Keyrock

I don't know what kind of super steroids they shot up Serge with that he's back this quickly, but I hope they have more of those super steroids for before game 4.

I got an itch to play Sleeping Dogs again. Man, I love that game. Regardless of how anyone feels about the game, you gotta admit it's a superbly optimized game. These are the best settings I could come up with, with my baseline being minimum FPS of 30 or higher. These are fairly high settings on a moderately modest laptop. And it's not like it's an ugly game, Sleeping Dogs is very good looking. Hopefully United Front Games gets to make a proper sequel. I know something called Triad Wars was announced, but very little is known. For all we know, it could be a F2P mobile game. Hopefully it's a proper PC/console sequel.

I wouldn't call a win over the pathetic Sawx huge. That's a team that wasn't playing well even when it was fully healthy, and is currently comprised of about 50% minor leaguers because their roster is decimated. There are probably a good number of college teams that could beat the Sawx right now.

So, I've pretty much done everything around Trelis short of liberating the city or wiping out the rebels at Nemora. I guess it;s time to head north toward Geldern and Silden. If I remember correctly, these were areas that were quite obviously far from complete when Piranha Bytes released the game, since there wasn't much of anything to do there. The content mod and quest pack, I think address this, though the user made quests will likely be of the simple kill x monsters or fetch quest varieties. Better than nothing, I guess. I made a mistake when I sold off my halberd in favor of a bearded axe. Sure, the axe does a little more damage and gives me +10 health, for some reason, but I'd rather have the reach of the halberd back. Oh well. Hopefully I find a non-worn halberd lying around somewhere.

Obsidian should just never realease Update 79 and go straight to 80, and play it off as a Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Case of the Missing Floppies type deal.

Yeah, hopefully this is just a false rumor made by some retailer or Intel itself as a ploy to sell off the remainder of the 4770K and 4570K stock. If it isn't, though, I ain't waiting for September. I haven't gotten a mobo yet, so I could always say go **** yourself, Intel and go AMD. The problem with that, though, is that AMD is so uncompetitive in the mid to enthusiast desktop segment (they have all but admitted defeat in that segment by not even releasing an FX line of chips based on Steamroller). The best I could do with AMD is getting the top of the line Vishera and I'd have to overclock into the 5.5 GHz regions (turning my mid tower into a space heater in the process) to even come close to matching the performance of an i5, never mind and i7. That would be tantamount to curring off my own nose to spite my face. If this is true (Grrrrr), then what I'll wind up doing is I'll still get a Z97 mobo, then I'll scoop up an i5 for about $200. Honestly, for gaming, it will make zero difference in 95% of cases. Some of my other applications and multi-tasking will be slower, obviously, because of the lack of hyperthreading, but oh well. Then, I'll skip Devil's Canyon altogether, hold on to that until Broadwell comes out (all indications are that Broadwell will be compatible with 9-Series mobos), eBay the i5 for half the price I paid for it, and get a Broadwell i7. It's so sad Bulldozer wound up being such a collosal failure. AMD has even lost much of their edge in the integrated GPUs department, with HD4600 and Iris Pro closing the gap considerably. Honestly, if HSA doesn't wind up being the game changer that AMD has been touting it as, and if the architecture that succeeds Excavator (by all reports the final of the Bulldozer-based architectures) doesn't wind up being waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better, AMD may die as a CPU company and essentially become ATI, only putting out GPUs. That would really really suck. Intel would be raping our wallets and dragging their feet in the desktop segment even worse than they are now. *sigh* I miss the days when Athlon64s were mopping the floor with the Pentium 4 space heaters and forcing Intel to scramble, innovate, and drop their prices to be competitive. Those were the days.

Let it be a lie!

Gothic 3 - I've done a bunch of work for the Orcs around Trelis, now I'm working the other side helping out the rebels nearby, just enough to get them to trust me (a trust I will eventually betray MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!)

That would probably be very fun to play with for an hour or so and to show off to friends. Beyond that, it would collect dust on my shelf. Yeah. I don't even much like typing on my Android phone. It just feels weird typing without any sort of feedback, or at least something physically getting pushed down.

I remember getting magazines with a disc, or just having someone come up to me in a store and hand me a disc with either America Online or Netzero on it (happened multiple times). Dial up...

