Keyrock

Portland, Oregon? I've never been there, but I hear it's quite nice. Quite the hotbed for the tech industry too.

It looks amazing is pictures.

Does the engine change make the combat not terrible?

I mean, I'm still a Cowboys fan... Oh wait, that's even worse.

Looks just as good in person. The Charlotte skyline is beautiful. Downtown Charlotte is gorgeous. The suburbs are like the suburbs of any big city; there are nice areas and not so nice areas. Also, given that it's a really big city (second largest in the southeastern US), Charlotte has essentially everything... well, except a port or beach, because it's not on the coast. Other than that, though, it has nearly every possible attraction, venue, and place of entertainment you could reasonably want without ever leaving the city border... with the exception of Charlotte Motor Speedway, which is (ironically) not in Charlotte itself (you don't generally build a super speedway inside a major city) but in Concord, approximately 20-25 minutes away. Beyond that, Charlotte is about 3 - 3 1/2 hours away from nice beaches (I purposely wanted to NOT be on the coast to avoid potential hurricane problems) and about 2 1/2 hours from the utterly gorgeous Great Smoky Mountains (visited there as a kid, they're breathtaking). The climate in Charlotte is subtropical. You do get a winter, but it's a short and mild winter (2-3 inches of snow per year and a January high of 50 degrees Fahrenheit average). Summers are hot but not flat out brutal. Shorts and t-shirt weather 8 months of the year.

If you're gonna die... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL8aGnDR60A Yes, I keep posting Iron Maiden songs. I'm going to keep doing it too, because the best band of its generation is worth posting again and again and again and...

I signed the agreement to move into the place I'll be living at in Charlotte in a little over a month. I also gave my current job my notice today (approximately 5 minutes after signing the agreement and emailing the signed and scanned copy over to Charlotte). Given that I'm giving them slightly over 5 weeks, as compared to the standard 2 weeks, I think I'm being more than fair with my soon to be former employers. No turning back now. In approximately 1 1/2 months I'll be living in (literally) greener pastures. This is both an exciting and scary time for me. It's never easy to move 750 miles away without a safety net. On the other hand, this will be the first time I dictate, of my own choosing without outside influences, where I will live. I was born in Warsaw, Poland. Obviously, I had no control over that. At the age of 8 I moved to (at that time West) Germany because that's where my parents moved. No control over that. 2 1/2 years later we moved to the US and Connecticut. Again, no control over that (not that I'm complaining, I appreciate the risks my parents took to get us where we are). Since then I've lived in Connecticut and moved in-state wherever the employment winds took me. The entire time I have lived in Connecticut I have never felt like I was "home", like this was the place I wanted to stay. Every place I have lived here, whether it was with my folks or on my own, has always felt temporary because this is not where I wanted to grow old. Not that Connecticut is a terrible place. Sure, the winters suck and the cost of living is among the highest in the continental US, but if I had no choice I could easily make do here. The thing is, I don't have to make do. I can choose to live somewhere else, and I did. For the first time in my life, I'm moving somewhere based solely on "I want to live here" and nothing else. For the first time in my life, I'm moving to a place I feel I can grow old in (Obviously, time will tell. The several visits I've made for Charlotte only give me a quick taste, living there for a few years will be the true test). A new, and hopefully greatest, adventure awaits me.

The super calm voice makes hacking off limbs with a circular saw that much creepier.

Maybe one should try leaving Senpai a gift. Like a severed head?

Holy crap, that's one heck of a voice cast. Most importantly, John De Lancie.

No no, that's fine, you folks continue. This may be sacrilege to say, but I'm over the Infinity Engine games of old. I started replaying BG1 a few years ago and after about 2 hours I was just "ugh no". Same thing when I tried to replay IW2. They were great games that I loved when I was younger, but I have no desire to ever play them again, not even Planescape: Torment, which was by far my favorite IE game. I just don't care any more. I don't care what Beamdog did with the EEs. I don't care if they added to the games or butchered them. The only Beamdog game I'm even remotely interested in is Siege of Dragonspear and that's because it's a wholly brand new game, though the fact that it's being built using IE is a bit of a turn-off. IE was a good engine for its time. By today's standards it kinda sucks.

This argument is still going on? And I thought I was anal retentive. Anyway, more Dying Light: The Following for me. I suspect it's going to take me forever to actually do the main story since I constantly get distracted by doing races and just generally ripping through dirt roads and fields at 60 mph and sending zombies flying. Good times. I'll probably also jump back into Satellite Reign in the next day or two. I had gotten slightly burnt out on that game (it's a long game), but the 3 week or so break I've taken from it has done me a lot of good and I think I'm ready to return and do the final push. I'm kind of itching to play another point & click but I don't see anything promising on the horizon except for The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy, and that doesn't have a firm release date yet.

