Keyrock

Mostly GRID Autosport. It's a decent enough semi-realistic racer. The ****ing spotter is annoying, though. Has there ever been a racing game where the spotter wasn't useless and flat out wrong 80% of the time?

The most recently released are Penny Dreadful 3: Erasing the Trail, Volta and the Stone, Full Moon Fever, and King of Diamonds. I have not played any of them yet, nor the previous Penny Dreadful missions, so I can't comment on them... yet.

All this Dishonored talk is making me want to play The Dark Mod.

I'll start. Soooo, how about that Neeshka, eh?

Today I reached Stage 4 of Cowboys Fans. Stage 1: Alright, we're looking good. Romo can lead us to the playoffs provided he stays upright. Stage 2: OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD ROMO IS DONE! WE'RE FINISHED. *thinks about chugging bottle of bleach* Stage 3: Well the Romo season ending injury was inevitable. *sigh* I knew it was coming. *curls up in fetal position and cries* Stage 4: Sooooo, how about that Dak Prescott. He sure is lookin' good in the preseason. I mean, he mostly just needs to hand the ball off to Zeke anyway, right? Right? *fidgets nervously*

Welcome Bio exiles, we begrudgingly open our community to you. All the horrific things you've heard about Obs boards are completely true. The hazing begins immediately.

Wasn't the "New 3DS" the "3DS 2" essentially? More like the 3DS 1.1

In the Gold Box games any helpless character was always a 1-shot insta-kill, period. This made any spell that paralyzed, stunned, or put anyone to sleep very powerful. My copy of Secret of the Silver Blades had a bug (not sure if this bug was only on the Tandy version or all versions at the time) where all characters (friendly or enemy) always failed saving throws. This made evil clerics the scariest enemies in the game (because Hold Person) and Hold Monster the most powerful spell in the game. Encounter a group of Ancient Red Dragons? Cast Hold Monster > Paralyze 3 or 4 of them at a time > have your mage walk up to them bare handed and 1-shot kill them. LOL In later D & D games they changed it so that helpless characters weren't insta-killed, just auto-hit for maximum damage, which is still powerful but much more reasonable. The idea of a mage walking up to a paralyzed ancient dragon, punching it in the paw, and it dropping over dead is pretty hilarious, though.

Still early on in Champions of Krynn. Ugh, I miss so many ease of life features that would come about 10 years or so down the road. Having to constantly equip a new stack of arrows or darts is insanely tedious. With arrows at least the stacks are 20 each, so it's not that crazy, but darts come in stacks of freakin' 4. I wish the game would just auto-equip the next stack of identical ammo when you run out; 10 years later games would. Also, have I mentioned before that I really hate low level D&D? Miss, miss, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, miss... you get the idea. Despite all the complaints, I am having fun with the game, I just really miss ease of life advancements that the Gold Box games unfortunately predate. As an aside, Sleep is an INSANELY powerful spell at low levels, especially since any helpless character is a 1-shot insta-kill with 100% hit chance regardless of its armor class or remaining hit points.

I started up Champions of Krynn. I played the Pools series of Gold Box games set in the Forgotten Realms setting way back in the day, but I never played any of the Dragonlance games before, so this is completely new to me. I'll tell you one thing, all the nostalgia goggles in the world couldn't get me to not hate the tedium of resting in these games; memorize healing spells, rest, cast healing spells, lather, rinse, repeat until all characters are at 100% and all spells memorized. When games 10 years later introduced having your healers automatically cast and rememorize healing spells until the party was fully healed with a single click, that was a godsend.

I'd just like to point out that it's gotten to this point with bull**** season passes, pre-order "bonuses", on-disc DLC, et cetera, because consumers have allowed it to get to this point. People (no names shall be included, you know who you are) that have been apologists for the publishers (Squeenix or otherwise) in the past, defending DLC and microtransaction schemes (which have slowly but surely become more and more aggressive) and continuing to pre-order and buy season passes need look no further than the mirror for who is to blame. Publishers are always going to milk consumers dry just as much as we let them, it's the nature of business. There is a fine line between how much the majority of consumers will allow themselves to be gouged and going too far and losing their business. Publishers have slowly, but surely, been pushing that line further and further in their favor, and they will continue to do so as long as we allow it. Anyway, on the off chance Mankind Divided ever makes its way to the penguin (as unlikely as it may seem, a couple Squeenix games have already been ported to Linux) I'll buy the GotY Edition at 50% (or more) off a year from now. Eat a **** Squeenix.

