Keyrock

Thanksgiving has lately been my favorite holiday. All the feasting and getting together with family goodness of Christmas minus all the gift shopping stresses. As a bonus you get (American) football games. That said, I've always been fond of Easter as well, partially because it coincides with winter being over and the start of beisbol season.

If that is a holiday you celebrate. If not... /shrugs

I worked my last day in Connecticut today. Tomorrow I drive up to Boston to see my sister. Sunday I go to my parents' for Easter. Next week is packing then a 750 mile one way trip south to Charlotte.

Well, nuts. I guess Nordic wins the shameless award. Sorry, Atari, you lose again.

Quick quiz! Which publisher will be the first to sell a physical copy on retail store shelves of an early access game? I'll give you a minute... ... ... ... ... ... If you guesses Atari you win! We are through the looking glass, people. Next step, all games will retail as early access. The step after that, developers don't even bother finishing the games and early access becomes "full release".

I'm a little over 21 hours in Sunless Sea now, still on my first captain. Voyages have become less interesting since I have been everywhere on the map, so there's no new places for me to go at the moment. I'm building favor with several groups but that takes a lot of time and there are things I want to do but I can't with my current ship because it's impractical or just plain impossible because my cargo hold is so limited. The goal right now is to get a merchant vessel which has 5X the cargo hold my dinky starter ship has, but that ship is expensive. I'm in a bit of a catch 22 where I need a lot of money to buy the ship with the much bigger cargo hold but I need a ship with a much bigger cargo hold to make money. As it stands, I've managed to get a little over half the money I need for the merchant vessel so far, so I am making progress, it's just really slow progress.

I generally prefer party-based RPGs to be turn-based. I'm down with RtwP if I'm only playing one character, or two, three at the absolute most, but if I'm going to be controlling a party of four or more then the companion AI better be really good (95% of the time it isn't, in my experiences) or I'm going to wind up pausing every 2 seconds to issue commands, which nullifies the preeminent selling point of real-time, the speed of the game. For whatever reason managing a party of 4 or more in turn-based combat wears on my brain a lot less than managing a party of 4 or more in RtwP where I pause every 2 seconds. I think the more organized structure of TB makes it easier for me keep track of things and plan things ahead.

Evolution Studios shut down

So, I was making the rounds over the past weekend visiting friends I'll likely not get to see in a long time, since I'm moving 750 miles away in less than 2 weeks, and I got to play the hot new game on the scene, The Division. I don't get what the buzz is about, I found the game dreadfully boring. First, I'll give credit where credit is due, the game looks impressive. I wish it were in a setting more interesting than wasteland New York, but the graphics are great. The gunplay is decent enough and getting a good drop feels good. Beyond that, though, I found nothing interesting about the game. Why is this a Tom Clancy game (other than milking the name for money)? What's Tom Clancy about it? Does it have a gripping story? Not from what I played, probably somewhere around 2 to 3 hours, maybe it gets better later on, but I found it utterly forgettable. Does it have interesting characters? I didn't encounter a single memorable character. The gunplay is fine but the combat is repetitive and tedious. Kill a bunch of guys in hoodies, kill a bunch more guys in hoodies, fight a super bullet sponge boss, kill some more guys in hoodies, lather, rinse, repeat. That was one of the things that made me hate Borderlands, how bullet spongey enemies, particularly bosses, were. But, at least Borderlands had bosses that were different and fought differently than regular enemies. In The Division bosses are just regular enemies that take way more bullets to kill. It's super weak sauce. The dark zone also feels pretty pointless. I guess I'm just not cut out for these kinds of looter shooter games, because I haven't found one that I don't hate yet.

Ever wanted to splash a bit of T-Virus on yourself? Well, if you're in Japan, in about a week's time you'll be able to. Personally, I'm staying as far away as possible from anything manufactured by Umbrella Corp., but that's just me.

I finished The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy. It was a pretty fun point & click. Not a classic by any stretch, but enjoyable and with amazing art and a great soundtrack. It took me a little over 7 hours to finish, which is reasonable for a $20 game and point & clicks in general. I'd love to see them make a sequel.

There are only 2 scenarios I can think of under which you would use a card like this, neither of them make all that much sense. Your motherboard only has a single slot for GPUs and you want to run a crossfire setup for extra performance. This seems like an unlikely scenario given that anyone able to afford a $1500 video card is highly likely to be a power user with disposable income and people like that are likely to have a high end motherboard too, and those generally have multiple PCI-E slots for GPUs. 2-way crossfire is not enough for you and you want to run a 4-way crossfire setup with 2 of these monsters. First off, holy ****! Second, unless driver updates have changed things recently, anything beyond 2-way crossfire, same goes for SLI, gives very much diminishing returns. So this begs the question, who are these cards for? (same goes for ridiculously priced Nvidia dual GPU cards like the Titan Z)

I'm down for a game that's dark, but I don't know about THAT dark.

I kinda worry that even in "a world where evil has won" (isn't that basically Warhammer 40K?) I'll still be forced to play the hero. Basically a "you're a commander in the evil army, but you secretly long to overthrow the tyrant and free the people" deal. I'm totally fine with that being an option, but I also want an option to be a ruthless tyrant myself totally cool with oppression and suffering and my desire to overthrow the tyrant comes from wanting to be at the top of the food chain ruling with an iron fist myself.

More twisted goodness from Spike Chunsoft. Vita and 3DS 6/28, PC via Steam sometime later this year.

There are not that many games that let you play a truly evil character, fewer still that do evil character well. In most games the "evil" options amount to nothing more than snide remarks or being rougher with someone than absolutely necessary, but you're usually still forced to carry out mostly heroic acts.

Okay, I'll stop derailing this thread now...

Yeah, I was just making a really bad joke (in poor taste to boot, because that's how I roll).

One could argue a tree falling on you is a "natural" cause.

No, killed in an accident (whether that accident involved another person, was just a freak thing, act of nature, etc.) is perfectly acceptable and the way I would expect to hear it more often than not. Died in an accident is also acceptable and common, but in my experiences I tend to hear killed in an accident more often. Killed by heart attack or killed by heart failure I have heard plenty of times, though I agree that died of a heart attack is more common. These things will of course vary from region to region as people use somewhat different terminology in different parts of the world or even different parts of the country. The rule of thumb is that "killed" is commonly used when the death comes suddenly and unexpectedly.

Yes. Killed implies there was a killer, but the killer does not have to be a person, it can be an object, a disease, etc. If you die of a heart attack you were killed by the heart attack. If you die by falling off a cliff you were killed by falling off a cliff. The only time you wouldn't use killed is if the death was expected (e.g. the person had a terminal disease, they were really old and their health was failing). In those cases, killed would still technically be correct (killed by old age), but people don't generally use it like that. If the death is something that's expected you'd generally say "He died of old age". To bring this back to video game, I was ironically discussing this about a game recently, The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy. You can tell the dialogue was translated by non-native English speakers (understandable for a small studio) because while all of it is technically correct, some of it is structured in a way that native speakers wouldn't say it like that. It's understandable that non-native speakers wouldn't get all the nuances of English. I'm sure it works the same way for other languages too.

"Killed" is perfectly acceptable, in fact it's the proper term, when anyone dies unexpectedly, whether it's accidental or premeditated. Another person doesn't have to be involved. Whether a tree fell on them, someone shot them, or they were in a car and a drunk driver ran into them, killed is appropriate in all those circumstances.

killed? i know it may be technically correct, that tree really wanted him dead but still... What word would you use besides killed? Killed doesn't imply that it was premeditated. You're thinking of "murdered".