Keyrock

Well, in their defense, there was only 0:26 left in the game, and Seattle only had 1 timeout left (after wasting 2 earlier in the drive). One of either the 2nd- or 3rd-down plays probably has to be a pass. You could ABSOLUTELY run 3 times with 26 seconds left. A run play is not a long developing play, it will likely take 5 seconds off the clock, 6 at most, then you call timeout if he doesn't get in. 20 seconds left. Even on plays in the middle of the field you can get back to the line and run another play usually in 14 or 15 seconds, at the goalline, where everyone is bunched up and no one is running far downfield, it's gonna be much less than that. You call 2 runs during the timeout. If Beast Mode fails on 3rd down, you rush back to the line and run again with probably 3 or 4 seconds left. You run Beast Mode 3 times from the 1 what are your chances he gets in? I'm guessing around 95%?

My first mate tends to spend much of his coin on the ladies of the night As a result, I have a prostitute standing on my deck. Bless that little man!

It's crazy, you have 3 chances, 2 at the very least taking into account the time left, from the 1. Run Lynch again and again. Dude will get you 1 yard. Such a stupid playcall. It's like saying "I have this practically sure thing, but let me play Russian Roulette instead".

C-Hox gave that game away. 2nd and goal from the 1, a timeout in your pocket, and you don't run Marshawn Lynch? What the ****? That was one of the most bizarre playcalls I've seen. Pete Carroll outsmarted himself.

Venetica

Playing more Raven's Cry. In true white man fashion, I just slaughtered an island's entire native population, their males anyway. I didn't see any women, which makes me wonder how the natives reproduce. I'll make a bit of a logical leap and assume they hid their women away somewhere deep. Probably a good call on their part. Now the natives did attack me on sight (can't say I blame them), so I could say I was defending myself, but considering the ***hole murderer I'm playing as, I'm going to assume I was going in with a mind for killing all of them regardless. That's how I roll. I like how the game has a "Fear Meter" that fills up as you damage enemies (pretty quickly too), and once it's full you can unleash an special insta-kill attack (at higher levels it can supposedly insta-kill multiple enemies). What's cool is that it's not always the same animation. Sometimes you go behind them, grab them, and slice their belly open, then stomp their head when they fall down, sometimes you grab them and run your blade through their stomach, and sometimes you simply stab them in the face. You can also attack with your hook, but I haven't unlocked that yet. A nice touch is that your pistol more often than not doesn't fire when it's raining. Also, you can sick your pet raven on enemies. It doesn't do much damage (yet, maybe it will with upgrades), but just the thought of it is awesome. I'm mostly avoiding sea battles right now because all I got is a dinky schooner, so I'm pretty much always outgunned. Luckily, with my upgraded sails, I can generally outrun enemies. With all the valuables I looted off the natives (hopefully all those gold idols are worth a pretty penny) I should be able to afford a larger vessel. I'd like to get a frigate. Galleons are super powerful but slow and cumbersome, a frigate seems like a good compromise of power and maneuverability.

Tribal Scarlett was always my favorite Scarlett.

Ignorance. This is what games used to look like. You think adding resolution and colour depth would change anything? Whoa, if I'm not mistaken, that's the first Need For Speed.

****ing stylin'!

Oh man, I just swindled a widow out of one of her possessions in Raven's Cry by playing the kindly stranger who needs her help to help her get more money (I might as well be a Nigerian Prince). I'm not sure if the game will give me a chance to actually repay her later on (doubtful), but if it does, **** that, I'm playing a pirate and I'm here to swindle everyone the last bit of coin out of fools I can, be they male, female, young, elderly, handicapped, senile, retarded, or whatever. The more mentally challenged or gullible the better, easier score. I will take all your money! AHAHAHAHA AHAHAHAHAHAHA! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Two Worlds 2 was perfectly playable on release. Fair enough, my bad, I didn't get Two Worlds 2 until much later. I do remember the first Two Worlds was a horrible mess on launch. Anyway, there are tons of issues being reported on the Steam forums about Raven's Cry. I've been quite lucky with the only major issue being an autosave bug that causes the game to completely lock up often times (not always) when autosaving. It's easily enough worked around by disabling autosaves (manually saving has never locked the game up for me). The game is clunky and low budget as hell. The dialogue in it is bad, really bad. Lip syncing is way off (I'm guessing because it was synced to Polish rather than English originally?). This is nowhere near a AAA title. Still, I'm having a lot of fun with the game. I love how much of an ***hole I get to be. Many conversation options break down to these options: a) Be an ***hole/threaten the person b) Threaten the person more forcefully c) Kill the person on the spot. That seems spot on for a pirate. Also, the game is nearly worth the money for the sea shanties alone. They are so vulgar, so deliciously vulgar. Edit: Just played the game some more. The main character is even more of an ***hole than I initially thought. I'm talking EPIC LEVEL ***hole with roughing up women and smacking around and threatening to kill helpless dudes, it's freakin' fantastic. Don't get me wrong, I don't condone those kinds of actions, but I am playing a pirate and it's refreshing to play an antihero with seemingly no real redeeming qualities, rather than how games always try to make the character likable and have him have a heart of gold inside (that might still happen here, but not so far). Hollywood had pretty much always tried to paint pirates as good people with good hearts trapped in a dirty world, struggling against what they must do and wanting to do the right thing inside, when in reality pirates are ****ing scumbags and murderers. Hopefully this game sticks with what I've seen so far, because it's really refreshing playing a complete scumbag. The SJWs are going to have a field day with this game if it doesn't fly completely under their radar. I hope it doesn't so they can all **** their collective pants about a pirate being portrayed like an actual pirate and how awful that is and Reality Pump not giving a **** about it, if I know my countrymen like I think I do. We don't give a **** about your feels. Cry to someone who cares.

