Keyrock

In fairness, item duplication infinite money exploits are a staple of the RPG genre. There are dozens of RPGs that have had such an exploit.

Yea.. because the word 'pagan' means the festival wasn't religious.... Point taken, but what I meant is that christians adapted a festival dedicated to Cybele into a holiday dedicated to the resurrection of Jesus. It's always been religious, but it originally served a completely different purpose than it does now. Christians repurposed a festival to a completely different goddess into a holiday for their lord and saviour because the time frame sort of coincided and there was conflict between the pagan worshippers and the christians in christianity's early years, so while the christians initially tried to abolish the festival they adapted it to their own purpose as a compromise.

Mars' gravity is too little and would cause many long term arterial, cardiovascular and bone related health problems, human bodies are not designed to live in near zero gravity environments, I don't think sustained life could be possible up there. Not to mention due to the immense UV and x-ray radiation because of the missing magnetic shielding you couldn't leave your habitat for very long. A long term solution would be building underground habitats. Sustained human life wouldn't be possible that way, you'd better of living on the moon. I think we would adapt. Mars' gravity is a little more than 1/3 of Earth's gravity. The first several generations living there would indeed have serious problems, but eventually the humans' on Mars bodies would change in accordance to the gravity present and to those humans (Martians at that point, for all intensive purposes) that gravity would be normal. Now, if they ever went to Earth they'd have severe problems.

The religious aspect of Easter is, at best, iffy, considering, like so many religious holidays, it was adapted from a pagan fastival.

Not necessarily. With artificial lighting you could grow food inside the ship and you could set up a filtration system to recycle fluids. It would be extremely difficult (not to mention prohibitively expensive) with our current technology, but it's not inconceivable for the near future.

Went through the bloodsucker lair. I'll be back with some gas later (/rubs hands together). Then I went to the substation workshops. I gave Hatchet some food, it's a small price to pay to get the fine tools, plus a firefight with those mercs would have been very detrimental to my health with my current gear. While I was in the area I also visited the Iron Forest and the crash site there. That takes care of all the crash sites in Zaton. It's almost time for me to move on up to some meaner and nastier areas, and with fine tools I was able to upgrade my SVD and my TRs-301 (zorry, Zoraptor) LR-300 to serious killing machine levels. I often leave the SVD behind in my stash, opting to carry a shotgun in addition to the assault rifle or submachine gun I almost always lug around and not wanting to take on the extra weight that comes with carrying the SVD in addition to my other 2 weapons, especially since it's mostly completely unnecessary at this stage of the game. Still, it's well worth upgrading for the few times I do bring it along for a specific purpose, like when I cleared out the mercs at the waste processing station. I set up on to the catwalk above the bridge, as far away from the station as I could, then sniped most of the mercs from there. When I went into the station to finish the job, only 2 mercs were left alive and I cleaned them up nice and easy. That would have been 5 times as hard without my trusty SVD.

Unlike in the video, we do only one tap in our egg battles, and we use the round end (using the pointy end is cheating).

We do the egg battles in our family. Egg battles are pretty fun. Maybe it's a Eastern European thing, since I'm Polish.

Time for me to head to the bloodsucker lair in Call of Pripyat. It's an easy mission, but that place gives me the creeps.

The biggest con I can see is that it's a locked chip, so no OCing. If you don't plan to OC, then that's a moot point. I might think about doing something similar when it's time for me to build, several months down the line, since integrated graphics is completely useless to me.

To me that's step 1 before we do anything interstellar, or even make manned journeys to the far reaches of our own solar system. We expend an enormous amount of energy escaping the Earth's gravity well. Starting the journey from the moon would save massive amounts of fuel.

Nice. That would be a fairly cold place to live, based on the amount of energy it's getting from its star, though there may be other forces at work heating it, such as tidal friction or a run away greenhouse effect.

Dynasty Warriors 8 coming to PC in May

The Clippers/Warriors series should be fun to watch. That, to me, seems like the most fun of the 1st round series. At least, on paper.

The combat itself, once the shooting starts, in Call of Pripyat, or any of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games is pretty mediocre, in my opinion. Everything leading up to the combat is absolutely brilliant. Trying to remain unseen and silent, crawling through the reeds, peeking around a wall, hearing sounds and trying to pinpoint their source, finding a good vantage point and looking for a good spot of cover to snipe from. Going through all the preparation only to have a blowout approach screwing everything up and turning things into a frantic scramble to get to shelter without getting gunned down.

