Keyrock

I've hit the dreaded refine limit again today, probably will again tomorrow. These double AD events are great. Once I dye my boots and once I get purple slotted pants and shirt, I'll buy some black dye and dye the shirt and pants black. I think that will go good with the color scheme I have going on now. I basically have nearly enough to get the final nightmare dye pack now, but I'm waiting to get Zen at a good price. The key to the AD to Zen exchange is patience. If you can wait a few days then someone will come along that's desperate enough for AD and has no patience that you can get them at a low price. For selling horses, a staple of Keyrock Astral Exchange Enterprices, LLC*, it's finding the sweet spot buyout price that will entice someone with no patience to scoop it up while you still get good profit. Set your buyout price too high and no one will jump at it and while people will get into a bidding war over the regular buy price, you'll almost always wind up with significantly less profit. Set the buyout price too low and you're leaving money on the table. I've pretty much got that price dialed in to where my horses always sell within a day or two for the buyout price and I earn mucho dinero. *Keyrock Astral Exchange Enterprises, LLC. is a subsidiary of Keyrock Global Domination Corporation (KGDC on Nasdaq). All rights reserved.

Getting ready to whoop up on the Forest Shadow in Jade Empire. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIReSB3vEdQ

Whoa, it's not just a myth! I actually got a coalescent ward from a coffer of augmentation (along with a rank 4 azure, which is perfect since azure and dark are what I'm after). This will let me fuse a 3rd lesser lifedrinker enchantment. Then I'll need 3 more lifedrinker shards (I'll have one left over after this fusion) and 2 more coalescent wards and I'll be able to fuse a 4th lesser lifedrinker enchantment then fuse the 4 of them into a lifedrinker enchantment and slot that badboy into my axe. A lesser lifedrinker adds 4.4% extra damage and gives you the same amount as healing, I'm guessing a regular lifedrinker probably does around 7 or 8%. Add that to my current 9.5% lifesteal and that kind of thing really adds up when you're damaging 4 or 5 enemies at the same time with wide sweeping slashes. If I slot all my defense slots with rank 7 dark enchantments (that will take quite a bit of time and effort), I think I can get lifesteal close to 15%. Add to that the boost I get from the Acolyte of Kelemvor and the lifedrinker enchantment and, outside of massive damage boss special attacks, I'll be nearly invincible since I'll heal faster than enemies can damage me.

I think of them as gun holsters. Now I just need some guns. This is what the gauntlets look like once dyed:

Yeah, it worked, I got the email and the dye pack. Thanks LadyC. I went ahead and dyed the gauntlets. Pretty soon I'll have enough AD to convert to Zen to get that last dye pack and complete the outfit coloring process.

I'm using the nightmare dye packs on my main. I've already dyed my chest piece and helmet, just need to do the greaves and gauntlets. It's more or less the same color scheme as the default look of the armor, but a lot more vibrant and pronounced.

I've run into the dreaded daily refine limit myself. I suppose it's not a bad problem to have. The dye packs would make my main character's armor look horrifically gaudy, though it works on my laborer wizard's outfit nicely: I'll hold on to the rest of the dye packs and a month or two down the line, when people have used them all up, sell them for a nice premium on the AH.

The value consoles tend to provide later in their cycle is that development has matured and there's a good library of games that are now available for it. What you describe happens every console platform, and the consoles still get the big booms in terms of software sold, while the PC tends to keep on chugging along. Yes, you and I can go "hey, the console won't be as powerful in a few years." But I don't think most people care. Whether or not the perception is accurate/fair, consoles tend to push a lot more in sales for this reason and I would contend that it's mostly only the more tech savvy that will even recognize that their PC is more versatile, let alone have the desire to actually set it up in the living room as the multimedia entertainment box. I'm not debating your point, I was strictly speaking from a hardware point of view, as my post indicated. Also, while developers learn to push the console tech as far as it can go, others also learn to push the existing (superior) PC tech as far as it can go. Anyway, point is that I have nothing against consoles, but I recogniose that they're a stagnant target spec wise, while PC is a target that's always moving. The PC model is definitely mot always he superior model for game development, in fact, often it is not.

The quintessential Iron Maiden Mix (Originally I wanted to narrow this down to 10 songs, but 10 songs for Maiden is ridiculously inadequate, so I went with 20, which is still inadequate, but not nearly as much). Anyway, in no particular order: Phantom of the Opera Prowler Killers Remember Tomorrow Invaders 22 Acacia Avenue Run to the Hills Number of the Beast 2 Minutes to Midnight Flight of Icarus Die With Your Boots On Revelations The Trooper Powerslave The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner The Clairvoiant Alexander the Great Seventh Son of a Seventh Son Fear of the Dark Sign of the Cross Iron Maiden aficionados, let me know if I made any mistakes (obviously this is all opinion, but I want to know yours). If you feel I missed a song you need to replace one of the ones on my list. As a side note, Somewhere in Time has the most badass cover art: Nothing can top futuristic exoskeleton Eddie.

Started another game of Deux Ex: Human Revolution. While the game is far from ugly, it immediately struck me just how... ... primitive the graphics are compare to something like The Witcher 2. The rectangular, segmented, shape of the bodies in the game is jarring, to say the least. Not, Morrowind levels of segmented bodies, but jarring compared to the high-end levels of today. Ironically some of the textures are quite impressive, too bad they're stuck on such primitive models. Still, doesn't make the game any less enjoyable.

