Keyrock

It's what you play when the a-holes in CoD yelling obscenities at you no longer seem abrasive enough and you're looking to get next level insulted.

HoonDing, you have your moments. Well played. Glorious Leader approves.

I'm surprised by how easy many of the levels of the Paths of Od Nua have been. I've cleared levels 1-7 completely and I plan to return to go deeper in the near future. So far, level 3 was by far the most challenging level. Levels 4, 5, 6, and 7 have been a cakewalk, by comparison. Hopefully level 8 and beyond gets more challenging. Anyway, off to I go to continue the main story. I also have been playing a bit of Age of Wonders 3, now that the Linux build is out in the wild. I haven't played many 4X games in the past few years, but it's like riding a bike. Plus, AoW3 isn't too dissimilar to Civ5, which is the 4X I had most recently played previously.

There sure are

Where was this fabled parachute? Was it built into the hoodie?

I play super duper slow. It's one of the reasons I don't play RTSs, as I have neither the skill, nor desire, to do fast paced micro and macro managing in real-time. I like to take my sweet ass time. Also, I read everything, and I mean everything. In Skyrim, when I first got to Whiterun, I literally spent several hours straight reading every single book in Dragonsreach.

I spent many many hours in GTA games just doing crazy stunts. San Andreas was the ultimate for that because there were spots in the San Francisco clone city where you could catch RIDICULOUS air. Good times.

I finished Act 2 in Pillars! It only took me 71+ hours to do it. The best part is that the next place I'm going is right back into the Paths of Od Nua. Time to descend to level 6 and beyond. I'm hoping to go through levels 6&7, then head back to the surface and to to pick the main story back up. I'll come back a bit later, probably when I ascend to level 10, to do levels 8 of the Paths and below.

Oops, posted in the wrong thread... Delete post... Act natural like nothing happened... Soooooo, That Witcher 3... Yeah.

If you don't want the extra punch at very low frequencies then you can skip a subwoofer entirely. A subwoofer doesn't really add much in the way of... how do I put this... tone, what it does is it adds punch, force behind really low frequency tones like bass drum hits and really really low bass guitar notes. You'll hear the same tones without a subwoofer, for the most part, but you'll just hear them. With a subwoofer you'll not only hear them, they'll also smack you upside the head, if that makes any sense.

They're okay, nothing special. It's a budget 5.1 setup, you get what you pay for. Decent frequency response range and clarity, probably not good enough for an audiophile, but plenty good enough for most regular folks. Enough power for a small to mid-sized room; a good setup for a bedroom or a study, but probably not enough oomph for a good sized living room.

Updated specs. These should be my specs for at least the next couple years. I don't foresee the need to upgrade anything anytime soon (I damn well better not need to upgrade after the ludicrous amount of money I spent on this rig): CPU: Intel i7-4790K (@4.7 GHz) CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro Series H100i Mobo: ASRock Fatal1ty Z97X Killer RAM: 32GB ADATA XPG V2 DDR3 2400 MHz GPU: Nvidia GTX Titan X SSD: Seagate 600 Series 480 GB HDD: Western Digital 7200 RPM 750 GB SATA PSU: Seasonic X-Series 850 Watt 80 Plus Gold Monitor: GREEN 27" 2560x1440 Keyboard: CM Storm QuickFire Rapid 10 Keyless Cherry Mx Brown Switches Mouse: Microsoft Trackball Explorer Speakers: Logitech Z506 5.1 Surround Speakers Headphones: JVC HA-RX700 Circumaural Microphone: AGPTEK Condenser Mirophone Gamepad: Microsoft Xbox 360 Controller Flightstick: Thrustmaster T-Flight Hotas X Wheel & Pedals: Atomic Lamborghini Gallardo Evo

That's a pretty sweet monitor. You're going to need a beast of a video card (or a SLI/crossfire setup) to render any remotely demanding game at 3440x1440, though. I have an obscenely overpriced monster GPU to power my 2560x1440 monitor, and that's significantly less pixels to render per frame.

I headed back to my stronghold to see the repairs I've made and decided to go back down to the Paths of Od Nua. I cleared out level 3, which gave me trouble before; turns out that a couple levels and some better equipment make a good bit of difference. I then went down to level 4 and cleared that out, it was significantly easier than level 3. Now I'm ready to head to level 5. Once I clear level 5 I'll go back up to the surface then back to Defiance Bay where I hope to finally finish Act 2.

Camera turning in an isometric game with 2D backgrounds...

