Keyrock

I finished the headquarters plot in X3: Albion Prelude, though I haven't bought my prize for finishing the missions yet. Unlike a lot of other plots, you don't get a freebie (we are talking about Teladi here, so it's not a surprise) at the end of this one, they sell you a headquarters. To make matters worse, it's bundled with a Teladi Albatross large transport, all for the low discount price of almost 50 million. It wouldn't be a bad deal if the Albatross wasn't complete garbage. It is arguably the worst ship in its class. It's slow and sluggish as molasses, which is not unusual for Teladi ships. However, the trade off with Teladi ships is that they generally have massive amounts of cargo capacity, but not the Albatross. In very un-Teladi fashion, the ship has pathetic cargo capacity for its class, so it literally has the worst of both worlds. To top it all off the design of the ship makes it childishly easy to hit. Granted, large transports are easy targets in general, but the Albatross presents a rather massive hit box from practically every angle, so even the slowest of dumbfire missiles couldn't miss it. Oh well, it's still worth it to get that headquarters and I can sell that hunk of junk Albatross after it's dropped my HQ off. While my trading empire has gotten to the point where buying something costing a couple million is something I can do without giving it a second thought, 50 million is still a considerable sum of money and will take me a while to save up for. In fact, my next steps will likely be to build another solar power plant and convert it to crystal-less, then probably do another one after that. In the short term it will considerably delay me affording the Albatross/HQ bundle, but in the long run it will be all types of worth it (The first crystal-less power plant I build is easily outpacing every other station I own in terms of the rate at which it brings in money. It will take a while for it to pay for itself, so it's still a net negative at this point, but eventually the net gains from it will far exceed any other station I currently own). Meanwhile, I've started up the hub plot working for the Boron. The first part was getting 1000 mosquito missiles for them. Easy peasy, those are found everywhere. The next part is getting 100 hornet missiles for them. That part is considerably more time consuming since so few places in the galaxy manufacture them and they are made in plants that also produce firestorm torpedoes, which take a ton of time to produce (the production alternates between making a batch of hornets and a batch of torpedoes). I contemplated building my own manufacturing plant to build hornet missiles to make the job go easier, but decided against it. I wouldn't expect to make much money off hornet missiles, though I could always use them myself. At one time, in earlier games, they were the premier heavy missile. These days there are more powerful missiles available. That's not to say that hornets are completely obsolete, but I personally prefer other types of missiles for every conceivable job: Wasps or Hurricanes against fighters. Typhoons against corvettes and frigates. Dumbfire behemoths like the firestorm torpedo against capital ships... or just go ham with typhoons. Really, while typhoon missiles are expensive, if you can afford to launch them in quantity, they're essentially an I Win Button. Another fun thing to do is to use Tornado missiles (dumbfire swarm missiles) essentially like a shotgun. You can absolutely shred fighter swarms with them, or corvettes or even frigates for that matter. Oh, you're launching a couple dozen fighters at me from a hangar bay? Here, let me fire off 10 Tornado missiles, have fun dodging 80 fast moving warheads. Good times.

Nice, they resolved the one minor problem I had with the game, the lack of a pop up explaining the hacking mini-game the first time it happens. Now I have nothing left to be pissed off about.

^ Zosha is so adorable. They're all so adorable. I might actually play as a non-rat in some games, I mean, I'll mostly play as a rat, but I might try a bunny or a bear or a wolf. It looks so lovely.

Is that Mercurio? Also, that art style is very nice.

tl;dw version: Avalanche did a bang up job, this is how every PC port should be. Robust options, full mouse control in menus, excellent optimization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v31S64A6K9U Less than 3 weeks until I ruin a bunch of pairs of perfectly good tidy whities.

Hour long video with a bunch of technical stuff that may go over some people's heads (sure went over mine) but some key points for laymen are: Nvidia has a working Vulkan driver you can use right now... if you're a member of Khronos and sign an NDA Vulkan is still on track for release this year Nvidia driver will release to the public day 1 or very shortly thereafter Nothing super surprising, mostly a bunch of technical stuff, if you're into that.

That's on my list of games I want to play that recently came out along with Satellite Reign and Fran Bow. It looks like a really nice board game-like game. You can play as a rat, right?

