Keyrock

Nazis and lizard people... Lizard Nazis! Oh crap! Edit: I didn't even know about Elon Musk talking about building a base on the moon, I just saw the story on that just now. I've been thinking about this for a good while now. It just seems like the next logical step. Great minds think alike, I guess...

Let me ask a question that keeps popping up in my head: So Mars is the new hotness, now everyone and their grandmother, from national space agencies around the globe to private enterprises, are all super interested in going to Mars. One thing we are not seemingly interested in, that I think we should be, is building an outpost on the moon. Why build an outpost on the moon? What are the benefits? There are several. It's an exercise in building something on an extraterrestrial piece of rock. Eventually, we're going to send people to Mars and we're going to build something over there. Now, the challenges to building on the moon and building on mars are not exactly the same, but there will definitely be many of the same problems to face, namely radiation. We can simulate concepts of radiation shielding on computers, but that's not the same as doing it in practice, and what better place to practice than right in our own back yard (galactically speaking). Other challenges include protecting the outpost from meteor and comet strikes (Mars, unlike the moon, has an atmosphere, but it is very thin) and the effects of low gravity over prolonged periods of time on people. If we face all these challenges for the first time on Mars and something goes wrong then the people there are SOL because help is at best 7 months away, likely much further (depends on how the orbits line up). If something goes wrong on the moon we at least have a chance to save the people. Mars is going to present its own unique problems but some of this stuff we encounter and overcome on the moon will be applicable. A base on the moon can also be used as a staging and refueling station for missions into our solar system. Eventually maybe you could actually build spacecraft there and just start the journey there. Some of the biggest hurdles to space missions are getting through the Earth's atmosphere and escaping its gravity well. We burn the majority of fuel in our current spacecraft just getting off this planet. If we refuel the spacecraft on the moon we're already past the atmosphere and a good chunk of the way out of the Earth's gravity well (the moon has its own gravity well but it is quite small comparatively speaking). We would use a fraction of the fuel to take off from the moon and get into deep space than what we use to get off the Earth, leaving that much more fuel to go wander around the solar system and take pictures and probe, or whatever. So my question is, why are we not trying to build an outpost on the moon? This to me seems like the clear next logical step. It seems a lot of people are wanting to skip this step and go right to Mars and I think that's a costly mistake (both in therms of money and lives).

October, eh? Perfect timing. That's right around the time I suspect Sony will slash the price on the PS4 Pro and when I buy one (assuming my hunch is correct). :D

I'm going to give HITMAN a break for a big and just bask in the glow of my silent assassin suit only elusive target victory. I don't want to start anything super serious in the short term with Pyre coming out in about a week, so I guess I'll play some American Truck Simulator to get my chill on. ATS is always a good go to when you just want to chill out and relax, a great virtually stress-free game.

New trailer for Battlefront II

I did it! My greatest HITMAN accomplishment thus far. The loadout: The infiltration: The exit (still wearing my stylish as **** Requiem suit): The result: Silent Assassin Suit Only on an elusive target. I am a shadow in the night. I am everywhere yet nowhere at the same time. I am the inevitability of death.

Starting the day off watching the Wimbledon Men's Final. Sadly, it looks like it's going to be a short match, the God of Tennis is not being very merciful to his opponent today. I've been fortunate enough to see Federer play from the beginning of his career to its end, though there's no telling when that will be, since even at age 35 (ancient by tennis standards) he's showing no signs of slowing down. I can say that I got to see the entire career of the greatest man that ever stepped foot on a tennis court. Edit: And it's over: 6-3 6-1 6-4. Roger winning Wimbledon at age 35 is remarkable enough on its own. The fact that he did it without dropping a set the entire tourney (as if to match Rafa's feat from earlier this year at Roland Garros) is frankly absurd.

I've started my work on the final elusive target in HITMAN. As per usual, I am only doing reconnaissance work at first. You can't save during an elusive target mission, but you can exit out of the mission and restart provided you didn't die nor did you complete any objectives. For this particular mission there are 2 objectives: Kill a target Retrieve an item I have managed to locate the target. Killing the target will be easy. Killing the target unseen will be a bit harder, but it shouldn't be too much of a problem. I could snipe the target quite easily, but I would prefer to poison the target, as that is much too delicious a bit of poetic justice for me to pass up. I have yet to locate the item, though, and I will want to retrieve the item before I make the kill. Back to snooping around I go.

This just reminded me that we'll probably never get Hellraid.

An emerging use of crowdfunding is advertising. Case in point, The Banner Saga 2 was not crowdfunded and it sold like crap compared to the first game because almost nobody knew about it. The devs went back to Kickstarter to make The Banner Saga 3 as much for the advertising it generates than the funding itself (if not more).

Agreed, the game is fantastic. I've been playing the game for over 90 hours now and I continue to find new and different approaches to missions. Virtually every obstacle has multiple methods to overcome it and there are so many different fun creative kills you can execute. I suspect I have at least 40 or 50 hours of fun left before I grow tired of this game.

I really liked the game but never finished it. I got to the final boss then got my ass handed to me a dozen times in a row and never even got remotely close to defeating The Allfather. I got super frustrated and gave up.

New elusive target coming to HITMAN tomorrow. I think this is the last one, at least if the plan that was originally laid out holds true. I'm going all out for this one. The mission: Silent Assassin Suit Only.

Damn, AMD is undercutting Intel pretty hard here. Good, hopefully Threadripper slaughters the i9s and Intel is forced to tone down the outrageously inflated prices they sell their high-end chips for.

That would be useful, as it's a sticking point for some people, not me, mind you.

Agreed, it's one of the things that made me hate that game, the others being the crappy gunplay and the fact that while there are a billion different guns, 99.9% of them are garbage. It's too bad because I love the setting, characters, and humor, but I just can't enjoy a shooter where the shooting feels so bad.

The Secret World has a fantastic premise and the best writing I've ever seen in a MMO. It's too bad it also has mind-numbingly boring gameplay.

It's definitely a very interesting premise, and also very ambitious. I hope it works out. In the current gaming climate of endless open-world action collect-a-thons, it's nice to see a really unique idea like this. At the same time, I can see this crumbling under the weight of its ambition. I hope it doesn't.

They could call it something like... oh, I don't know... maybe Omega Code?

One word: Wuxia If BioWare won't ever give us the Jade Empire sequel some of us crave so much, maybe someone else can have a crack at the genre. Whether actiony or tactical (Wuxia more lends itself to an action RPG, but it could work as a tactical RPG too), I just desperately want another martial arts RPG. Also, I'm not completely sure how you would fit this into the game, but I also would want a training montage where our young hero gets trained by the silver-haired, long-bearded, wise master, complete with the hero slacking off while they think the master is dozing off, only to find out that he was completely alert the whole time and he comically beats our ass as punishment. I suppose it could be a mini-game.

I've heard Metro increases everyone's DPS on higher difficulty levels. Same for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fwiw. I find that a much better way to increase difficulty than the much more often used alternative of more enemies and/or enemies that have much more health (which only adds tedium, IMHO). Making combat more immediately lethal, in both directions, and making supplies harder to come by keeps tension super high as every bullet counts and you're always just a slip up or a stray bullet or two away from death.

I've heard Metro increases everyone's DPS on higher difficulty levels. Yes, Ranger Mode means the enemies do more damage but so do you (as well as less HUD, less ammo, and less filters).

None that are still alive.

Which is a perfectly natural thing for an assassin to do.