Keyrock

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.

I'm still slowly making my way through my first playthrough, savoring it. I have no desire to get through the game rapidly. GOG doesn't keep track of time played, but judging from the fact that I've recorded 13 episodes and that they tend to average a little under an hour, I guess I've put in between 11 and 12 hours. Obviously, I don't know exactly where I am in terms of game completion, but it feels like I'm halfway through at most. I think of the time I've played, maybe around 10% of it has been combat, if that, which is great, as far as I'm concerned. I look forward to seeing where this winding road leads.

My Aamon Prototype, rewarded to me for completing the main plot. Considering how ridiculously frustrating the capture a Xenon L mission was (I must have destroyed over 50 Xenon Ls and nearly 300 Xenon ships overall before the pilot of a L bailed and I was able to capture one), they should have rewarded me a freakin' destroyer. Still, the Aamon Prototype is a damn good heavy fighter. Once I build my headquarters, I'm going to reverse engineer this fighter (it's unique, only 1 exists in the game) and build a fleet of them.

New trailer:

Not wanting to start a new thread, I'll just put this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llOHf4eeSzc Keep in mind this is just a benchmarking demo specifically designed to show Vulkan in the best possible light and we may rarely, if ever, get this kind of result in a real world game.

You can destroy pretty much any facility or ship in the game. And yes, the race/faction under whose control the facility/ship that you destroy was will not take too kindly to you doing so. Occasionally pirates or Xenon will attack and potentially destroy stations. Be warned that the game has a steep learning curve and requires massive time investment to get to the point where you're owning capital ships and leading massive fleets, assuming that's your end goal. Edit: Also, keep in mind that Albion Prelude is an expansion and requires Terran Conflict to play. Look for the Terran War Pack on sale, it has both games.

Thanks, Barty, glad you can give Mamoulian War better info. I just kind of use imgur at the most shallow level, I never bothered learning much about it since the bare essentials are enough for my needs. I decided to make a complex out of my drone factory in X3: Albion Prelude. I bought 2 complex construction kits and a massom mill and a scruffin farm. This removed massom powder as a necessary resource for the station (scruffin farm only needs energy cells, it produces scruffin flowers which are used my the massom mill, along with energy cells, to make massom powder, which is used by my drone factory), I only need energy cells and silicon wafers for the station to run (both are readily available). Best of all, I set the station up to sell intermediate products (massom powder and scruffin fruit) as I can produce these faster than I use them, so that way I can make a little extra on the side. Now back to using the jumpdrive on my Centaur to jump around sectors bordering Xenon sectors on the quest for capturing a Xenon L (this is probably going to take forever). At least while I'm wasting time doing that my 6 stations are constantly making me money. I'll likely build a solar power plant somewhere soon. Solar power plants are very expensive to build, but they are so worth it. They require no resources to run and produce the single most easily sold ware in the game, energy cells. Pretty much everyone needs energy cells, you will always have customes unless you build in an area already saturated with solar power plants. About the only caveat with power plants is finding a sector with both a fairly high sun rating (the higher the sun rating the more you produce per cycle) that doesn't already have several power plants. If you find a good place to build a power plant you will have the most steady source of income imaginable. It may not be massive burst of profit, but it's pretty much nonstop. Edit: Crap, I forgot player owned power plants have crystals as a primary resource. Personally I think this is kind of messed up as none of the AI controlled power plants have crystals as a primary resource, it;s always a secondary resource (secondary resources are irrelevant to production, whereas primary resources are essential). I think there's a script out there that removes this handicap for a fee (in-game currency fee, not real world money fee). If I can hunt this script down I'll use it. Why should my power plants have an artificially tacked on disadvantage?

Each image is a separate page, you can probably group them together in a folder, but that likely requires an account (I never tried). You can add as many as you want, you can even upload a whole bunch at once and it will create all the links for you, but they'll all be separate pages.

Yeah, I always use imgur. No account necessary and it has easy options for thumbnails and such. Solid site.

I would imagine the C and the H probably stand for something, maybe the first letters of the last names of the founders or something? I've never seen it mentioned anywhere what the letters stand for, if they do indeed stand for something.

The newest member of the Street Fighter V roster: Things I like about this: She's a pro-wrestler. My unbridled love of rasslin' is no secret. She does a Stone Cold Stunner. Bonus points if you can flip off the opponent before hitting the Stunner. The liberal use of ass-based offense. I'd like to think she learned this from "The Funky Weapon" Ryusuke Taguchi. Not shown in the trailer, but she can cut a promo in the middle of the match. I hope she can do a Northern Lights Bomb and/or a Kudo Driver.

Oh man, I hope this lives up to the expectations and is the Syndicate game people have been waiting for. This is the type of real-time strategy game I can play, I can't do traditional RTSs with large armies and base building and resource management, my feeble brain just can't handle all that in real-time, not very well, anyway. But you give me a squad-based real-time strategy, yeah, I can get down on that. I loved Dawn of War II and this would probably be even more up my alley, since it's likely more stealth/deception-based and not purely combat-focused. I look forward to hearing your impressions, Shady (or anyone else playing this game, for that matter).