I loved Sleeping Dogs. It's a really fun GTA-clone. On the gritty realism to cartoonish ridiculousness scale, the needle is definitely on the gritty realism side of the scale, whereas GTA is somewhere in the middle and Saint's Row (especially the latter ones) push the needle all the way up against the cartoonish ridiculousness end of the scale. Hong Kong makes for an amazing backdrop, the Arkham-style melee combat system is well executed and satisfying, the game actually explores, a bit, the horrors and struggles of Wei Shen as he's torn between his job and loyalty to his friends, and there are some pretty sweet radio stations (though sadly no user station). On the down side, the game could stand to be a little bit longer (It wasn't super short, mind you), a lot of seemingly interesting characters don't get explored nearly enough, girlfriends are sadly mostly glossed over then forgotten (though they did bring my personal favorite, Not Ping, back for a DLC), and car handling physics are super twitchy. Most importantly, though, you can buy and eat pork buns. Wise man say, man who never eat pork bun is never a whole man. Still playing Pillars. 58+ hours and I still haven't finished Act 2. I'm happy to say that I haven't gotten bored or burned out on the game yet, which is amazing at nearly 60 hours. I feel I've found the perfect party for my play style: Beefstick the Barbarian, Eder, and Pallegina up front, providing the melee meat-shielding. Durance with heals and buffs, Aloth with DPS and debuffs, and Grieving Mother with DPS and utility (I also have her dip into melee sometimes), from a distance. I'll of course, switch some of the others in to do their personal quests from time to time, but that crew is my A Team.

Don't see why this is an issue. I don't either. It doesn't have any effect on competitive balance whatsoever. If someone wants to spend $5 to be able to do fatalities easier, more power to them.

https://youtu.be/am_8xRt37JE I've been waiting for this to leave Early Access. Soon.

I know that feeling. The only way I can get past that starting indecisiveness is to create a cookie-cutter hero-type (Paladin, usually) and decide that since I'm going to be replaying the game multiple times anyway, might as well explore the obligatory "fight baddies, rescue maidens" path first. Shockingly enough, I've managed to avoid starting indecisiveness, which I am prone to, with Pillars. I made Beefstick the Barbarian and 56+ hours later I've never looked back. No metagaming either, I've been making decisions and living with the consequences, even if I have a change of heart moments later.

Pillars. Did pretty much everything in and around Dyrford. Met some people that were less than on the level; discovered nefarious plans; carved a path of blood through some cultists; made some decisions. Now I'm going to see if there's anything beyond Dyrford Crossing, then back to Defiance Bay I go to pick the main storyline back up.

This weekend has been glorious (finally). I can finally safely say winter is over and pack away my longjohns until November or December. I did my first 2 bike rides of the year yesterday and today. I'm all types of out of shape, but that's every year for my first couple of rides. I'll round myself into riding shape in the next couple weeks, then I'll start doing long, strenuous rides. Today is officially T-shirt Day (the first day of the year warm enough that you can be outside wearing a t-shirt and be completely comfortable). T-shirt Day is a wonderful day.

I scooped up Shadowgate while it was on sale from GOG. Curiously enough, while I grew up on point & click adventure games and love them dearly, I never actually played this game back in the day, which is weird since it came out around the time I was all about adventure games. I may use Shadowgate to break up my Pillars playing time a bit. I'm still playing PoE and thoroughly enjoying it, I'm some 50 hours in now, but I need something for a change of pace once in a while. A guy can only eat the same meal so many times in a row, even if it is his favorite dish, before he wants something else just for a change of pace.

Yeah, this whole Cloud thing will happen eventually, but the latency issue hasn't been solved yet. Even if you believe the most optimistic numbers touted by Nvidia (I'm skeptical) about their GRID service, I believe they were talking something like 80 ms, that may be good enough for some games, especially anything turn-based or of a non-twitchy nature, but for other games 80 ms of latency is simply not acceptable. The most extreme example is fighting games. I'm not sure how those can ever work through the Cloud, unless latency can somehow be completely eliminated. No amount of latency is acceptable for a fighting game where top players depend on frame data and hone their skills to moves that depend on being executed with a precision of just a single frame or two.

I wish I had a hookup to get a chip for a hundred bucks, but I don't, so I'm happy to get it for about $60 less than I would normally from Newegg or Tiger Direct. As for the overclocking, I do a lot of encoding, so every bit of juice I can squeeze out of the CPU and the extra RAM I got all help cut that time down. Not enough to justify the expense, mind you, but I do have this badass liquid cooler and the best damn thermal paste money can buy, so I might as well put them to good use.

$275 Edit: Also, bumped the CPU up to 4.7 GHz and now for the stress testing. Just ran Unigine Heaven 5 times in a row at 1440p, ultra settings, extreme tesselation, 4X AA without a hitch, though that stresses GPU more than it does CPU. Now for MPrime (Prime95). I'll run it all night when I go to sleep.