Keyrock

Changed my oil and did some minor repairs on my car. Not fun, but it had to be done. The weekend looks like a washout anyway as it's been pouring most of the day and that's not supposed to change tomorrow. I'll be a shut-in the rest of the weekend and watching March Madness.

This should be really tough sledding for Dayton, but go Flyers!

That is beyond adorable!

Gołąbki and bigos. Double the cabbage, double the pleasure!

Aaaarg, it's so hard to choose which game to watch. Both the Louisville/Kentucky and Virginia/Mich St. games are hella exciting. Damn you NCAA for scheduling two really entertaining games at the same time. Damn youuuuuuuuuuu!!!

Yup, that super long regular season of America's Pastime America's Second Favorite America's Third Favorite sport is upon us. So how about that Miguel Cabrera deal? Holy ****ing ****. Don't get me wrong, Miggy is a terrific player, but that contract is INSANE. The guy is 30 years old. 30! What are the chances the Tigers are regretting that deal 5 years from now? 80%? 95%?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI0icFKbjiI If I had the time to lose An open mind and time to choose Would you care to take a look Or can you read me like a book?

To each their own, I thoroughly enjoy watching the sun go down slowly and the world get progressively darker (or the sun go up and the world get progressively lighter), I just feel it happens too fast in 95% of games. I should not notice dusk starting out, then 2 minutes later pitch dark. Conversely, when I'm in a dangerous area, particularly if the game implements more dangerous/frequent encounters at night, and sensing dawn coming, the desperate want for the sun to come over the horizon adds a lot to my experience, and it would add more if it happened more slowly and not in 5 minutes. That feeling of "dawn is coming soon, I just need to survive for another half hour", that's what I'm looking for. I get it to some degree, but when that half hour is actually 3 minutes, it's not nearly as meaningful.

Using wait/rest function to turn it into whatever time of day you want is irrelevant to this conversation. You can do that with whatever ratio. You want to talk about breaking immersion, that's as breaking immersion as it gets. There is no wait/rest function in true immersion. 1:1 is not a realistic ratio for gaming. No one never plays for 24 hours straight... No one sane, that is. Realistically I see a LONG gaming session as 3-4 hours straight at most . The "best" immersion in my mind would be to make that one session feel like a day, thus a 1:6 or 1:8 ratio, somewhere in that ballpark. That way you play through a long gaming session (and 3-4 hours is a long time to game without a break, it really is) and feel like you just played a whole day's worth of game.

Props to the Cyclones for getting back into it, they figured out the UCONN D toward the end. Unfortunately for them, they dug such a deep hole for themselves that it was simply too late by then. It got to the point that Iowa St. was forced to play the fouling game, and it was clear they didn't want to, Fred Hoiberd is a smart guy, he knows that's a losing game. UCONN is just much too good a free throw shooting team. The Huskies went 17 for 18 from the stripe down the stretch. It's funny how often free throw shooting gets overlooked and how often it decides games. This "#7" seed is headed to the Elite 8, where they always belonged as one of the best 20 teams in the country.

1:1 ratio is insane and unrealistic. A 1:6 ratio would be more feasible, where 1 hour is 10 minutes and a day lasts 4 hours. A single, long gaming session might last 1 game day, which would work quite well, methinks.

UCONN up by 17 with 14 minutes to go. It's not over, but it's looking really good for the Huskies. That's a really big deficit to overcome for the Cyclones. Edit: Iowa St. made a push and got it back to 10 really quickly, but they desperately needed to get it to single digits by about the 10 minute to go mark and just could never get past being down 10. Now the Huskies have pushed it back up to a 14 point lead with less than 8 minutes to go. The game is nearly over. It would take a monster run from the Cyclones to claw their way back into it now. Edit 2: Cyclones got it down to 7 with 4 1/2 left. Not over yet. The problem for Iowa St. is that UCONN is now in the bonus and they're a good free throw shooting team.

