Keyrock

The killer's first male victim.

I will valiantly fight a (losing) battle against the incoming tide of XCOM 2 screenies.

I started playing Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders. So far they've managed to capture Poirot's abrasive, yet oddly charming arrogance fairly well. I like how you can observe people and make observations, piece together deductions, and get to reconstruct the crime, though I wish they'd take the training wheels off and not tell me how many clues there are to find in each scene and also give me more options when making deductions or reconstructing a crime to make it more complicated. Hopefully they're going easy on me now for tutorial purposes and it get much harder later on.

Still slower than I'd like, but otherwise it looks badass.

If the swamp didn't exist I would recommend playing the game wholeheartedly. I can not, in good conscience, tell anyone to play The Witcher without warning them of the horror that is the swamp. The swamp is a terrible place full of frustration that will take you forever to get through. You will come to curse its name. All the other areas are great, though. The combat in the game is garbage, it's basically a rhythm game. You pick the right sword and style for the situation and you click the button when the prompt flashes. The voice acting and dialogue are hilariously bad, too. However, the main story is fantastic and the game has choices that will haunt you 5 hours down the line. Also, you get nudie cards for sleeping with women. It's great.

Xenonauts 2 Announced Scheduled for 2017 release.

Is the murderer supposed to be different from in the book? Just wondering if the game would be anti-climactic to one who has read the novel to then play the game. I'm kind of wondering that myself. Edit: From Steam forums:

Looks like I'll get to use my little grey brain cells very soon. This comes out tomorrow.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong is getting an Extended Edition with 5+ hours of new gameplay and developer commentary. https://twitter.com/WeBeHarebrained/status/693513739023310848 https://www.facebook.com/HarebrainedSchemes/posts/942112145856953 I'm assuming the 5+ hours of new gameplay is the mini-campaign that was promised to us before.

Wait, are there copyrights on tattoos? When you get a tattoo (I don't have any so I wouldn't know) does the tattoo artist retain the rights to that tattoo or does the person getting tattooed have the rights? LeBron is a basketball player, he plays in a a tank top, he's going to have tattoos visible all the time.

I look forward to playing this in 2027.

Definitely Japan. Not only would I get to experience a completely different culture, I'd also get to go to puro and joshi shows regularly. As an added bonus, I'd get to play Japanese games as they were meant to be, not tainted by the foul stench of censorship for the sake of our fragile western psyches.

I finished Attractio. I was right, I was doing the final challenge before. In fact, I was about 5 minutes from finishing when I left off. Fun puzzle game minus the clumsy action sequence at the end. The ending left it open to a potential sequel. I'd be down for one, especially if they end with an actual puzzle in the sequel. I'm not 100% sure what I'll play next. I'll go back and finish Satellite Reign at some point, but I think I need a few more days break from that game. I may wind up playing Agatha Christia - The ABC Murders. I'm definitely feeling the itch to play a point & click and I'm always down for a detective mystery. Getting to play as Hercule Poirot is an added bonus. The game comes out on Thursday. If the reviews are decent, I'll likely pull the trigger and dive right in.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled GIANT wall of text.

Where there is money to be made fraud will follow. It's the natural progression of things.

Proving once again that cats are the most devious species on the planet.

Did you use Gruyere?

Not exactly a tall hurdle to clear.

I'm at what I assume is the end part of Attractio, if not, then pretty close to it. For the most part, I thought the puzzles in the game were pretty good. There were a couple of parts where the mechanics were a bit wonky, leading to... for lack of a better term, inconsistent results,something that should never happen in a puzzle game, but overall I thought the puzzles were clever and made good use of gravity, momentum, and friction. Sadly, as is far too often the case, the final challenge of the game, assuming what I'm at is the final challenge, winds up being disappointing. It just seems so unnatural to end a puzzle game with an action sequence. To be fair, there is a tiny bit of a puzzle element to this challenge, but it's mostly action. I had been playing this game for over 8 hours and everything up to that point, which I'm assuming is the final challenge, had been a puzzle. There is a little bit of an element of timing and platforming and quick aiming to these puzzles, slightly more so than Portal, but overwhelmingly getting past the puzzles has depended more on creative thinking over twitch skills. Then I get to what I assume is the final challenge and the puzzle element of it is very much secondary and the challenge is heavily reliant on running, dodging, and quick aiming. It flies in the face of everything that came before it. This is so reminiscent of what also happened at the end of Portal Stories: Mel and how it left a bad taste in my mouth after what was otherwise an enjoyable puzzle game. Is it so hard to end a puzzle game with... wait for it... wait for it... a puzzle? Am I crazy here? Anyway, I got about halfway through it a couple days ago and haven't had the desire to touch it since, but I guess I'll power through it just to finish the game today or tomorrow.

