Keyrock

Been continuing to play a bit of Might & Magic X and a lot of Saints Row IV. Might & Magic X needs a lot of tuning and balancing, but I'm having fun with it. Saints Row IV is absolutely ludicrous and I freakin' love it. I mean, I got to pilot a spaceship inside of a bigger spaceship while listening to mutha****ing Haddaway. I'm about 8 hours in, but I haven't progressed the main story too far because I'm having too much fun collecting data clusters, doing side activities (there is a metric ****ton of them), and just causing hilarious mayhem all over Cyber Steelport.

Blasphemy! Hickman is a writer responsible for the Dragonlance series and also one of the absolutely best D&D modules ever: Ravenloft. Next to Planescape and Al-Qadim, Ravenloft is my favorite D&D setting.

The botanical garden factory, sunrise flower farm, I presume, is breathtaking. RPS has higher res pictures, I'm just too lazy to go through the steps necessary to link to the higher res versions.

Screenies! /picks jaw up off floor

Yeah, hirelings don't do anything in combat, they provide other bonuses, like letting you spot enemies at a greater distance or making it harder for enemies to spot you, giving you a free rest (no supplies used), letting you carry more lootz, etc. I'm still sad I can't hire the Goblin chef right now. Hopefully they fix that bug soon, I want him in my party so bad. I'm going through the lighthouse right now. Weapons and armor break way too often. It's made it so that I have begun to meta-game the game, which is something I don't generally do. Another thing they will need to tune before the release. Overall though, I'm having a fun time playing this game.

R.A. Salvatore is pretty meh in my book (pun intended).

Super Saiyan President: The 'Merica Weapon is pretty awesome, it's a machine gun, rocket launcher, and flame thrower all at the same time:

It all depends on where you live and where it ships from. Generally the free shipping option winds up being either UPS Ground, FedEx Ground, or DHL to USPS. If the place it ships from is close enough to you, it will wind up getting to you 1 day after it ships, despite shipping via the "slowest" option available. If it needs to ship all the way across the country then it may take as much as 5 days. Anyway, glad you got the game quickly. SR4 is what I'm been playing 80% of the time at the moment, the other 20% is spent playing M&M X.

That video has all the marketing buzzwords, all of them. It definitely sounds good, but any excitement that may ignite is quickly doused by the memory of the promises I've heard from BioWare in the past and how things really turned out (e.g. the personalized ending that reflected all my choices throughout the series I was promised for ME3). If the promises they make here actually come to fruition, then I'll get excited.

Man Uses Samurai Sword To Break Down Door And Throws Knives At Family Members Over Can Of Shrimp They make canned shrimp? Ewww! Typical Florida.

Presidential Style:

Sawx called up Xander Bogaers to the majors yesterday. Bogaerts is a shortstop and generally considered the Sawx top prospect and the reason why they were able to trade away Iglesias without a second thought. Bogaets is the youngest player to play for the Sawx since Dwight Evans some 40 years ago. Middlebrooks has been hot since getting the call back up, so it's unlikely he'll be losing any playing time to Bogaerts, more likely it will be Stephen Drew splitting time with Bogaerts.

It would be anti-competitive to brick and mortar stores that have stricter schedules. Which would make sense were they actually selling boxed versions in Europe, which they are not.

Yeah, in the age of digital distribution, the different release dates for different regions is just plain ludicrous, especially since the EU version, unlike the Aussie alien drug-free version, is probably identical to the NA version except for a PEGI rating screen.

So Saint's Row IV released earlier today at midnight (in The States, anyway) and I decided to stay up late last night to get my grubby little digital hands on it. I'm definitely paying the price for it a bit today (lack of sleep and all), but it was worth it, oh it was so worth it. I didn't play nearly enough to give anything approaching a review, but for now here are some early impressions for those wondering what all the buzz is about. As the vast majority of professional reviews have stated, it's fun, it's really fun, even before you get super powers, it's fun. There is a particular 50s America sequence early on that had me doubled over laughing then grinning from ear to ear. While the graphics are definitely showing their age, they're not bad, it's the same graphics as SR3. The voice acting work is fantastic as usual. While I miss my Russian lady boss, having a female president with a thick French accent and saying things like "merde" is great. Zynyak, in particular, has been an absolute delight to listen to. I like the little touches. Most games have 2 different movement speeds when using a controller, depending on how far you push the analog stick, basically walk and run. In SR4 the walking speed has a lot of increments depending on how far you push the analog stick, right down to hilariously super slo-mo. Right off the bat the game starts poking fun at other games and pop culture. Mass Effect, in particular seems to be a big target. It's never done in a mean or condescending way, though, more of a fun loving, wink wink way. Super powers are a game changer. Holy smokes are they fun! tl;dr version of my initial feelings on SR4: I'll post further thoughts as I get deeper and a thorough review once I finish the game.

