Keyrock

I'm assuming this is a visual novel type deal? I'm scared to click that link at work. Anyway, why would anyone want to bang their own twin broth... wait, never mind, this is the interned we're talking about.

I've got a Steam copy of Serious Sam 3: BFE to give away, I got it as a freebie when I bought The Talos Principle, I think, and I already own the game. I'm pretty sure I tried giving it away before, no takers (not too surprised, the game's been on steep discount so often than anyone that wanted it probably already has it), but I figured I'd give it a try again. Send me a PM if you want it. First come first serve. Edit: And it's gone. Edit 2: Disregard the first edit, it's still available.

I'm scared to do patches mid-playthrough in case it breaks save games. I got the GOG version so it won't auto-update it. I'll wait until I finish my playthrough to update it to whatever the latest is at the time on GOG (they're usually a couple days behind Steam, at least if you're not using Galaxy, which I'm not since it doesn't exist for my OS yet).

Just a couple years ago it seemed like we had a veritable bounty of proper space sims heading our way, then X: Rebirth turned out to be utter rubbish, Elite: Dangerous turned out to be a quasi-MMO, and Star Citizen is still just a bucket load of promises that may or may not materialize at some point. And this is why I keep going back to play X3: Albion Prelude. I started playing Crookz - The Big Heist. So far the game seems like it's 80% planning and 20% action, which is fine with me, I enjoy studying a place, analyzing its defenses, and formulating a plan of action to deal with said defenses. I suppose this likely somewhat mirrors what real professional thieves do, granted I'm not one myself, so I can't speak from experience. Still, I imagine the vast majority of the time and effort for a burglary, I mean a big time professional heist, not a liquor store stick-up, is spent casing the joint, finding the security systems used, figuring out guard patterns, etc. The actual robbery itself may be a matter of minutes while the planning may take weeks.

So, a horror game? I have to reset my brain and remember that once upon a time Funcom made The Longest Journey, so they have done stuff besides MMOs. My brain immediately thinks "MMO" when I see the Funcom logo.

I would think that'd be the reason you would click on it, Keyrock. I'm into some weird stuff, but nothing quite as nightmarish as the people from Frozen. There's something really off about the way the characters look, especially when they do that creepy smile. I think they want to devour my soul. Anyway, trailer for the free Shovel Knight expansion:

I refuse to click on that 14 Upcoming Games video because of how creepy looking the thumbnail is. I don't want to have nightmares.

I think for me what really wore me out about the combat in Pillars was just how incredibly samey it all was. With a few exceptions, very few exceptions, every combat encounter felt almost exactly the same, despite the decent enemy variety. With almost every battle feeling almost identical combined with the sheer amount of combat in the game it got to be a real slog eventually. That and the story was simply not interesting enough to make me eager to keep grinding through the combat. I don't remember if the combat variety was better in BG2 or if it was a case of the story being interesting enough to help keep me excited to continue, or maybe I just had more patience back then? I don't think patience is the issue, I spent just as long with Wasteland 2 as with Pillars and W2 had quite a bit of combat too and I never got bored with it. Anyway, sorry to continue the derailing of this topic. In my current game when doing the Neville Ma mission

