Keyrock

Dubs up 2-0 after thumping the Cavs again. Cleveland better come up with something, anything to slow down KD, and quick, because Durant is getting whatever he wants.

Well, you never get to play a female in PB games. You are always a generic nameless white guy.

I had to work today. Normally working a Saturday night would downright suck, but when the 6 1/2 hours I spent at my job entailed less than an hour of actual work (emptying garbage cans, folding chairs and tables) and the rest of the time I spent schmoozing with people, eating free food (delicious beef brisket), and drinking margaritas and beer, all while on the clock and getting paid overtime, I really don't mind. Too bad the company only does an open house like this once per year.

Really great and efficient night from KD. Gonna be hard to beat the dubs if KD keeps shooting 50%+.

The launch date for Pyre, Supergiant's (Bastion, Transistor) new game, is set for July 25th (Windows, Linux, PS4). They haven't put out a new trailer so here is the old reveal trailer as a refresher: The art style, as expected from Supergiant, is great, but what really draws me to the game is the concept of battles being played out as a sort of sport. It's a very interesting idea. Anyhoo, if it reviews well, this is setting up to be my next gaming purchase (I have plenty of stuff to keep me busy for a couple months).

Switching from solder to the toothpaste they use for their consumer-grade chips for a $2000 chip? For shame, Intel.

I love finding the weird disguises in HITMAN.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through my second playthrough of Bound By Flame. I'm not enjoying dual daggers as much as I did 2-handers, basically because dual daggers is easy mode. I just slap some interrupt increasing add-ons to my daggers and the game becomes childishly easy. You don't need good timing or tactics, you just run in and stab the enemy 30 times in the span of half a second. While the interrupt chance is relatively low compared to 2-handers (especially hammers) you get so many attacks in a short span of time that one of them is bound to interrupt the enemy, and then it's like "welcome to stun-lock, sucker". I'm also back to going ham on HITMAN, because HITMAN is awesome.

RIP Gregg Allman. Dead at 69 years of age.

As someone who lives in the US, this is about the least compelling location they could have chosen, even if I've never been to Big Sky Country. Obviously, for people living in other countries, or even other people living in the US, this may be different. The crazy Christian cult is a fine take on Far Cry's usual fight against the evil totalitarian regime trope, granted, you've dealt with religious zealots before in the series. Ultimately, it's going to come down to how interesting and charismatic the antagonist and major characters in the game are and if the story is strong enough to carry you through the tedium of Ubi's infamous open world grind.

I don't do crowdfunding any more and I'm pretty tired of the veritable deluge of pixel art games we've gotten over the last half decade or so (mainly because the pixel art in 98% of them is garbage), so it's weird for me to post a project that is both being crowdfunded and using pixel art. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/828401966/blasphemous-dark-and-brutal-2d-non-linear-platform That said, holy **** look at the quality of that pixel art and those animations! That's Owlboy-level stuff.

So we're looking at a crazy Christian cult out in some remote region of the US? Didn't Outlast 2 just do that?

Star Crawlers fully released today. Temptation level rising... rising.

The hits just keep on coming. RIP Roger Moore. I was a fan of his more lighthearted take on Bond.

Well, they got Alexis Kennedy who wrote Sunless Sea working on it, and Sunless Sea had some great writing, so maybe BioWare are aware how terrible their writing is and are taking steps to address the issue? On the other hand, I wonder how much creative freedom Alexis will get under the thumb of Dread Lord EA? I, for one, won't be holding my breath waiting for Bio to make something great again, but it would be nice if they prove me wrong.

Maybe it's better for the Cavs to get a game like that out of their system now, because they sure can't afford to be having games like that against the Dubs.

I don't know if I'd call a 3 point loss "slaughtered". Still, they lost to an Isaiah-less Celtics team. Oh well, it will take them 5 games instead of 4 to get to the finals.

I started my Bound By Flame second playthrough and decided to go twin dagger ranger style, rather than the big 2 handed axe I used last time. I generally prefer the combat style of a slow, big weapon, where you have to be patient, parry, then go in for one or two big attacks when an opening presents itself to the quick, jump in almost whenever you want and stab away in a flurry of twin daggers. I will admit that the single target DPS of twin daggers is pretty satisfying, though. It's particularly great against ranged enemies, since I'm more mobile to begin with and can close the ground more quickly, then when I reach melee range archers just straight up melt to my daggers. I may also try a heavily pyromancer-focused build in the future, though I have my doubts that you can go full mage in this game. Even with the perks you get from going full demon and every magic focused item and upgrade you can wear at the same time, I still think my character won't have the mana pool and mana regen to exclusively hurl fireballs at enemies. I'd wind up either having to fall back to a weapon when my mana runs out, or running around like a chicken with my head cut off, kiting enemies, while my mana regens. It might be possible to do a pyromancer/crossbow build, though, where the fallback weapon is the crossbow rather than either the daggers or a two-hander. I wonder if there's enough ammo in the game to make that work, though.

I'm continuing to go ham on HITMAN. Finding new ways to kill targets is endlessly entertaining. I think I'm also going to start my second playthrough of Bound By Flame. I went full demon last time, so I'll go minimum demon this time. I won't get to look anywhere near as cool, but oh well.

Holy smokes, what a blowout!

My first silent assassin, suit only success! Getting to the target and killing him silently was challenging, but not crazy. Getting out unnoticed was intense and took me many failed attempts. Ultimately I manipulated the mechanic where if a guard sees a weapon lying on the ground they will pick it up and dispose of it to thin out the herd a little bit, but I still had to sneak through a small room with 3 guards in it (rather than 4) to make my clean escape.

Hitmanception

Ah Nashkel Mines, the biggest reason I'll never play through BG1 ever again. Over the last 3 or 4 years I've tried playing BG1 again twice, both times I completely lost the will continue the moment I stepped inside those damnable mines. What an awful dungeon. I hope there's a special place in hell for whoever put all those kobold commandos in there.

Damn, I grew up on Soundgarden. Really sad.