I wound up getting this 16GB of DDR3 2400. Tiger Direct tossed me a $15 off offer so long as I spent over $100 and did so within the next 2 days. Not sure why, probably because I haven't shopped there in forever until I got that sweet SSD recently and they want my business back. Whatever, I'm not complaining. Anyway, I highly doubt I'd get 16GB of very high speed DDR3 any cheaper than $130 (heck, I doubt I'd get 16GB of regular old DDR3 1600 cheaper). Now I just need to make sure the mobo I get supports 2400 MHz XMP profiles. All I have left to get is the mobo and the CPU and the build will be complete. Soon, my precious, soon.

There are advantages to mechanical keyboards. Reduced, or completely eliminated (with PS/2 input) key ghosting. Potentially faster response times (particularly on the lighter types like the red and brown). Better double tapping precision. Potentially less typing fatigue as you don't have to bottom out the keys to register presses (this is especially true with the tactile varieties as it'a a lot easier to tell when your keystroke registered). Also, they tend to last a lot longer, though care/abuse will play heavily into that. A mechanical keyboard is something you'd probably never think you'd need (and you'd be essentially right) until you've owned and used one. Once you've used a decent mechanical keyboard you won't want to go back to a membrane keyboard, even though you can get by with a membrane keyboard just fine. A mechanical keyboard is definitely a luxury rather than a necessity.

You're a man after my own heart. Dialogue-heavy and combat-lite is just how I like it, thank you very much. If it makes you feel better, there is a deep, stinging wound in my wallet region. It's like a knife twisting around inside the wound combined with a deeply sorrowful voice faintly screaming "What have you done? Where have all my friends gone?"

Where does it say it'll run on SteamOS? Is Steambox even real or vaporware at this stage? I'm confused. Here is the Steam Store product/pre-order page. Notice the beautiful Tux logo next to the ugly Windows logo. As for Steam Machines being real actual physical models versus vaporware, at the very least, in my case, it will be a very real, physical (albeit self-built, as opposed to pre-built) machine in approximately two week's time. I'll even fenagle some sort of Steam Logo sticker to put on the case to make it look "official", along with a sexy Tux logo. Edit: Maybe a combination Tux/Valve logo?

So, seeing as I spent about 30-40 bucks less on the SSD (and got a better one than I expected to boot) than I planned, I used that money to get this mechanical keyboard rather than a cheap ass membrane keyboard. 10 keyless, which is fine since I never use the numpad anyway and it saves space. Cherry MX Brown switches, which are my personal favorite since they're almost as light as MX Reds but have the nice tactile bump without the really loud click of the MX Blues (not to mention the heaviness of the MX Blues, or the MX Blacks, for that matter). After the rebate it will only set me back about $57, which is quite cheap for a Cherry MX Brown keyboard.

Watch Dogs - driving from one end of Chicago to the other

Marcus Miller slapping the mutha lovin' funk out of his Fender Jazz Bass Gotta love how in the middle of playing rhythm while the sax is laying down sweet sexiness, he just sneaks in a slide arpeggio progression all casual like, because, why not?

Have a good holiday weekend Obsidian folks.

Does default difficulty include friendly fire? On hardcore D&D difficulty there is friendly fire and that winds up being a killer. For example, in NWN2, Qara will OBLITERATE your party if you let her cast spells on her own.

I don't think I've ever played a party-based cRPG where the companion AI was good enough that you could leave the casters to be controlled by the AI and do their own casting. Definitely not on Hardcore D&D difficulty (which is how I always play). I've tried every custom AI script under the sun and it's never nearly good enough.

I kind of wish I could justify spending another $220 and getting a second one to set up RAID 0. The performance would be insane. Alas, I'll just have do deal with the sorta blazing fast performance of using just one. I'll put the OS and the games on the SSD and keep all the stuff that I could care less about read/write speed (music, videos, documents, etc.) on my archaic 7200 RPM HDDs.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/05/22/metro-redux-officially-announced-with-debut-trailer/ Probably doesn't make sense for people that already have the games, particularly on PC, where you could get 60 fps (assuming your hardware is capable) already, but this is perfect for me I've never played 2033, and while I have played some of Last Light, I don't own it, so this is a no-brainer. This will purr nicely on the SteamOS monster rig I'm currently building.

Yeah, as soon as I saw that price I got quite happy. Every professional review for the Seagate 600 series I've seen is quite positive. I was just hoping to not go far above 50 cents per GB, this is less than 46 cents per GB.

I wound up getting a Seagate 600 Series 480GB SSD. Surprisingly, Tiger Direct, who is usually slightly more expensive than Newegg, has this about $130 cheaper than Newegg.

I wonder how much that makes up for the epic failure of Russia not even making the semis on home soil in the Olympics?