Keyrock

That is epic. I bet it's awesome while playing with a controller and lounging back in a chair a little ways away from the desk, but how is it when you're sitting at the desk typing and stuff? For me, I wouldn't want a monitor larger than maybe 27 or 28", unless I had a wide enough desk that the monitor was 3 or 4 feet from my face when sitting at the desk.

I had forgotten that the Split are almost as xenophobic as the Paranid, so buying a transport from them was impossible initially (they wouldn't even let me dock with the ship yard). Luckily, raising my rep with them to an acceptable level was rather quick and easy, and I made some good profit in the process. Now I'm the proud owner of a Split Caiman transport Unfortunately, I don't have enough rep with the Split (or anyone else for that matter) to buy 25 MJ shields, and I haven't found a spot nearby that sells 5 MJ shields yet, meaning I'm stuck with this dinky 1 MJ shield that came with the ship, which might as well be no shield. With that in mind, I need to continue being very careful where I trade. On the bright side, the Caiman is almost as fast as some heavy fighters, so my chances of reaching safe haven if set upon by pirates are decent.

Gawker is grotesque chimera of lies and contradictions, trying to understand its "message" is sheer folly. /gives self a pat on the back for using "chimera" in a sentence

Out of curiosity, is Reddit a big deal? Serious question, I never go there purposely and whenever I happen by it the formatting of the front page dissuades me from delving deeper, hence I don't really know what the place is about.

No. If I was getting arrested the attractiveness and gender of my arresting officer would be of no consequence. My mind would be far too occupied with thoughts of "****, I'm going to jail" and "how do I get out of this one?" to be having sexual fantasies about the person who put the cuffs on me. I mean, if this were a porn movie, I'd offer her some kielbasa and good times would follow. Sadly, real life doesn't work like a porn movie (bummer) and offering her some kielbasa would make a bad situation significantly worse.

So I started building my empire in X3: Albion Prelude, and by "building" at this point I mean just earning whatever money I can doing short trading runs to upgrade my transport so that I can haul more stuff faster which I can turn into more money which I can turn into a second transport and eventually my first station. Eventually I'll buy combat vessels too, but that's much later on, I'm not aiming to fight anybody right now, I always play these types of games as merchant first and foremost. I did the Humble Merchant start, which is the easiest starting point, at least if you're looking to trade. With the Humble Merchant start you get an Argon Mercury (transport) and an Argon Discoverer (scout) and some meager chump change to begin with. Like all Argon ships, the Mercury is a capable vessel, average across the board. Argon ships are never a terrible choice, regardless of the role you're looking to fill, but they don't excel at anything either, hence why I pretty much never buy Argon ships. Still, it's a decent enough ship to start with. The discoverer I haven't touched yet, I just had autopilot park it at the nearest station while I do my trading runs. The Discoverer will come into play soon enough, but I'm not quite there yet. I have my Mercury decently upgraded at this point, but it still has a ways to go. Once I fully upgraded the engines (which is fairly cheap) it became a balancing act of purchasing as many cargo extensions as I could afford while also maintaining enough cash in my account to fill said cargo hold with goods. The transport starts off with no weapons and a weak ass 5 MJ shield. I'll eventually get the ship as shielded as I can (3 X 25 MJ shields, I think), but right now cargo space is more important, plus finding a station that sells 25 MJ shields is easier said than done (that's where the Discoverer will come in). For now, because of the pathetic shielding I have, I need to stick to safe, well patrolled sectors. A 5 MJ shield will protect me from minor collisions, but if I get attacked by pirates I'm toast, that shield will go down right quick. I'm never going to bother putting any weapons on this transport,or any other, for that matter, I kinda don't see the point. You don't fight with a transport, if you see pirates a comin' you turn tail and run as fast as you can to the nearest station or (non-pirate) military vessels you can find, get on your comm, and ask for protection. Either that, or you fly with an armed escort (advisable if you carry expensive cargo and tend to fly in dangerous sectors). You can arm a transport with weapons somewhat comparable to a light fighter (especially if we're talking about a Split, Paranid, Terran, or OTAS transport), but transports aren't exactly the most nimble ships ever made. Any fighter will have no problem flying circles around you and blasting holes in your hull while making it extremely hard for you to get any hits on them. Once I finish maxing out my cargo hold, I'll hire a pilot to take over my Mercury and do trading runs in a safe area while I hop into my Discoverer and go exploring. I don't remember if the Discoverer comes with any weapons to start, but if it doesn't I won't bother getting any. While you can fight in a scout, I'm not looking to do that. If I see danger coming I can simply outrun it; only another scout is catching a scout. Step 1 will be to find a facility that sells 25 MJ shields for my Mercury. When I find that I'll order my Mercury to fly over to that sector, get fitted with the shields, then back to trading with it (I can then be a bit less careful with what sectors to trade in to boot). Then I'll take my Discoverer and head on over to Split territory to buy another transport. When choosing a transport there are a couple different theories you can subscribe to. If you follow the Boron and Teldai train of though, you get a slow transport with tons of cargo space. If you follow the Split and Paranid train of thought, you get a transport with less cargo space but that is much faster. I subscribe to the Split and Paranid transport theory. Sure, I have less cargo room so I can't haul as much stuff per trip, but I can make the trip much faster, also I can beat the competition to stations to get the best price, also also having a faster transport gives me a better chance to get to safety before pirates get to me. Of course, you can get a OTAS transport and get the best of all worlds (they have the best ships in the game pretty much across the board), but I won't be reaching any OTAS sectors any time soon unless I want to take some real big risks. While Paranid ship designs, in my view, are far more pleasing to the eye, Split transports are much cheaper and a bit faster to boot. Plus Paranid are tough to deal with at first, I'm not even sure they'd let me buy their most basic transport with my current reputation, while I'm almost certain the Split will sell me on of their basic Caiman transports. I'll be dealing with the Paranid later to get military vessels, I like their combination of firepower, speed, and shielding. Outside of OTAS, I think Paranid make the best war vessels. Once I get my Split Caiman then I trade until I can afford to build my first station, likely an ore mine. After that, more transports and more stations until I get enough steady income pouring in to begin building a fleet of fighters. Then I start hunting pirates and other aggressive factions to raise my rep high enough to get larger and more powerful war vessels. Once I get a frigate it's on like a pot of neck bones and then I go into conquer mode.

