Keyrock

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.

It's being published, not developed, by Namco Bandai, who also published Dark Souls. Dark Souls was developed by From Software, Lords of the Fallen is being developed by Deck 13.

I liked that the battles looked methodical and strategic, sort of like Dark Souls, but a bit faster (which seems fitting since they've compared the game to Dark Souls ad nauseam). I'm down with a combat that's more a chess match than just button mashing. I already stated I could do without the dodge rolling, so we're in agreement in that regard. Anyway, bottom line is that I watched the video and my brain went "that looks like something I'd enjoy playing". /shrugs

Yeah, from the full on goofball fun of Ankh and Jack Keane to the gritty, soul crushing Lords of the Fallen. It's quite the change in tone. I guess Venetica was the transitional game, somewhat serious but still with definite lighthearted moments. Anyway, that trailer is the first thing shown about this game that made me genuinely excited for it. I could do without the dodge roll (thanks Twitcher 2), but otherwise it looks pretty dang good.

New Lords of the Fallen trailer:

"Gameplay" Trailer: I put "gameplay" in quotes since there's maybe 15 total seconds of gameplay in that 2 minute long trailer. They made Laliana extra sexy in this one. Maybe to make up for ugly-fying Morrigan?

Who's Jin-Roh?

Wiped out Shishak and his bandit goons and rescued Mitay. Shishak and 4 goons were in the garage, so I found a spot with partial cover around the other side of a car, lobbed a grenade before they realized what was up, then darted into cover. The blast took out 4 of the creeps (luckily, Mitay had a wall between him and the blast) and I gunned down the last chump with my LR-300 before he could get his bearings. After that it was a simple matter of grabbing a good spot with partial cover across from the one and only entrance into the garage and gunning chumps down as they tried to enter. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, except they were bandits in a garage. I used up nearly 200 rounds of ammo, but took only minimal damage. Mitay is free, bandits are dead, I get paid, and I get to keep the artifact. Everybody wins... except the bandits. I'll stash the artifact in my personal box until I feel like returning to Zaton, then I'll sell it to Beard for major profit. With that I should easily have enough scratch for a SEVA suit which I'll need eventually to get through the Jupiter Underground into Pripyat. There's just no going through there without a SEVA suit. I'm not nearly at that stage of the game yet (got some mutant and artifact hunting to take care of first), but it's something to keep in mind. I look forward to the journey through the underground to Pripyat, as it's one of the more intense parts of the game.

I wanted to get it but I need confirmation that it isn't more of the same as the first one. By "more of the same" do you mean similar gameplay or abysmal PC port?

Box Art Revealed:

You can be diplomatic? Yes. You can pay the ransom, either with the artifact or the money. One of the guards will shake you down on the way out, but it you plan it out and have very little money on you on your way out then it matters little. I'll likely do it the violent way. Pretend like I'm going to pay the ransom, then gun down Shishak and the other guards in the room, then wipe out all the other bandits in the compound. I'll go through tons of ammo, but it shouldn't be too taxing a fight, considering how much better equipped I am than any of the chumps there, and all loot I'll get off the corpses should pay for the ammo I've gone through and any repairs, not to mention that I'll get to keep the artifact.

I'm debating whether I should be diplomatic with the hostage crisis in Call of Pripyat or whether I should pretend to be diplomatic and slaughter all the bandits there for maximum profit.