Keyrock

Different kind of idiot box, but I've been watching TI5 on Twitch and it's been so great so far. The best part is that it's just getting started and there have already been a handful of ridiculously entertaining matches, including a crazy comeback from over 20k down. Edit: Holy ****, I just watched the most ridiculous match. It went 95 minutes long, just about everybody wad 6-slotted and had no room, so for 2 Roshans in a row the Aegis went to Crystal f'n Maiden Templar Assassin had so much money that she bought 2 divine rapiers and had the courier leave them in the fountain in their base for like half an hour. There were 2 freakin' divine rapiers just sitting there doing nothing for half an hour. In the final battle everybody had buyback, so there were like 9 deaths and 9 buybacks and at the end Templar Assassin died, bought back, dropped a couple items, picked up both rapiers, boots of traveled right back into the battle and just OBLITERATED everybody that was still left alive. It was madness.

It is kind of frightening to watch as "tolerance" and "inclusivity" are slowly perverted into oppression.

Well, just to catch you up, Halo is a series centered around Master Chef. Master Chef is a phenomenal cook but he has a severe skin condition forcing him to always wear a full helmet to avoid contaminating the food he makes. There is an alien gang called the Covenant, I think they're from Mexico. Anyway, not only did these aliens come across the border illegally and are causing trouble for out law abiding citizens, they also don't much care for Master Chef's most excellent cuisine, causing our hero to have to take matters into his own hands and drive these illegal aliens back across the border.

Splitting time between Cradle and The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna. Cradle keeps getting weirder and I'm starting to form conspiracy theories. The voice acting is a bit stiff, but the game has kept me interested and I look forward to finding out more. Road to Gehenna has been quite fun so far. I've done 8 puzzles so far. They've been challenging, but not overly so. Of course, I've yet to truly attempt any star puzzles, which I expect to be much harder. The terminal interactions continue to be a highlight of the game, I'm finding them to be significantly more enjoyable than in the base game (and I found those interesting). I'm not sure how much time I'll have to play in the near future with TI5 being on much of the time, but I'll sneak some game time in when I can.

To be honest, I'm over Half-Life 3. If it comes out some day, great, I hope it's good. If it never happens, no skin off my back. As far as this rumor, it sounds like a whole bunch of conjecture based on other conjecture which is based on yet more conjecture.

I meant literally when all other options have been exhausted. I'll eat grass and bark and dig worms out of the ground to eat before I eat human, but once there is absolutely nothing else and it's down to chomp on human or die of starvation, I would imagine that survival instinct would override any and all moral aversion I have toward cannibalism.

They had an image change and are now rebranded as hipsters. And got less dirty buy more annoying in the process. Until you get hungry enough, then the neighbors better start running. Well sure, if starvation comes into the equation then all the rules get thrown out. I suspect I'd go cannibal if it came down to that.

My only rule is that I'll never (knowingly) eat any animal I've ever had as a pet. With that in mind, that means cats and rats are out, everything else is fair game. I have no qualms about anybody else eating cats or rats (or any other animal), though, that's their prerogative.

Are hippies still a thing?

Picked it up as well. Spent about an hour in the first task of making breakfast for an eagle since it's as if the task given to you assumed that you the player have lived in a Mongolian Yurt your entire life. Went crazy trying to figure out where the mortar and pestle that was needed to grind up the ginger was as although I had a general idea of what they looked like, I didn't know where some Mongolians living on the steppes kept them (on top of the crockery). Although the game has the kind of adventure game designer logic that aggravates me, otherwise having a good time. Am probably about half-way through the game if the level select screen is anything to go by, and the fiction of that world is certainly drawing me in. I went almost an hour before I even began the first task because I just went around the yurt looking at pictures and reading newspaper clippings (there are tons of these everywhere) and I missed the one paper that's right in front of your face at the very start. Once I finally managed to read that I got down to doing actual tasks. I still don't really know what to think of it, but it's definitely an interesting game. I'm probably nowhere near as far as you because I'm splitting time between Cradle and The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna. The nice thing is that Victor Vran remains on sale until the end of the month (it's only 10%, so not really a big deal), so there's a good chance I can wait to finish one or both of the games I'm playing and still scoop that up while it's discounted. Edit: As a bonus, if Flying Cafe for Semianimals (yes, that's the name of the developer) ever want to make a sequel, they can call it Cradle 2: The Grave. (If you're wondering "Wait a minute, did Keyrock just make a lame ass joke using a super outdated movie reference just to post a DMX video?" Guilty as charged )

It will be called Loud Flatlands.