That's really sad. I knew he had been having health issues recently, I guess they got the best of him.

Methinks it's time to start up a new game of X3: Albion Prelude. I need to build a new galactic empire. The nice thing is that my old custom flightstick profile is still saved, so that's 15-20 minutes of setup saved.

Through the Woods demo

It just never got that big final day push that most Kickstarters get. I mean, it did better the final day that the previous couple weeks, but only marginally so. I think it was pretty bad timing with E3 grabbing everybody's eyeballs and ears smack dab in the middle of this campaign, plus Yooka Laylee, Bloodstained, and Shenmue 3 ravaging a lot of people's wallets. Plus, The Bard's Tale might just be too old for a lot of the people to get that same nostalgia rush they got from Torment, and there is the matter of the recent-ish Bard's Tale comedy game being the first thing people think of when the words Bard's Tale are mentioned, and, while I kinda liked the game myself, a lot of people didn't think too highly of it. Still, they got a million and a half, plus InXile can kick in profit money from Wasteland 2 and, hopefully, TToN too, assuming it sells well. I'd like to think we'll still get a meaty game, thy'll just cut back on some bells and whistles; maybe have less voice acting and cutscenes.

I'm tempted to jump up to $65. I need that code wheel. I must have that code wheel.

Actually you kinda do Tale of Tales, because correlation doesn't speak to causation. There's a correlation between shark attacks on humans and swimming in the ocean, but that doesn't mean swimming in the ocean is the cause of shark attacks on humans. That's pretty standard procedure for elitists types. Present a statement as fact without any factual or academic evidence to back it up (in this particular case there is mounting academic evidence to the contrary) and if anyone questions said statement or asks for evidence then act outraged and claim that said statement, which is clearly not self evident, is self evident. For bonus points they'll throw out the name of a famous (likely Russian or Chinese) philosopher to show off the size of their culture pen1ses, likely without any true understanding of the works of said philosopher and what made them great.