The thing about consoles, is that they ironically tend to offer the best value for the money, from a strictly hardware perspective, when they are first released, which is also when they are the most expensive. At launch a console often sells at very little profit, no profit, or even a loss. As production costs go down and parts become cheaper they start to turn a profit. A couple of years down the line when the console drops a hundred bucks in price, the components it is made of have dropped 150 buck in price. The down side is that what is presented at launch is what you're stuck with for the console cycle. Even if a hardware revision is made with somewhat better components, games are still made with the lowest common denominator in mind (i.e. the launch specs). So while the PS4, or even the XBone, may offer great value at launch, they're locked into that setup for the next 5 or 6 years. Meanwhile, a year and a half from now you could buy a somewhat better PC for the same price. Four years from now you could buy a PC that blows either console out of the water for the same price. And that's not counting that, even with PS4's and XBone's expanded multimedia capabilities, a PC is still a FAR more versatile piece of equipment.

I hope they bring back the President Skroob greeting: Edit: Also, I hope they have better tattoos, like in SR2. The selection and quality of tattoos really dropped off between SR2 and SR3.

I know, I'm bummed that it seems the Russian female voice isn't coming back, unless they're getting someone other than Tara Platt to do it. The prospect of a female American President with a thick Russian accent had me feeling all sorts of tingly inside. The "Southern Belle" voice better be a super over the top southern drawl to make up for it.

I'm hoping for a possible Oleg love scene. Tastefully done, of course.

Keith Mutha ****ing David delivers the goods yet again.

They're running an event starting now and through the weekend: http://nw.perfectworld.com/news/?p=929631 Personally, I don't much care for fireworks or the stupid looking star mask, but I'm down for some free dye packs and double AD. In other news, I finally got around to making another character, a dwarven control wizard (because ironic or whatever). He's there simply as a laborer to run jobs through the gateway and get me more AD. I got him up to lev 10 so he can do jobs, now I just need to get him 1 more level so he can invoke his deity and get free AD.

While it has already happened with several, much smaller scale and lower publicity, Kickstarter projects, the "oh ****, we wound up with a lot less money than we anticipated" drama inevitably has to play out a few times with bigger projects in the limelight for companies doing these projects to become a lot more cautious and calculating with their rewards and budgets.

The budgeting problems for Broken Age are definitely a concern for a backer, like myself. In the end, if Tim & Co. deliver something on the level of Grim Fandango, or even Full Throttle, then all will be forgiven, as far as I'm concerned.

Ulukai, I sure have.

They had some great hotspots for Insurance Fraud in SR2, particularly ones that included a freeway overpass. You'd get steady high speed traffic and the potential of getting launched hundreds of feet into the air and off the overpass for more hang time. I've gotten a good 8 or 9 seconds of hang time off of getting plowed by a bus at like 70 mph off the overpass. Good times.

Agreed. There's nothing really challenging in the entire game. That doesn't prevent the game from being a blast to play, but I wouldn't have minded some challenge, at least in some of the optional stuff like the activities/distractions.

Not sure. The only activity I had any real problem with was Hard Mayhem, and only until I got unlimited ammo for the rocket launcher, at which point it became a piece of cake. The Sad Panda Skydiving gave me a bit of trouble the first couple of tries until I figured it out. Insurance Fraud is the greatest. Getting ragdolled into oblivion will never be not fun.

Yeah, it's pretty sad when I have to go through these measures just to play a game I bought. But hey, on the bright side, at least this stonewalled the pirates dead in their tracks. Oh wait, no it didn't, it didn't have any effect whatsoever. I guess the silver lining of being forced to use a crack is that I don't even have to turn on Steam to play the game now. Anyway, Playing Jade Empire and loving the **** out of it. I even enjoy the little shmup mini-games. I want a sequel to JE so bad. I'm still in the very early stages, just started chapter 2. I'm looking forward to getting my axes so I can start cleaving chumps up with style. For now I just slice them up with my claws, Enter the Dragon style. I'm pretty much going full on closed fist so I get to be a massive a-hole to everyone. Good times. One thing really jarring about the game is how much crappier the movies look than the rest of the game. I know it's a product of the game getting HD-ified from the original XBox version, while the movies stayed the same, but it's so insanely noticeable that it basically slaps me across the face every time another movie comes up.

Sounds like someone wanting me to burn AD. Anyway, I could always try to get the rank result on a lower level blue item since those burn cheaper, more common assets.

I was thinking mostly of car racing games, and I can't think of a single one off the top of my head where you use the mouse to steer (or accelerate and brake). But even if you have the option of steering with a mouse it will still be awkward because you can't just automatically return to neutral by letting go of the thumbstick (or conversely it could automatically return to neutral if you stopped moving it, but then you'd have to keep moving the mouse to go through a long sweeping turn and you'd likely run out of mousepad or even table unless you had a trackball). You'd have to manually aim back to center, which would be a hassle (it's also likely why they don't implement that in car racing games). Fun fact: I used a combination of gamepad and m&kb for playing space sims (X2 and X3 namely) before I got my flightstick. Gamepad most of the time when I was just cruising around in space. When I'd get into a battle I'd switch to m&b for the superior precision of mouse aiming. Then I got my flightsick, and, well, obviously that became my control method. We agree on the basic point, m&kb is an inferior tool for certain types of games. It's a superior tool for certain other types of games.