Keyrock

Phantom Doctrine My KGB agent Ekaterina Vasilyeva, codename: Kodiak. I tried to make her match her portrait as closely as possible. The game gives you a metric ****ton of portraits to choose from.

Regardless of how I feel about jRPGs Valkyria Chronicles would be my choice from that list, on account of the fact that it's just a really good game.

Believe me, I want Jagged Alliance Rage! to be good. I desperately want it to be good. I can look past the art style, which I'm not keen on, if they nail the gameplay, but they showed all of 3 seconds of gameplay in that trailer, so we don't really have much to go on.

Only Kiefer Sutherland can answer that question.

I scooped up Phantom Doctrine on PS4. I watched a couple first impressions videos and I liked Hard West enough to give this a shot. I'm not taking my PS4 onto my semi, or lorry, as the British folk call them, yet (I will once I go solo), so I only have a couple of days to play it before I get back on the road, hence I'll be going ham on the game over the next 2 days. It's downloading now. I'll put up some impressions as soon as I can.

Not a fan of the art style, nor anything about the trailer, for that matter. I'd love to have another good Jagged Alliance game, but I have little confidence that this will be it. I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

Super Metroid. Still looks great, still plays great, still has great music, still has great level design. It was great 24 years ago, it's great now and it will still be great 24 years from now.

Still playing Shin Megami Tensei Liberation Dx2 on my phone. It's telling how much I like this game now that I'm home and I have options to play games on my PS4 or PC and I'm still mostly playing a game on my phone. I finished chapter 3 and am mostly concentrating on doing the Aura Gate (1st person dungeon crawl) and grinding my character level up to 30 (I'm at 28) so that I can fuse high tier demons. I've reached the point in a MegaTen game where you can't really brute force your way through battles any more and you need to really think about the composition of your demon teams and use careful strategy in battles. This is also where buffs and debuffs come into play, whereas they're mostly a waste of time early on. I continue to be impressed by this game. There are personal quests for every character who joins your team and these are multi-stage fully voice acted quest lines with their own story. I'm just not used to seeing this level of quality and effort in a phone game and I still haven't hit anything resembling a paywall after some 15 to 20 hours of play time. At this point, I'm almost certainly going to buy some stuff with real money in-game, not because I need to, but to support the developers. I've played and had a ton of fun for zero dollars for a good long time now, even if there is a paywall somewhere down the line, I've gotten a ton of enjoyment out of the game for free and I think that deserves rewarding. I'm just really surprised that they made a legit MegaTen game for phones and not a shoddy slapdash cash in exploiting the MegaTen name. It's telling of the state of the mobile gaming market overall where a good game that doesn't try to rip you off popping up on the app store in a shock.

The Threadripper 2 benchmarks are out and these things are monsters. The 2950X and 2990WX OBLITERATE anything Intel has on offer right now, and the 2950X does it at a much lower price point than Intel's top offering in the category while still mopping the floor with it. For us gamers, though, these chips are overkill and not a value proposition as they offer few, if any, benefits for gaming at a much higher price point than consumer grade chips. The best value proposition for gamers is the 2920X. The 4 extra cores over AMD's consumer grade top offering isn't a big deal for gaming, but what is nice is that you still get the 64 lanes of PCIE 3.0, like its more expensive cousins, and at a price point that's not as ridiculously higher than consumer grade chips. For big production workloads, encoding, stuff like that, with properly extremely high-threaded workloads, though, the high-end Threadripper 2 chips are monsters that wipe the floor with anything Intel has out now in the same category, and, quite frankly, I don't think Intel has anything they can put out at that price point that can even attempt to compete with the 2990WX in the next couple years, until they develop a new architecture that can scale like AMD's Infinity Fabric or better.

^ I'm surprised his company doesn't run teams. Here in the US a lot of companies are pushing for people to run as teams. It makes sense from the employers' point of view. Loads get to their destination twice as fast without any extra equipment. It makes sense for drivers too, since you make a bit more money, plus you always have a spotter for tight backups if you need one. That is, if you can deal with driving as part of a team. I hate it. The only reason I'm driving as part of a team right now is because I have to, it's part of my contract that I have to drive 6 months or 65000 miles as part of a team, then I can chose what I want to do. At the rate we're racking up miles now, I'll fulfill the 65000 miles way before 6 months. It's nothing against my teammate, I lucked out and got a good driver who pulls his weight and I get along with, my problem is that I have a hard time sleeping when the truck is moving (which is almost always, that's the whole point of team driving). I am looking forward to the days when the truck is parked and I'm sleeping in a bed that's stationary.

^ We're at a stage in video gaming now that developers create characters with the expressed purpose of cosplayers dressing as said character and, well, Cindy looks like she's right up Jessica Nigri's alley.

Releases tomorrow: I hope it's good. Alternate history cold war era espionage XCOM seems like such a great idea. Hopefully stealth is a option in missions. This is from the folks that made Hard West, a decent enough turn-based tactical game with a really great theme.

How do you game on the road? Mostly my phone these days, that's why I'm playing Shin Megami Tensei Liberation Dx2 so much (and also because it's MegaTen and I love MegaTen). In the future, once I go solo, it will be a laptop. I might even bring my PS4 and a TV and use that, but all that is out while I still have to drive team. I tried gaming on my laptop, but the truck vibrates and rattles way too much while it's moving for that to work. There is a driver at work that has just that, a ps4 and a TV in the lorry for when he's off the clock. Some trucks even have a built in mount that swivels for mounting a tv to the wall of the truck.

How do you game on the road? Mostly my phone these days, that's why I'm playing Shin Megami Tensei Liberation Dx2 so much (and also because it's MegaTen and I love MegaTen). In the future, once I go solo, it will be a laptop. I might even bring my PS4 and a TV and use that, but all that is out while I still have to drive team. I tried gaming on my laptop, but the truck vibrates and rattles way too much while it's moving for that to work.

