Keyrock

And she's probably white. I bet neither of them is handicapped. These abeleist scum disgust me.

I'm a bit sad I won't get to rename my characters to Xena and Gabrielle.

Well, they are former BioWare devs, so a ham-fisted tripe of a story is a definite possibility. That said, I'll reserve judgement until we hear/see more. Who knows, it could be good.

Former BioWare devs KnightMayor announce their first game entitled Mooncrest.

Could it be that the trail has... ... ...vanished? *crickets* I'll see myself out.

X3: Albion Prelude - Finally got my secondary transport (the Mercury I started the game with) over to my ore mine and assigned it to service the station (buy resources and sell products). It took a little while for me to get the transport there because it was quite a number of sectors away and I don't have it fitted with a jump drive, plus I had it make several stops along the way to buy and sell wares while I serviced the station manually with my Caiman transport. Sure, the trip took a little longer, but that transport also made a good bit of profit along the way. Having a transport fly empty for several sectors is a terrible sin (that's my inner trader talking). Anyway, my Mercury is now bound to the station, production is in full swing, and I'm off in my Caiman doing trading elsewhere working toward buying another transport and another station. A couple hundred hours from now, when my galactic trading empire stretches across dozens of sectors and I'm making millions of credits per minute and buying up war ships to build my conquering fleet, I'll look back fondly at this moment. The moment when my trading empire first truly got off the ground.

It's a well known fact that Masta Ace is from Brooklyn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2NqcWP8tos

Personally, I found that light did have an effect on stealth in LL, at least with human enemies. In the areas that it took me several tries to get past I found that the times that I didn't bother turning off the lights I was spotted much quicker and forced into a firefight, whereas the times I made the effort and extinguished light sources I had a much easier time remaining unseen and killing off baddies like a shadow in the night. I never bothered doing much stealth against monsters outside of scripted sections. The one exception was gargoyles, I generally tried my best to avoid getting spotted for as long as I could, but gargoyles appear almost exclusively in well lit areas (read: outside) anyway, so there's not much I could have done about light against them.

My Split Caiman Vanguard coming in to dock at my newly purchased ore mine Ore mines are a great choice for building your first station. The biggest hurdle is finding an ore rich asteroid in an area where you won't be facing heavy competition from existing ore mines. If you can manage that, an ore mine is a pretty good starter station as it only requires one resource to operate (energy cells) and the product it manufactures (ore, obviously) is the second most used resource in other production stations (energy cells are first, by a long shot), meaning you are likely to have steady demand for your product. Also, ore mines are fairly cheap and generally don't require high reputation to purchase, relatively speaking. An ore mine doesn't have nearly the potential for profit that some of the high tech factories and multi-factory complexes do, but I'm a long ways off from affording such things at this stage of the game, not to mention not meeting reputation requirements. The bottom line is that once I get my secondary transport over to the station (I had it trading a good number of sectors away), I can set it up to automatically make resource buying runs and product selling runs while I go do my thing elsewhere and I'll have an automated source of steady income in addition to what I earn making trade runs manually on my own. Alternatively I could just leave the station be on its own and other traders would come and go to my station and buy and sell with it as with any other station (they will do this also anyway), but having one of my owned transport do trading runs for the station generally brings in both greater profit and less (preferably no) downtime due to empty resource reserves or full product storage. It's a slow drip of steady income at first, but it adds up and will allow me to buy more transports and build more stations which will in turn accelerate my profits and eventually allow me to build some specialized, high tech manufacturing stations with the potential for far greater profit.

I stealthed way more in Last Light than I did in 2033, but I pretty much never used throwing knives and barely ever used a silenced pistol. I prefer the OG method of outmaneuvering them and sticking a knife in their throat up close and personal. Way more satisfying that way. As for areas being brighter in Last Light, you know that you can turn off circuit breakers and blow out flames, right? Also, I agree with Woldan, I thought the level design in Last Light was really great. So many levels with many different paths and approaches you can take to get through them. As for me, I'm on the verge of building my first station in X3: Albion Prelude. I have enough cash on hand to buy an ore mine and enough extra to supply it and have some on hand for my own trading, but I need some more because I need to hire a TL (station transport) to bring my ore mine to where it will get set up. A few more trade runs then it's time to scout out a mineral rich asteroid in a sector that isn't already saturated with mines (easier said than done). Alternatively, I can build a scruffin farm instead. Hmm...

Thanks Shady, good lookin' out.

