Keyrock

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.

I read everything, and I mean everything, even flavor text on mundane items, fully. That's how I roll. That's also why I'm at 48 hours+ and not to Act 3 yet.

Scooped up a i7-4790K to replace my Xeon E3 1231 v3. The original plan was for the Xeon to be a stopgap until Broadwell came out. Now that it's become clear that Broadwell is pretty much purely a power efficiency upgrade and not a performance upgrade, I went ahead and just got the Devil's Canyon Haswell. The best part is that I got it mad cheap, brand new too, and sold my Xeon off for a decent price so that the gap between what I paid for the 4790K now and sold my Xeon for is smaller than the gap between what the prices of the 2 chips were back when the 4790K first came out, so I actually saved money (thanks Ebay! ). I also scooped up a Corsair H100i All-in-One Liquid Cooler and Gelid GC Extreme thermal paste (that stuff is the best) for the Devil's Canyon chip and I'm currently running the 4790K at 4.6 GHz. I may crank it up to 4.7, 4.8, or even 4.9 GHz, because right now it's not even breaking a sweat. Running at 4.6 GHz, my Devil's Canyon chip runs cooler, both idle and under load, than the Xeon did at 1.2 GHz less on stock cooling. I dunno if I won the silicon lottery or the H100i is just that beastly of a cooler. Probably a bit of both. I'll probably knock it up another 100 MHz in the near future, stress test it, then go from there.

I've stopped watching trailers for this entirely. I can't handle any more hype, it's too much.

The pathfinding in PoE is atrocious, as it is with almost every game of this type, sadly. I have to micromanage almost every second for all my melee party members in many fights because I can't trust the AI to not be a complete idiot. In a recent battle, after Eder finished off a chump, I saw another chump coming toward one of my flanks. I select Eder and tell him to attack said chump. He has an almost perfectly straight shot after stepping around another of my party members to the gap between my flank and a wall, plenty big enough for him to fit into, engage said chump, and form a nice line. Instead, Eder decides the best course of action is to head around my entire party, around the OTHER flank, behind the entire enemy group to get to this one enemy and stand surrounded by all of them, a path at least 3 times as long, because reasons. Luckily, I was prepared for this absurd behavior, because it's happened plenty of times before, and I immediately paused the game when I saw him walking in the wrong direction, then manually guided him, little by little, to the right spot. It's like they're little children and you can't leave them alone for 2 seconds or they'll run off and start chasing butterflies, or something; you have to hold them by the hand. "No no, little Eder, this way. Come along. No Eder, we can't go into the toy shop, daddy doesn't have enough money to buy you more toys, you have plenty at home. Stop crying. I know, I know, you want another toy. I'm sorry Eder, come along. Be good and I'll give you some ice cream when we get home."

I cleared out Readric's Hold and made my choices. I'm not sure if what I did is for the better or worse for the area, but I'll see that play out in the future, I guess. No metagaming for me; I make a decision and I stick to it, for better or worse. While there I also picked up another pet (I'm up to 4), a semi-dead(?) kitty. It's sickly looking but it seems friendly enough, so I'm going to love it just the same, because that's how I roll. Also, I picked up sooooooooo much loot while in Readric's Hold. I had enough weapons and armor to equip an entire army; not a squadron or batallion, but an entire army. I then stopped by my stronghold to fend off a skeleton attack. Now I'm on the road to Dyrford. After that, I guess it's back to Defiance Bay where, I'm assuming, I'll pick up the trail of the main story arc and work toward moving Act 2 along and eventually finish it and move on to Act 3.

Why does Rape Horse look like Anthony Kiedis?

Report to your local Patriarchy safehouse where you can thrust your toxic masculinity into a female who the Patriarchy is currently internalizing their misogyny in. Thanks KaineParker, for being there during my time of need. I was on the verge of raping every coworker in sight. I may need to get me a 3DS or *shudder* start playing some mobile games on my phone to try to avoid another one of these attacks coming on. Edit: Now that I think about it, Video Game Deficiency Induced Rape Urges, VGDIRU for short, is a serious and crippling condition. I should open up a Patreon so that people can give me money to help keep me stocked with a steady supply of video games and video game hardware. I mean, you don't want me going around and uncontrollably raping, do you? Really, the money wouldn't so much be going to me as toward the benefit of the public at large and their safety. I'm doing everyone a service by trying to control my VGDIRU.

I'm stuck at work, haven't played video games in over 14 hours. Urge to rape rising. Dunno how much longer I'll be able to control myself.

I liked DX:HR. My biggest beef with the game is that it encouraged you to take ever path into a place. If you snuck in through a ventilation shaft, it was in your best interest to go back out and hack in through a terminal and also go punch your way through a wall somewhere else to get into that same building. They should have set it up that once you infiltrate a facility the other means of getting in no longer give exp.

I tried the Zolla fight from every angle. I'll try it again when I level up to lev 7. Edit: Do you ever get a talent that changes the "casting time" of Frenzy to instant? If I could modify that ability to instant I might actually use it. The ability is garbage as it is because the "casting time" is just too long.

So, I went down to level 3 of the Paths of Od Nua, and boy oh boy do I hate that level. The battles where you fight 1 or 2 ogres at a time are child's play, but the Zolla fight kicked my ass. I don't know how hard it is on easier difficulties, but on hard it's pretty brutal. To make matters worse, I came so freakin' close to winning, in fact, I beat the battle on my 3rd try but Durance got killed (there is no maimed in Expert Mode) and I don't want to lose my primary healer. It takes so freakin' long to take ogres down unless you get super lucky with crits and once Aloth runs out of spells, I'm pretty much toast since it's so hard to damage them physically. I got super duper salty trying to clear that level, yelling, swearing up a storm, toward the end I was so irritated that I was rushing, making mistakes, getting super pissed at the pathfinding (which frankly sucks), and just being miserable, so I knew I had to just turn the game off right then and there. I wound up scrapping the entire (expletive-laden) LP episode I was recording and starting over from where I left off in level 2 before and heading topside. From there I ventured to Readric's Hold. I haven't completely cleared it out yet, but I get the feeling I was supposed to do this area earlier, because I am straight up MASSACRING the fool in this place. I like how there are (at least) 3 ways to get in. I wound up taking the path. I am out of camping supplies, so I may need to head back to town before completing the area if I don't find any along the way, but I still have most of my spells since I've been steamrolling fools with just basic attacks and per encounter abilities. I do think I'll need to get Eder some damage increasing skills next time he levels up, as I've been going all defense pretty much every level since holding the line is his main job; his damage output is pathetic. Pallegina dishes out decent damage, but my main, Beefstick the Barbarian, does insane damage output. He's my primary damage dealer 95% of the time. He smashes up fools like they owe him money, and I don't even use Frenzy (because I think it sucks, it takes too long to activate and you can't activate it before combat begins). Come to think of it, since I loot them afterwards, maybe they did owe him money? As an aside, how do you pay hirelings in the stronghold? I have one hireling constantly listed as "unpaid". I have plenty of money and would like to pay him, but I don't know how? Is this something that just happens automatically? If so, why isn't he getting paid when I have plenty of money? Do I need to put money in some coffer? I'm confused. Edit: Aside #2: This game could really use a button that lets you manually go into "combat mode".

Kielbasa Myśliwska (Hunter's Sausage)

Dear Lord, I hope not.

Friendly reminder: If you are a white heterosexual male you don't have the right to hold an opinion and you cannot be discriminated against.