Right now I am bordering on too many games to play, it's an embarrassment of riches. I got my drone factory in X3: Albion Prelude to the point where it's fully operational and relinquished control of the transport servicing it to a hired pilot. There's always that awkward period with a new hired pilot where they spend excessive periods of time sitting idle at the station when there are wares that could be sold. You can either wait that period out or, if you're monitoring the situation, give the pilot a direct command to sell wares, which is what I did. After that initial period the pilot generally becomes more efficient and has minimum down time, I guess their training is complete and they know the job. I'm at that point now, I'll monitor the situation a bit longer just to make sure, but the pilot seems to have a grasp of the job now and is buying and selling wares as it makes sense to. I'm back to flying the Centaur corvette and back to doing the main plot missions. Next up I need to help set up defenses for a high tech station overseeing some experimental stuff. Basically I need to haul 3 lasertowers over to the station and set them around the perimeter to help keep the station safe. This is one mission where they actually didn't give me the necessary equipment to complete the mission, I have to obtain the lasertowers myself. I suppose I can't complain, since they did recently give me a 10 million credit ship, so spending around 500,000 credits on lasertowers out of my own pocket is the least I can do (plus I can easily afford it). One reason I took a break from the missions before is that lasertowers are hard to obtain, for two reasons: 1) You need pretty high reputation with a race to be able to buy them (I didn't have enough with anyone before, I do now with the Split). 2) They are constantly out of stock in most places (which gives me an idea to build my own lasertower factory in the future, there's money to be made there). I found a factory that builds them in Split space and made my way over there. Right now I'm using my corvette as a makeshift transport to haul ore and energy cells to the factory so they can build some more lasertowers (they have 1 in stock right now, which is 1 more than any other place I've come across in my travels recently). I'm balls deep into Shadowrun: Hong Kong. I just did a mission where I attended a party and did some snooping (also Gobbet got to fill up on expensive food and drinks). I managed to get that one done with zero loss of life (there was combat but it ended before anyone got killed). I like missions I can do without killing, better yet, without any combat whatsoever. I feel missions like that better reflect my own experiences with the PnP game. Back when I played the PnP game, combat skills were usually a contingency, for when a job went sideways. Ideally, our team would get in, bypass security, and get out, ghost style. Also, Crookz - The Big Heist comes out today. I'm pretty excited to play that again after playing through the demo a week or so ago. That game is right up my alley; tactical team-based stealth set in the 70s with funk tracks and a foxy black woman with an afro. I got that bad boy pre-loaded for when I get home. I'm usually anti-pre-order, but if you put out a free demo of your game that gives me ample time to 1) make sure it works on my machine 2) gives me a feel for how it plays and lets me decide whether I want to play more, then I have no qualms about pre-ordering, since I can make an informed decision, even better informed than if I had only read reviews. And this is all before the deluge of games that come out in September. How am I going to find time to play all these games? #FirstWorldProblems

I figured that might be the case. I suppose if and when that happens I'll personally pretend there is no crowdfunding campaign and go back to the old skool way of buying a game when, and only when, it is physically available. In all honesty, I'd probably be best served to do that with all crowdfunding, not just Fig. I've kind of started growing disenchanted with crowdfunding in general. For me, the honeymoon is over, I guess.

Supposedly DX12 and Mantle are very similar, so I guess it makes sense that AMD would initially be able to squeeze more out of DX12, since they were the ones that created Mantle, kind of giving them a head start on DX12. Also, since Vulkan is also heavily based off Mantle (in a way Mantle became Vulkan), that gives me hope that the similarity of the 2 APIs makes porting from DX12 to Vulkan (and vice versa) much easier than from earlier versions of DX to OpenGL.

