Keyrock

I finished the Rage of Demons expansion for Sword Coast Legends. It was... disappointing. Keep in mind that this expansion was free, so in terms of content to price ratio there's nothing to complain about. That said, the quality of the expansion is significantly lower than that of the base game, not that the base game was anything to write home about, though I'm one of the few people that enjoyed it. Still, I was hoping for a little more than this. First off, the positives. The expansion introduces a new class and race, the Warlock and Tieflings, respectively. The two are obviously meant to go together as Tieflings get a bonus to charisma and Warlocks are a charisma-based class. It's a fun class to play, essentially a less focused mage with slightly better weapon combat ability. Tiefling would be a cool race to play if the game ever reacted to your race and allowed you to role play it, granted the expansion takes place in the Underdark, and if there's any place people wouldn't bat an eye at a Tiefling, that's probably it. There's really no room for role playing of any kind in the game. You generally don't get any dialogue choices other than bog standard good character. You almost never even get to make a snide remark, which, sadly, is the extent you get to play "evil" in all too many RPGs. There is a bit of choice in the expansion, as it opens up with a side questline that allows you to finger or clear a character. You also get the choice of aligning yourself with one of 3 factions: Drow, Duergar, or Zhentarim. Ultimately, the choice makes no difference, aside from whom you'll fight as enemies in one of the side quests. You can do the main quest or side quests in whatever order you like, other than that, the game is linear. All the dialogue is uninspired, as are the characters. There are no new companions, one new hub area, and a few generic dungeons. It's not even 1/3 the length of the base game, which isn't an issue given the price ($0), but the expansion just sort of ends suddenly. It's never a good sign when my reaction is "Wait, that's it?" as the credits roll. Granted, the final boss is a worthy opponent, but the game implies a greater enemy that you never get to so much as sniff. I suppose that leaves room for a second expansion. However, given the reception and performance of SCL, I highly doubt we'll ever see it.

I mean, gender is an artificial construct anyway.

It's not about blatantly and purposely lying, no mainstream news outlet would do that because of the potential consequences if they're caught red handed fabricating a story. Mainstream news outlets are, however, often times willing to regurgitate misrepresented and skewed stories from more extremist outlets. Generally speaking, the more you go from moderate to an extreme of the spectrum, any extreme, the more people are willing to bend the truth and even straight up fabricate things, probably because the more you go to an extreme of the spectrum the more you need to bend and fabricate to make things fit your views, since the unbiased truth tends to fall somewhere near the moderate middle ground. It's less about political leanings and agendas and more about the bottom line, though. The top priority of almost any large mainstream news outlet is money, and since they get paid in advertising revenue and more views equals more advertising revenue, it's all about getting as many views as possible... Clicks, I guess the current unit of measurement of exposure is clicks. Anyway, it's fairly commonplace for mainstream media to pick up on and run sensationalist "news" stories from more niche or extremist outlets. For the most part, the stories are just regurgitated as is. Fact checking takes time and effort and who has time for that, amirite? Besides, they're being handed what essentially amounts to free money (since sensationalism sells and sells well) for little to no work, why look a gift horse in the mouth? The best part is that they have their own asses covered in the event that they are called out for misrepresenting the truth. They can just cite their source and put the blame on them for fabricating a story. So long as they have plausible deniability, the worst case scenario is getting burned for incompetence, which, while not great, is a heck of a lot less damaging than getting burned for fabricating the story.

I can say this with 100% certainty: So long as no one with at least a modicum of power and relevance, on whatever side of the fence, takes the risk of shaking up this broken as **** system, nothing will change. If someone takes the chance there may be a very small chance of succeeding in changing the system and a very high chance of failing. If no one does anything there is a 0% chance of changing the system. So long as people keep saying "you just have to play along with the game" we'll be stuck in this bull**** vicious cycle forever until the country completely collapses.

Because that would be stupid and self-destructive. First, because it's too late in the process to get on the ballot in a critical mass of states. Second, because it would sabotage their policy goals and, consequently, career. We tend to get caught up in the personalities, but there are rather huge policy differences between the major candidates. Anybody who cares about tax rates, economic opportunity, immigration, environmental policy, education, energy, etc., would just end up undermining whoever of Trump or Clinton is closer to their views, and hand the election to the one who they like least. I don't know, it would be incredibly risky, that's for sure, but it might be worth the risk for someone to take. The 2 party system is terribly broken, I've know this for quite some time. The fact that Trump has managed to become the GOP candidate and that Socialist Grandpa managed to get as far as he did in his bid for the Dems candidacy shows that the number of people in the country that recognize how broken the system is and that are sick to death of it is at an all time high. Sure, someone going independent would quite likely damage their standing in their own party, but that might not matter as much going forward and they would have the talking point of "at least I tried, I risked my career to try to stop the madness" 4 years from now.

Wouldn't this be the year to run as a 3rd candidate? You have arguably the 2 most hated candidates of all time going against each other. What better time for a big name from either side to run as an independent?