Made a bunch of phone calls, sent a bunch of emails, did some research, and visited my (soon to be ex) landlord all in preparation for my trip to Charlotte in a couple weeks to look at places to live and fill out a bunch of applications which will ultimately lead to my move in a couple of months. It's a scary and exciting time for me. I can't wait until it's all over and I'm settled and established in my new, much warmer home.

It's cool, I get what you mean. Story-driven games are nothing new, they've existed as far back as text-based adventures. The gaming public at large likes to pat itself on the back at the progress its made since those "dark days" and in some ways there has been progress, but at the same time some of the narrative spark that existed in the early days has also been lost (mostly) in the pursuit of the shiny object. Many (though certainly not all) of the big budget stories we get today that are celebrated by the self-congratulatory media are regurgitated, stale, predictable tripe. Publishers are so sure that giant spectacular set pieces and over the top melodramas are what sell (it's hard to argue they're wrong) that they sometimes overlook, or willingly ignore, that it's the quiet, subtle drama and intrigue that makes a good story. Also, I'd just like to reiterate what you wrote, namely that Betrayal at Krondor is phenomenal (and so underappreciated). I mean the gameplay is pretty ****, but the story is so freakin' good.

I'm afraid that I have to disagree here Keyrock, the Ultima games dealt with complex themes and had narratives that were reinforced by the mechanics, and stood quite well on their own, Betrayal at Krondor was fantastically written by Mr Neal Halford and there are many others. I'm also not so sure that gaming has evolved that much, in fact in places it has positively devolved, after all what do you expect when a new game comes out? Features that were present in games decades ago are impossible to implement now, gameplay other than combat and conversation has disappeared, environmental interactivity is non existent, worlds and characters are painted backgrounds that have no life or agency, organic map design and exploration has been replaced by handholding and quest markers, fantastic sound design such as we heard in Thief has been replaced by some manner of idiot vision, magic is simply another weapon to use rather than an art of wonder and utility, loading screens are incessant and yet in games like Ultima and Dungeon Siege there were massive worlds that required none. Of course there are exceptions and in even the most dull and safe AAA+ games there are innovative elements, but I think it has become far too popular to ridicule the games of yesteryear, and dismiss them as regressive when in fact they were introducing many innovative elements that have not been bettered yet, or even emulated, and certainly not built upon. When I look back on what I played many years ago, and see how stale and unambitious the genre has become in comparison, well I am saddened at how little was learned from or built upon the RPGs of the past. Edit: To be fair Dungeon Siege which I mentioned also introduced a positively degenerative design where the game would literally play itself. As we have seen this has become a desired feature now for some players (who unfortunately designers are catering to) who do not wish to play and learn the mechanics of a game, but instead simply wish to be told a story and fed a power fantasy. Accessibility and streamlining run riot rather than used to distil a game into what it needs to be, such as the first Fallout does so well, each feature and mechanic reinforcing the themes of the game. Which part of "most" was unclear? Sure, there were narrative-heavy games even back then, they were the exception to the rule and it's partly because of that that they became famous, because they helped herald in the forthcoming games with a larger focus on story (and those games deserve all the praise they get). Back in 90 or 91 or 92, when Doom was just beginning to be conceived, which is when that Carmack quote was made, even the Final Fantasy series, in many ways the epitome of the story-driven RPG (at least in terms of mainstream), was only beginning to hit its narrative stride with FFIV (a game the west wouldn't never see for a decade). My point is that the majority of mainstream games at that time were heavily gameplay-focused with story as an afterthought. Story-driven games existed long before then, as far as Sierra adventure games in the mid to late 80s or even earlier with the Zork games. Those games were in the minority. Most games were like Asteroids or Missile Command.

That's pretty weak sideboob. You gotta see the skin of the side of the boob for it to be proper sideboob. Also, it needs to be the outer half of the side of the boob, not the inner half (that would qualify as cleavage). Yes, i did just argue the semantics of sideboob. No, I do not find this to be unusual, why do you ask?