Keyrock

I did a perilous trek south from Nivalis in extreme northeastern Morrowind south to Necrom. I was saving frequently along the way because there are some NASTY customers out in that part of the countryside, both in terms of bandits and beasts. The trip got me thinking about how this compares to the Morrowind in TESO, given that the Tamriel Rebuilt project got started before Oblivion released and long before TESO was a thing, so I looked up a map of the current TESO: Turns out the area I went through isn't even in TESO yet, it's the grey part north of Necrom, I cut a line south along the eastern half of that peninsula. That map actually goes a little bit further north, you can't zoom out far enough to show the entirety of what's in the game at once, even in openMW, but that's almost all of it. It's a little hard to see because they don't exactly use contrasting colors on this map, but there is the path I took south to Necrom, more or less along the eastern coast of the continent (I was always close to the shore but rarely on the actual shore itself), plus the parts of Vvardenfell and mainland Morrowind I explored previously. I'm currently in Akamora. I am consistently pleased with the content in the Tamriel Rebuilt mod. I was hoping this was simply more Morrowind and that's exactly what this is. I don't feel that this is a step down in quality compared to the vanilla Morrowind content. There are settlements, caverns, ruins, quest chains, encounters, etc. It's all been overall enjoyable and just feels like a natural extension of Morrowind. As you can see on the map, I have A LOT more to explore, plus there's more coming. There's no ETA AFAIK, but the next update to the mod promises to be the biggest ever and will be adding a big chunk of southern Morrowind. Eventually, I'll be able to go to Narsis.

After a long and perilous journey I finally made it to the City Above Necrom.

The town of Llothanis in far eastern Morrowind: It's unmistakably Telvanni, which means it looks awesome and is a nightmare to navigate.

Downloading the character creator now... Edit: I like the character creator. It gets pretty in-depth. It even lets you set your posture.

After attending to some mage's guild business in and around Balmora I decided to head back to the mainland for some more exploring, but this time I decided to go to Firewatch and branch out from there to explore the northeastern most part of Morrowind. Exploring along the coast I ran into a fellow Nord woman who did not take kindly to my presence. She put up one hell of a fight. In the picture I have half health but that was taken after I had chugged a potion, I was pretty close to death at one point. There are some fairly challenging enemies here so it's a good thing that I'm very well equipped. Venturing further north I then took a boat to Nivalis. This is about as far north as you can go in Morrowind, or all of Tamriel, for that matter. From here I plan to explore the island Nivalis is on then work my way south on the mainland toward Necrom.

Dirty shameless save-scummers.

I have sympathy for @kanisathaand @xzar_montybecause I was in a similar position some years back. I believe they are specifically looking for isometric RTwP CRPGs. A little while ago both isometric and turn-based games were out of fashion, so you can imagine that isometric turn-based CRPGs were few and very far between. Since then we have had a resurgence both in isometric games and in turn-based games, which is right up my alley because that's my jam, but now RTwP fans are the ones getting the cold shoulder. I unfortunately have no suggestions for y'all since, as I've mentioned, RTwP isn't my thing, so I have no reason to seek those games out, but hopefully some isometric RTwP games are in the works, plus RTSs. I feel bad for RTS fans, they've been malnourished for years. I don't play RTSs, on account of being complete dog**** at them, but, man, it's been tumbleweeds in RTS land for like a decade, I hope y'all get some good games eventually.