LOL, I remember the real-time M&M games had mountain loads of exploits you could use, not that the turn-based games didn't have exploits. A lot of games have a certain range enemies will travel in and a point they would not go beyond no matter what, you could get them to that invisible "border" and pelt them with arrows as they would run toward you then turn around to walk back to their regular location over and over again. I haven't found anything I'd go so far as label an exploit in M&M X yet, mostly I use clever manipulation of the grid-based movement system and terrain to get melee enemies in a position where i can pelt them with arrows from afar and to get to within melee range on range attack using enemies without them getting free shots on me, or as few free shots as possible. I don't really think of that as an exploit, that's just being smart on how you use the grid.

Nice win for the Sawx last night. More importantly, it was great to see Lester pitch well again. That was one of his best outings of the entire season. After getting off to a good start, Lester had been decidedly mediocre over the last couple of months. He looked like an ace on the mound last night. That's the Lester the team is going to need in October.

Might & Magic X - I'm only a short bit into the game, but it feels decidedly old school Might & Magic. That's a good thing.

Yeah, I pulled the trigger myself also. The Uplay thing is a bummer, but pirates/hackers will take care of it for me. They'll be a cracked exe out in the wild within days, if there isn't one already. At least you can play it in offline mode for the time being. The game itself is pretty cool. Here are some of my thoughs: 1) It's old school Might & Magic, it feels like old school Might & Magic, it looks like old school Might & Magic, except much prettier, it plays like old school Might & Magic. 2) As Hurlshot mentioned, the graphics are not amazing, but they are quite pleasant to look at. The interface is decidedly old school, but quite user friendly and makes navigation quite speedy. 3) Day/night cycle is crazy exaggerated right now. I know it needs to be exaggerated to make resting abilities/supplies valuable, but it's straight up ridiculous as it stands right now. It's alpha so they have plenty of time to tune it. 4) I love the old school style changing portraits to reflect status effects. 5) Occasionally the enemies will freeze and the game will break when you use the air blast to push enemies back. Again, bugs are to be expected in an alpha. 6) Even with the limited number of abilities I have at this low level, there is a surprising amount of tactical decisions to be made in combat between drawing aggro on a certain character, pushing enemies back, manipulating the environment to force ranged enemies to enter melee, putting up shields, entangling enemies, etc. 7) Make sure you get every character some kind of ranged weapon skill early on (either at creation or level 2), it will help you immensely. That one is pretty much common sense. Anyway, I'm liking the game so far. I wanted old school Might & Magic and so far I've gotten old school Might & Magic, so I can't really complain.

For 320 BioWare points you can buy a friendship token. For 800 BioWare points you can buy a flirt token. Friendship token can be traded in for a 1% chance at romance, flirt tokens for a 3% chance at romance.

Once you have it, can you confirm that the UPlay requirement is indeed only a one time activation after which you never need UPlay again (hopefully without even needing the client, just going through a browser)? If so I can live with that, if I need UPlay running in addition to Steam then no sale.

So, umm, yeah. I'm going to be one of those few people that thinks they should just go the full Shepard for combat. Obviously isometric, IE-style full party control combat ain't gonna happen, as much as most of us would like that. If they go all the way third-person actiony combat and have your companions act like squad-mates in ME, I think that would actually work.

But if you'd called a white guy a "cracker," a few eyebrows would have definitely raised. In my experiences, no. My point is this, the derogatory term I used, which was all asterisks, by the way, was leveled at a character who is obviously a villain and a murderer. If I had called Mother Teresa a derogatory term then I would understand people finding it distasteful being accusatory. Would anyone by up in arms if I had called Charles Manson a derogatory term?

I guarantee that if I had referred to a heterosexual male character with an obscentiy (such as a-hole or <word referring to genitalia>) then no one would have so much as raised an eyebrow. It's all good if straight men are spat upon, but heaven forbid if one should use a derogatory term toward a female, one well deserving of said derogatory term, I might add, or worse yet, someone falling into the LGBTI group. Obviously then said person must be a monster. Now, who exactly is being discriminatory?