Keyrock

Day 1 of the TI5 main event was pretty great, even with the big delay for technical difficulties (get your **** together, GabeN). I didn't see every match because the last couple were on during the middle of the night on the east coast. The highlight of the day for me was the NaVi/VG match with NaVi coming so close to winning, VG barely holding on until their greedy lineup came on line fully, then the crazy finish with a double team wipe in NaVi's base as VG went straight for throne and VG buying back everyone they could and marching straight down mid and NaVi desperately trying to kill them while they took down their ancient. That was an intense match and, as a bonus, we got to see Luna for, I think, the first time in this TI. Sadly, no Dendi Pudge this year.

I can't wait for the TI5 main event, the group stage was pretty awesome. There were like 7 or 8 Techies matches, most were the standard Tusk/Techies combo, but there was 1 with the far less common (and overall not as strong) but hilariously awesome Tiny/Techies Hand Grenade combo.

Mostly Shadow of Mordor, it's such a great game. It's a hallmark of a great game when it creates really great emergent stories, and the Nemesis System works wonderfully for that purpose. Also, with how the Uruks move dynamically around the world it can set up some situations where missions suddenly become exponentially more difficult than they would have been under different circumstances. For example, I was doing a mission where I needed to confront and kill an Uruk captain. Seemed like a simple enough mission, I even sniped all 5 of his bodyguards with elf-shot before hopping down from my perch to confront him. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right? Well, it turns out he had a horn he used to alert nearby Uruks and summon them and it turns out there were 3 other captains nearby at the time, so suddenly a 1 on 1 fight became a 1 on 15, including 4 captains. Oops. What followed was a tense 15 minute battle/cat and mouse game as I systematically whittled down the numbers while trying my best to not get surrounded and overwhelmed, until the numbers got to a point that I could manage a straight up fight. It was fantastic.

Fargo is a salesman, first and foremost. In fairness, in his position you kind of have to be if you want to be at all successful. His "us against the evil corporations" sales pitches are quite eyeroll inducing, but they must work on a good chunk of people, since he's managed to get a good bit of money by using them. I don't particularly care how silly and hypocritical his sales pitches are, so long as his company delivers me games I want to play. So far it has.

Thanks, I had forgotten that was a separate download. With the game being a whopping 47 GB, I figured that was included, but it's another 4 GB on top of that. The game looks plenty pretty even without the Ultra textures, but they definitely make a difference when you're up close to walls and such.

It's a cool feature, but I'm glad they have an option to turn it off. I kept triggering it by accident during combat, so I just turned it off. I'd much rather have uninterrupted gameplay rather than cool screenies. To each his own....I think Monolith's in-house gfx engine has come a long way since FEAR I think the graphics are great, I just wish they had mapped it to something else than the left thumbstick press. IMHO nothing should be mapped to left thumbstick press in a character action game ever because the likelihood of triggering it accidentally is so high.

It's a cool feature, but I'm glad they have an option to turn it off. I kept triggering it by accident during combat, so I just turned it off. I'd much rather have uninterrupted gameplay rather than cool screenies. My mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts.

It's a 50+ hour game, they didn't exactly skimp on content. In my opinion, it's easily the best of the Kickstarter games I've played, and I've played quite a large number of them.

GhoulishVisage, a nightmare fuel warning would have been appreciated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do5X7W3BCAg

Wasteland 2 Director's Cut has a release date

I completed my first star puzzle in The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna. The funny thing is that I had ideas in my head for how to complete 2 star puzzles, one I felt really confident about and one I was fairly unsure about, and the one I managed to solve was the one I was unsure about, while I couldn't solve the one I felt confident about. Still, it feels good to solve a star puzzle, any star puzzle, as those tend to be the most fiendishly difficult puzzles in the game, at least that's how it was in the base game.

There's a buttload of games on sale on Steam during the SteamOS Weekend sale. They're all popular games that have SteamOS/Linux versions, including the new to Mac/Linux Shadow of Mordor.

255 mods?

BattleTech was the original tabletop game, MechWarrior was the RPG spinoff. In BattleTech you controlled a bunch of BattleMechs (as well as infantry and aerial units which were added in expansions) and did battle against other armies. In MechWarrior you generally played a single character, most often a BattleMech pilot. Seeing as this is branded BattleTech, rather than MechWarrior, I would expect you will be commanding a (growing?) squad of units. I'm imagining the game playing a bit like Fire Emblem or AdvanceWars, though we'll have to wait for the Kickstarter campaign and the pitch contained within to know for sure.

Third person Doom Diving

I'm not getting much time to play anything this week because TI5 is on and I'll hate myself forever if I miss a Techies game (there have been a handful already!), but I sneak in a bit of game time here and there. In The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna I've finished all the basic puzzles in 2 of the 4 hub areas, but I've yet to complete any star puzzles. I have some ideas floating about in my head for 2 of the star puzzles (I'm pretty convinced I've solved one of them, I just need to physically test my theory out) so I'll give those a shot before moving on to the 3rd hub area. Cradle is still weird and interesting, though the voice acting for the main character is starting to wear on me. The voice acting for Ida and Tabaha are passable, but voice acting for the main character, Enebish, is downright cringeworthy. Beyond that, I'm not a big fan of the cube tossing mini-games, at least the 2 I've played so far. Still, the game is holding my interest and I look forward to seeing more of the story unfold.

A BattleTech game? From Harebrained Schemes? Turn-based tactics?

I like the art style of the new KQ game. /shrugs

Who likes announcements of announcements? You know you love 'em, don't try to front. 2K to reveal Mafia 3 next week

I mean, sure eSports players don't make nearly as much money as pro athletes in popular sports, but eSports is still in its infancy. NFL, NBA, MLB, EPL, La Liga, NASCAR, F1, etc all these leagues didn't get to where they are overnight, it took many decades to grow them to the massive money making machines they are today. The fact that eSports pros can already make the amount of money they make today is damn impressive.

The total prize pool for TI5 is 17.6 MILLION dollars. That's a pretty good chunk of change. The winning team stands to take home over 6.3 million.

I hope those indicators are wrong and we aren't heading for another crash. We haven't even fully recovered from the 2008 crash yet, a second crash on a similar scale would be devastating right now. I suppose the silver lining could be that a second crash this close to the previous crash might be so jarring that it could bring about actual reforms, because after the 2008 crash, while there was a lot of crying and Occupy Wall Street organized protests and such, ultimately, in the end, nothing really changed in the way business is conducted and monitored. The cynic in me believes that a second crash wouldn't bring any reforms either, though, just another round of bitching and moaning and outrage that winds up being counterproductive as it devolves into a contest of who's more underprivileged, meanwhile the bigwigs that sent their companies into nosedives walk away with ridiculous severance packages, the institutions get bailed out by the government yet again, driving the countries further into debt, and the erosion of the middle class continues, further separating the population into the super rich and the poor, with less and less people in the middle ground. And then back to business as usual of under the table deals and cooking the books while lining their own pockets, and we get to do this all over again a couple decades down the road. Anyway, hopefully this is just a false alert.