Keyrock

It would certainly help if AMD was actually relevant again on the mid-high end desktop CPU front (I miss the Socket 939 days *sob*). What motivation does Intel have to sink money into r&d toward serious IPC gains when they're essentially competing against themselves?

I find the lack of Slowbro disturbing. Pikachu Libre is pretty great, though.

1) Everything coming straight from Nvidia's (or AMD's for that matter) mouth should be taken with a grain cup bucket of salt. 2) The 10X performance claim is mostly applicable to compute, which will by far benefit the most from the expanded bandwith and 3D memory. Gaming will likely see some benefit, but it will be a fraction of the benefit that compute will see. Anyway, my i7-4790K at 4.7 GHz and Titan X with generous oveclocking headroom should have me set for years to come. I'll think about an upgrade 3+ generations from now.

I started playing Shadowrun: Hong Kong. More indepth stuff about that in the S:HR thread. I also decided to keep going with my X3: Albion Prelude galactic conquest rather than to put it on the backburner while I concentrate fully on S:HR. I'm in no hurry to finish S:HR, I want to savor it. Anyway, I started the main plot missions. The first part is just to fly around the war front sectors and help out in battle and get a couple kills; easy peasy in my well equipped Perseus. Next up was a mission to spy on a deal going down. They gave me an Advanced Argon Discoverer scout for the mission. I was kind of tempted to tell Commander Homeslice that I have a better (not to mention less conspicuous) scout for the job already, but hey, I'm not turning down a free ship, even if it is just a mediocre scout, and it's capable enough to complete the mission. I'll probably just sell the Discoverer later or park it at one of my stations and forget about it. The end game here is to get the Split Acinonyx Prototype. It is a ship I've never actually flown before, but the stats are impressive as hell. It's a heavy corvette that's the fastest ship in its class and has massive firepower backed up by a generous laser capacitor and downright ridiculous laser recharge (several times greater than any other heavy corvette and greater even than any frigate), meaning that I would be able to sustain said massive firepower for extended periods of time, allowing me to single-handedly destroy anything in the game, destroyers, carriers, and stations included. About the only downside to the ship is that it only has average shielding for a ship in its class (less than the Hyperion, the other special heavy corvette). The only way to get the ship is to complete the Shady Business plot and to be able to start the Shady Business plot you need to complete the main plot, ergo why I'm doing the main plot, and have max reputation with the Split, ergo why I've spent the majority of my time so far working with the Split and why 3 out of my 4 current stations were bought from the Split and operate in Split space. Reaching that end game is going to take at least a couple hundred hours more than what I've already put into the game (over 50 hours), but it will be so worth it. Rolling into a sector in the Acinonyx Prototype, flanked by a pair of Split Tiger frigates (pocket destroyers) and a pair of Split Panther frigates (pocket carriers) and knowing that I can go exterminatus style and wipe the sector clean if I please will be the best. My enemies shall tremble at the mere mention of my name. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I was caught a little off guard at just how rough a battle the game throws you into almost immediately. I mean, I got through it with no casualties first try, but things did get a little hairy. I just wasn't expecting to have my feet put to the fire so early. Anyway, my build is an ork mage who carries a shotgun. I do magey stuff from a distance and if enemies charge my position to engage in melee, I give em a taste of the ol' buckshot. I thought about doing mage/physical adept and just kicking people in the face instead of using a shotgun for the close combat stuff, but then I would have to spread my karma out across 4 stats rather than 3 (body, strength, quickness, willpower) and would likely wind up sacrificing either some body or quickness to get my strength up. I decided to stick with the mage/shotty build since it lets me focus on 3 stats (body, quickness, willpower). I put 4 points into charisma to get 2 etiquettes (I went with Shadowrunner and Academic), but I won't be touching that stat again; I'm not a shaman and 2 etiquettes seems like enough for 1 playthrough.

Dang, not even an hour in and **** just got real.

Started up the game and made an ork mage called Rubick. Good times await.