You really love survival games, don't you, LadyC?

Aesthetic will almost always win over resolution/fidelity for me. Just look at Nintendo. They put out some of the best looking games out there and do so on a console that is objectively weaker than their competitors. How does Nintendo do it? They are very good with coming up with a really good, pleasant aesthetic that both masks the lack of horsepower of their system and looks terrific. Another example is Jagged Alliance Flashback. That game uses a fairly simplistic aesthetic with less detailed more single toned blockier shapes (e.g. faces have very few features, no mouths), and highly saturated colors. I feel this works really well for the game (and the tropical setting) and the game looks really good, even though, by fidelity standards, those are early 2000s graphics. It does go on a case by case basis. Sometimes it fits a game to have as realistic as possible graphics, and obviously fidelity helps a lot there. Going with a more cartoony, 8-bit, comic book, Aztec wall painting, or whatever aesthetic isn't always the answer. Going with a strong aesthetic is, however, a good way for a smaller developer without the resources to pour into cutting edge graphics to overcome the lack of fidelity in their games and still come out with the game looking really good.

Cheap flavored malt liquor (I'm talking cheaper than Four Loko), it does a liver good.

The one effect that developers use that's clearly overdone most of the time and nowhere near realistic, but that I do like, is light shafts, god rays, that sort of thing. It's quite rare in real life to see god rays as pronounced as they are regularly in games, but I think that it looks really awesome, so developers should feel free to continue overdoing that effect as far as I'm concerned. On the what I'm playing front, I'm holding off on Dying Light for a bit. There's a bug on Linux making it impossible to secure safe houses (other than the ones that are part of scripted events). I thought I was just doing something wrong, but it's a problem on all Linux machines. This isn't a showstopper, but it does hamper gameplay at night to a significant degree and I'm at a point in the game where I'm about to do some night missions. The first patch fixed some Linux stuff, but that bug remains for now. Hopefully it's fixed soon. I scooped up Raven's Cry. I'm not a fan of either Two Worlds game, but I scooped up the game for several reasons: 1) Reality Pump is a Polish studio. I can't help but give studios from the motherland more extra chances than I would otherwise. 2) I love me some pirates. 3) Day 1 Linux release. 4) I desperately need an RPG to tide me over until Pillars of Eternity. So, the game is a pirate RPG set in the real world, though I've yet to meet and real historical characters. So far as I can tell, there is no magic, it's real real world (except with a fictional story and all that). The game features normal on foot stuff, ship combat, trading, and crew management. I typical TopWare and Reality Pump fashion, the game is buggy and obviously unfinished at launch. Some characters are completely missing voice acting (I don't think they were meant to), the sound mixing is way off in certain scenes (luckily there are separate volume sliders for voice acting, sound effects, music, etc., so it can be worked around), animations are pretty stiff and hilariously bad at times, the environment looks decent but character models look like they're from 2008, dialogue is hilariously bad, the story they drop you into at the beginning has a bunch of stuff happening and they do a really bad job of explaining why (until after the fact and even then, it's not explained well), and on foot combat is pretty clunky. The game is a mess right now. With all that said, I'm kinda liking the game so far. The game has a weird, low budget, clunky charm to it and there is a lot to do, even if some of it is implemented in a less than elegant way. I kinda like how the character you play is pretty much just a straight up ***hole. In many games this might work against the game, but you're playing a pirate, you're kind of supposed to be a scumbag thief and murderer, that's what pirates were (and still are). The naval combat is far slower and less graceful than in AC: Black Flag (that was my favorite part of Black Flag), but it's serviceable once you get used to the controls, and I like how they don't physically show you an arc for where your cannon shot is going to go, but instead you need to adjust the cannon angle by your own judgement watching where the previous volley went (did it go over the ship or come up short?). There is a fairly basic trading system, buying and selling goods with different prices in different ports. I haven't played enough to see if the prices fluctuate and if they do so randomly or using a real supply/demand economy model (hopefully it's the latter). I like how you have to keep your crew paid and happy and how hiring different officers gives you bonuses/penalties in naval combat. Also, the game has sea shanties in taverns, and not nerfed sea shanties, but real, proper, dirty, sexist sea shanties, the way sea shanties were meant to be. As an aside, your character's name is Christopher Raven and the name of the game is Raven's Cry. They went with the every cheesy action movie naming scheme. "They kidnapped his daughter and killed his wife. Now there will hell to play when former Navy Seal Henry Stone returns for blood and hard justice in Stone's Throw."

