too good at the HITMAN games? They need to institute a new 4th difficulty and call it Keyrock Difficulty. Hopefully the game goes on sale soon, because I'm definitely itching to continue putting my master assassin skills to use.

Meh, it doesn't even bother me anymore, I'm kinda apathetic to the whole situation. This sort of crap used to really get under my skin, but then I came to a realization. Sure, most of what [sneering Jim Sterling voice] AAAs [/sneering Jim Sterling voice] are putting out these days are these "live services" or "games as a service" or whatever they're calling it these days, and the vast majority of them are the same ol' giant open world map collect-a-thons, battle royales, or hero shooters. At the same time, there is a veritable deluge of really good games coming from indies and AA developers all the time. So, if I never bought another AAA game ever again I would be completely satisfied and wouldn't feel like I was missing out on anything. Plus, AAAs do still put out great games that aren't following what the latest trend is or what focus groups told them would appeal to the largest possible demographic... occasionally (e.g. God of War). What I'm saying is that I'm not dependent on AAAs for my gaming. When they do make a game that appeals to me, it's a nice bonus, but I don't need them, I have tons of great games to play from smaller studios.

I beat the prologue mission in HITMAN 2, silent assassin, suit only, naturally. Very easy mission, as I would expect from the prologue mission. I completed it on professional difficulty, which threw me off at first since difficulties have changed from the previous game. In the previous game you had normal and professional difficulties. In HITMAN 2 you have casual difficulty, which is for the people that bought the wrong game and wanted to play Call of Duty instead. There's professional difficulty, which is normal difficulty from the previous game. Finally, there's master difficulty, which is professional difficulty from the previous game. I believe I get to do one more mission in the freebie pack I scooped up, but before I get to that I'm going to run the prologue mission a couple more times on master difficulty and try to pull off some more fun kills (I strangled the target with fiber wire going through it the first time, which is classic, but hardly inventive), and to silent assassin, suit only the mission on the highest difficulty at least once.

I found out that the first location in HITMAN 2 is free, like the first location in HITMAN, so I "bought" that for $0. I'll buy the rest of the game next time it goes on sale.

I finished the final mission in the HITMAN bonus campaign. Nice clean run: I completed a bunch of challenges in that run, but the most important one, as always:

Count me out of the Conan Exiles server. I'm sure I'll play it again at some point, but after 250 hours, I need a break from the game and to play some other stuff. Even when I do get back into it, as an over the road truck driver, I don't have a steady schedule, it changes all the time, so it would be neigh impossible for me to be on at the same time as others with any sort of regularity. As much as I'd like to join y'all, it's not really feasible. Sorry folks. Currently I'm playing La Mulana 2, started X4 Foundations, and recently got back into HITMAN (there are still a few challenges left for me and I never finished the final chapter of the bonus campaign, namely because I really want to unlock the electronic lock descrambler and I need to reach lev 15 (currently 11) in Colorado to do that. I really should pick up HITMAN 2 at some point. I've been putting it off because I was hoping it would get a native Linux version, like the first game did, but that hasn't happened so far. It does seem to run flawlessly and with great performance via Steam's Proton, though.

You may be cool, but you'll never be 8 year old Japanese girl ripping it up on the skins cool

We've already had the 8-bit graphics revival and the low poly graphics revival, I guess the next logical steps are ASCII and wire frame.

^ I imagine Greedfall will have a lot of good ideas, but also come up short in several areas, like all the Spiders games before it, but I'll still almost certainly play it and most likely enjoy it because I'm a sucker for janky European RPGs. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to side with Team Manifest Destiny or Team Tree Hugger.

I'm playing Setting Up My Controls On X4: Foundations. They don't have a premade profile for my Thrustmaster HOTAS X fightstick, so I have to set everything up myself. My flightstick has plenty of axes but not nearly enough buttons to cover all my usual functions, so I'm using a gamepad in addition to the flightstick. I mapped all the on foot controls to the gamepad (walking around with a flightstick would feel weird) as well as menu navigation. I have all my usual flight, targeting, and weapon controls on the flightstick and I'm mapping as many of the communication, fleet command, etc. functions to the gamepad as I can. I'll still need to use m&kb once in a while, but I'm trying to get a setup where I can use flightstick & gamepad 95% of the time.

The Orochi Group? Is this happening in The Secret World universe?

Be wary about the Thin White Duke coming after you for revenge a few years down the line.

I finished Judgment on normal difficulty. It took me 65 hours to complete, though I still have plenty of content to explore in premium adventure mode. Great game with terrific writing, I expected no less from Ryu Ga Gotoka. If I have 1 criticism of the game is that it's too Yakuza, which seems like a really weird criticism given that I love the Yakuza series. If they make a sequel, I hope they depart from the Yakuza series a little more. I hope they set the game some place other than Kamurocho. I understand why they went with Kamurocho for the setting and why the game was so Yakuza-like, it was the safe play, the game would be instantly familiar to all Yakuza fans. Still, I hope they take some risks for the follow up. Have the sequel take place in a new setting and spend more time making the detective aspects of the game a bit more in depth and challenging. I know some people didn't like the detective aspects of the game, like tailing and scene investigation, but I was into those, I just thought they were way too easy. Furthermore, during interrogations choosing wrong dialogue options didn't really come with any consequences. Maybe on the higher difficulty settings detective aspects are more challenging, but I suspect that the difficulty setting mainly just makes combat more difficult.