Keyrock

I'm in the same boat. I usually don't much care about getting the highest score or achievements or whatever, I just want to get through the game, but in Hitman I'm all about getting silent assassin rating, or, better yet, silent assassin, suit only. When I pull off a silent assassin, suit only run, I am so freakin' proud of myself.

Everything you wrote is correct and makes perfect sense, but I cannot get the image of muh Boys scoring to take the lead in the 4th quarter while leaving TOO MUCH TIME (read: any time at all) for Rodgers. Rodgers is like a troll. You can't just kill him regularly, you need to burn the corpse or he just regenerates and comes back to kill your whole party. Stock up on oil flasks, Cowboys. STOCK UP ON OIL FLASKS!

I'm not eliminating the Packers just yet. They'll find some way to sneak into the playoffs and Rodgers will murder muh Boys like he always does, assuming we even make the playoffs. I'll only breathe a sigh of relief once the Cheeseheads are mathematically eliminated. Then someone else can break my heart.

I got my ASUS lappy today. Looks awesome and weighs a ton. I love the brushed aluminum look. Now to check it out and make sure it's in working order, then I'll format the drives and install Linux on it.

A weird pagan ritual in the US where people inexplicably camp out outside large stores the night after Thanksgiving so that they can get into fights and potentially arrested over discounted items.

Buying a whole year of PS Plus at a time is by far the cheapest option and you do get free games every month, good ones too. Still does suck to have to pay for multiplayer though. If you just signed up snag Yakuza Kiwami, Bulletstorm, and Roundabout before the month is up. Just add them to your account and they're yours forever. You can download them whenever.

A chuckwagon sandwich is a ground beef breaded and fried on a bun. You can put whatever on it, the usual lettuce tomato and mayo is most common. Nothing fancy and definitely not healthy but it is delicious.

Hot taek: Titan Quest > Diablo 2. Grim Dawn > *

Yeah we're almost certainly getting an L next week.

Believe me, Barty, I'm already envisioning the last minute drive during wild card weekend where Rodgers ends our season. I have Rodgers PTSD. We need to make the playoffs first, though.

Dak had a good game, Zeke did Zeke things, Amari Cooper looked like an actual #1 receiver, and muh Boys now sit tied for 1st place in the NFC East, and with a good conference record to boot. Goddamit, I was out. I was out and they pulled me back in... Just so that they can break my heart in spectacular fashion a couple months from now. I've been down this road before. I know how this movie ends.

Happy Turkey Day!

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead an pull the trigger on that ASUS.

Awesome. Good luck out there on the open road.

Is this forum about to have 2 active member truckers?

AMD's APUs are great for casual gaming but just don't have enough oomph for hardcore gaming, not at anything above very low settings. AMD hasn't really made a specific laptop variant of their discrete GPUs in several years. There are some laptops out there that actually run desktop AMD ryzen chips and discrete Radeon cards in a laptop, but they tend to run extremely hot and have dismal battery life because that's what happens when you put desktop components in the small form factor of a laptop. And even then they lag behind Nvidia's higher-end laptop GPUs in performance. As far as finding a laptop with a AMD CPU and a Nvidia GPU, they may exist, but good luck finding them. You're generally getting either AMD/AMD or Intel/Nvidia. Sadly, in the gaming laptop segment, at the moment, AMD/AMD just doesn't compete with Intel/Nvidia.

I got a hankering for a chuckwagon sandwich, which worked out since I'm home for a few days and to the best of my knowledge the chuckwagon is a regional food item. At least I've never seen it outside of the western half of North Carolina and the very most eastern part of Tennessee, right by the Smokies. Has anyone ever seen a chuckwagon sandwich on a menu elsewhere?

