Keyrock

I liked Prey, though I kind of forgot about it. That may be the closest game to Unreal 1 since. Maybe not in terms of overall quality, but in being a somewhat similar type of shooter and letting you explore a weird, alien environment.

Serious Sam is a different animal altogether, it's the FPS equivalent of a bullet hell shooter. As far as games like Unreal 1, sadly, I can't really think of anything even remotely equivalent since then. Half-Life 1 & 2 is the closest I can think of, just to give you an idea of how far off even the closest thing I can think of is.

Resourceful woman. I would like to think that I too could be that calm and quick thinking is a situation like that, but, obviously, you can never know until it actually happens. Hopefully, I'll never have to take that test.

Thanks for the thread bump, Walsy. No longer necessary, but nevertheless appreciated. I wound up getting GeltabZ and they worked like a charm. Nice and soft and they have little nubs on them so your thumb doesn't slip off. They were cheap too (the shipping was more than the cost of the item) and it came with 7 pads, 6 regular size and a smaller one. If you're putting them over the existing rubber pads (like I did for the right thumbstick, just for consistency and aesthetic purposes, then they fit perfectly and stay put as if they were glued on (I didn't use any glue). If you're putting them (regular sized pad) on directly on the plastic (like I did on the left thumbstick), then they slide around, still function, but feel weird because they're on there loosely. So I has an idea, I put the smaller pad on first, then put a regular sized pad over it (double pad madness!) and it worked perfectly (stays nice and put like the other thumbstick). Now I have a controller that's super comfortable to use. Here's a picture of the product and my now comfy controller: You can't see the little nubs on the pads because I took the picture with my crappy phone camera, and also because I'm a terrible photographer, but they're there. Anyway, maybe this can help someone in the future if they get into the same predicament as I did.

Iron Maiden 1984 Better than your favorite band. Iron Maiden 2014 Still better than your favorite band.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E50QazmwP7M ♫ Circle of fire my baptism of joy at an end it seems The seventh lamb slain, the book of life opens before me. And I will pray for you. ...Some day I may return. Don't you cry for me Beyond is where I learn. ♫

My body is ready.

Agreed, the Victorez is the only sniper rifle that is even remotely viable as a short to medium range weapon, the SVD is far too unwieldly for that, and it's a far more versatile weapon. My thought process is that for medium range, that's what my assault rifle is for. It's at extremely long range, where the target, even in the scope, doesn't look much bigger than an insect, where the SVD (and Gauss Gun) tend to be significantly superior to any other weapon. Knowing that a center mass shot, even on a soldier wearing a fully upgraded exoskeleton, is gauranteed to take him off his feet (with the Lynx, not sure if a standard SVD will guaranteed take him off his feet) doesn't hurt either. Plus, I kind of enjoy the massive recoil and thundering sound of the SVD. It makes me feel virile, or something.

I recall liking the special Vintorez more...I'm struggling to remember its name. Tide, maybe? Then again, I always liked the regular Vintorez more than the regular SVD/SVU. Tide is a quality rifle and it's a matter of personal taste and application. While Tide's rate of fire is slower than that of a regular Victorez (more than compensated for by highly increased damage), it still fires faster than Lynx. Another advantage of Tide is practically no recoil. Tide's damage is pretty impressive, though it's not as high as Lynx or the Gauss Gun. The thing that makes Lynx (and SVDs in general) preferable to me is that Lynx has significantly less bullet drop than Tide, making it a far more accurate weapon at very long ranges. Of course, if you get really good at calculating the bullet drop into your aiming then that becomes a much smaller issue.

Inception Dog

I got Nimble to get me a Lynx sniper rifle in Call of Pripyat, it's a modified SVD. I consider it to be the single best sniper weapon in the game. The Gauss Gun does more damage and has a better scope, but it's slow rate of fire and prohibitively expensive ammunition lose out to the Lynx's vastly superior rate of fire and only slightly lower damage output (The Lynx will still knock just about anyone off their feet with a single bullet and will insta-kill, to the best of my knowledge, anything with one headshot). Now I have arguably the best sniper rifle in the game, and arguably the best assault rifle in the game. Now I just need to get my hands on an Amsel Striker for maximum short range killing goodness. The SPAS-12 will have to suffice until I get my hands on one.

Well played. In other news, the defending champ Sawx have been flat out awful so far this year.

Back to Call of Pripyat. I went to the Jupiter Factory and visited the helicopter crash site there, as well as going through the chain of documents that eventually lead me to the plans to open up the underground passage to Pripyat. While I was there, I also completed the Strelok's group 3 stashes questline and got Strelok's SIG Sturmgewehr 550 (/rubs hands together). Strelok's SIG 550 is arguably the best assalut rifle in the entire game and a definite upgrade from the LR 300 I had been using up to that point. The SIG 550 is already one of the better rifles in the game, but Strelok's modified model eliminates the only 2 real disadvantages the gun has, that being the inability to mount a scope and the inability to mount a silencer. I can already afford a SEVA suit as it is and I have a pretty good shotgun (SPAS-12), a kickass assault rifle, and a sniper rifle (SVD), so basically everything I need for that intense journey through the underground, but I want to tie up some loose ends around Jupiter before I round up a team to take through the tunnels with me. Man, the mercenary ambush in the Jupiter Factory was fun. I obliterated those chumps, and, surprisingly enough, mostly with my shotgun. I managed to lure them to choke points where they couldn't really lob a grenade at me to flush me out effectively and had no choice but to come through that point and into point blank range. I don't care what kind of armor you are wearing, a point blank 12 gauge blast to the face is not good for your health.

