Keyrock

Some unseasonably cold air has moved in for the coming week, so I decided to make some chili in the crock pot. Nothing fancy: Ground beef, kidney beans, diced tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, and jalapenos. Good times.

Aloth's alter-ego, whatever her name was, was easily the most entertaining companion in Pillars. It's a shame she came to the surface so seldom.

Overall, Ryzen definitely is a massive step in the right direction for AMD and puts them right back in the game in the enthusiast desktop sector, a place they've been pretty much completely absent from for well over half a decade. I'm happy to see Intel again have someone to compete with in that sector other than themselves. That said, nothing out right now makes me interested in upgrading my current i7-4790K/Titan X (Maxwell) setup, neither on the CPU, nor on the GPU front. When Zen2 and Coffee Lake come out, likely in the latter half of 2018, I'll see what the situation looks like then. By then Volta and Navi GPUs should also be out. As with any brand new architecture, the second iteration tends to be much better than the first, not just because of a refined manufacturing process and getting the kinks out on the hardware side, but also because compilers will have had time to get more optimizations put in (which would also benefit the first gen). I'm expecting big things from Zen2. Hopefully Intel steps up their game to match also.

I'm about 16 hours into TToN, still in Sagus Cliffs, still enjoying the game. I actually just had my first bit of combat, outside of the quick tutorial battle at the very beginning, and I had to pull out all the stops to survive as I have a very non-combat oriented party. Still, I got through it first try, so job well done, I guess. I'm also jumping back into HITMAN to do the escalations and bonus missions, which, like the elusive targets, reuse existing levels, but vary things up to some degree. Hopefully we also get another elusive target soon. I think the basic framework that got put in place when they rebooted the series is pretty great, so I would be all for Io Interactive reusing most of it and churning out another season that's basically the same game just with new locales, targets, a few minor tweaks, and a continuation of the story.

Sweet, even more incentive for me to play through the game again once I finish my current playthrough (12 hours in right now).

There is something kind of macabre about all the female faces in ME:A. The male faces look fine, though.

I imagine that most of the game won't be like this, just the fortress sieges, which will be the culmination of doing quests and stuff in a particular region in order to gather intel and weaken defenses. Probably most of the game will be similar to the previous game, doing standard open world type stuff. It would be cool if you could choose to bring one of your followers along on quests and exploration so that you can have adventures and forge friendships with your orc buddies. Oh man, now I want a Middle Earth themed ranger and orc buddy cop movie!

While there are marine varieties of bass (as well as freshwater), even those are not deep enough (in the ocean) to drop the bass.

Every game should have a hide helmet toggle.

Oh absolutely. When I played PnP Shadowrun, firefights were a last resort. If we were in a shootout, plan A, plan B, and possibly plan C had all failed. To that point, when I play the video games, I always do my best to avoid combat as much as possible and try to stealth/dupe/disguise my way to the goal as much as the game will allow. In that regard, Hong Kong seemed like the game that most allowed you to "ghost" (or come close to) missions more than any of the 2 games that came before it.

A lot of people equate game length with value and it's a heck of a lot easier, faster, and, therefore, cheaper to fill your giant open world with mindless kill X creatures quests and tons of random bull**** to waste your time collecting for quests, stronghold upgrades, and stupid crafting (in case my disdain for crafting isn't coming through clearly, I really loathe crafting) than making meaningful, interesting, compelling side content that will pad out an equivalent amount of gameplay time. So long as the publisher can say "look our giant open world has 60+ hours of content" that's enough for a lot of people, even if 90% of said content is mindless busy work.

If you want something that tastes good and has plenty of kick then I'd recommend FYM hot sauce. I have a bottle of their original hot sauce in my fridge. It's delicious but I use it very sparingly because it's really hot.

I'm some 8 hours in and I've barely scratched the surface of the game, I haven't even been to all the districts in Sagus Cliffs yet. I can definitely see where the "unresponsiveness" an UI criticisms are coming from. I'm a super slow gamer, I take my sweet ass time, so the game taking its sweet ass time to have my character shuffle into place then slide the UI out doesn't bother me. Plus, I'm kind of a sucker for the sliding out stylized UI gimmick, even though I usually prefer minimalist UIs. Anyway, still having a grand ol time with the game, talking for what seems hours on end to everyone I see and I still haven't had to do any combat, save for the battle with the Sorrow in the tutorial at the very beginning.

I'm having the most American breakfast imaginable, cold pizza.

Holy smokes, simultaneous Vita, PS4, and PC release. I didn't see that coming. I'm really liking this recent trend of Japanese developers finally embracing PC.

Oh ****yes, a new Fire Pro game!

My favorite thing about TToN so far is that, like its predecessor, death and failure aren't necessarily bad, sometimes failure can be beneficial in unexpected ways. It reduces the incentive to save scum to get the "best" outcome from any given situation. I mean, I wasn't going to save scum anyway. Much like I did with Tyranny, I'm making my decisions and sticking with them for better or worse. I'll take all my successes and failures in stride and deal with the consequences. I find that exponentially more enjoyable than save scumming to get "ideal" results.

Not just significantly slower RAM, but also higher latency. The RAM used for the Ryzen setup is 2133 MHz CL15 while the RAM used in the Intel setup is 3200 MHz CL14. Usually higher speed RAM has that advantage offset somewhat by having higher CAS latency, the fact that the RAM used in the Intel variant is both significantly higher speed AND slightly lower latency gives it a fairly significant advantage. I'll wait for benchmarks done on a truly even playingfield.

This trailer is from a month and a half ago. I totally forgot this was a thing

Intel has chips without IGPs. Some of the Xeon server chips are pure CPUs, no GPU bolted on. There are Xeon E3 variants that are more or less the exact same chip as the same generation of i3/i5/i7, minus the IGP.

That sounds ominously familiar... let me think... Ah yes, the Pentium 4 toasters, back when Intel was all about clock speed and were mostly marketing and selling their chips on having the highest clock speed, because "look higher number!". Meanwhile AMD was investing into new and different ways of increasing IPC and their slightly lower clock speed and slightly lower price processors were going toe to toe with Intel's higher clock speed higher price processors. Intel had visions of 5 and 6 GHz... then they hit the 4 GHz thermal brick wall and, unable to keep ramping up clock speeds because their Pentium 4s were space heaters, they got left in the dust, performance wise, until they went back to the drawing board. Of course Intel still outsold AMD during that time simply because they had the Intel name, they used shifty marketing, and a lot of people weren't smart enough to buy the better and cheaper product.

Just starting out, made a male slick nano. I'm going to try to avoid as much combat as I can, all of it if possible. So far so good.

I can't wait to hear your angry rants on that trainwreck. :D

Hmmm... nothing that I didn't already know. Mostly, I'm worried that there will be too little combat. I mean, I know the trend is "no trashmobs!" but doesn't it get to a point where you have too little combat? From my point of view, there's no such thing as too little combat.