I scooped up Cradle a "sci-fi" exploration quest" (their words, not mine). I'm not sure what to say about this game. 45 minutes in and I still have very little idea of anything. So, there is zero hand holding in this game. You wake up in a yurt, presumably somewhere in Mongolia. There is a mechanical woman on a table but she's not functioning. There are tons of objects to interact with and pictures to look at and newspaper clippings to read. From what I can gather this is taking place in the not too distant future and there was (is?) some kind of virus. I think this virus was killing off humans and they figured out a way to transfer their consciousness into machines... maybe. I can go outside but I haven't yet, I've mostly been checking out the yurt. This is one of those games where they plop you somewhere, tell you nothing about what you're supposed to be doing, and let you figure everything out completely on your own, which is completely fine with me. I don't know what to think of the game yet, but I'm definitely interested to play some more. Next step is to go outside, I guess.

You leave mechanical woman alone, she's gonna be my new waifu. I haven't seen any real reviews on it yet. I'm sure the IGNs and Gamespots of the world are too busy pumping out article #657 on the latest upcoming semi-annual AssCreed reskin to be bothered to look at this, so I might not see any reviews for it for a while. The few Steam reviews that are up are all positive, but you know how far you can trust those (as far as I can throw tanker truck). I might just risk the $13 and give it a shot, I've been looking forward to this since they first announced it a couple years ago. Worst case scenario is that I'm out a 12-pack.

Cradle, made by some former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. devs, among others, released today Why do all the games I want to play have to release at the same time? The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna and Victor Vran yesterday and Cradle today.I instantly go from nothing new to play for a couple weeks to too much to play. #FirstWorldProblems

Ion Maiden? Motherflakker? P.M.S.? Anyway, I could go for a twin-stick shmup like this, I haven't really played one (outside of arena type twin-sticks) since the Shadowgrounds games.

I started playing The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna. I freakin' loved the base game and I'm loving this one so far. Not much to differentiate it from the base game yet, which isn't surprising; I wouldn't expect them to break out new mechanics right off the bat, but hopefully there are some new mechanics. I will say that the puzzle difficulty right off the bat is significantly more difficult that the early puzzles in the base game, which, again, I would expect, as this is an expansion, so anyone playing is expected to have played the base game and thus is familiar with the existing mechanics and at least some of the tricks and strategies developed while playing the base game. So far the interactions with the terminals have been rather amusing and even more interesting than in the base game, there was even a Zork-like minigame I got to play in a terminal (I hope there are more). Hopefully, later on I'll run into some RUTHLESSLY difficult puzzles. Some of the star puzzles in the base game were fiendishly tricky, hopefully they upped their game even further and made some star puzzles downright diabolical.

Which one? You should play them both, preferably in order.

So, there's a Zork-like game inside the game. I hope there are more.