But I can't drive Gran Turismo 5 and 6 on my PC.

Played some more of The Golf Club today. I played a user made 9-hole course. It was pretty well designed except for a couple of holes. The most glaring was a par 4 with the most ridiculously inaccessible green. It's one thing to make a postage stamp sized green. It's another to put a big ol' bunker covering 75% of the front of said green and another bunker behind it. It's then even another thing altogether to put said green on a par 4 that has no right calling itself a par 4 seeing as even if you hit a perfect drive with favorable conditions you're still going to have to hit a 3 wood from there just to be able to reach the green in 2. Despite this, I still managed to par the hole due to a spectacular chip from the rough next to the green. I had a masterful 2 under round going until I melted down on the par 5 6th. I sliced my drive into the deep rough. Rather than take my medicine and chip it back onto the fairaway, I opted for foolish heroics and tried to muscle it toward the hole. Predictably, this put me in more deep rough. Long story short, I walked away with a double bogey on a hole where a birdie is basically a par. After that my rhythm was shot and I unraveled further, finishing 3 over par. Just like in real life golf, **** can go sideways real quick.

The Ariel Atom is small, open wheel, light, and has insane acceleration and braking (due largely to the car's low weight). The most insane thing about the car is that it's street legal.

This time you can't just win your love interest's favor by simply giving them gifts. You give them gifts then continuously click through one of 5 different dialogue options until you stumble upon the correct dialogue option and a +1 romance appears over their head.

Project Cars has a release date (November 2014) and a shiny new trailer: Sweet mother of shiny paint jobs that looks fantastic. If this comes out in November then The Witcher 3 might just have to come out as a text adventure because this game is taking all the graphics. There will be no graphics left for anyone else.

Good looking out. I'll probably never play it, but I might as well add it to my account in the highly unlikely event I suddenly develop an affinity for military shooters.

LOL, I shot 6 over par on my own course. It was the putting that did me in. I'm pretty good at the ball striking, and obviously I had an advantage of being intimately familiar with where it's wise to lay up and where I could go for it, but the putting did me in. Not too much in the way of fairly flat greens on my course and I've yet to master judging how hard I'm going to hit the putt. Way too many 3 putts in that round. Oh well, it's a learning experience, both in terms of getting my putting skills dialed in and in terms of golf course design. While I don't want to make the greens flat and make them too easy, I think I overdid it with the slopes and ridges.

Never mind the people, the star of the picture is the giant tree stump table.

Just know that it's pretty basic right now with a lot of missing features. On the plus side, zero crashes or major glitches so far, though that's only a 3 hour-ish sample size. If you do get the game you can try out the course I made. It's called "Rusty Meadows". It took me about 2 hours to make. I initially made it in about 20 minutes, but then I played the course and every now and then would pop out of my round into the editor (they make it fairly easy to do so), and move some things around, adjust where fairway bunkers are located, change some elevations and pitches around the green. I tried to design a decent bit of risk/reward into the course. There's a par 4 potentially reachable in 1, but you'd have to run it up onto the green and thread the needle between some bunkers. I have several fairways where if you go driver you'll bring fairway bunkers into play, so it might be wiser to grab a 5 wood and lay up, or go for it and try to set up a pitch to the green. That kind of stuff. It's my first course made in the game, so I'm sure I made a bunch of mistakes designing it that I'll learn from.

The Golf Club (low settings)

I probably shouldn't dip again into early access, but I was really jonesing for a golf game, so I scooped up The Golf Club. It's early access, and very early access at that, so there are a ton of missing features, but it is quite playable and I'm liking it so far. I really like the game mechanics. It's not the standard 3 click swing fare. There is no power meter. You aim with the left stick, swing with the right. Pull down on the stick for backswing, push forward to let it fly. It's easy enough to do basic full power shots, but 3/4 shots, slices and hooks (performed my pushing not entirely straight up), and other touch shots are a lot trickier. It's harder to master than the standard 3 click fare and the game is better for it, in my opinion. I haven't tried using the mouse to swing yet, I read it's quite tricky at the moment, and all the prompts are right now based around a controller. The ghost ball multiplayer is pretty great since anyone can drop in or out whenever they want and play at their own pace, and you can play against already finished rounds. The course creator is missing a bunch of features right now, but even in its current state it's pretty robust and very user friendly. It will procedurally generate a course accorning to a few settings in seconds, and from there you can fiddle with each individual hole to your heart's content. It's a Unity game and not particularly well optimized at this point. Graphical settings, at the moment, are limited to resolution, windowed or full screen, low, medium, and high, no advanced settings whatsoever. On my lappy (i7-3630QM, GT 650M 2GB GDDR5) it runs nice and smooth on low settings, choppy on medium, and slideshow on high. Anyway, I took a chance and so far I don't feel like I wasted my money. The game certainly has a ton of potential.