I'm home for a few days after 5 straight weeks out on the road. Driving my passenger car felt so weird. In the semi I sit way up high and look down on the road, allowing me to see pretty much everything, including down into other people's cars; people sometimes do some... interesting things when they drive. In my Mazda I sit really low, almost on the ground. It felt so weird to see the road from such a low angle, really disorienting at first.

CrossCode is releasing fully on September 20th https://steamcommunity.com/games/368340/announcements/detail/1699432921261651351

CJ from San Andreas might be the closest. Yeah, he was a criminal and did some terrible things, but he was likable and genuinely tried to do right by his family and friends.

I'm about halfway through chapter 3 in Shin Megami Tensei Liberation Dx2. If this is anything like previous MegaTen games then I expect 5 or 6 chapters of increasing length. I still haven't hit any real paywall and the game has an almost overwhelming amount of stuff to do.From previous experience MegaTen games tend to take 30+ hours to complete if you rush and close to 100 hours if you want to assemble the ultimate team of demons (and why wouldn't you?). This game seems to be following that same path as far as projected play time.

Shaq is obviously sitting down in the picture with the women.

After playing Shin Megami Tensei Liberation Dx2 on my phone for a bit I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised so far. I was worried that this would simply be a clone of an existing, exploitative, crappy phone game with a MegaTen coat of paint over the top of it. After all we've seen famous jRPG franchises exploited to sell garbage pgone shovelware before *cough* Final Fantasy All the Bravest *cough* I can happily report that this is not that, but instead an actual MegaTen game. All the elements you would expect to find in a MegaTen title are here. You play a demon tamer of sorts, in this case you download demons into the world via an app on your phone making you a Demon Downloader, hence Dx2. You, and other Dx2s you add to your team along the way, make parties of up to 4 demons each. You acquire demons in several ways: You can negotiate with enemy demons sometimes and, if successful, convince them to join you. You can summon demons via a summoning portal which costs currency (more on currency in a bit). And, of course, you can fuse demons together to make different (hopefully stronger) demons. There are often multiple combinations of demons to fuse the same demon, but, since the new demon may inherit skills from its "parents" it can create different versions of the same demon type. Plus stronger versions of parent demons tend to create stronger new demons, so a lot of work and thought goes into creating the demons you want, you need to think several generations ahead when fusing high rank demons. You can also improve existing demons several ways to make them stronger. Constantly evolving your parties of demons to make them stronger is the core of MegaTen IMHO. Combat itself is what you expect from MegaTen. Turn-based, menu-driven battles centered around exploiting elemental weaknesses. I'm not going to go into a lengthy explanation of how everything works (its deeper than it seems at first) but suffice to say that hitting weaknesses not only does more damage but also gives you more actions per turn, while an attack that is nullified, drained, etc. takes away actions. Also, powerful abilities cost high MP and you only recover 3 MP per turn, you may need that MP later. You need to think about your acfions carefully, especially later on when battles drag out much longer. The main story happens in stages consisting of some story exposition followed by a battle then sometimes more exposition. Rather than full on movie style cutscenes, you get characters appearing in front of a static background, visual novel style. The characters themselves are not static, however, they have animation loops as they gesture. Also, they are fully voice acted in Japanese with english subtitles. The character designs are flat out terrific and they have quirky, over the top personalities, in the tradition of MegaTen, and Atlus franchises, for that matter. The animation loops are also really well done, it really makes them come alive. I can't comment on the quality of the voice acting since I don't understand Japanese, but I do like the way it sounds. Sound effects are solid and the music is quite good. Besides the main story there are other activities. Some of them are just battles against strong monsters, but of note is the Aura Gate, a multi-level dungeon played in old school grid-based dungeon crawler fashion. This game already has a ton to offer and I haven't even unlocked it all yet. I'll also praised this game for its tutorials. The first time you do anything the game, quite literally, guides you through everything step by step, showing you what to press and how it works. It's a bit frustrating to a MegaTen vet, like me, since it slowed me down and I know full well how all this stuff works already, but I'm glad it's there for those new to the series. Another cool feature is that you can set the game to loop auto-battle any battle you have already manually beaten. The game even has specific levelling quests designed for this where 2 characters' teams gain experience at once. The designers recognized the tedium of grinding and how prevalent it is in jRPGs and, while they didn't remove the grind, they put in a feature where the game literally plays itself at max battle speed and you can set your phone down and make yourself a sandwich or whatever while your demons level up. With all the praiseout of the way, I still fully expect to hit a paywall eventually. It hasn't happened yet, but it's a f2p game, it's bound to happen eventually. The game does have a popup every now and then offering to sell you stuff, some for real money and some for in game currency, which you can also purchase for real money, of course. I'm a lot more forgiving of this sort of thing when a game is f2p (they have to make money somehow) as opposed to a game that also charges you up front, especially a $60 title, but know that it's there. Summoning, fusing, enhancing, awakening latent skills, etc. all costs currency and, as you would expect froma f2p mobile game, there are so many different currencies that you need to hire a team of accountants to keep track of them all. I have not yet come close to being short on currency for something I REALLY needed to do, but cost increases with the power of the demon in question so that's almost certainly coming down the line. All in all, I'm quite impressed so far. I expected a slap dash, crappy cash grab and instead got an honest to goodness MegaTen game that real effort and polish was put into. How egregious the paywall that's almost certainly coming and how shamelessly they try to milk me will determine whether I reward their efforts with some money and continue to play or not give them a dime ans uninstall. Hopefully its the former since I'm having a great time so far.

Unlike some other Nintendo characters, Waluigi is still all there.

Like most games, it gets harder as you get older.