I decided to take a break from doing the main plot missions in X3: Albion Prelude to get back to my trading empire building. I bought my 6th transport and my 6th station, going high-tech for the first time with a drone manufacturing plant. Generally speaking, high-tech is high risk/high reward. The potential profit to be made is greater, but high-tech products tend to be a lot more specialized, hence locating buyers can be a problem, whereas something like ore is easy to sell because it's needed almost everywhere, so while you don't make massive profit, the income is steady, hence why I like building ore mines so much, they're reliable. With high-tech plants, finding a location where you have buyers is top priority. I found just such a spot in a highly militarized area of the galaxy. There are a whole bunch of military installations spread around 4 or 5 sectors, all of them needing fighter drones, and there isn't a drone factory for a dozen sectors in all directions. Unsurprisingly, these military installations constantly have little or no drones on hand, on account of nowhere to get them from nearby and it being highly impractical to get them from a quarter of the galaxy away. Building a drone factory smack dab in the middle of the sectors makes sure I always have eager buyers for my products. Getting the resources I need to keep the factory running is a somewhat less rosy predicament. The factory needs 3 resources to produce drones: energy cells, silicon wafers, and massom powder. The energy cells are a piece of cake, there is a solar power plant one sector away and several more a couple sectors in the other direction, nice, easy, reliable resource. The massom powder and silicon are a bit more iffy. There is a massom mill just 1 sector away, but it's usually woefully understocked and there isn't another one anywhere near. The closest silicon mine is a whopping 5 sectors away, thankfully it's usually well stocked as there are very few installations that use silicon wafers in the general area (one of the reasons I don't just build my own silicon mine nearby) and there are solar power plants nearby to keep it full of resources. Another good bit of news is that high-tech facilities, like a drone factory, tend to produce products and chew up resources slowly, so I only need to get resources for the plant once in a long while. With high-tech plants you'll go through long periods of no sales, and quick bursts of high profit, as opposed to the slow but more consistent trickle of profit from more generalized installations. I'm not particularly worried about the silicon wafers, I think that one silicon mine will keep me stocked well enough, but I am worried about the massom powder. I see several solutions: 1) Build my own massom mill nearby. This comes with the caveat that I then have to keep the facility supplied with scruffin fruit, luckily scruffin farms are at least a little bit more plentiful in the area (there are 2). 2) I could attach both a massom mill and a scruffin farm to my drone factory, turning it into a complex. This option would entail the greatest out of pocket expense to start, as I'd have to buy both the massom mill and the scruffin farm, as well as 2 complex construction kits to connect all the facilities. In the long run, though, it would make for a highly efficient facility that only relies on silicon wafers and energy cells. In theory I could also have attached a silicon mine to my complex, further reducing my resource requirements down to just energy cells, but that would have required building my drone factory in a far less ideal location as far as nearby customers go, since you can't just build a silicon mine anywhere (like you can a drone factory, massom mill, or scruffin farm), a silicon mine needs to be built on an asteroid, and one that is rich in silicon. 3) I can set up a program for my transport pilot where I have them not only service my drone factory, but also monitor the nearby massom mill's resource levels (I have a satellite in that sector, so I always can see supply levels and prices) and supply that mill with the resources it needs (scruffin fruit and energy cells) whenever it gets low. I can do this with a drone factory since there is so much downtime with a high tech installation because the products take a long time to manufacture and the resources are consumed slowly, thus that transport should have ample time to service another station while still attending to the duties of my own station (whereas I couldn't do this were it an ore mine which constantly churns out product and goes through resources). This way I highly raise the probability of the massom mill being well stocked when I need to buy from it and I make a little bit of extra profit to boot when selling resources to the mill. This seems like the best way to go.

I think RTwP is great if you're controlling a single character, fine if you're controlling 2. Anything more than that and more often than not the real-time component winds up being a liability rather than an asset. With 3 or more characters to control, unless the companion AI is really good, which it most often is not, a rather large amount of micromanagement is necessary, so I inevitably wind up pausing constantly, effectively turning the game into turn-based anyway, except a less intuitive and structured turn-based for the reason you listed.

My apologies to Orogun for my snide remark earlier, it was late, I was tired, but I should have resisted the temptation. Anyway, I've put almost 9 hours into the game and up to this point I've done exactly 1 run since "officially" becoming a shadowrunner. So far, I've spent 75% of my time in-game engaged in conversation or reading narrative. I imagine that would rub some people the wrong way, folks looking to have a lot more action and a lot less talking, but for me it's perfect.

The first part is essentially Simon. The second part I guess you need to match the alien letters code that flashes up with one of the strings below. It sure would have been nice if they had explained it in the game. Edit: What Orogun wrote. Not to brag but I really didn't need an explanation, it was bit of an ego boost to figure it out myself. Congratulations, you are a champion of cleverness, truly a god among mortals, we are all blessed to be able to bask in your splendor. That doesn't change the fact that this should have been explained in-game the first time it came up. The first time you spend karma a pop up box comes up explaining how points are spent. The first time you enter combat a pop up box comes up explaining turn-based combat. The fact that no pop up box comes up the first time you enter a hacking mini-game is doubly as perplexing given that not only have there been pop up boxes for everything else up to that point, but also that this is the first time in the series that this mini-game has been used. It's not a huge deal, a minuscule blemish on what has so far been an otherwise excellent game, but it seems like such a weird oversight.

