Keyrock

Classless, skill based. The system has drawbacks, especially when implemented without giving too much thought to people abusing the system (e.g. hopping around the land like a rabbit to level athletics), that said, it still feels the most natural of all the choices.

I got to play some FF XV over the weekend at my buddy's house. I played 2, maybe 3 hours, my friend has nearly 25 hours in it and my initial impression is pretty much the same way he feels. I'm really torn, the game is... candy covered dog poop. There's a lot to like about the game. The 4 boyband members on a roadtrip aspect is great. The 4 characters are really endearing, even Noctis, who's kinda a b***h. Getting to drive around and listen to tunes is great. There are plenty of fun mini-games like chocobo racing, fishing, Justice Monsters V, etc. and a lot of care has gone into those mini-games. The game has a lot of silly and ridiculous stuff that makes you smile, plus they threw in Boobs McGee (Cindy) and she even cleans your windshield to give you a quality cleavage shot when you fill up the car (Squeenix lose points for not having proper boob physics, though. Come on guys, you're a Japanese company, I'm counting on you). In fairness, there's plenty of eye candy for the ladies too, in the form of the 4 main characters. They're even set up completely like a boyband: There's the tough and rugged one, the prim intellectual one, the funny, spicy one who might be gay or bisexual, and Noctis, who's an ass, but a romantic deep down inside. There's something for everybody. Combat is pretty fun except that magic completely sucks (magic is grenades). It's just too bad that that sweet, tasty candy shell surrounds an awful core. The main story is a trainwreck. It is abysmally bad, both the storytelling, if you can even call it that, and the story missions, which are among the dullest, most painful things I got to do in the short amount of time I played. Maybe the main story gets better later, but what I've read about the game doesn't seem encouraging. We all know this started out as FF XIII VS then got changed to FF XV partway through development and that this game had a ridiculously long time in the oven. I suspect both those factors play into how much of a mess the main story arc is.

Part of me kind of hopes we do meet the Giants in the playoffs so that we can avenge our only losses of the season in the sweetest way possible, by sending the G-Men packing. That's getting ahead of myself, though, we gotta get 1 more win and seal up the division and the 1 seed first. That will make sure we get to play all our January games in Dallas, which, for the most part (Dallas does see some snow once in a blue moon), takes wacky snow games where anything can happen out of the picture. We'll meet whoever we meet in the playoffs and see how things go.

It was closer than I would have liked, but a win is a win. The Cowboys now essentially have a magic number of 1. Any Cowboys win or Giants loss gives us the division and the 1 seed as no other team besides the Giants can get to 12 wins in the NFC.

Too early for me. I'll get back to you sometime in January.

I'm drinking Micheladas. I've settled on Clamato, the spicy variey to be more precise, as my go to juice for making Micheladas over any variety of Bloody Mary Mix, plain tomato juice, or v8, that subtle hint of clam in Clamato works really well with the drink. Also, obviously, lime and salt go in. Plus, I like to add a dash of dill weed, that's my own little twist on the drink. The great thing about Micheladas is that you can use cheep beer and it comes out great. Well, not with ALL cheap beer, but my go to beer for Micheladas is Rolling Rock, which is dirt cheap. I find that lighter, more watery beers work best in the drink over stronger more flavorful beers. The beer is mostly there for the carbonation and a hint of alcohol taste, you don't want the beer's taste overpowering the flavor of the juice and spices. The bad thing about Micheladas is that they taste so delicious and go down so smooth and easy that it's easy to get too drunk off them.

I got a beef stew going in the slow cooker. Nothing too fancy: beef, potatoes, carrots, celery, mushrooms, and spices. Toss in a bit of corn starch at the end to thicken it up and good eatins will be had.

I finished the 8th mission in Shadow Tactics. It took me well over 2 hours to complete the mission, loved every second of it, even the countless failures. They keep introducing new mechanics in each mission; in this mission the new mechanic was puddles, which make noise, giving away your location to anyone nearby, when you pass through them. I can't wait to see what the next mission has in store for me.

Damn, these jerks are straight up executing innocent villagers. Normally, killing soldiers is something I do when they're in my way, I don't go out of my way to do it. In this level, every single one of them is going to die.

Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 Remix Disgaea 2 PC on Jan 30th

Another thing I should mention is that the high-end Ryzen CPUs are going to have a 95W TDP, which is pretty decent for an octa-core and more or less in line with current high-end Intel quad-cores, lower than Intel high-end octa-cores (140W), and massively lower than AMD's own high-end Vishera chips (220W). Not a huge deal in a desktop, but still a positive sign. Even if power draw doesn't directly correlate to thermal headroom, the two do sometimes go hand in hand.

Dying Light is indeed great. Speaking of Techland, whatever happened to Hellraid? I was really looking forward to that, but now I fear it may never happen as it got put on hold and we haven't heard anything about it in a long time.

Reviews of almost anything will always be very subjective, by their very nature. That's why I like to read/watch/listen to a number of different ones from sources I know and trust (I prefer sources who try to be as objective as they can while always disclosing their own personal biases) and use that to compile my own conclusion. But hey, I'm not here to convince you. Go ahead and keep buying products based on zero information, I give zero ****s if you waste your money.