Since Nintendo is never going to bother making another proper F-Zero *sob* at least it looks like someone else developed the lovechild of F-Zero and Wipeout. I'll take what I can get.

That's one of the few games that give me PS4 envy. It looks like the kind of game David Cage would make, if he were competent.

I mean, you can play these games with a gamepad, particularly the second one, since it has simpler controls. I'm sure people have made profiles for gamepads for these games, particularly popular gamepads, like the 360 controller. You're still going to need the keyboard for some things, a gamepad simply doesn't have enough buttons, but the bulk of what you'll use in combat can probably be mapped to a gamepad. Of course, it's never going to be the same experience as with a proper flightstick.

@Mamoulian War - They're quality space combat sims. They have some trading, though nothing as robust as Elite or the X series, the games are very combat-focused and very good. The games use Newtonian physics, like Zoraptor mentioned. The first one has significantly more complicated and in-depth controls, they're both quite good, though. Both games will kick your ass too, they're rather challenging. For my money, for pure space combat, nothing beats FreeSpace 2, even if the physics in that game are more arcadey, but the IW games are rock solid.

I started playing Hitman Go on my phone and it's surprisingly good so far. It was a whole dollar so I scooped it up thinking "what's the worst that can happen?". According to Google Play the game has microtransactions, though I've yet to see any, granted I only just started. I'm wondering how microtransactions would even work in this game? It doesn't seem to have anything resembling traditional energy bars like microtransaction games tend to use, giving you the choice of waiting 12 hours or paying them money and you can keep playing now. Maybe they use the Valve model of "Hey, you like hats don't you? For a few dollars you can have this shiny hat." I suppose there might be a straight up paywall of pay more money for the next set of levels. Considering I spent a whole dollar on the game, if the next set of levels is also only a dollar, I'll probably do it. Anyway, I played it on the bus ride in to work this morning and I had a lot of fun with it. It's a pretty clever little puzzle game. Just reaching the goal is usually not too hard, but doing the optional challenges takes a bit of thought. I think a Tomb Raider version of this type of game is coming out or already has come out on some platforms, I think it's called Lara Croft Go, or something like that. Once it shows up on Android, I'll likely scoop that up too. I'm more excited for that than Rise of the Murder Simulator.

I'm on potentially the most time consuming mission in the main plot of X3: Albion Prelude. My goal is to capture a Xenon L and bring it to the Beryll Station. Now, fighting a Xenon L (a heavy fighter) with my Argon Centaur corvette isn't a problem, I've destroyed many Ls and even larger Xenon ships like LXs and Ps (I want to capture one of those in the future, when I have the means). The problem is that an L is too small a ship to use boarding tactics on, not to mention that I don't have a ship that fires boarding pods right now and spacewalk boarding is tricky as hell. A Xenon L must be captured and Xenon ships have notoriously low bail rates. It doesn't help that the bail rate when using Ion Disruptors was nerfed, so it's a much less reliable tactic than it used to be. Basically I just need to keep trying until a Xenon L gets abandoned after I smash its shields and put a couple holes in the hull. It will happen sooner or later, potentially much later. I'll be quite happy when this mission is over. Hopefully the rng gods help me out.

I've also now got a Steam copy of Portal 2 to give away. It's a game I owned for years and suddenly another copy of the game popped up in my inventory... for some reason. I don't know why, but whatever. Like with Serious Sam 3, send me a PM, first come first serve.

Fair point. I still think the sales are decent for a series that essentially gets zero advertisement and zero coverage outside of niche sites and an occasional joke article at a mid-size site (the games might as well not exist to the IGNs and GameSpots of the world). I imagine it probably gets some coverage (as well as the bulk of its sales) in Japan. My boobs sell comment was more hyperbole than anything else (the "Japan is still awesome" comment, though, completely serious). Really, I was just trying desperately to steer the thread away from incest *cringes* and latched on to the first piece of "news" I could.

Keep in mind how niche the series is, this is far from a mainstream game. Were it a mainstream game, yeah that figure would suck. Most importantly, it's apparently profitable for the developer, so they'll likely keep making more.

I suppose it also depends on who you and your twin are. If you're Scarlette Johanson and your twin sister looks like Scarlette Johanson then you'll at least consider it right? Keep in mind, I don't find Scarlett Johanson as attractive as a lot of men do (I don't think she's a troglodyte or anything, mind you), but even if you replaced her name with, say Io Shirai (the wrestler in my avatar), still nope. In less incestuous, but just as sexual news, the Senran Kagura series has now sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. Not a bad number for a niche, indie series. For those not familiar with the series, it's a beat em' up that features a cast of all female, rather well endowed, ninjas whose clothes have a tendency to... explode during combat. Proof once again that boobs still sell. Also, Japan is still AWESOME.