Keyrock

In a utopia, Microsoft would approach Harebrained Schemes and say "You've done the series proud, in exchange for a cut of the sales, here's 50 million dollars. Keep the gameplay style the same if you want and you handle all the creative stuff, but go hog wild on the production value." Of course, in that same utopia I'm living in Japan, following the Joshi scene on my limitless budget, and drinking sake with wrestlers after shows. I guess I should just be happy Microsoft has let Harebrained schemes use their IP and kept their hands out of creative.

It's made by Avalanche, not some bottom dollar second rate company. That helps. I'm happy to see all the positive stuff around this game and can't wait for the promised Linux version to come out. No word on when it will happen, but if I had to guess, I'm thinking it may wind up being about the same time as when Steam Machines officially launch.

Nice to see they cover the standard 4 anime bust sizes: Flat chested, small, large, and dayum. By the way, if you're at work, click that link at your own risk.

Relax. BAdler was speaking in matter of fact terms and the business reality is that developing for Linux is generally not profitable, particularly before Steam Machines come out (whether that drives up Linux market share or not remains to be seen) and particularly when it's the first time a company does a Linux port and they have to learn a new engine and/or port tools over to Linux. Every subsequent Linux port thereafter will be easier and should cost less to produce, thus making it potentially more profitable, because the company now has experience developing for Linux and they have tools in place that support Linux. That first time is always going to be the worst. All that aside, BAdler was asked a question and he answered honestly. Would you rather he told you the truth or what you wanted to hear? I'd rather he tell me the truth, even if the truth hurts a bit.

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.