Ignore everyone, really. Games are much more fun when you play them for what they are instead of 800 people taking turns telling you what to hate them for. Yeah, because being a completely uninformed consumer sounds like a great idea.

Agreed. If the IPC is around the same as Haswell then, given the right price, Ryzen could be a good bargain. Skylake IPC isn't all that much higher than Haswell. I mean, you're still good to go these days if you're running Sandy Bridge, heck, even higher end Nehalem chips still offer acceptable performance. Given a well multi-threaded application (I know, there are still plenty of applications poorly multi-threaded at best), an octa-core Ryzen at approximately Haswell IPC should beat or at least match a hexa-core Skylake, and completely trounce a Quad-core. This is all speculation, of course, until we get independent 3rd party benchmarks.

Also, we all know Valve can't count to 3.

You're dismissing balance tweaks like they are trivial. Even tiny changes can have massive effects on a game with 130+ heroes, dozens of items, and hundreds of interactions between all the different abilities. It's pretty daunting work trying to keep things at a point where a wide pool of heroes are viable at all levels of play and, while not all patches have been winners, Icefrog has done a pretty remarkable job of maintaining a wide pool of viable heroes while changing the game just enough to keep the meta from getting stale.

AMD unveils new details on Ryzen, the new name for Zen Ryzen to launch Q1 2017 with Naples (the server counterpart) due in Q2 2017 At least 3.4 GHz base clock on the top of the line Ryzen desktop chip 8 cores/16 threads on the high-end chips 20 MB L2 + L3 cache Boosts in steps of 25 MHz I'll be interested to see independent 3rd party benchmarks. So far they've only given a rather favorable Blender benchmark, which is but a single usage scenario out of hundreds, plus I never trust benchmarks performed by the manufacturer themselves. 3.4 GHz base clock is adequate but underwhelming, assuming it boosts to somewhere around 3.7 GHz. Hopefully there is enough thermal headroom to get it to 4 GHz without crazy cooling solutions, as single-threaded performance is still a big factor in many scenarios these days and clock speed is a big part of that.

I like how in Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun the characters will tell you a way to help you achieve your objective, sometimes they'll offer multiple options, but you don't have to do them, there's always another way, multiple ways usually, to get around whatever obstacles lie in your path. They did a damn good job designing the missions.

Yeah, the whole Kai Leng thing was triple facepalm worthy

Oh come now, don't give me that ****. Yes, technically a few of the choices you made, particularly in the suicide mission at the end of ME2, SLIGHTLY changed the ending cinematic (I can't possibly capitalize and boldface the word "slightly" enough). The characters you met are glossed over so quickly at the end that it barely makes any difference whatsoever, the differences are just enough that, from a strictly legal standpoint, they did not falsely advertise. The fact of the matter is that no matter how you chose over the course of 3 games you got 98% the same exact cutscene with you choice of 3 colors of explosion. Yes, making a unique cutscene for each and every set of choices during the trilogy would be impractical, which is why they would have been much better off doing text and stills at the end, like what Obsidian did with Tyranny. But big flashy cutscene at the end is what sells to the mainstream, I guess, even when said flashy cutscene is terrible.

The complete nonsensical idiocy of the ending to Mass Effect 3 aside, and boy was it a trainwreck, my main issue with the ending to ME3 was that we were lied to by BioWare. They stated, many times, including just weeks before release, that all the choices you made throughout the trilogy mattered and that you would get a personalized ending based on the choices you made. Turns out, that was a bold faced lie, a lie that was used in marketing to sell the game. As far as I'm concerned, all the **** they got for the ME3 ending was completely justified (minus death threats, those are never justified). In lee treading over ground we've all been over news, Yooka-Laylee now has a release date and a new trailer:

Yeah, IceFrog...the guy who didn't even start DotA. Alright. Icefrog may not have started DotA, but he's been the main driving force behind it for the vast majority of its history.

I agree with Thingolfin, I personally think DotA is the most complicated, highest skill ceiling, most strategic game ever made. There are so many layers of strategy in the game that it boggles the mind, from trying to outsmart the other team during the draft, masking your own strategy as long as you can while trying to predict the opponents' and blocking and counterpicking, to laning setups, knowing when to give up a lane and jungle, itemization and knowing the hundreds of interactions between item abilities and skills, skill builds, understanding probable power peaks so you know when your team should back off and avoid fights, potentially sacrificing your offlaner or a support to split push and keep the other team occupied while your carry farms up their next item. Then there are all the split second decisions and actions you have to make in the midst of a chaotic team fight. Proper positioning, force staffing a disabled ally to safety, manta dodging disabling abilities, blink initiating, covering your retreat, smoke ganks, using a scan to try to confirm the enemy smoke ganking, it goes on and on. All of this constantly changes a bit with new patches that tweak abilities, add heroes, and add items, plus the meta shifts even during a patch as different heroes become popular and strategies shift to counter them. One of the main reasons LoL became so popular is because DotA is so dauntingly difficult that there was a definite market for a similar game that was significantly less complicated and more accessible (though still fairly deep in its own right).