Keyrock

Having seen the pre-order and deluxe edition/DLC plans, I'll now be waiting a year to get the XCOM 2 Complete Edition for 50% off, which is generally a good idea with Firaxis games anyway.

Well, Toussaint is supposed to feel really out of place with the rest of the world. It's this duchy where everything is bright and cheerful and they have no standing army to speak of, yet everyone leaves them alone and leaves them to their own devices, including Nilfgaard, even though they are technically part of Nilfgaard. Makes you wonder what's really going on beneath the surface. Given the title "Blood & Wine", I wonder if it's vampires?

For what it's worth, Pani jeziora translates to Lady of the Lake.

To be honest, I've barely touched the main plot. The little bit of main plot I've gotten so far has come sporadically. You're given some direction at the very beginning; plant a probe at this location, go look for the missing team, they were last spotted here. After that, the orders given to you are extremely general, basically explore the planet, gather resources, plant probes, look for other pieces of the ship. There are side missions that will give you specific places to go and specific things to do, but the overall general directive is just "explore". Along the way you stumble into things or an event will trigger based on some criteria that will then advance the story. I don't know if it becomes more structured at some point, but it's mostly do your own thing and explore and stuff will happen at some point. So far it's not a very story driven game, like a Bethesda game except it's an awesome looking weird alien planet instead of boring familiar looking stuff.

Mostly Xenoblade Chroncles X. This game makes the land area in Skyrim look tiny by comparison. I've only just made my first forays into the another area of the game called Noctilium. The area you start in, the area around New Los Angeles, is called Primordia. It's mostly a plain, though it's pretty hilly in some areas and has some fairly tall rock formations, including some that seem to defy gravity, though gravity seems like it's a lot lower on this planet than on Earth, judging by how high you can jump. From New Los Angeles, which is located in the southern center of Primordia, going northwest, it takes me nearly 20 minutes running in as straight a line as I can at full sprint to reach Noctilium. Noctilium is a lush jungle/swamp area filled with huge colorful flowers and gargantuan... vines, I guess, that you can run on top of. It's all types of awesome looking. There are 5 areas in total, I guess I could call them continents, though that may be overstating their size a bit. Large islands, I guess. I can't wait to see the other 3, but I'm only scratching the surface of Noctilium. From what I've read, the estimate of time to complete the main story is between 70-80 hours, and well over 200 hours if you want to do and explore everything. Besides that, I'm still playing Bound by Flame. The game sure does make you travel down the same paths again and again. I've gone through the same 3 areas of swamp 4 or 5 times each now, it's starting to give me scary flashbacks of DA2. Luckily, the combat is really fun, so hacking through the same bunch of beasties in said swamps is enjoyable. Still, I hope I get to move on to a different area soon.

I'm all for it. For me a ****ty sequel doesn't ruin the games before it. For example, Master of Orion 1&2 are still awesome despite MoO3 being utter garbage, no legacy was sullied as far as I'm concerned. So, the way I see it is that a SS3 is gonna be made, there's a chance it's awesome and lives up to its predecessors, there's a chance it doesn't. If no SS3 ever gets made then there's a 0% chance that we get another great game in the series.

For a car that's probably been sitting there exposed to the elements for decades, those seats are in remarkably good condition.

Yeah, the Retribution campaign was not as good as the base DoW2 campaign or Chaos Rising, but those were tailor made for Space Marines, even a specific chapter of Space Marines, while the Retribution campaign had to be vague and general enough to accommodate Orks, Tyrranids, Eldar, etc. For me, personally, the awesomeness of the Orks more than made up for the campaign being lackluster. They were so hilarious.

Yes, please.

That's why DoW2: Retribution was my favorite in the series. You could play as any faction through the campaign, so, obviously, I played as Orks, because Orks are awesome and hilarious. And, as always, the answer to any problem is always more dakka.

The NFC Least everybody:

I haven't watched the Angry Joe Far Cry Primal video yet, because every time I mulled watching a 30 minute video I decided to just play Xenoblade Chronicles X for 30 minutes instead. I'll probably watch it in chunks at work today. Anyway, I'm curious as to how they'll fit in towers in a prehistoric setting. I mean, it's a Ubi game, so surely it will have towers.

Sorry about how small these pictures are. Since they redesigned Miiverse earlier this year, I haven't been able to figure out how to save and post full resolution pictures from the Wii U. Xenoblade Chronicles X New Los Angeles Planet Mira (those are actually some of the more plain looking areas, I'll have to get pictures of some of the weirder fauna and flora) Combat Tatsu, he's awesome

I'm having a blast with Xenoblade Chronicles X. Some compromises clearly had to be made to get a steady framerate on the Wii U's hardware. The game has a lot of pop in. It's disguised quite well in outdoor areas and I don't notice it most of the time, but inside the city it's very noticeable and, quite honestly, jarring. Also, things like bushes and tall grass don't move or rustle when you run through them, you just pass through them like they're illusions. That said, I can't emphasize enough how huge and great the world outside the city is. It looks freakin' amazing. It gives me a bit of the same feeling I got when I first played Morrowind, because the landscape is so weird and alien looking. It's way more fun to explore than something like Skyrim, which looks nice, but it's familiar looking. It's going to get even better once I get a skell (mech) to pilot, though I have no idea how long that will take.