Yikes, considering how well run Double Fine was, that's not exactly reassuring. But Brian Fargo and Feargod Orcheart are on board. Yeah, sorry, but Fargo and Feargus are not enough to offset the Double Fine stench for me.

At least 1 more hour before I can start downloading. Jealousy level rising... rising.

You mean this, right? As much as I loved the gold box games when I was a young'un, I am afraid to revisit them. I'm scared that the 2015 version of Keyrock, bereft of hair and rotund of belly, made cynical by exposure to the real world, would destroy the romantic images I have of these games. I'll keep my rose tinted glasses on and leave the memories in the past.

Sucks there's no pre-load, but, judging by the previous games, the DL size should be fairly manageable. Sadly, I have to wait until I get home from work, some 3 1/2 - 4 hours after this releases, to even start downloading it. #FirstWorldProblems

@KaineParker - That is an impressive Richard Stallman picture.

Now that I have a fighter in X3: Albion Prelude, I need to properly outfit it for battle. The Paranid Perseus heavy fighter I bought came fully shielded and with 4 High Energy Plasma Throwers. HEPTs are somewhat antiquated weapons by the time of Albion Prelude, but they have their uses. They do impressive amounts of damage (once upon a time they were capital ship weapons) and have excellent range, but they use a lot of energy and the blasts travel at a fairly slow speed, making them poor weapons against light fighters, and nearly useless against scouts. HEPTs are fine against other heavy fighters and great against an opponent larger than myself that's easy to hit, like a corvette. I need to mount something in the single rear facing turret, mostly for missile defense purposes. The first obvious choice would be an Impulse Ray Emmiter. IREs are the lightest and cheapest weapons in the game and they have a high rate of fire and are highly accurate, making them good candidates for missile defense (you don't need to do much damage to a missile, but you do need to actually hit it). There are a couple of problems with IREs, though. First there is the issue of availability, they are notoriously hard to get. These weapons are supposedly sold at every single Argon equipment dock, as well as some of the other races' equipment docks, but they are practically never in stock. You have to find one of the factories where they manufacture them, and even then you may need to supply the materials to the station and wait for them to build one. It's pretty ridiculous. Second is the issue of range. IREs have pretty pathetic range. That's not a problem for most missiles, but there are a few with really hefty blast radii, meaning there's a decent chance you'll get caught in the blast by the time your IRE can detonate it. Third, IREs have such pathetic damage output that they're useless for anything beyond missile defense or fighting scouts. I'll probably go with a Particle Accelerator Cannon for the rear turret. PACs are good all around weapons. They have pretty good range, a fairly high rate of fire, reasonable power drain, and the blasts are fairly speedy, making them accurate enough to deal with missiles. On top of that, PACs pack enough punch to be effective against any vessel up to and including heavy fighters. If you link enough of them together they can even do good damage to corvettes, though my HEPTs will be doing the bulk of the damage against ships that large/tough. I'll probably also mount PACs in my 4 remaining forward facing slots (the Perseus has 8 fixed forward mounted slots and 1 rear mounted turret) so that I have something to deal with scouts and light fighters, as well as the HEPTs I already have for dealing with heavy fighters and corvettes. If I really wanted to min-max this ship, I'd get rid of the 4 HEPTs and replace them with Phased Repeater Guns. PRGs have great range, insane rate of fire, and fast moving blasts that are highly accurate. They don't do nearly as much damage per blast as HEPTs, but they more than make up for it with the crazy rate of fire. Another downside is that PRGs do chew up power very quickly, but I guess that's the price you gotta pay for massive firepower. PRGs are quite expensive, though, and I don't really want to pour that kind of money into a ship that's only a stopgap as a player ship and will later just be one of many fighters in one of my wings.