Yeah, do you want a 15.6" screen or a 17.3" screen? If you don't mind getting to the upper end of your budget, this seems like a decent choice: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834154829 It has a beefy hexa-core CPU that should keep you covered for years to come as far as compute tasks and a GTX 1060 which will play pretty much anything at 1080p at med settings or higher. The SSD is only 128 GB and the 1 TB HDD runs at a snail's pace 5400 RPM, but that's expected at this price. Speaking of which, I'm also in the market for a laptop right now. I was going to wait until laptop versions of the Nvidia 20xx cards came out, but those are likely not happening until several months into 2019 and I don't want to wait that long. Also, having seen the price and performance of the RTX 2080Ti, 2080, and 2070 desktop cards compared to the previous generation cards and my belief that that trend will continue with the laptop variants, I see no point in waiting to buy a similarly performing product for more money 3 or 4 months down the line. Since I'm earning a bit more money now and my original plans of building a new desktop rig went out the window when I changed careers to trucking (no point in investing in a rig I'll only be able to use 4 or 5 days a month) I'm thinking of going all out with the lappy and getting something truly beefy, and it has to have a 17.3" screen. With that in mind, I'm seriously considering this monster: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834234811 The downsides are that it's thick and heavy, which aren't a big deal since it will mostly be residing in the storage compartment in the back of my semi. Also, it has a 7th gen quad-core CPU, albeit the absolute top of the line, rather than a 8th gen hexa-core, but for gaming quad-core is still king, the extra 2 cores do essentially nothing for gaming at this point and at least until the PS5 and XBOX Negative 1 Billion come out, assuming those consoles push core counts higher. Also, it's refurbished, which always has a bit of a risk associated with it. That said, I can't see getting a lappy with anywhere near these specs for under $2K that's NOT refurbished or used. 32GB of 2800 MHz DDR4 (overkill honestly), GTX 1080, and 2 256 GB NvME SSDs in Raid 0 which should damn near insta-load almost anything. Thoughts? Suggestions?

That is impressive. It's no wonder a lot of big corporations are getting in on eSports as the money to be made is increasing sharply every year. It's too bad the grand final of Worlds was such a *fart noise* as the rest of the event was great. Watch for me at The Artifact International 2020. I'll be the guy dominating the event.

@GhostofAnakin - Sounds like you're further than I am, so I can't help you any more at this point. @Starwars - Yeah the final ocean floor segment in SOMA is among the most frantic segments I can remember in a game, really masterfully designed. I think it's even more intense than Amnesia's famous water segment.

The Shapeshifting Detective That trash icon allows you to stay silent instead of speaking. The circle with the name on it in the lower left corner is which person you currently look like. Sam is the default character you arrive as.

I started playing The Shapeshifting Detective. It's a FMV game, so it plays mostly like a visual novel, except with live action FMV instead of mostly static anime. On the surface, your job is to solve a murder case, but there's usually something else going on in these types of games, and the choices you make determine how deep you get yourself into whatever other wacky stuff is going on. The unique mechanic in this game, as the title implies, is that you can shapeshift into any character you have already met. Another cool mechanic in this game that I don't believe I've seen in a FMV or visual novel game before (not that I've played all of them or anything) is that you can often stay silent rather than replying. You need to feel it out when it might be better to hold your tongue and let the person you are speaking to ramble on and when it is better to press them for information. I've already met one character who is obviously lying through their teeth, though that doesn't necessarily mean they are the killer, but it definitely means that person is hiding something. As a neat little bonus, whenever you go back to the guesthouse a radio plays some weird story. Some are fairly short, some run for quite a few minutes. I don't think they're related to the game's plot at all, they're just there as a bit of a diversion, and I don't know how many there are, but I haven't heard a repeat yet. Obviously, this type of game is rather niche and won't appeal to a lot of gamers, since there isn't much in the way of gameplay. It's all about listening, picking up on details, and using deductive reasoning and manipulating the characters you interact with to get them to spill things they are trying to hold back; detective work, essentially. This type of game is definitely my jam, as I'm always into games that rely more on using your brain than using hand to eye coordination, in no small part due to my hand to eye coordination slowly deteriorating as I get older and it not being particularly exceptional in the first place. Anyway, I'm having a blast so far.

I just scooped up The Shapeshifting Detective on PS4. It's a FMV game where you play... *drum roll* a shapeshifting detective. Anyone that knows me knows my irrational love for FMV games. It's downloading now. I am so excited.

The butthurt is fantastic.

I've been watching a lot of Artifact Titch streams the last few days in preparation of the game's upcoming release. I've been wanting to get into a CCG for years now and while Hearthstone was fun for a bit, I found it too... streamlined for my liking. I played Magic the Gathering many many years ago, the physical version, and loved it, but I never got into the digital version of the game for some reason. When I heard Richard Garfield was helping Valve make Artifact I immediately grew interested. Having now seen the game in action the anticipation is killing me. I am going to be the world's greatest Trucker/Artifact player.