J E T S Jets Jets Jets! I have no delusions of the Cowboys still winning the NFC Least, despite the fact that mathematically they have a chance. That ship has sailed, as far as I'm concerned. My NFC Least interest is now purely for getting schadenfreude fueled boners from division rivals losing. Yes, I am that petty.

Schafer knows how to appeal to the masses, I'll give him that. I thought the thing with his games was that they don't appeal to the masses. I meant his sales pitch videos, not his games.

I've never been that attached to FFVII, so I'm cool with whatever changes they make. Now, if they ever remake FFVI, I might flip the **** out over changes.

This is no hyperbole, but an honest to goodness straight from the heart statement. A couple hundred years from now Iron Maiden will be mentioned along with the Bachs, Chopins, and Mozarts of the musical historical world as the musical greats of their time. How many artists have even 1 really memorable album in their entire lifetime? 1%? 2%? 3%? Iron Maiden had six truly memorable albums. SIX! Killers, The Number of the Beast, Peace of Mind, Powerslave, Somewhere in Time, and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Edit: Also, I'm going to post my favorite Eddie, Futuristic Exoskeleton Somewhere in Time Eddie: Edit 2: Also, Steve Harris is a GOD. Not a demi-god, a GOD. Dave Murray is a demi-god.

Schafer knows how to appeal to the masses, I'll give him that.

Squarepusher is still awesome in his current incarnation, but I miss this jazz Squarepusher from almost 20 years ago.

Xenoblade Chronicles X definitely get better after chapter 1. The game gives you so much more freedom and, while you still get some cutscenes, you're let loose upon this giant awesome alien world to do as you please. No level scaling either. You can absolutely wander into an area with level 40 creatures at level 8 and if you are noticed by aggressive creatures you will get obliterated. At the same time, not all creatures are aggressive, so if you're sneaky you can find cool stuff in those areas and get out alive, plus the game doesn't punish you for dying, so exploring is essentially encouraged. The best part is that you can go pretty much anywhere. Areas where in other games you'd have an invisible wall, no invisible walls exist. Areas where you'd die if you jumped down into in other games, jump away, you'll land down there an be fine, go nuts, explore everything.

Xenoblade Chronicles X is a really frustrating game at the beginning. So, the prologue is alright. Elma finds you in a pod outside the city, there's a cutscene showing off the awesome looking world, then the both of you run back to the city and you're free to take whatever path you choose to get there. You get to the city, cutscene, prologue over. Chapter 1, however, is frustrating as hell. So there's this beautiful open world full of cool looking creatures out there and it's huge, I'm talking ridiculously gigantic, but instead of letting you go out and explore the cool looking world, the entirety of chapter 1 (chapters in this game seem fairly short and there are probably tons of them) is walk for 30 seconds, cutscene, walk for 30 more seconds, cutscene, walk for 20 seconds, cutscene, walk for 30 seconds, cutscene. Did I mention there are a lot of cutscenes? I get they need to introduce characters and such, but it's really frustrating when there's this giant awesome world out there, but instead you get interrupted every 30 seconds for another cutscene instead of being able to just go around the world freely. Honestly, all of act 1 should have been just 1 long cutscene. Why let me do the walking when it's going to only be for 20 or 30 seconds and I'm forced to go to a set location? Anyway, it seems I have more freedom in chapter 2, hopefully it stays that way for the rest of the game. Speaking of frustrating, I was at my buddy's place and played Just Cause 3 on his PS4 for a couple hours. That game is maddening. It's like an oxymoron, a contradiction. The game thrives when you go wild and do crazy stuff in the game, tethering vehicles together, strapping booster rockets to stuff, awesome stuff like that. Then in puts up a bunch of barriers to you actually being able to do said crazy stuff. The vast majority of the game is you liberating locations by destroying "chaos objects". You can destroy them any way you want, and the fun way to do it is to get inventive and do something ridiculous. However, blowing up these chaos objects the fun way generally requires a bunch of set up and a lot of trial and error, all while a couple dozen dudes are shooting at you, interrupting your plans and generally ruining them. If you're gonna liberate these locations the fun way, you're probably going to die a whole bunch or have to run away to heal while you're setting up the ridiculous wacky thing you;re staging, and it's going to take you forever. Or, you could just pull out a rocket launcher and do it in seconds. The worse part is that the game starts you off with rather limited tools to do wacky and crazy stuff with. There are tools to unlock which will allow you to get more creative and cause more havoc, but you're going to have to go through a metric **** ton of challenges to unlock said tools, and these challenges are dull as dish water. They are straight up some of the most boring challenges I've had to endure in a game, completely uninspired. It's a game that can be super fun, and it probably is eventually once you unlock everything, but you have to go through a ridiculous amount of super boring stuff to be allowed to use the fun toys. Ugh.