Keyrock

Chani > Patty

So now Sierra Online is back officially and the first 2 announced titles are a new Geometry Wars and a new King's Quest.

Steve Jobs is turning over in his turtleneck in his grave.

Recursive links for the win!

He sounds very different when he's not being Geralt. I suppose I should have expected that, but it still caught me off guard a bit.

Like I wrote, slippery slope. It may be fairly innocuous now, but they'll keep pushing it just a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, all nice and gradual like so that most people either don't notice or put up with it because it's not so different than before.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/08/11/frontier-developments-to-potentially-introduce-dynamic-in-game-advertisements#disqus_thread Slippery slope.

I think I'll just stick with a sling. Rapid Shot works with slings, right? It's only crossbows that don't work with Rapid Shot, if I remember correctly. Anyway, so far things are going smoothly. I haven't bothered hiring a meat shield for my druid since my bear Pookie and a summoned dire boar do the job well enough, letting me hang back and hurl rocks. Granted, I've mostly been fighting zombies so far, things will surely get tougher staying out of melee once I face faster and less mindless enemies. One more level until Call Lightning (/rubs hands together).

Lifetime Hardware Sales: Wii - 101.04 million PS3 - 83.01 million 360 - 82.63 million Lifetime Software Sales By Platform: Wii - 921.30 million 360 - 897.70 million PS3 - 835.52 million

Neither Sony nor Microsoft won the previous generation, Nintendo did, and by a rather large margin. The Wii sold poorly toward the end of its lifetime, but people often forget how insanely well it sold at the beginning of its lifetime. Microsoft really needs to turn the XBone around, it's still early so it can be done. They've already done a price cut (by removing Kinect), now they need compelling games. This may well be a make or break machine for Microsoft. They lost a bunch of money on the original Xbox, but you could justify that loss as that was the machine that Microsoft used to get a foothold in the console market, you can look at it as a loss that will pay off with profit in the future. They made very little, if anything, with the 360, in no small part due to RRoD, but you could justify that by saying that the 360 helped solidify Microsoft in the console market. So, it stands to reason, that they need to make a good profit on XBone. They've lost money to get their foot in the door and to solidify their place in the market, but if the XBone doesn't make them money then all that sort of seems for naught. I mean, do you take another disappointing outing and say, we'll get them next console cycle? Any reasonable CEO would definitely consider cutting their losses at that point.

She's not fat, she's just big boned.

Look how much bigger I am than Aribeth, she looks like a child by comparison.

Alright, so a NWN druid focusing on ranged combat. Is it worth it to spend a feat to get martial weapons so that I can use bows, or am I better off saving the feat for other things and just sticking with a sling?

1) Wasteland 2 - because it is releasing first 2) Pillars of Eternity - because it's coming out after Wasteland 2 NA) DA:I - because I have no intention of buying it, as things stand now

I've decided to fire up a game of Neverwinter Nights. It's been many many years. Hordes of the Underdark, right? Nope. Dear lord, you're not going to play the original campaign, are you? I am. The hell? I know. You are aware the original campaign is rather boring. I know all too well. And you're still going to play it? Yep. Are you a masochist? I've been accused of worse. Anyway, I'm going half-orc druid style, I plan to scoop up zen archery and stick with missile weapons whenever possible. I got a bear animal companion to keep enemies occupied in melee. I named my bear companion "Pookie".

I just got back from a nice bike ride. Between yesterday and today I probably covered 50 miles, if not more. Yesterday was a longer ride, both in terms of distance covered, and in terms of time spent on the road, but a much less challenging one, with no truly challenging climbs, just a bunch of small ones. Today was a bit shorter, but much harder. I went up Avon Mountain again, but this time I rode completely around it, and went up the side starting furthest away from where I live. That side up the mountain is the shortest, but steepest and with no respite whatsoever. It was really hot out there today so 2/3 of my water bottle got ingested and the other 1/3 got poured over my head along the way. Good times. I can now deservedly be lazy the rest of the day... well, after I do laundry, anyway.

I'll say this for BioWare, the Starchild was both one of the laziest and most confounding and illogical explanations they could possibly have come up with for the corner they painted themselves into. In a twisted way, it's quite an achievement to both use a deus ex machina and at the same time make said deus ex machina use such unbelievably, ridiculously, baffling circular reasoning. It's quite a triumph of mind-bogglingly stupid writing. Even Kojima probably had to tip his hat to them and think to himself "even on my best day, I'm not sure I could have come up with a more ridiculous twist". Edit: Either that, or Kojima must have thought to himself "challenge accepted".