"Attacked by a gamer lynch party"? Who are these mythical people that have been attacked by a gamer lynch party, pray tell? Edit: Now I have a pretty hilarious image in my head of greasy, overweight, pimply gamers frothing at the mouth and smashing hipsters with pink hair with XBOX 360 controllers and choking them with the cord. Come to think of it, maybe that is the reason behind the move to wireless controllers?

The Mother****ing Anthem

You don't, just skip over the posts about him.

The Road to Gehenna an expansion to Croteam's thoroughly great puzzle game The Talos Principle is coming July 23rd. Color me excited, I loved The Talos Principle and July 23rd is almost here. Woohoo!

How is this relevant? The 2 seconds he says "it's a AAA game so we have to give it a good score"? Because otherwise it's 12 minutes of a guy yelling and swearing, basically doing the shock jock routine of voice an unpopular opinion, sprinkle in just enough truth to get people interested, then be as belligerent and insulting about it as possible for shock value.

I've long had the suspicion that Star Citizen is going to be one extremely lengthy crowdfunding campaign that never actually produces results, at least not results anywhere near in line with expectations. I do hope it does some day fully release and is awesome, but I'm very skeptical. If it were to fail spectacularly, it would be humorous from a schadenfraude perspective, but it also might effectively kill crowdfunding once and for all.

With Portal Stories: Mel completed I needed something else to play, so I went back to playing Strife and decided to learn a new character. I decided to try to play as Iah. So far I'm liking her a lot' she's quite versatile. Primarily she's used as a support as she can help the team in a variety of ways in a team fight with her ability to crowd control, buff allies' resistance and attack speed, and heal allies. She's also one of the better split pushing heroes in the game since she can summon sand elementals. The elementals don't do all that much damage and they only stick around for 6 or 7 seconds (or less if they're killed), but she can have 2 of them going at any time, they don't cost particularly much mana, and the ability has a super low cooldown (2 seconds), meaning she can spam them out indefinitely, as long as she doesn't run out of mana. The elementals will tank tower hits for her, meaning that Iah doesn't need to wait for a brawler wave, she can siege without one. I mean, theoretically anyone can siege without a brawler wave, but they'll take tower hits, which are detrimental to their health, and tower damage scales with level, so they're always a danger, even at max level. I give her warp boots, an essential item for split pushing, as it allows you to tp to any ally or allied structure, Hexbane, a useful item pretty much always (it hexes an enemy for 2.5 seconds, making them unable to use any ability), and I try to give her mana and mana regen items early to get her to the point that she can spam out elementals forever and still have enough mana for her other abilities comfortably. I overdid it last time with mana regen items; I got to the point where I was regenerating mana much faster than I could possibly ever use it, so next time I'll back off a bit on the mana regen and get her more power or survivability.

Sorry I don't recognize pin up model nationality by body, I just thought it was a funny picture. *shrug* Better?

Seeing as we know essentially nothing beyond the game's existence, the answer is I don't know.

Murica, son. Ya best recognize.

Thank goodness they give you an option to use modern controls. The main reason I could never bring myself to replay the original Resi games is the horrendous tank controls. I hated those controls so much, even back in the day when they originally came out.

Probably because developers feel they have to do something unique for the grand finale. That's the moment when they try to invent something new that wasn't done in the game before or was rarely used. That drives me mad when developers do that. Hey, you know everything that you did and learned throughout the entirety of the game up to this point? Throw that out the window, it doesn't apply to the finale. It's particularly maddening for a puzzle game. Over the course of a puzzle game you learn various mechanics and tricks and apply them in various ways. The finale should be a culmination of everything you have learned during the game. Specifically, in the Portal games it's all about using your brain, wrapping your head around the different mechanics, the physics behind them, and how to apply combinations of them to overcome obstacles through logic. Once you figure out the solution the execution is quite simple as Portal isn't a twitch game, it doesn't require split second moves or precision platforming or precision aiming. Everything in Portal Stories: Mel up until the very last challenge is like that, it's all about using your brain and wrapping your head around combinations of mechanics to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles with logic. In contrast, the final challenge, from a logic standpoint, is dead simple. The execution is the challenge, and not because it requires difficult jumps or aiming, but because the mechanic used is inconsistent and extremely touchy, making a simple job frustrating. I need to again stress, though, that I really liked Portal Stories: Mel. 95% of the game (everything before the final challenge) is really great.