Here you go, Bruce

More Call of Pripyat. I made my way to the first helicopter crash site, the one near the sawmill. I should have just went there when I was at the sawmill getting tools for Cardan, it would have saved me a walk. Oh well. After that, I went to the snork filled caverns to get snag's container. Easy peasy. Of course, I didn't give the container to Snag, because I'm shady like that, instead I had Cardan open it for me for a small fee. I kept what I needed and sold the rest, giving me enough scratch to upgrade my SVD and Viper 5 to acceptable killing machine levels. Next up I'm going to do The Hit. I had tipped off Beard earlier, so I'm going to wipe out the bandits. The weaponry I have now will be acceptable for a while. The SVD is a mean murder machine, but obviously rather situational. The Viper 5, which I like much better than the 74/2U you start with, is quite effective at short to medium range. I don't mind that it loses accuracy very rapidly at longer ranges, that's what I carry a sniper rifle around for. I like that the Viper 5 doesn't have a wild amount of recoil so that I can neatly land 3 or 4 shot bursts and rarely waste many bullets. The stopping power is... acceptable. I'm not going to waste any more money on upgrading it beyond the basic upgrades I've already had done to it, since I'll likely wind up getting something better relatively soon. My main goal right now is to get some better armor than the sunrise bodysuit you start with.

This very much mirrors my own rant on the game some months ago when I played it, except you did it in a much more calm and rational manner, whereas my rant was a lot more bitter and hate fueled. The game skews heavily toward everything I hated about the Tomb Rider series (combat) and away from everything I loved about the series (exploration, puzzle platforming). It's a well made game, but it's a cover shooter masquerading as a Tomb Raider game, not actually a Tomb Raider game.

Same here. The difference between winning and losing would have been the price of a cup of coffee, but I'll gladly keep that in my wallet. I need to set aside a weekend to jump back into Zeus, not this weekend, though, since I'll be away visiting my folks.

Sweet. Now I can finish up my globetrotting adventure with George and Nico. Cool. I probably won't play it for a few weeks, though.

Yeah, the end game stuff isn't the greatest, but I'm a very long way off from that and the journey there is so worth it. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games create there amazing dynamic moments of tension and desperation. Slowly stumbling, wounded, irradiated, out of breath, out of first aid kits, toward Yanov Station. Hearing a blowout approaching and desperately trying to make it to shelter while muties chase you. The first time encountering a chimera. Good times.

I was off by 2 bucks. I just found out this is a $2.99 DLC.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat with a few mods, nothing game changing though. I'm using AtmosFear 3, which, in addition to making things look prettier, does change the weather patters and introduces a new storm type, but doesn't radically change the game, and Absolute Nature 3 and Particle Paradise, which are strictly graphical mods. The Zone is an eerily beautiful place, but if you stop for too long to admire it, it will kill you. I've only just started. I got the artifact from the Dredge, then made my way to the Sawmill and scooped up the basic toolkit for Cardov. I thought about taking out most, or all, of the zombies there to make getting the toolkit that much easier, but there are just so many of them there that I would have chewed up all my ammo in the process. Granted, I could recoup some of that with all the goodies off the corpses. Instead I opted for a sneaky approach until I got close, took out a couple zombie stalkers that were in my way, sprinted inside the building and up the ladder, grabbed all the goods up there, including the toolkit, fired a few rounds to get their attention and draw as many zombies into the building as possible, then hopped out through a window and made my escape nice and clean. While I was in the area, I went ahead and scooped up the SVD hidden behind the tree near the gate. Now that I have a legit sniper rifle, it's on like neck bone. When I got the artifact from the Dredge, I completed the mission the shady way by giving Tuna the artifact, chasing him for a bit, then gunning him down and taking the artifact back. I think I got far enough away that his two mugger buddies didn't see me gun him down, but I'm not sure. Either way, now that I have the SVD, I may just go back over toward the Dredge and kill both of them from a good safe distance and loot their corpses for profit. Hey, they were going to gun me down if I didn't hand over the artifact, they have it coming.

I thought he was changed his name to Snoop Lion? Now he's back to Snoop Dogg? Is he a dog or a lion? I need to know these things. I'm guessing this voice pack will be a $4.99 DLC?

I scraped snow and ice off my windshield this morning on April 16th. I really hate this god forsaken hellhole called Connecticut. I've lived here long enough that getting snow in mid-April isn't a shock, it happens roughly 1/3 of the years, but it's really depressing.