Keyrock

At first I thought this was going to be Great Value Three Musketeers, but it's clearly Dollar Tree Zorro.

I carry my Glock 40 whenever I go hiking. The bear has 2 options: 1) Walk away 2 ) Get shot

I'm apathetic to the Star Wars IP but this game has potential to be really great. Of course, I thought the same thing about Watch_Dogs Legion and that turned out to be meh. Hopefully this game lives up to its potential.

So Phantom Liberty probably wouldn't run well off one of these?

All 857 of them?

How new are we talking? I have a PCIe Gen 4 Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. Hopefully that's new enough. It was pretty much top of the line... a couple of years ago. If Direct Storage works on the MSony consoles then it can't require PCIe Gen 5 since Gen5 didn't exist (not physically, anyway) when those were first manufactured.

And since I posted the image I must now post the video: https://youtu.be/UBS4Gi1y_nc Well, a link because it's age restricted, probably because of all the foul language(?)

By the time TES VI comes out a mid-range GPU will have 2 TB of VRAM. Minimum PSU requirement 650,000 Watts.

You probably meant that as a derogatory term but I'm going to take it as a compliment. Thank you.

It doesn't have to be a physical war, though that helps since it means pumping more money into the military industrial complex which in turn means palms are greased and re-election funds are contributed to. The important thing is that Imperial America always be at war with someone or something, whether that's a proxy war with Russia, a war on terror, a war on drugs, etc. It's important that there's always some sort of enemy out there, a spectre looming for the general population to fear. Fear is a powerful emotion to be exploited by sociopaths. What's the end goal? Full totalitarian control. The sociopaths in power have been eroding our civil liberties for quite some time. I'm sure it's not going nearly as quickly as they would have liked, but it's happening nonetheless. You could go back to the 90s and the Clinton administration with the clipper chip. Interestingly, attempts to install a backdoor for the government into end to end encryption predate the Oklahoma City bombing, but said bombing provided perfect fear mongering ammunition for the establishment to try to ensure that private communication on the internet was impossible. We saw this again in 2001 with the Patriot Act under the Bush Administration (to be bipartisan here). Remember, this was sold as a temporary measure to keep the country safe and stop those nasty terrorists abroad and at home. 22 years later, how temporary does it feel? We're seeing it again now with the Restrict Act. It's not just Imperial America either, other governments are introducing similar measures, all in the name of "safety". This $#!+ is so Orwellian that it's comical. The aim is to be able to monitor anyone anywhere at any time. This makes it easy to dig up or manufacture dirt on any potential dissident. They can use their propaganda arm, the mainstream media, to smear, discredit, and rile up outrage. Any attempts to rebuke their claims can be labeled "malinformation" which is a fancy way of saying inconvenient truth. The unfortunate (fortunate for us) hurdle is that the mainstream media is damaged possibly beyond repair. Confidence in the mainstream media is shockingly low and many independent media sources now dwarf the mainstream media in reach. That doesn't mean the sociopaths in DC will stop trying. They will use whatever events, whether real or manufactured (e.g. WMDs), to fear monger because a scared population is more likely to trade away liberty for security. To bring this back to the Ukraine War, I can't really call it serendipitous, because this certainly wasn't an unprovoked attack, NATO has been provoking Russia for decades, and it could have been and was predicted, but this war is being exploited by Imperial America to pump money into the military industrial complex, to weaken Russia, and to pass draconian laws further eroding the liberties we were granted by the Constitution under the guise of stopping malinformation and preventing tampering with our democratic process, when they themselves are the ones tampering.

You are right about that. The neocons in Washington are already gearing up to go to war with China. Whatever it takes to keep us in a state of perpetual war so that they can keep syphoning those dollars.

Let's just call it what it is, Imperial America is the world's foremost arms dealer.

The US recently raised the debt ceiling just short of defaulting. As part of the deal the government will be cutting spending almost across the board except... Wait for it... Wait for it... Military budget. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our education system is woefully underfunded, the opioid crisis ain't getting any better, inflation is out of control, the mental health crisis is at an all-time alarming high, often manifesting itself in mass shootings (but let's just say "guns bad", blaming a symptom rather than addressing the root cause). Maybe we should spend more of the budget to address some (preferably all) of those issues at home? No. Slash the budget on all of that and funnel more money into the pockets of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc. The Imperial States of America already spends more money on its military than the next 10 countries COMBINED. Apparently that's not enough. MORE MORE MORE!

If the 5 hours of awesome is all at the beginning that's fine since I can just play those 5 hours and be done with it. If the 5 hours of awesome is at the end and I have to get through 45 hours of meh to get to it, I'll pass. If the 5 hours of awesome is sprinkled in throughout the 50 total hours, for example 10 minutes of awesome, then an hour of meh, 15 minutes of awesome, then another hour of meh, and so on; those nuggets of awesome would probably be enough to get me to keep playing the meh parts. I'd still rather have just 5 hours of pure awesome rather than 50 hours that has a little awesome and a whole lot of meh.

Hours of gameplay is an imperfect measure of value. I will gladly take 5 hours of awesome over 50 hours of meh.

I started playing Mask of the Rose (courtesy of @majestic), it's a visual novel set in the Fallen London universe. Early going but so far I'm really enjoying the writing, which doesn't come as a surprise, given that writing is Failbetter Games' strong point. This makes them well suited to making a VN since writing is of utmost importance to that type of game... Well, and the quality of the art depicting individual distinctly lacking clothing in certain types of visual novels, or so I've been told.

If there's a 36 year old Adrienne Barbeau in the expansion then forget about Panam, I know who I'm hooking up with.

The Nugs rolled up the Heat, sparked 'em up, and smoked 'em.

It's $70 USD here. I agree that's more than what I'd like to pay, but that's now the standard price for "premium AAA" games. That said, wait for discount is always a good plan... Unless you are looking to buy a 1st party Nintendo game, those almost never go on sale. I don't know about 67% off, you may be waiting quite a while for that, but you'll probably see 25% off, perhaps 33% off within a year of release. If you happen to have Game Pass then it's "free".

Never mind hearing Canada, we can't see it because of all the smoke.

The most notable thing from the Ubi presentation was that professional wrestler Athena, some may know her better as Ember Moon, from her WWE days, was in the audience. I kept wondering if Ubi was doing a wrestling game, but I guess she just happened to be there. Star Wars: Outlaws has potential. I didn't see a single ***hole with a laser sword, so that's a plus. Fem Solo and Minibacca make a good first impression. Keep those stupid space wizards out of this and you might have a winner on your hands, Ubi. I am interested in The Crew: Motorfest. I had quite a bit of fun with The Crew 2. One thing that's disappointing is that it looks like it's only ground vehicles. What really set The Crew 2 apart from other games like it was the ability to switch between cars, boats, and planes on the fly. Driving a car, hitting a jump, switching to a plane in mid-air, flying over a river, switching into a boat and dropping into the water, that was badass. If it's just cars it's going to have a hard time topping Forza Horizons. Kind of cool to see Prince of Persia go back to its 2D roots. Far Cry: Giant Blue Elf Edition could be good, I guess. I don't care about the AssCreed games.