Keyrock

His dedication to kayfabe is admirable.

I've played The Last Remnant. I really like the battle system which features one of the best uses of QTEs I've ever seen in a game (and I hate QTEs generally). Here's the thing, though. If you do play it, just play it and don't try to power game it and/or min/max your characters. This game has, quite possibly, the most confusing and least intuitive character advancement system ever created. Trying to understand it is a foray into madness that Lovecraftian eldritch horrors couldn't begin to compete with. Seriously, there are guides out there trying to decipher the system that are in excess of a dozen pages long. Whoever came up with the system is a sick and twisted individual.

The Thunder are a mess. PG13 is playing great basketball, but he's probably going to leave once they get bounced from the playoffs, which looks to be quite soon. The Carmelo Anthony experiment failed spectacularly, as many of us predicted. Putting one of the most "I need the ball in my hands all the time" guys in recent history on a team that already has the current most "I need the ball in my hands all the time" guy just seemed like a terrible idea, and it was. I think it's time to blow this team up.

Glad we could help. And remember, don't tease the octopus, kids!

The sprite-based games most definitely aged much better than the early 3D games IMHO. PS1 and PS2 era jRPGs, for the most part, look hideous these days, while SNES/Genesis era sprite jRPGs retain a certain level of charm. Speaking of Genesis, add Phantasy Star games to the list.

FFVI is the greatest jRPG ever made IMHO, but it's also very long, as are pretty much all the Final Fantasy games, so I'm not sure if it's an ideal entry point into the genre.

Journalists are in the business of selling newspapers, or clicks these days, I guess. Sensationalism sells. Valve has acquired Campo Santo, so, if nothing else, it looks like Valve will be releasing a walking simulator sometime in the future.

The Ryzen 2 chips, according to what I've read, are clearly the best value on the market in their respective price ranges, neck and neck with their Intel counterparts in gaming and flat out beating them in most other real world tests, especially highly threaded ones. If nothing else, this has forced Intel to bring 6 core, and soon 8 core with the upcoming new Coffee Lake flagship chip, to the mainstream market, something Intel probably wouldn't have done had AMD not stepped their game up and started competing in the mid-range and enthusiast sectors again. My i7-4790K is still getting the job done, so I won't be getting these, but I am eyeing a new build somewhere roughly 1 year from now, which will make my current setup about 5 years old, which seems like a reasonable length of time to run a setup. It's good to see renewed competition from AMD and this bodes well for what will be on offer when I do build a new rig.

I played Satellite Reign for some 20-25 hours or so and I had fun for a while but it gets super repetitive and I just didn't have the will to finish it. I don't regret the purchase, though.

^ good luck

Agreed on all accounts. If there's one thing I hate it's filler battles against trash mobs, which unfortunately is a staple of RPGs. It's just a tedious waste of time. Once you've beaten a particular composition of enemies, I wish the game just had an auto-resolve option (button) available. Having to fight that exact same group of trash mobs 25 more times is so meaningless. It's just a way for the developer to be able to claim "60 hours of content", even if 80% of said content is tedious meaningless filler. /glares menacingly in the direction of Nashkel Mines

I hesitate to call Nier: Automata a RPG, though. It's kind of hard to define that game since it's a mashup of a bunch of different genres. I used to think that stat and skill progression were what defined RPGs, but those systems are in pretty much every game these days, so who knows? As for me personally, I always harken back to my pen & paper RPG playing days and remember what made those sessions fun. It usually wasn't combat or stat or skill management, instead it was meeting NPCs, the banter between party members, trying creative solutions to obstacles, and scrambling when things went horribly horribly wrong. Of course, much of that depended on having a good GM who could adjust things on the fly and accommodate unorthodox proposals. It's really hard (if not impossible) to really replicate that in a video game. Funny you should say this. I was playing Command and Conquer earlier to day and was reminded of how refreshing it was to have a obviously good and bad side. I love the cartoonish over the top characters and campy acting in C&C.

Anthony Davis and Jrue Holiday went SUPER beast mode and the Pelicans are the first team in the second round. I don't want to overreact, because the Blazers might just be garbage, but the Pelicans sure looked real good in that series. I still don't think they can beat the Dubs, but I'd give them at least a shot against the Rockets since there's always the chance their shooters go ice cold (live by the 3 die by the 3) and James Harden does have a history of disappearing in clutch moments in the playoffs. Obviously, I'd still favor the Rockets in that matchup, though.

This thread could do with a diss track.

I'll throw a few out, in no particular order: Different settings - I am so sick of standard Tolkien-esque fantasy settings and am slowly starting to grow sick of space opera too. There are so many other settings out there to explore. Give me wuxia, Indian mythology, wild west, modern espionage, hard sci-fi, anything but the beaten to death standard elves and dwarfes fare we've been getting for decades. Turn-based combat - Particularly if it's a party-based game. If I'm only controlling a single character then real time actiony combat is cool. If I have to control a party, especially if it's a large party, then give me turn-based. Non-combat methods of dealing with conflict. Allow me to bypass a lot of (if not all of) combat by using diplomacy, deception, stealth, etc. Choice & consequence - Real C&Q, not just window dressing.

The Cynical Brit has already gone beyond the time he was originally given to live. Here's hoping he keeps defying the odds.

Great to see LeBron go beast mode in game 2 after the Cavs got punched in the mouth in game 1. It's a bit worrying that they nearly let that game slip away, but a win's a win. Should be a good series going forward.

July seems highly doubtful, full time GDDR6 production only started up recently. Something along the lines of September or October seems a lot more realistic.

I got the Dwarf in Tower of Time. Really great character and surprisingly a really great caster because he steals mana when attacking allowing him to regen mana quickly and spam his abilities, particularly his hammer throw ability which has super low cooldown. I specced that ability to strip armor, does anyone know if it stacks on successive hits? Probably not, because that would be ridiculous with how much you can spam that ability.

Dwyane Wade looked like he went 6 or 7 years back in time yesterday.

Now I remember. I (wisely) decided not to disturb the mausoleum the first time I encountered it. I went back and fiddled with it to give it a try and those elite guardians are indeed really strong. I think I'll come back when I'm a bit stronger and/or have a 4th party member. It might not be impossible on hard difficulty at this stage if I completely respecced Kane to lower the cooldown on his wall ability as much as possible, but I doubt I could lower it enough right now to get it to the point where I perpetually can have a wall up. The key would be to wall off 3 of the guardians so that I only have to deal with 1 at a time, I get OBLITERATED if I have to face all 4 at the same time. Their damage output is brutal and they have way too much HP and armor to bring down quickly.

The first level has a mausoleum near the exit that you can interact with. Looting it causes an ambush by four rather angry elite guardians. They're massive HP sponges at that point in the game and are almost impossible to kite. I guess I missed that battle. I did the ambush battle at the well and the optional battle where the game specifically tells you "maybe you should come back to this later" but I don't remember that battle. Can I go back to a level once I've gone down to another one?