The problem with Kinect is that, and this is speculation and conjecture on my part, Microsoft saw the killing Nintendo made with motion controls and wanted a slice of that pie. Now, in theory, Kinect is a far superior motion controller than a Wiimote, and in some ways it is, plus it's a lot more than that. The problem is that motion controls, in their current state, are mostly a fad, and by the time Microsoft, and Sony, for that matter (with Move), jumped in on the motion control train, the fad was mostly over, the train had come to a screeching halt, most gamers had their 30 minutes of goofy fun then realized they wanted to be comfortable on a couch with a familiar controller in their hand rather than jumping around like an idiot, and the moms and dads, and grandparents, mostly were content to stick with the Wii, because Nintendo is the undisputed king of colorful kid friendly games that parents can enjoy too and there's no beating them in that department, it's sheer folly. Compound that with Microsoft forcibly shoehorning Kinect into "mature" games that have no business whatsoever utilizing Kinect ("Better With Kinect" - LOL), which has failed to establish Kinect as a medium for "hardcore" gaming, if anything, it has backfired and created backlash. Then, top it off with the fact that, outside of dance games, and some basic sports type games, the Kinect motion controls are horribly inaccurate and inconsistent, something Kinect 2.0 was supposed to solve, but nope. Add all that up and you have the unequivocal failure of Kinect as a mainstream gaming controller. Microsoft staked a lot on Kinect being their path to dominance and it failed. Hard.

For a company the size of Microsoft? Not really. Plus, companies expect to either lose money or make less money at launch, because, as stated in the video, launching a console costs a lot of money. Still, while this is nothing to panic over, it's not a good figure and undoubtedly putting all their eggs in the Kinect basket proved to be a definite mistake, one they have recently, thankfully, rectified. The far more worrying thing for Microsoft than this reported loss is that even after the separation of the XBone and Kinect and the price drop that accompanied that move, the XBone is still getting outsold 2:1 to 3:1 by the PS4, and is even getting outsold by the Wii U, albeit not by a large margin, consistently.

I think that's pretty much a given since we already know Jane's got a deal with Activision to do the remake/remaster.

When has Piranha Bytes ever let you play as anything other than GWhiMP™ (Generic White Male Protagonist).* * GHwiMP is a registered trademark of Keyrock Corporation, all rights reserved. All uses of GWhiMP are made with the expressed permission of Keyrock Corporation. Wow, this is a day a never thought I would see. Keyrock actually making a comment about a SJ issue, these things normally don't bother you at all or you just don't comment? Would you guys think less of me if I said " I am going to be playing this game and have really enjoyed the past 2 games" [quietly]Shhhhhh. Don't tell anyone, Bruce, I've got an image to maintain.[/quietly] [loudly]Woman, get back in the kitchen and make me a sammich![/loudly] /brofist //burp ///pulls underwear out of ass crack ////guzzles can of Natty Ice /////crushes can against forehead On a serious note, I wasn't particularly making that (lame) joke as a "OMG, they've never let you play as a woman or any other race, those discriminating pigs!" way. It was more of a "you're always stuck playing the same nameless lazy generic white male character, it would be kind of nice to get a little bit of variety once in a while". I'm all for female protagonists and black protagonists, and Hispanic protagonists, and Asian protagonists, etc. but not so much because I feel everyone must be represented equally all the time, rather because it gets boring playing the same stock character all the time. Anyway, generic character criticisms aside, I enjoyed the first two games also and would likely play the third if it came to one of my platforms of choice. For all my criticisms of Piranha Bytes, I still like them as a developer quite a bit, though I do feel like they've very much fallen in a rut, granted their rut is still better than a lot of other developers' output.

When has Piranha Bytes ever let you play as anything other than GWhiMP™ (Generic White Male Protagonist).* * GHwiMP is a registered trademark of Keyrock Corporation, all rights reserved. All uses of GWhiMP are made with the expressed permission of Keyrock Corporation.

I'm really happy you got your Mario Kart 8 replaced. My Miiverse account is Keyrock (just like my username here) if you want to add me as a friend (that goes for anyone else here with a Wii U), in case you want to do some Mario Kart online racing in the future, and in case you ever wind up scooping up Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate or Bayonetta 2 for co-op goodness.

It's crazy how much better old sprite games hold up than early 3D model games. I mean, that's a GBA game from 2001, a freakin' handheld game, and it looks a lot better, in my opinion, than many 3D model games on home consoles or PC as recently as 2004 or 2005.

I think I need a break from Pirate Creed. I like the game a lot, but... there's just too much game for me to go through without taking a break to play something else. I have my game of KoA:Reckoning to return to, but I have very little motivation to do so. I like the combat in the game fine but everything else is just so... forgettable. I played the game as recently as a week ago and I can't recall even one character's name, not one, and I'm not the type to skip through dialogue and narration, I read and listen to everything. I have no motivation to progress the story because I don't care about anyone or anything in that world. I'm thinking of scooping up Golden Sun on the eShop. I could use a jRPG fix.