Keyrock

I finished Act 3 in Pillars and I think I'm pretty close to the end. Good thing too, as I'm really tired of the game. If you want to hear me swearing, then watch the latter LPs I am doing for this game, as I get progressively more and more salty. Trying to do all the side quests and complete the Paths of Od Nua was a mistake on my part. Had I not let my compulsion toward completing everything possible in single playthrough keep hold of me so long, I could have finished the game much earlier, before it had outstayed its welcome, while I was still enjoying it. At this point, 88+ hours in, the only thing keeping me going is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and just wanting to get it over with. The only joy I have left in playing the game at all is any story bits I get to listen to/read. Every single battle at this point is excruciating. Were I not this close to the end, I would take a good long break from the game and maybe finish it some months from now. Since I'm so close, I'll just power through it.

On the other hand, if it wasn't for rodents, humans would never have existed in the first place.

Perfect bodies? No way she's packing a C cup under that dress.

I'm aware the bubonic plague still exists, but it's kept in check and, for the most part, of little concern in 1st world countries.

Because that's still rampant these days. Besides, what's chancing a little Black Death to have a cuddly rodent to care for and love?

I like rats, and rodents in general. Is there a parasite associated with that?

I scored 10/20. ...I think I need a drink. I did slightly better 11/20. Fun, if somewhat disturbing, game.

Sure, but they made that game before GTA V. Just Cause 2 was already all about doing completely ridiculous stunts and creating giant explosions that would make Michael Bay jealous. This looks like more Just Cause 2, and I'm completely fine with that.

Konami has delisted itself from the New York Stock Exchange. http://www.konami.co.jp/zaimu/2015/0427/en_aa7e9c.pdf Pictured: Konami Headquarters

I personally have every intention to play this game with my 360 controller, but I do hope the m&kb controls are up to snuff.

Aloth has the Grimoire Slam to create space and let him get away and any spell/ability that hobbles, stuns, paralyzed, knockdows, etc a target can be used to get away. There's also that spell (I forget what it's called) that lets you trade places with an ally, doing damage to everyone in between, but that's obviously highly situational as to whether it puts your caster in a better or worse spot. For me it's very rarely an issue as I have a 3 1/2 meatshield party with Beefstick the Barbarian, Eder, and Pallegina acting as full time meat shields and Grieving Mother making a surprisingly serviceable support meat shield when someone manages to get past my front line. Outside of spirits, which just laugh at my defensive line and teleport right through it, it's pretty rare that anyone gets into melee range with Durance or Aloth. My current favorite mage spell, I call it the Nighty Night spell (Call to Slumber, I think), is one of the most insanely useful spells in the game, in my opinion. Decent size AoE, no friendly fire, and it puts enemies on their asses for a good long time. That is some seriously awesome crowd control.

I think your prediction of the next gen of GPUs being 2X as powerful is HIGHLY optimistic. As far as 3D memory goes, that will help out in the compute department a lot more than gaming. The move to 16nm will help, but a die shrink does not guarantee increased performance. I'm fully expecting the typical 20-30% gain per core over the previous generation. I'll be happy to be wrong (in the positive direction). As far as DX12 (and Vulkan) goes, I think a lot of people are setting themselves up for disappointment. Not necessarily people here, but a lot of folks in the comments section of articles on DX12 and Vulkan on various sites seem to think that the new APIs are a magic switch and when they arrive later this year that just flips a switch and *snaps fingers* suddenly games just run with much higher framerate. The tech demos that get put out for new APIs like this are generally the absolute best case scenarios and very rarely are indicative of real world results. The amount the new APIs will increase performance will almost certainly vary wildly as ultimately it comes down to how much effort and time developers are willing to put in to implement optimizations. I'm expecting relatively meager gains on average, that way I'm unlikely to be disappointed and there's a chance I could be pleasantly surprised.

I've been friend zoning Triss since TW1 as much as the games would allow.

Change of plans for Pillars, most likely. I think I'm going to say "screw it" with the remaining levels of the Paths of Od Nua (I just finished lev 8 ) and any remaining side quests and just head straight for the main story to finish the game as quickly as possible. I'm getting super burned out on the game. Granted, I'm at 86+ hours and there are not too many games that I wouldn't get burned out on after playing them for that long. All the little things I could laugh off before are really starting to irritate me, like the SHOCKINGLY horrible pathfinding. Plus, I'm so freakin' tired of filler battles. I know the Infinity Engine games had tons of combat and Pillars is emulating those games, but there is entirely way too many filler battles in the game. Hopefully I can bang the rest of the game out in a couple of days. After that, I'm going to play something else... not sure what yet. I'll almost certainly play Pillars again in the future, but not for a good long while.

This whole Konami/Kojima thing has been a mess. In this picture the part of Konami is being played by Bolo Yeung.

Paid mods, like DLCs, are not inherently evil, it's all about value. Is the mod offering you enough substance to justify its asking price? It's just like making any other purchase, does the content justify the price?

That's a wise choice, in my opinion. SLI/Crossfire, while usually a more cost efficient option, does bring its own set of extra issues (issues I'd rather not have to deal with). It's the reason I went for 1440p rather than 4K; you really still need SLI/Crossfire to do 4K. Titan X is the first single GPU card that can legitimately do 4K, but it's still not fully there. I mean, there are other single GPU cards that can technically do 4K, but no one investing the money in a 4K setup is looking to play on low settings or with crappy framerate. Titan X can't max games out at 4K, but it can run them on mid to high-ish settings and still maintain a decent framerate. We'll have to wait and see how the upcoming R9 390X performs, but unless it's significantly more powerful than the Titan X, I doubt it will be able to max games at 4K either. Most likely we're looking at at least another year before it's possible to max out at 4K with a single GPU, and probably at least 3 or 4 years before you can max 4K without buying a top of the line card.

Lord have mercy

I should hope so. This is 2015, we should have realistic pen1s physics.

To me Mad Max will all hinge on how good the driving/car crashing physics are. Car combat has always been the crux of the Mad Max movies. If they can achieve Flatout-level car combat physics, I will be a very happy man.

84 hours in on Pillars and I feel I'm getting close to finishing Act 3. I'm going to take a break from the main story and pop into the Paths of Od Nua and push down into lev 8 and deeper. The plan is to clear all levels through lev 12, then finish Act 3 and do the last few levels in Act 4, assuming that's possible and Act 4 isn't just a linear push to the end.

I will likely too, once GOG Galaxy comes out, that is. Quite frankly, I value the convenience Steam and it has generally steered me to buying from Steam (or getting a Steam key from a 3rd party) over GOG. Once GOG Galaxy is out, and assuming it has feature parity with Steam (at least as far as the features I use), then I'll gladly buy from GOG, assuming the prices are the same. Until then, I'm stuck with GabeN, because I don't want to give up the convenience.

Yeah, there is definitely a problem with a company, any company, having essentially a monopoly. I don't care how well intentioned or kind hearted the company may be going in, they will abuse their position of power at some point. It's inevitable. It's human nature.

So, I was watching Lucha Underground on Wednesday when this happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjCeyQnmpuo You don't need to be a rasslin' fan to appreciate the sheer insanity of that. That's not CGI, that's an actual thing that happened.

I think the pricing will sort itself out over time. The free market has a way of self-adjusting. I'm still trying to wrap my head around Valve taking 75%, though.