I finished Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth clocking in at a svelte 150+ hours; probably a good 50 hours of that was on Dondoko Island. I also defeated the final bosses of both the Yokohama dungeon and the Honolulu dungeon. These are extra hard boss fights above the level of the final boss of the game, your Ruby and Emerald Weapons, if you will. Really great game that builds on the foundation of Yakuza: Like a Dragon. They made positioning in combat more important this time around with a whole array of combo attacks and assists. You have a bond level with each of your companions and at certain thresholds (10, 20, 30, 40 , 50) you gain assists with said companion. With that in mind, it's a good idea to get all your companions' bond levels up to 50 ASAP. Ideally, you get them up to 100 to unlock the 6th and final skill inheritance slot which you can use for Essences, but 50 is the big number because it unlocks the full spectrum of assists. You can set up some crazy chain reactions with assists, the enemies can do it too, the system works both ways, but the AI doesn't exploit the system that often, it mainly occurs by happenstance, whereas I'm constantly purposely setting up these chain reactions. I've one-shot groups of enemies using a standard, single-target physical attack by exploiting this system. Standard physical attacks and some skills have the knockback property, it's exactly what it sounds like, the attack knocks the victim back, sending them flying in a direction. This can knock them back into something in the environment, causing more damage to them, into one (or more) of their allies, damaging the ally(ies) in the process, and/or into one of your characters, triggering a free attack on the poor sod, provided you have a high enough bond level. You can ping pong enemies around the battlefield if you set things up correctly, it's pretty great. Battlefield positioning is also important for lining up enemies for AoE skills which hit enemies in a line or a cone, but that was already present in Y:LaD. The new map, Honolulu, is freakin' awesome. It's definitely RGG's largest map yet, it's significantly larger than Ijincho and absolutely dwarfs both Kamurocho and Sotenbori (no Sotenbori in this game, just Honolulu, Ijincho, and Kamurocho), that said, it's still tiny compared to other games. Honolulu, Ijincho, Kamurocho, and Sotenbori COMBINED would still be much smaller than Night City in Cyberpunk and that's without Dogtown. It's not the size of the map but the quality of its contents, though, and I'm happy to report that Honolulu is just as wonderfully meticulously detailed as all of RGG's previous maps. Back to Morrowind I go.

I'm honestly surprised other devs haven't tried to swipe Dragon's Dogma's pawns system. It's a pretty ingenious way to do companions IMHO.

Honestly, I'm surprised you managed to get that. Given that fork (verb) is a rather common term in the programming world, especially in the open source space, and given that a rather sizable percentage of the population are people obsessed with cats, there has to be significant overlap in that Venn diagram. I'm shocked some cat loving programmer out there with a penchant for splitting projects off of other projects didn't snatch it up.

I went to AEW Revolution at the Greensboro Coliseum for Sting's retirement match (and the other matches too). What a fantastic show top to bottom and a great sendoff to an all-time legend. Tony Khan did right by Sting, it's hard to imagine a better way to go out. Anyway, good thing I can still type because my throat is all types of hoarse after all the yelling I did.

I disagree, I love that part of Monster Hunter, which is interesting since I don't normally like prolonged boss battles, but I love Monster Hunter's prolonged boss battles precisely because of this. I like having to chase the monster down after they flee when you get them significantly injured. I like the tracking part before the battle too. Dragon's Dogma didn't copy those parts, though, just the actual combat where characters can try to climb onto giant monsters in an effort to stab a vital spot. It's not exactly the same, of course. Either way, hopefully DD2 winds up being as good as it looks, because it looks pretty awesome.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is less than a month away. I've long been puzzled as to why more games don't copy Monster Hunter's combat. Over the last decade or so, everybody and their grandmother have tried to copy Dark Souls combat, and with good reason. Very few games have tried to copy Monster Hunter combat, despite the fact that it is the gold standard for fighting gargantuan beasts IMHO. One of the few games that did copy Monster Hunter was the original Dragon's Dogma, I believe some of them worked on Monster Hunter previously, so it makes sense. Anyway, this game looks ****ing awesome.

Kolaches

The cat looks so baked.

That's Hollywood's motto.

I don't think AAA studios are going to destroy the industry, but I definitely see them destroying themselves. Maybe not all of them, but some of the big AAA publishers and developers will absolutely go under or get taken over. I think Ubisoft will be the first to go, they've already almost been hostile taken over multiple times over the last decade or so.

I went back to Dondoko Island and redesigned the entire island from the ground up. The island is effectively split up into 4 sections that you can build on, 2 large areas and 2 small areas. I sacrificed one of the small areas and put all the unsightly passive resource generating buildings there, stuff like the garbage dump, metal working sheds, a chicken coop, gardens, stuff the guests don't need to see. That stuff is in its own little area off to the side and out of the way. That left me 2 large areas and 1 small area to work with. One of the areas is on the sleazy side but balanced, there's plenty of more wholesome stuff to do. I have another large area that's very family friendly, that's for the more puritanical sorts. The remaining small area is super sleazy. If you're booking a room in that area then you're here to have a really really good time. No worries, we here at Dondoko Island make sure that we don't specify the area of the island you stay at on the billing invoice so you have plausible deniability. What happens on Dondoko Island stays on Dondoko Island. I like that you can invite people you meet during the game to the island, plus there are reoccurring characters from previous games. It's kind of weird, though, because you can invite Kiryu, but it's not current Kiryu, it's young Kiryu. It's neat inviting characters from the series to vacation at my tropical island resort. At this point I have no need for anything on the island, I have everything I planned to build built, so I can mostly hang out with the guests and watch them chill at my resort. You can have a big ol' bonfire on the beach because why the **** not?