I've read it that motion blur is supposed to be something or other more realistic. I still don't understand how. It's supposed to simulate the effect that you naturally get when your field of vision changes rapidly, like turning your head really fast. The problem is that I've yet to see a single game come even semi-quasi-remotely-esque to replicating the actual motion blur I experience in real life if I change my field of vision rapidly. The motion blur in games always, and I do mean ALWAYS, feels extremely unnatural. I think no developer has been able to contain themselves to allow the effect to look natural. In real life, at least in my experiences, the effect is extremely quick, I'm talking microseconds, and it's virtually unnoticeable unless you're actively thinking about it and looking for it. When a developer adds the effect they want you to notice it, so instead of making it super quick and subtle, they clobber you over the head with it and maker it last 1000x as long as it does in real life, hence why it feels so ridiculously unrealistic. That's my theory, anyway.

That might be the best Clueless Gamer yet.

For as much as I love Nintendo, they pull some really draconian scumbag **** sometimes that more often than not just winds up being them shooting themselves in the foot. Most youtubers won't even touch Nintendo games because they don't want the headache of dealing with their bull****. I'm not sure if Nintendo is aware that they are cutting off their nose to spite their face by doing this and effectively murdering any chance they have at getting free advertisement for their games. Nintendo is insanely cautious and protective of their IPs, very much to a fault.

The dyed hair is a sign of individuality. After all, doing the same thing everyone else in your circle does is the epitome of individuality. The glasses, I assume, have to do with vision problems. I'm a dude who wears glasses. In my case, I assume it's from all the masturbation, at least that's what I was lead to believe when I was younger. Then again, I still haven't gone completely blind, in fact my vision has slightly improved recently, and I've been known to crank one out on occasion still, so I don't know if the masturbation leads to blindness hypothesis hold up.

I'm definitely curious about how it turns out. I have no intention of getting it any time soon since it's episodic and I'm not keen on getting anything episodic until all the episodes are released.

I'm shocked SVU is still on. I've watched the show in the past, mainly to ogle Mariska Hargitay, but that was a loooooong time ago, and even back then the show had been running for a long time. Kind of funny how radical feminists have tried and very much failed to drag several words through the mud and get them stripped from the collective vocabulary and the only word they have managed to successfully drag through the mud and make people want to remove from the collective vocabulary is "feminism". Sucks for the moderate, sane feminists that are still out there trying to make sure everyone gets a fair shake in life without any special favors, but there is some delicious irony to how things turned out.

*cough*

In honor of Raven's Cry releasing tomorrow (WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE)

More Dying Light. The game is quite fun, and with filmgrain off it looks so much better now. I like how when I get agility level ups, the game becomes closer and closer to Mirror's Edge. Combat is still mostly meh, like in Dead Island, but you don't have to do nearly as much of it, if you don't want to. Also, you can pull off hilariously awesome moves like dropkicking zombies into spiked barricades. That's right up there with Fus Ro Dah-ing fools off cliffs in the goofy fun department.

The insane amount of chromatic aberration in all those UE4 demo Oculus Rift images makes me dizzy and a little bit sick, and I've worn glasses most of my life, so I'm used to chromatic aberration, though not generally at such absurdly pronounced levels. Is the effect that noticeable when you're looking through the rift or does it just look that pronounced in split images? Also, is it just as pronounced in that demo or does that happen in all the games? Because if the effect is that strong looking through the rift I doubt I'd last 20 minutes before either developing a vicious headache or throwing up.