Keyrock

My current favorite beer: Light body with a medium amount of flavor, hoppy taste, and a hint of malty flavor. Best as a summer beer, but enjoyable any time of year.

More open world games need to put more time, effort, and emphasis into developing a method of travel that will be really fun for the player. I mean, you're going to spend a very large chunk of the game exploring a vast landscape, method of traversal should be high priority. Chumbucket, he's the best.

I couldn't agree more. The traditional 2 party system is fundamentally broken, possibly beyond repair. The democrats are saying the republican party is broken. The republicans are saying the democratic party is broken. The truth is that they're both broken.

I fulfilled my civic duty and voted today. Chalk one up for Gary Johnson. He has no chance to win, of course, but at least I can sleep at night knowing I voted my conscience.

I mean, what other race would you play? Orcs are simply superior to everyone else. There's something really beautiful to driving through a sandstorm.

Not to mention Sleeping Dogs (not really an RPG, though). " A man who never eats pork bun is never a whole man" - Wise Man

New Sheoth from Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion, particularly the Crucible half of it, though I had fun in both halves. I spent so many hours rooftop jumping and getting into wacky shenanigans in Crucible. Good times.

While I have yet to visit Colorado, I imagine you have some lovely vistas out there too.

You're not that much further from the mountains than I am. I live in The Queen City. I saved my 2 favorite pictures I took for last. The godrays streaming through the cloud cover looked even more amazing in person. I can imagine European colonists seeing something like that and having a Manifest Destiny moment: God is clearly telling me it's my right to rape the natives and take their land by force.

I finally got my copy of the Conan board game today (I'm one of the very first as I was in the first wave of shipping). I crowdfunded this waaay long ago when I still did crowdfunding. It got delayed many many many times as Monolith worked with their manufacturers to get the cards, boards, and figurines just right. The wait was worth it, though, as the product is top notch. The box on the right is the King Pledge box, a deluxe version of the box that will be available at retail. It has 2 double sided game boards, a bit over a handful of character cards, rulebooks, playing cards, dice, tokens, and a whole bunch of really great figurines. The box on the right is the stretch goals box. Everything in the stretch goals box is limited run and only available to backers and possibly at conventions until Monolith run out of their personal supply from the initial run, never to be manufactured again. It contains another double sided game board, a scenario, over a dozen more character cards, more playing cards, more dice, a map of the world, a dice bag, and a buttload more figurines (the amount of figurines combined from both boxes is in excess of 200). At some point, I may paint the figurines, though it's been a long time since I did that and I was never particularly good at it (not terrible either). I'd take pictures of some figurines but my phone is terrible at taking pictures at very close range, plus I'm a terrible photographer. I'll wind up joining one of the many board game clubs here in Charlotte. The board game scene is arguably in the best shape it's ever been.

A lot more Mad Max. I haven't been this hooked on a game in a while. It very much features the nearly endless collect-a-thon/checklist grind that I've generally grown bored of lately, but the game cleverly has included quite a lot of checklist stuff that you can do without ever getting out of your car (especially once you get cleanup crews). While the on-foot combat is competent enough and features some great animations, the game really shines when you're inside your vehicle. It has one of the best driving models of any non dedicated racing game out there and the vehicular combat is a real blast. As a side benefit, it makes traversing the vast landscape extremely enjoyable, which dulls the pain of the collect-a-thon grind quite effectively. I use fast travel in most open world games very liberally, I nearly never use it in Mad Max. Right now I've taken a break from the main story to go back to Jeet's region and finish 100%-ing it.

Where are you currently, if you don't mind me asking?

There are large parts of the US that have been quite deforested, luckily we still have some havens of nearly untouched nature scattered about the country.

I'm playing Mad Max, which got ported to Linux a few days ago. While I do have open world fatigue, I am enjoying the game immensely nonetheless, probably largely due to how good the driving and car combat is. It doesn't hurt that the game is gorgeous looking and runs extremely well. Probably my favorite thing in the game is driving around in Chum's buggy and having the dog sniff out mines. That mechanic is well executed and I love that dog so much. Also, harpooning dudes out of vehicles and dragging them around at high speed will never get old.

While TB and I do see eye to eye on a great many things, he does have a set of pet peeves and biases (as do I) that I strongly disagree with. That said, I do always appreciate his opinions, even when they wildly differ from mine, because he wears his biases on his sleeve and he's not afraid to be brutally honest and drag a game through the mud (and not for ideological reasons). As for BF1, I think Blodhemn nailed it. Who buys Battlefield for the campaign? It's always been primarily about the MP.

Unfortunately, I highly underestimated how long it would take me to traverse the Blue Ridge, largely due to the sheer overwhelming amount of amazing vistas to stop at. Plus, a flat tire further set me back. Hence, I wound up coming up well short of reaching Shenandoah. Tomorrow I drive back home via interstate. Still, it was a great trip and I got a ton more pictures to share. I'll drive up to Shenandoah another time and I'll do the entire Blue Ridge and Skyline Drive trek around this time next year when I can set aside a good 5 or 6 days so that I can take my time and easily make the whole trip. In addition to being breathtakingly beautiful (the pictures don't do it justice), the Blue Ridge is also a super fun road to drive, especially if you own a vehicle with sporty handling.

The bottom one looks like something I could hold and use comfortably for extended periods of time. The top one looks like it would make my hands cramp up.

I wish.

Entering the parkway, complete with straw hat and Hawaiian shirt, naturally. It rained lightly on and off all day today. The silver lining to that is getting to see some sweet rainbows.

Today I leave and go on a trip up the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Skyline Drive. This will be the first road trip for my trusty new steed. I'll be posting lots of pictures here from my 2 day trek up one of America's most scenic roads.

I'll be voting today, just before I go on my road trip. Edit: Never mind, the voting place just down the street from me (public library) doesn't open for early voting until the 27th. I could find another place further from my home, but I can wait a week.

I can't, in good conscience, vote for either Trump of Hillary, I won't be able to look at myself in the mirror. Jill Stein is several orders of magnitude further left than I am even remotely comfortable with. That leaves Gary Johnson...

I just think the NX Switch is way too big to succeed as a traditional handheld and much too underpowered to succeed as a home console, not to mention a different architecture to the PS4 and XBone, which will quickly kill 3rd party support, and it will be the Wii U all over again.

This thing has dead on arrival written all over it.