And therein lies the problems. Publishers and developers wind up shoehorning in token characters just so that the whackos shut the **** up or as a way to show off how "progressive" they are for some kind of hipster brownie points (*cough* BioWare *cough*), rather than writing characters that fit the story they are trying to tell.

Man they churn these out quick. It seems like only a couple years ago the first one came out, now there's like a dozen. Are they any good? I haven't owned a Sony platform since PS2, so I have no hands-on experience with them.

You are absolutely correct. Skin color, however, I believe is pertinent in this case because this refers to the "There aren't black people in The Witcher 3, y'all are racist!" complaint. This first part comes from hearsay, mind you, as I haven't been back to Poland in many years, but my folks and sister were there recently and they said there are some black folks there now, though still very very few. Back when I was growing up in Poland in the 80s, however, seeing a black person in Poland would likely be met with a "wow, I'd read about them in books, but I never thought I'd see one in person" reaction, just to give people an idea of how "white" Poland was at that time. (clearly purely the work of Nazis, I'm sure it was a veritable melting pot before 1939 )

tl;dw version: Overall solid and with good performance. Didn't run at launch on some older CPUs missing an instruction set, an issue that may or may not have been resolved by now. Some minore annoyances such as missing mouse control in menus. Otherwise, it runs pretty well

You can't alter canon externally (sorry, I'm a page or two behind here, getting back to earlier topics). The media creator IP owner gets to decide what is and isn't canon, period. I can alter details in my own mind for my own consumption. For example, say I'm playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution and I decide it would be cool if Adam Jensen was a Pacific Islander, I can pretend in MY OWN game that I'm playing for MY OWN enjoyment that Adam Jensen is a Pacific Islander, and that's fine. That is where it ends. Because I want Adam Jensen to be a Pacific Islander doesn't officially make him a Pacific Islander, he's only a Pacific Islander in MY OWN game, no matter how much I wish he was a Pacific Islander officially in the series (because that would be freakin' awesome). As an aside, can we get more Pacific Islander protagonists in video games, please (without altering already existing characters)? That would be cool.

As someone who knows a thing or two about Polish history, was born in Poland, whose entire family is Polish and can trace their ancestry all the way back to when Poland first became Christian then later officially became the Kingdom of Poland, I can say unequivocally that Poland has always been "super white". There was undoubtedly a little bit of intermingling with Turks, especially back during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but for the most part, super white. Who you believe, me or Donna Dickens, I'm sure she's an expert on the matter, or at least thinks she is, is up to you. The Internet - Where Everyone Is An Authority On Everything. No Actual Experience Or Knowledge Required!

The official word on it It's a full screen implementation of Steam aimed at being navigated with a controller and used on a TV (you can still use your mouse, mind you), like a console. SteamOS is not meant to replace Windows, at least it wasn't in the state I tried a while ago, it's meant to be a console OS with some desktop functionality. With some wrench work it can be made to be a full fledged desktop, but there are other Linux distros much better suited to that task.