Seems like we (IA State) are rushing things to much and not properly doing plays. There seems to always be a lot of blue at the rebounds. UCONN came out ON FIRE shooting the ball, then cooled off a bit, I can't expect them to keep shooting lights out. It's really the defense that's the key to UCONN's game, though. The Huskies have been rebounding well and blocking or disrupting tons of shots. If UCONN can keep that up I feel good about our chances. Hoiberg's a good coach, though, he'll make adjustments. I really hate I have to root against the Cyclones. I wish they were playing someone else so I could be cheering them. Iowa St. caught 2 bad breaks, the first being losing Niang, the second in running into a UCONN team seeded 7 when they're really a 4 or 5 seed team. Had UCONN been seeded properly they wouldn't be playing the Cyclones right now.

UCONN up by 10 at the half and looking very impressive. Lots of basketball left to play, though, so I'm not feeling comfortable. The Cyclones are very capable of going on a big run.

Yes! Verne Lundquist and Bill Raftery are doing the UCONN/Iowa St. game. Onions! Edit: Yes, we get Allie LaForce for this game too. They brought out the A team for this one.

My new Might & Magic X party: I went with an all-might party. No mercenary because, holy smokes that class sucks, they can't grandmaster any weapon, so I replaced the merc with another barbarian. Warrior difficulty, as usual. Having almost no magic whatsoever will definitely present challenges. Wish me luck!

There is something fundamentally wrong with society when Keyrock doesn't have an interest in playing games .....I am worried...is this the end of days The seventh seal has been broken...

I take that you are implying some people actively want Dragon Age: Inquisition to fail? Undoubtedly the Shandenfreude Faction does indeed exist, though I wouldn't count myself among them. I will be thrilled if DA:I winds up being spectacularly good. I would much rather have a great game than whatever erection I could get from schadenfreude. I'm just not giving BioWare the benefit of the doubt.

Would you say that this game is the Greatest Of All Time?

RiffTrax + Sharknado? This news is so awesome that a high five gif won't do, this deserves EPIC PREDATOR HANDSHAKE!

^ I wouldn't have expected every little decision to have an impact on the endings, like whether generic female crew member (Ashley) or generic male crew member (Kaidan) dies, or whether you choose Udina or Anderson, or whether you kill the terrorists or save the scientists, but I figured some of the major choices may be reflected in the endings. Did you cure the Genophage? Doesn't matter. Did the Gith make nice with the Quarians? Makes no difference. More importantly, they advertised the importance of the choices on the ending right up until launch, it was one of their major talking points and they went out of their way to stress it every time they pimped ME3 then delivered something completely different. BioWare flat out lied to their customers. Not to mention that the ending was complete and utter nonsense. "Hey, you sentient being always wind up making machines that will ultimately kill you, so to solve that problem I made these machines to kill you." That's like some **** straight out of a Douglas Adams book.

Hello chap, how's the weather? Now, let me introduce myself: I'm an emeny of man. The weather is fine. How is it being an agent of Satan? I bet your days are simply fascinating. Most fascinating indeed, my good sir. The latest developments in making teenage girls the largest consumer demographic has really produced excellent results. While i do appriciate the large surge of damned souls, or clients as we like call them here at the 'human decency regression'-department, i cannot help to worry about the rather homonegenous nature of the clientele. They all seem to be very fond of business venture called "Bioware", which is not bad in itself, but i am afraid that if this trend continues, we will not meet our diversity quota before Halloween. After all, we are all seriously committed to meet the standards of Hell having a multicultural environment according the last directive by management. You have get with the times, you know, and all that. Hail Satan, and Tallyhoo! I tip my hat to you, good sir. You have just won the internet.

It sucks that I'm going to have to root against the Cyclones tonight, because Fred Hoiberg is so likable. I can't root against the Huskies, though. Go UCONN!

Hey, if there are suckers people out there willing to pay that then more power to them.

The 3 ending being basically identical but with a different color explosion in ME3 was quite pathetic, but that wasn't the worst part of it. What was the biggest kick to the balls was that the entire time during ME3's development, right up until just before launch, BioWare was touting how all the choices you made in ME1 and ME2 and during ME3 will have an impact on the trilogy's ending and you will get a "personalized" ending, then delivered the polar opposite of that by making all your choices, previous to choosing what color explosion you'd like to see, completely and utterly irrelevant. So you'll have to forgive me if I don't take BioWare's claims on the endings of DA:I at face value.