Ooh ooh ohh! The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna released today. I may have to take a few days off from my galactic trading empire building in X3, or at least cut down the time a bit as I go puzzling again. /rubs hands together

I bought my 3rd transport, another Split Caiman, and my 2nd station, a Scruffin Farm, in X3: Albion Prelude. I still make money faster doing manual trading runs myself than my station and secondary transport make, but the money they make requires zero time investment from me, it's just a nice half a million credits I can deposit into my account every now and then basically for free (well, it's basically free money from now on, now that the profits from the station have covered the cost of the station and the transport). The amount of "free" money will accelerate now that I throw in that 3rd transport and the Scruffin Farm into the mix. I got a nice location for the farm, it's in a sector with 2 Massom Mills (they use scruffin as a resource) and no other Scruffin Farms within 2 sectors, so I have basically no competition. The only down side is that the nearest Power Plant (Scruffin Farms only need energy cells as a resource) is 2 sectors away, but that's not too bad. Once I get the Scruffin Farm fully into production and scatter some Navigation Relay Satellites around neighboring sectors (the satellites act as your "eyes" in a sector so that you can see prices while you aren't there physically, this helps my hired pilot find the best places to sell products and buy resources efficiently) I'm off to Paranid space so that I can do some trading and run some missions for them to start raising my rep with them, since they're the ones I'll be buying warships from in the not too distant future. Paranid are super xenophobic, so getting any work done with them is going to be really tough sledding at first and it will take a good long while until they trust me enough to sell me a heavy fighter or a corvette, let alone a capital ship. It's worth it though since their warships not only look awesome, but they're top notch performance wise (outside of OTAS ships).

Yeah, if I had an aftermarket GPU cooler it would force me into a less than ideal airflow configuration in my case where I would either have to have the hot air do a full lap around the case before exiting through the top and back or I'd have to completely reconfigure my setup to suck in through the top and back and blow out through the front and side. I'd rather not do that since I have the 240mm radiator for my liquid cooler in the front (it's the only place in my case where I could fit and mount it without major surgery of the case itself) and I'd rather have fans sucking in cool air from the outside to cool the radiator that's in turn cooling the liquid cooling my CPU than having warm air from inside the case blowing out through the radiator. All these issues could easily be avoided if the GPU just faced the other direction and blew the hot air toward the top of the case instead of toward the bottom. Unfortunately the ATX configuration doesn't allow for that/they don't build GPUs to face that direction. With the blower on my GPU I avoid all those issues and have nice cool air coming in from the front cooling the radiator then getting sucked up and toward the back of the case where it exits, and I have the side vent blowing in cool air that gets sucked up around the GPU then out the top and back of the case. I have a nice jetstream of air moving from the front and side of may case, merging in the middle and blowing out the top and back and no issues of airflows opposing each other.

I've grown to really like Nvidia's reference cooler (I think AMD uses more or less the same design for their reference coolers), I think I'm going to stick with it rather than getting a card with any sort of aftermarket cooler in the future (unless I put liquid cooling on a GPU myself). While Nvidia's reference cooler doesn't push quite as much air as some of the dual or triple fan coolers, it pushes the hot air out of the back of the case instead of blowing it into (generally the bottom of) the case. I've never actually seen the fan on my Titan X go above 75% (I don't think it ever even hit above 70%), and that's during stress testing (Unigine Heaven) and overclocked at +100 MHz clockspeed and +500 MHz memory speed (I have no need to overclock the card currently nor do I run an overclock generally, I just did it to see how it would handle it during the stress test to see how much overclocking headroom I have for future considerations). I know it's been said that in some cases a 980Ti can potentially be faster than a Titan X because it has greater overclocking thermal headroom, but either I won the silicon lottery, the Titan X has plenty of thermal headroom overall, or my case has really good airflow keeping the ambient temperature around the card low (likely a combination of the 3), because I easily have at least 200 MHz of clock speed and 600 or 700 MHz of memory speed I can push the card beyond stock speeds. That's completely irrelevant right now because the Titan X easily handles anything at 1440p currently, but it's a nice bit of overclocking headroom to have in my back pocket, in case something comes along that needs it.

New Assault Android Cactus trailer I've had my eye on this for a while now, it looks like a pretty great twin-stick. I just wish it had online co-op (it only has local co-op).

I can only speak for myself, but quite obviously I was joking around about having a problem with the characters in the game, poking fun at the utter insanity of today's outrage culture and the so called "progressives" (What exactly they're trying to progress us toward is unclear. I think it might be oblivion). I'd like to think everybody else was too.