Oh crap, i just installed some updates day or two ago for my W7, I hope Valve will speed up their linux OS so i can get rid of M$ trash tl;dr version: If you're looking for a console-like experience, SteamOS works great. If you want a full-fledged desktop, you're better off using a different Linux distro Full version: SteamOS already exists, has for a while now, as for whether it's ready for prime time, that part I'm not sure of. The last time I tried it, which was sometime very early this year I found the actual implementation of Steam Big Picture Mode to work quite well. If all I was looking to do was to use it like a console, then it was good to go back then, it worked great. What I didn't like was their desktop implementation. It used (likely still does) GNOME 3 by default, a desktop environment I don't particularly like (keep in mind that this is a personal preference, lots of people like GNOME 3 just fine) and the default selection of software available, while sufficient for most tasks, was rather minimal (as a long time Linux user, I'm used to having a billion choices for all standard desktop programs readily available at my fingertips out of the box). I couldn't install my beloved XFCE desktop because it wasn't in their official repos, so I had to add repos myself, then repos for other programs I wanted. Then I altered lines in config files to make sure SteamOS chose official SteamOS repos over the repos I installed myself, since there may have been some overlap and I wanted to make sure I didn't run into version mismatch problems (probably an unnecessary step, but a safeguard). It was at this point that the thought occurred to me: Why jump through hoops to get a desktop I like in SteamOS when I can just use Xubuntu and have a desktop I like out of the box and only do a little bit of tweaking to dial it in just so? Anyway, I am curious to give it another shot, just to see how it has progressed in the half a year or so since I last tried it. I would expect their official repos are probably a lot more robust now, so there would be a lot less adding of 3rd part repos necessary. I'll likely install it on my laptop (which I barely use these days) to see how it's progressed, since I'd have to resize partitions to make room on my desktop to set it up in its own partition, and I'd rather not do that when I can just pop it on my laptop and then later replace it with a clean installation of another Linux distro (there is nothing much of value on my lappy, so I don't need to take careful care to avoid writing over home partitions or anything). My own experiences with SteamOS (granted, a while ago) was that it worked quite well as a console OS. It booted straight into Steam Big Picture Mode and playing games was quick, easy, and seamless, just like you'd expect from a console. It had more or less the same limited computer functionality that modern consoles have, plus a little more, so compared to PS4 or XBone (yes, I still call it that, I refuse to change) or Wii U, it compares quite well. As a full fledged desktop, while it can be made to work, you're much better off just installing one of the other Linux distros of your choice in whatever variant you desire (one of the Ununtu, Linux Mint, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Arch, etc.) and simply installing Steam. Whatever performance improvements Valve make to the Linux kernel to maximize game performance will always get backported into the kernels other popular Linux distros, such is the way of open source. Hopefully Steam Machines officially coming out in a couple months further pushes publishers and developers to port existing games to Linux and, more importantly, develop for Linux from the get go, so that it become s a more viable gaming platform. It has made great strides since GabeN, our Lord and Saviour, has put his conductor hat on and started driving the Linux gaming train, but it's still far more limited than Windows in terms of choice.

State of the art technology

You're making a rather unreasonable request.

The Final Fantasy series is dead to me at this point. I haven't been following XV at all. I don't know what it's about and I don't care. I kind of wish I has a 3DS so that I could play Bravely Default and its sequel. From the little bit I played, those games seem a lot more Final Fantasy than Final Fantasy at this point, if that makes any sense.

It worked! Oddly enough, I don't find Quiet the least bit attractive, at least not from the screenshots and trailers I've seen. There's something off-putting about her face, like it should be pretty, but... I dunno, maybe it's the excessive eyeliner? And the outfit is just so ridiculous that I actually feel it's almost too revealing to be sexy, if such a thing is possible. Like, it would work better if a little bit was left to the imagination.

I continue to be impressed by how good Hitman Go is. I can't believe I scooped this up for 99 cents, I kinda feel like I owe Squeenix some more money for this game... then I think about the Deus Ex pre-order crap they're pulling and any feeling of being beholden instantly goes away. Anyway, it's a really good little puzzle game. Who knew turn-based Hitman would work this well? I've still yet to see any microtransactions. My guess is that maybe you can buy the tokens you get for completing the levels and optional challenges so that people that fail to complete the optional challenges but still want to unlock latter sets of levels can pay to do so. If that is indeed the microtransaction scheme then that seems fair to me. Over on the desktop side of things, Crookz - The Big Heist keeps getting more and more tense. I pulled a prison break and I came so close to screwing up at the end. The whole thing took me about 2 1/2 hours to complete and a little over 2 hours in I thought I was caught for sure. I used a noise emitter to lure a guard away from his normal route to give myself a little extra time to pick a lock, but I underestimated how fast the guard moved and my timing was just barely off, so his vision cone caught a couple of my crew members as they moved toward the door my locksmith was taking care of. I was boxed in with nowhere to run except through the door that wasn't yet fully picked and I didn't think my locksmith would get it done in time. He did, just barely, then it was a tense game of hide and seek hiding next to a staircase and around the back of a pillar to escape the guard's vision while he searched for me. It was super duper close, but eventually he gave up looking for me and went back to his regular route. My stealth score was crap for that mission, but I was just happy to finish at that point. I do like how there are usually multiple ways to approach obstacles, depending on your crew and the tools you have, and how you can sometimes turn a screw up into a positive, like when a guard leaves his usual route to search for one of your crew he caught sight of, another crew member can take that opportunity to perform a time consuming task, like picking a lock or rewiring a switch box, that might have been very difficult to do (if not impossible) without being spotted while the guard was on his usual patrol route.