Well yeah, no place is completely immune from earthquakes. Heck, we've gotten a couple in Connecticut in the almost 30 years I've lived here, but we're talking small tremors that, as you wrote, you might not even know about if you weren't told about them.

I got back from my trip to Charlotte today. That trip served 2 purposes: 1) Vacation 2) Determining whether it's an area I could see myself living in. To answer the question posed by item #2: Yes, definitely. I'm stuck in Connecticut until at least March (lease), but after that I have every intention of getting the **** out of this God forsaken state. With that in mind, I have plenty of time to make up my mind and start looking for work and a place to live before my lease is up, but the Charlotte area is the top contender at the moment. It ticks pretty much all the boxes for me: Lower cost of living. Lower taxes. Mild, short winter. Friendly, polite people. Far enough from the coast to have no fear of hurricanes, but close enough that I can drive to go to the beach for a weekend. Close enough to the mountains to drive there for a weekend but not close enough to get a legit winter. Not in tornado alley. Not in earthquake country. Plenty of attractions. Gorgeous downtown area. Yeah, I could see myself living in Cackalacky. With any luck, I will be this time next year.

Young grasshoper, one must not always stand and fight... okay, you do have to kill it once.

The snow level.

This is a pretty fun soap opera :D As for the publisher issue, I have no doubt that every single one of them wants to turn as much profit as possible (that's the ultimate goal of every business) and to keep their customers happy. The difference is in how much emphasis each publisher puts on profit margin vs customer satisfaction.

I'd like to think that is true, but how many times has Ubisoft ****ed their customers or released a pile of bugs, yet people still buy the crap out of every AssCreed reskin they put out every 6 months. I imagine there is a threshold of crap where even the mainstream will abandon a publisher, but it seems they'll get to pile the mountain of crap up pretty high, and laugh all the way to the bank the whole time, before we reach that threshold.

My Split Jaguar Vanguard While not the fastest ship in the game, it is not that far off. This ship is great for exploring because you can go through sectors in no time at all and you pretty much never have to fight unless you chose to, on account of there being only a tiny number of ships in the entire game that can catch a you. Heck, this ship can outrun some missiles.

Again, to me it seems like logical character progression. In 2033 he's being cryptic and "hands off" because he wants Artyom to find out the truth and to come to the correct decision on his own because of some kind of philosophical young padawan must find things out for himself bull****. When Artyom doesn't come to the correct decision on his own and nukes the Dark Ones instead, Khan decides he needs to be more direct and hands on because, well, look where being hands off got him and the dark ones. His change in character seems very appropriate to me. Yes, his demeanor is different, but it seems natural to me given the events of 2033. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

To me it seemed appropriate, given the bad ending is canon. In 2033 he's more cryptic about things, but obviously he's telling you "don't kill the dark ones" ("the dark ones are not the enemy" was literally the first thing that popped into my head when I fist met Khan in 2033), so in LL he decides to be more direct in what he's saying since dumbass Artyom was too thick headed to catch on before. Seems like logical character progression to me. /shrugs

Khan may never directly say "don't harm the dark ones" in 2033, but, come on, it's pretty f'n clear that's what he means. Also, I personally never felt like he was in direct opposition to the Rangers in LL.

ShadySands never posts again outside of WoT to maintain his 1337 status.

Did it? I never actually learned how Last Light ends: the absolutely pants-on-head-ridiculous love plot line was enough to put me off of that game for forever. The complete revamp of Khan's character from an old, wise sage type character (with possible hints of not being totally correct?), to a crack-smoking hippie type character didn't sit well with me, either: throw that in with the LSD tunnel or river or whatever it was as well as Anna, and you've got yourself a nigh insufferable game. Well, at least the final gameplay sequence is a lot better. You get to go through a pretty badass firefight instead of tripping balls sequence. As for the love plot, yeah that was ham-fisted to say the least, I basically just ignored it to the best of my ability. Personally, I thought Khan's character was pretty consistent between the two games. Also, Last Light has actual proper villains.

You mean the tripping balls sequence at the end? Yeah, that was... something. Did you get the bad ending or the good ending ? Regardless of which ending you get in 2033, the bad ending is canon in Last Light. Thankfully, Last Light has a more satisfying less WTF ending, plus it's just overall a better game to boot.

^ Yeah, it's definitely a slow game, which actually fits my play style perfectly, as I like to take my sweet ass time playing games in general. It takes forever to get to the point where you've amassed enough wealth and influence to build a massive fleet, but rolling into a sector with several capital ships, a wing of corvettes, and several dozen fighters, and having a massive fleet battle is so insanely satisfying.