Coming Jan 2017 to Win, Mac, Linux The only appropriate response to this awesome news is Rake the Cat Hopefully the rest of the series comes to peesee as well.

It seems to be a trend in the AAA games industry, not just Bethesda themselves, where almost all games are going toward the same convergence point of being action adventures with RPG-lite elements. So you have traditional RPG studios dumbing down their RPG systems to make games more based on action (glares at Bethesda and BioWare) and other developers pushing RPG-style progression into genres like shooters and such that didn't traditionally have (or need) such elements. On the one hand, I don't mind ideas from different genres crossing over as sometimes it makes for cool gameplay, but I don't like the trend of all games essentially becoming the same, only the setting differing. This is why I play less and less AAA games and more and more indies, who still make focused games, which are now niche.

I got to play No Man's Sky for roughly 3 hours over the weekend. I guess the best way to describe my feelings on the game is ambivalent. The game sort of exemplifies both the best and worst of procedural generation. There is a real sense of wonder exploring a weird alien world and being able to go to other weird alien worlds, but the wonder fades quickly as it becomes painfully obvious that the stuff going on around you (e.g. battles in space) is nothing but window dressing and none of it means anything. It doesn't help that the gameplay itself is bare bones and dreadfully boring and basically becomes a repetitive farm fest. Each planet technically looks different, but in practice it's all the same stuff to do, just with somewhat different elements to farm and different monoliths or stones to find. Maybe the game gets better and there are some cool scripted events as you get deeper toward the center, but the problem is that I would need to invest a lot more time into the game to find out if that's the case and after the 3 hours or so I played I have zero desire to invest any more time into it, hence making the potential of cool stuff down the line a moot point. I desperately want to play something with hand-crafted levels now.

Combat looks clunky, but that's par for the course for PB. I'm definitely interested, as I am in all PB games.

I've only watched a few boxing matches this Olympics, but just in those few I've seen a couple obviously bad decisions, one of which was so outrageously and blatantly crooked that it boggles the mind. I shouldn't be surprised, though. Crooked judging in boxing, Olympic or otherwise, is to be expected. It's a tradition! In other news, Japan's utter dominance of women's wrestling continues.

Killed the Kraekan Cyclops in Salt & Sanctuary, the hardest boss fight for me so far. It took me 5 tries and much frustration to beat him. Part of the difficulty is that he's strong against physical attacks, which is what I primarily use. Blessing my weapon to add holy damage definitely helped, but it was still a really hard fight because he kept chain stunning me. I could jump over his thrust attack and roll under his jumping attack, but his other attacks were very difficult for me to dodge as often you couldn't roll through him and you couldn't roll away from him either since his reach is insane. Eventually I just got lucky with the chain stuns and managed to take him down with a blessed giant hammer before he could chain stun me to death.

With TI6 over I can watch Olympics more freely. I'm checking out some track cycling today. It's swell.

Back to Salt & Sanctuary after an extended break due to TI6. I fought and killed another boss, The False Jester, and got him on the first try. It was a relatively easy battle due to how armored I am and having a large enough stamina pool to be able to cast my healing spells several times. By the end of the battle I could not cast any more healing, but I had plenty of potions. I only needed to drink 2 of them. The armor was the key. He couldn't damage me quick enough to kill me before I could heal up.

Wings wins TI6 and over 10 million 3-1. In the end, it was even year magic, it was pre-ordained.

HOLY **** IT WORKED! MID SKYWRATH MAGE WORKED! NOT ONLY DID IT WORK, W33 ****ING CRUSHED! WHAT AM I EVEN WATCHING!? WHAT IS DOTA!?WHERE AM I? AAA.. BBB..GHHHH>YHGHGHG&YUQWGKOASDBVAKL:bv

MID SKYWRATH!? WHAT THE **** IS HAPPENING?

Holy **** game 3 of the lower bracket finals! That was ****ing amazing. Moo's play in the final moments when EG were making their all-in throne push was phenomenal. The Digital Chaos Cinderella story continues. Wings vs DC is going to be crazy. I'm sad both these teams can't win.

Shadwen got a little harder in level 4, nothing really brutal, but a welcome increase in challenge. The main difficulty is clearing the way for Lily to make it through the level. Getting Shadwen to the end of the level is a piece of cake, but clearing the way for Lily is much trickier. So many times I am in a situation where I could easily backstab a guard and make thing considerably easier for myself, but getting through with no blood on my hands requires a lot more patience and strategy.