I went ahead and built my first solar power plant in X3: Albion Prelude and I downloaded and installed the crystal-less power plants script. I wasn't really looking to mess with the script editor. It's a powerful tool and it can be used to great effect to give yourself an advantage (as well as all manner of wacky stuff), which isn't necessarily the wrong thing to do, if you want to skip the 100+ hours to build an economy and relations with races so that you can afford to build a massive fleet you can just give yourself 1 billion credits and rank 10 with a bunch of races at the start of the game and go straight to fleet battles. However, I wanted to go through the entire process of building up from basically nothing to a commercial empire that generates millions upon millions of credits for me to owning a massive fleet and dealing death and destruction everywhere without shortcuts. I will make an exception for this one script since I don't feel it gives me n advantage, rather it erases an unfair disadvantage. Every other kind of production station in the game is essentially identical whether it is player owned or AI controlled. The only difference is that player owned stations don't stock secondary resources, but secondary resources don't affect production of that station in any way shape or form, their only real function is to try to help alleviate some blockages on other stations by (slowly) consuming resources that might be otherwise difficult to sell. Whether a station has zero secondary resources or full secondary resources, production on that station remains the same. AI controlled solar power plants have no primary resource (i.e. they require nothing to produce energy cells), they have a secondary resource, crystals, but, as stated before, the crystals are in no way required for production. Player owned solar power plants, curiously have crystals as a primary resource, meaning you have to have crystals for the plant to produce energy cells. I always thought this was bogus, why should my power plant need a resource to produce wares when all the AI controlled power plants don't? Luckily, there is a script that removes the need for crystals on player owned power plants and makes them like AI controlled power plants. The service, however, is not free, it costs roughly double the price of the power plant to convert it to not needing crystals. So essentially you pay triple the price for a power plant that performs exactly like AI controlled power plants, and power plants are pretty expensive to begin with (As a point of reference, I spent about 15 million on the medium power plant I just built: roughly 5 million for the plant itself and 10 million to convert it to crystal-less). It's still worth it in the long run, though, as that power plant will now produce energy cells for "free" forever and ever. it will take quite a while for it to pay for itself, but in the long run it will make me a tidy profit, especially since I don't need to buy a transport and hire a pilot to service the station, since it has no need of resources. Selling wares won't be a problem either, everybody needs energy cells; so long as I offer a good price I will always have AI controlled transports coming to my plant to buy energy cells, there is almost no chance my output will exceed demand. Anyway, with the main plot completed and my economic machine churning away and bringing in decent profit constantly, I'm off to start the headquarters plot. Hopefully starting the headquarters plot will shut up the Argon commander who keeps calling me ever since I started the main plot. Yeah guy, I know the war is still going and some stuff is going on in Asteroid Belt or Heretic's End, I don't care. I did my part, I put in my service to the commonwealth, I prevented a big catastrophe from happening. My service is finished, as far as I'm concerned, someone else can fight Terrans on the front lines. After the headquarters plot I'll do the hub plot, then finally the shady business plot so that I can get that Acinonyx Prototype (the whole reason I'm doing all this). By that time I should also hopefully have some frigates.

That's pretty much the gist of it. It saddens me that crap like this is going to be associated with a storied franchise. The most hilarious part is that fanboys are going to come out in force defending and supporting this, because they are the ones who will pre-order this, in turn giving them a vested interest in influencing others to do the same. If it wasn't so damn dirty, I'd applaud Squeenix for how ingenious this scheme is.

There's a link in my sig to my YouTube channel. For convenience reasons here is a link directly to the Shadowrun: Hong Kong playlist.

Crookz - The Big Heist is so good. The one fear I had with the game after playing the demo was that it would be too simple. I can happily say now that my fear was unfounded, this game is most certainly not too easy. I'm 6 heists in, 7 if you count the tutorial, and the last heist I did was relatively complicated, and that was a 2 star (out of 5) difficulty rating. There were a ton of moving parts and a good bit of teamwork and precision timing was involved. About 2/3 of the way through the heist, which took me almost an hour and a half to complete, I came real close to being caught out and ruining the whole heist. Lucky for me, Cleopatra is really fast and I was able to pull off some slick moves to get away and lose the heat off my trail. There were so many guards and security systems to keep track of that it was easy to lose sight of one of the guards and get caught unaware, which is exactly what happened to me. I can't wait to see what 4 and 5 star difficulty heists look like. If you remember Commandos or Desperados, this game plays a little bit like those games, though the AI of guards isn't at the level of those older games.