Aren't economy shattering bugs/exploits/oversights a staple of old skool RPGs or am I remembering wrong?

Lol. Wow. That's gonna ruffle a few feathers when it arrives. Sometimes you gotta go to extreme measures to make senpai notice you.

One of my applications for a place to live down in Charlotte was approved today. I am now 1 step closer to escaping Connecticut and moving to a place that I actually want to live in.

Vulkan 1.0 has been released

I finished Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders. Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable point & click experience. The game took me about 7 1/2 hours to finish, which is decent for a point & click. While it unfortunately wasn't David Suchet voicing Poirot, I nevertheless thought that the voice acting was for the most part solid. While the production value was far from AAA and I did encounter a couple jarring production hiccups, I thought that generally the game was well put together and it had a consistent and pleasant aesthetic. My only real complaint is that there seemed to be no punishment for getting things wrong during the deduction segments and you could trial and error your way through them with no penalty, something I admittedly had to resort to a couple of times (most of the time I knew exactly what I was going for). It is nice that the game lets you make a few key decisions toward the end that will produce different endings. While I've only seen one myself, I have a pretty good idea of how a couple different endings may have played out. Most importantly, I enjoyed my entire time with the game and when it was over I had a big smile on my face and a sense of satisfaction. I can't really ask for more than that for my money. Also, instead of scratching my point & click itch, this has rekindled my love of the genre and left me wanting to play another p & c soon.

I don't know about cinematic, but Dying Light plays great with a controller.

Wow, this creepy as **** game is really coming along

The inside of the mailbox is dark. Your are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Microsoft did the same thing with Windows 8 initially. There were a few games that had exclusivity deals with Windows 8 at first. Nothing much became of it and some of the few Win 8 exclusive games eventually wound up getting out of that deal and releasing elsewhere. Microsoft does this every few years where they make a big announcement about how they're getting behind PC gaming again then push one or two games to their latest iteration of Windows as a show of "see we're serious this time" then a couple months down the line they return to the status quo of completely ignoring gaming on PC and concentrating on XBOX. We'll see how this go round pans out. I imagine it will be much the same as every previous go round. The fear of Microsoft trying to ape Apple and lock people into their own version of a walled garden is one of the reasons GabeN and Co. are pushing SteamOS (not particularly quickly or successfully so far, but then, Valve always does things at a snail's pace). As a former Microsoft employee, I guess GabeN is privy to the inner workings of that company, granted that was a long time ago and leadership has changed multiple times since then. Honestly, not too much has seemingly come of Microsoft's supposed push toward a walled garden so far. Only time will tell, I guess.

Same thing happened to me in my early 20s. I had hair halfway down my back then eventually buzzed it all off when it was plainly obvious where genetics was taking me. On the one hand, I do sometimes still miss my long hair, but on the other hand, hair is essentially zero maintenance now. Get out of the shower, drag a towel across top of head, done.

I got back from my trip to Charlotte early this morning (around 2:30 AM), it was 0 degrees Fahrenheit when I got home (Connecticut, if this was your way of pushing me to leave, no need, my mind was already made up. I'm leaving ASAP). The trip was all business. I looked at a whole bunch of places to live and filled out a bunch of applications. Now I hope I get good news replies this coming week while continuing to make inquiries and do whatever I can via internet to set things up for my move. Ideally, I'll have both a decent job and a nice place to live lined up by April, but it's hard. When you're trying to move to a far away place and not transferring with your job and you don't know anyone there at whose place you could crash at for a bit, you run into a chicken and egg scenario: What comes first, the job or the place to live? You really need to already reside there to get a job and you need to have a job there to get a place to live. So how do you get a job without already residing there and how do you get a place of residence if you don't already have a job? Regardless, I'm going to make this happen, one way or another. This is not an if, it's a when. It's happening and it's happening this year and soon. Once I get one it makes the other exponentially easier to achieve. If I get accepted for a job in Charlotte I can give property managers a letter of offer that shows them I'll have income there. Conversely, if I get accepted for a place to live, I can show employers that I have a residence in Charlotte, which proves to them that they can depend on me to be there if they offer me a job. As long as I get one or the other, I'll move even if I can't immediately fulfill the other part before I make my move. If I get a job there but don't yet have a residence, I can stay at an extended stay inn for a while until I do get a permanent residence. If I get a residence but don't yet have a job when I move I have enough savings that I can go several months without a paycheck. Plus, I'll take whatever job I can find at first if necessary. I'll work at a convenience store of a grocery store or whatever if I have to at first, so as to keep as much of my nest egg as possible intact. I'll take whatever I can get to establish a foothold in Charlotte. Once I have a job and a place to live there, then I can get picky and find find a better job and a nicer place to live. Ideally, I'll have a good job and a nice place to live from the get go, but I'll make do with what I can get at first if necessary.

Yes, but it's a separate campaign. It will import your character from the base game, though.