My first legitimate war ship, a Paranid Perseus heavy fighter Not anywhere near the top of the fighter quality chart, but it's a start. I decided to get a fighter now since I want to start the main story, and I'll need a fighter for at least a few of the missions. Like in all X games, the story is throwaway in X3: Albion Prelude. However, there are rewards for completing some of the missions and the story itself. More importantly, completing the main story is a prerequisite for some optional questlines that reward you with some of the most ludicrously powerful ships in the game; ships that are nearly impossible to attain otherwise.

I haven't played any of the Aquanox games. Are they any good?

Yikes, considering how well run Double Fine was, that's not exactly reassuring.

It releases this Thursday!

I don't understand why this would take them so long. Steam OS even gives them a platform target. Not only that, if it's been compiled for OSX, then the OpenGL interface should already be handled. According to Larian, it had to do with middleware of some sort. I don't know anything more specific than that.

Back to X3: Albion Prelude during this short lull before the next round of new releases (Shadowrun: Hong Kong on the 20th and Crookz on the 25th). I set my 3rd transport up to service my second station (a Scruffin Farm), so that station is now self-sufficient and bringing in slow but steady income. I then took my primary transport and headed toward Paranid space. I probably should have taken the longer, safer route since I wound up getting attacked and destroyed by pirates when travelling through a pirate sector (I had to go through several pirate sectors to get to Paranid space via the shorter route). It turns out an unprotected transport with a cargo hold full of ore (I try to almost never travel empty, there's no profit to be made with an empty cargo hold) makes for a juicy target for pirates in an unprotected sector. After reloading I went through the pirate sectors again, but this time took a much more roundabout way to keep as far away from the pirates as possible. They still came after me eventually, but this time I was close enough to the jump game to get away before the missiles tracked me down. I'll remember those sectors and in the future I'll come back there with a fleet of capital ships and heavy fighters and I'll blow all their **** up. All of it, every station and every ship. No mercy. I'll wipe those sectors clean. Anyway, once in the relative safety of Paranid space I set upon the task of increasing my rep with the Paranid by trading with them. Unfortunately the Paranid are super xenophobic so I could only trade in a few of the fringe sectors, they wouldn't even let me dock anywhere in the core sectors. It was tough sledding until I got my rep up enough. Now I'm finally at the point where they trust me enough to let me do business at any of their stations. I still have nowhere near enough rep with them to buy the warships I will be getting from them eventually, but it's a start and trading will be a lot easier now that I have a lot more options open to me. I have a nice juicy spot all planned out for where I'll build an ore mine in the future in Paranid space to expand my trading empire and further cement my relationship with the Paranid. Once I get up to 4 or 5 stations running self-sufficiently I'll think about starting to buy some heavy fighters and exploring some of the more dangerous sectors.

How is the character creator? Can I make a balding fat dude?

I'm playing the Crookz demo (a playable free game demo before the game releases, why that's unheard of!). It's an isometric (the camera is not fixed, you can rotate, zoom in and change the angle from directly overhead to only a little bit above ground), RTwP stealth game. It's set in the 70s (or at least has a 70s theme) and you pull heists with a team of professional thieves, each with their own specialty (a runner, a lockpicker, a bruiser, etc.) working as a team to bypass security and remain unnoticed. I've only played the tutorial and the first heist so far, so the game has been quite easy, as expected, but I really like it so far. I don't know yet how many heists the demo will let me do, I expect 1 or 2 more at most. The interface is really elegant. You can pause at any time and give instructions to all your characters, you can set as many waypoints as you like and queue up instructions at each individual waypoint, you can set a "wait" instruction at any waypoint, causing that character to stop there until you give them the go ahead to continue the queue, you can delete any waypoint individually, at which point the game will automatically connect the remaining waypoints, or you can remove all waypoints at once and start over. It's very well thought out and user friendly. Also, the game has a 70s style funk soundtrack and I get to play as a foxy black woman with an afro, it's as if the devs made the game expressly for me. The game comes out in a little over a week and I'm very much considering picking it up. Edit: The demo is the tutorial and the first 3 heists.

Crookz demo

Thanks, Oerwinde

What is SPJ Airplay?