I guess SMT V: Vengeance is going to be to SMT V what Apocalypse was to SMT IV. I was a big fan of Apocalypse, I enjoyed it more than the base game. Hopefully this is just as good, and, if nothing else, it will be good to have SMT V outside of just the Switch.

People constantly misspelling Cate Blanchett makes me feel better about my own constant misspelling of Sam Neill.

Can we, down the line, get a Traveling Wilburys movie tied into the BECU (Beatles Extended Cinematic Universe)? It could be a crossover event with the HECU (Heartbreakers Extended Cinematic Universe). The smarter way to go would be to create the TWCU (Traveling Wilburys Cinematic Universe, colloquially known as the Wilburyverse). They could do Beatles movies, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers movies, Electric Light Orchestra movies, Bob Dylan movies, and Roy Orbison movies, all culminating in an Avengers-style Traveling Wilburys team-up movie.

Eli Roth is an interesting choice for this, wouldn't have been my first choice, I would have gone with either James Gunn or Tim Miller. He is a capable director, though, and I think Tim Miller had some involvement in this. Will they be able to ride the line and make the characters funny but endearing rather than obnoxious and insufferable? That is a line that the game series itself has ridden, and crossed at times. This has potential but I can also see it going horribly horribly wrong. I'm hoping for the best; while I don't much care for the game series I do like Cate Blanchett and I'm always happy when she gets to ham it up, as opposed to her usual dramatic roles. I bet Jamie Lee Curtis is in the movie for a grand total of 5 minutes.

Tommy Wiseau is an interesting point of comparison to Neil Breen in that it shines a light on what makes Neil Breen so rare. The Room is one of the most famous awesome terrible movies, even people not specifically into terrible movies have heard of it and some have even seen it. Some years after making The Room Tommy Wiseau caught on to the fact that his movie was terrible but it was a big hit as a cult movie because people has a wonderful time laughing at it. He then changed his tune to "it was a dark comedy all along, it was meant to be funny"; sure it was. Since then, Tommy Wiseau has tried to capitalize on the popularity of The Room by making several more movies and shows and they've all been absolute garbage; not fun garbage, just garbage. The reason is that he has been purposely trying to make awesomely terrible movies and shows and, as I've written before, that virtually never works, it pretty much always comes off as phony and forced and the bad acting and terrible dialogue aren't funny when it's obvious that they are terrible on purpose. Unintentional comedy needs to be, well, unintentional to work. While it is theoretically possible to purposely create comedy that feels like unintentional comedy, that is of an extremely high degree of difficulty to pull off. Neil Breen, on the other hand, has now made 6 movies over nearly 20 years and has somehow seemingly remained pure. That's why I wrote my 3 possibilities before. I didn't write those as a joke. #1 I'm eliminating, I can't fathom the possibility that he hasn't caught on to the fact that his movies are considered terrible, albeit awesomely terrible; not in an age when the internet exists. That leaves #2 and #3, in both cases he's aware of his movies' reputation. In #2 he is delusional enough that he thinks everyone else is wrong and his movies are great or he just needs to tweak a few things and he'll really knock it out of the park the next time and everyone will see his genius. To me this is the most likely scenario making Breen a modern day Ed Wood of sorts. #3 is highly unlikely because it would require what I wrote about above, making unintentional comedy intentionally, and the degree of difficulty of that is extraordinarily high. The point is that Tommy Wiseau made 1 awesomely terrible movie, albeit one of the greatest examples of an awesomely terrible movie, and nothing but trash since. Neil Breen keeps making awesomely terrible movies one after another. It's an impressive feat regardless of why or how he is doing it.