Pro-tip: While the 2D backgrounds in the game look freakin' amazing, the 3D character models are pretty aliased, especially when you zoom in. The game may or may not have bulit in anti-aliasing of some kind as part of "post processing" (who the hell knows what that actually means?), but I went ahead and forced AA (4XSS and 2XMS) and AF (8X) on to the game via nvidia-settings and magically jaggies be gone. If your system can handle forcing AA and AF on to the game without killing the framerate, I definitely recommend it.

Argon ships do indeed look cool, though I'm partial to Paranid designs myself, but Argon ships tend to be so... average. You're right about X games being a massive time sink. They're not games where you can start a new game and you'll be doing really awesome stuff a couple hours later. They're games you start up and a month later you might doing really awesome stuff. My current fledgling galactic empire consists of 5 stations (2 ore mines, a silicon mine, a scruffin farm, and a chelt space aquarium), 5 transports (4 Split Caiman and 1 Argon Mercury), 2 scouts (1 Split Jaguar Vanguard and 1 Argon Advanced Discoverer), 1 heavy fighter (Paranid Perseus), and 1 corvette (Argon Centaur). I'm getting really close to having enough steady income and rep with the Split to be able to get a frigate. Then it's on like a pot of neckbones.

The first part is essentially Simon. The second part I guess you need to match the alien letters code that flashes up with one of the strings below. It sure would have been nice if they had explained it in the game. Edit: What Orogun wrote.

My Argon Centaur. A decidedly mediocre corvette, but hey, it was free.

Doing the main plot missions in X3: Albion Prelude is really paying off. They gave me a freakin' Argon Centaur corvette for one of the missions and I got to keep it afterward. I had forgotten you get a corvette that early into the main plot missions. I mean, it's a fairly mediocre corvette, but still, it's a far larger and more powerful ship than anything I owned previously, I'll take it, thank you very much. I mean, that's a 10 million credit ship, it's overpriced at that price, but still. It came damn near fully equipped too.

They do an amazing job of fleshing out characters through their dialogue, the mannerisms they describe, their garb, etc. I noticed myself subconsciously speaking differently, even slipping into slight accents, as I spoke dialogue from various characters out loud (I'm speaking out loud because I'm recording LPs), just because my mind was formulating a manner of speaking for each of these characters from the bits of description I've been given. I just spent an hour where 90% of it was me reading text on a screen and I loved every second of it. Also, Auntie Cheng is the best. I freakin' love that character.

*sigh* I was really afraid this was going to happen when Trine 3 was first unveiled, but I hoped Frozenbyte would be able to pull off the perspective change and retain the series' strengths. Such a shame, as Trine 1 & 2 were really good games. I has a sad now.

Yeah, I get they're just running the platform, but that's enough to keep me away. I will never again give my money in advance to anything that has anything to do with the folks that run Double Fine, regardless of their role in it. Also, I'm glad you used the word "liability", because Fig seems like a ticking legal timebomb just waiting to go off. I want nothing to do with it.

Too early to really tell, but the 2 I picked (Shadowrunner and Academic) have already given me a couple conversation options so far. The writing in this game is so enjoyable, which is good because there's a lot to read. I'm down with that, I like to read, and HBS has such a good narrative style.

It sure would have been nice if they actually explained their new hacking mini-game. Not necessarily a full blown tutorial, but even a little pop up box of text with a brief explanation the first time you attempt it would have been helpful. Nope, nothing, timer running down, figure it out by trial and error. It's especially bothersome since they had pop up text like I just described earlier in the game describing basic turn-based combat and such, stuff I didn't need to read since I played the earlier games, but it's cool it's there since this could be somebody's first Shadowrun game. But then they get to something that everybody will be seeing for the first time ever and no explanation at all. The ****, Harebrained Schemes?