Still playing Salt & Sanctuary. The game is great. I'm happy that they didn't make the game too punishing. The game is hard and I die a lot, but even if I lose a lot of salt by dying (doesn't happen that often because I'm a wuss and play it safe and use a bell to get back to a sanctuary whenever I have a bunch of salt on me) I'm never like *throw controller across room* "welp, I'll never get that salt back" *sadness & anger*. I'm like "well that sucked, but it's all good because I can either kill that enemy to get my salt back or grind for it for a short bit, no biggie". I also really appreciate all the shortcuts they put in that you open once you get through an area. As much as I love confusing metroidvania mazes, and I do, I like to have a quick way to bypass stuff once I've gone through them once.

That mouse is so adorable

But but but video games cause violence, despite countless studies claiming otherwise. For example, that person that shot people in Munich recently... I bet that person played a video game at some point in their life, therefore video games make people kill.

Killed the Mad Alchemist in Salt & Sanctuary. Definitely the easiest boss fight so far. I almost killed him on my first attempt, only died because I didn't know what I was up against. I wrecked him on my second attempt.

More Salt & Sanctuary. I died many many inglorious deaths in the forest. I've now got a hang of the area, though me plummeting to my death due to my piss poor platforming skills remains a very real possibility. On the positive side, I killed the Queen of Smiles on my second attempt at fighting her. This is still undoubtedly very early in the game, but I'll take whatever small victories I can get.

Frictional Games are working on two new games, including their first non-horror title. I personally don't have any issues with "walking simulators", so long as the walking is really interesting. As for Firewatch, brevity aside (I'm glad I waited to buy it on sale), that was a game that I felt was let down by its ending. It was a game that seemed like it was heading somewhere really interesting, then decided to head down just about the most mundane and uninteresting path possible for its conclusion. If Frictional do plan to make something like Firewatch then they really need to work on their dialogue, as that was Firewatch's strongest point and the dialogue in SOMA felt quite clumsy at times. I'll definitely be interested to see what they come up with, though I'm not particularly “existentially traumatized.”

As with any Firaxis game, I'll wait a year or so then decide whether or not I want to buy the complete edition.

I always keep tweaking the formula and trying different ingredients. I'm thinking of trying some leafy veggies in there like spinach or bok choy. Also, maybe some cinnamon or nutmeg for a bit of spicy kick. Blueberries are the one constant (besides yogurt as the base and a bit of milk to thin it out) in my smoothie recipes. They're delicious and I like the texture of the "crunchy" debris you get from them.

Blueberry, blackberry, banana, and plum smoothie:

The only BBF boss fight I had trouble with was the Deadwalker General battle in the swamp, and that's mostly because my character was still pretty weak at that point. It took me a bunch of tries and when I did beat him it was a tense nearly 10 minute battle that involved me mostly running away. Later on in the game I got to face a Deadwalker General again as a mini-boss and I MASSACRED the dude quick and easy. By the end of the game I had somewhere around 30% crit chance with my axe (I concentrated on weapon speed, crit, and damage for gear upgrades). I didn't bother much casting fireballs because they did pathetic damage, they felt like a waste of mana, but I would flame up my axe and flame myself up then charge in and just murderate stuff. If I crit (which was fairly often) with a flamed up axe I could nearly 1-shot weaker enemies and take a big chunk off tougher enemies. Flame weapon and flame shield were awesome when maxed out. My character was all types of OP in late game, but maybe that's because I went full-demon. I should try it again going down the humanity path and maybe stabby stabby style instead of big 2-hander axe.

Rabbits can have different stats? Will there be a Vorpal Bunny?

How is the character progression relative to the challenge of the enemies? For me, both Mars: War Logs and Bound By Flame start out relatively the same; your character is a pathetic weakling. The biggest difference is in the progression of your character's power level relative to enemies. In M:WL you remain a pathetic weakling throughout the entire game. While your abilities do get a bit stronger, the skill increases are pretty mediocre and the enemy strength and numbers grow at least as fast as your character. In that game it feels like you need every single weapon and armor upgrade available just to keep up with enemies. I am forced to constantly cheese the system just to survive as I'm almost always massively outnumbered and nearly every enemy seems stronger than me. Also, companions are completely and utterly useless in M:WL; they're good for 10 seconds of distraction at best. In BBF you start out as a pathetic weakling too, but your character grows in power relative to enemies throughout the game. By the late stages of the game I was feeling like a legitimate badass and I very rarely felt the need to resort to cheese tactics. Even when severely outnumbered I could usually buff myself quickly, then charge in and dispatch a couple of the weaker enemies very rapidly to reduce their numbers to a manageable amount. Also, companions, while still not great, have a more measurable impact on the battle. Heck, they even kill enemies once in a while all on their own.

How does Technomancer's combat compare to Bound By Flame's? I thought BBF's combat, while far from perfect, was significantly better than Mars: War Logs'.

I'm torn on the look of Salt & Sanctuary. The aesthetic is consistent and I like the lighting effects and there's a lot of layers in the background giving nice depth, but I hate the look of the human characters.

I'm playing Salt & Sanctuary. It's pretty good. I've gotten my ass whooped quite a few times already, but it's all part of the learning process.

WB pulled a ton of shady **** with Shadow of Mordor to manipulate the press. The weird thing is that the game was actually pretty ****ing awesome and they totally didn't need to do anything of the sort and could have just let the game get by on its merits.

Timothee "TTimo" Besset was the guy who made Linux/Mac versions of Id games. When he left Id so did Linux/Mac ports.