Keyrock

How about dem Cowboys? Also, the Jets don't suck?

Mom, can I get Space Witcher? No honey, we have Space Witcher at home.

Today I discovered this inside a fortune cookie: Fortune cookies now have advertising inside them... The meteor can't come soon enough.

It's a point n click based on Jak Rozpętałem Drugą Wojnę Światową (1969). Edit: I should watch that again.

Pizza Margherita This might be the best pizza I've ever made, it came out perfect. I even went all out and did the salt-rimmed glass for the michelada.

Seasonally appropriate spooky gaming is just over a week away (October 14). I'm pretty excited for this. I'm not usually big into body horror, but I love the vibe Scorn is giving off. Supposedly, while it does have some shooting, it's much more of an adventure/puzzle game than it is an action game. As a bonus, it's day 1 on Game Pass. I've already got it pre-loaded on my xXxBOxXx.

They're already building a statue in Arlington.

I'm currently worried about the Rams, I'll let you know after that game. A lot depends on who will be my team's QB that week.

He's getting so much mileage out of "thanks Steve".

Nothing wrong with being a cheapskate, I was dirt poor and well versed in the cheapskate arts for many years. Even now, when I make decent money and have no pressing need to cheap out I still sometimes employ the cheapskate skills I learned years ago. I might be a bit worried about leftover sushi. How leftover are we talking here? How long was that sitting out? I suppose it's no older than the stuff you can get at the supermarket and higher quality too.

Hercules shows up wherever he wants.

It would work better if it was ribbed for her pleasure.

Muh Boys beat the Washington Football Team (Commanders sounds stupid, I'll keep calling them "Football Team") which was about as challenging and satisfying a victory as jumping a crippled child from behind and stomping them while they were down. Still, I'll take 3-1.

Cease and desist from Disney in 5... 4... 3...

My best bet might be to jump into a MMO right after it first releases. Jumping into a 10 year old MMO comes with 10 years of feature bloat. It's one thing when you are an existing player and a MMO adds a new system in an expansion, you only need to learn the 1 new system because you are already familiar with all the existing systems. As a new player I am bombarded with 2 dozen systems and expected to learn them all at once. Also, MMOs sometimes start out with good early game progression but then after an expansion or two they add boosts and/or tweak the progression so that new players can rapidly get to the end game stuff they have been working on for the last however many years and join their friends who have level 80 or whatever characters quickly. That's all well and good, but in the process they kill the progression curve of new players who want to experience the early and mid game as it was originally intended.

Well, my latest MMO experiment with PSO2 is over, didn't even last a week. It's not a bad game but... Where do I start? First of all, there are 2 different games, PSO2 and PSO2:NGS (New Genesis), and they are completely different games. NGS is the recent revamp/relaunch/reimagining/rewhatever and it's what I played first. I only played the Gunner class, these observations may or may not apply to the other classes. NGS is a fast-paced game, you are always moving. There is a dash, a double jump, and a glide you can perform, and these are awesome... Almost. Keep that in mind, I'll get back to it. You have several different attack abilities, basic attack you can spam as much as you want and special attacks that consume PP. Also there is a giant super attack that you need to build up energy for that has a long cool down. You can perform every attack while moving, running and jumping, doing flips through the air. With the gunner's twin machine pistols it's a John Woo movie minus doves taking flight in the background. There is a big ol' world to explore with lots of verticality. Main quest cutscenes are voice acted and the voice work is... Passable. So far so good, right? Let's get to the negatives. NGS suffers from what a lot of games, not just MMOs, though MMOs are the biggest offenders, suffer from, I call it "complexity for complexity's sake". This game has A TON of systems, many of which do nothing to make the game more engaging. It could be argued that it makes the game "deeper", and there may be some truth to that, but at the cost of making it more confusing and way more tedious. Within minutes of starting, my inventory is already cluttered with a metric ****ton of different items, most of which are used in various crafting systems. There are ingredients, modifiers, items that increase success rate, items that increase chance of critical success... Ugh, I hate crafting so much. I'm a ****ing adventurer, shouldn't a weaponsmith be making super cool gun +5 for me rather than me having to waste my time scouring the land to make super cool gun +5 myself? There's a weapon crafting system, armor crafting, food crafting, I could go on and on. The leveling system is needlessly convoluted. Going up levels only increases your HP and PP and allows you to use level-gated items. To get skill points you need to find these buildings called "cocoons" where you can do trials. Trials are short mini-games and completing a trial earns you 1 skill point. There is a nice bit of variation to trials. One of the trials is a platforming course meant to show off the movement systems. In theory, this should have been a trial that I had a blast with, and I almost did... Almost. The problem is that the jumping and gliding mechanics are inconsistent. The way it's supposed to work is that you press the button to jump, hold it down for a higher/longer jump. No problem so far, pretty standard. Tap the button again for a double jump or hold it down to glide. You can also glide after a double jump (tap or hold, tap, hold). That's how it works most of the time. Sometimes, regardless of how quickly you tap the jump button, instead of performing a second jump you go into glide. Inconsistent mechanics are extremely frustrating. My last gripe is that the world is level-gated. To enter certain zones you need to have a certain battle score and if you don't you are stopped by a force field. I hate this so much. If I'm too weak to enter an area, give me a warning but let me still enter the area and potentially get horrifically murdered. PSO2 is the original, now 10 year old game. This game is slower paced. There is no dash, no double jump, and no glide. You cannot move while shooting, which prevents me from John Woo-ing, but does introduce some tactics because special attacks lock you into an animation which will prevent you from dodging, so you have to be smart about when you use them. There is a bit of a rhythm game to combat as attacking again at just the right time, represented in the game by a red circle around you, does extra damage. Leveling is more traditional and simple, you get more HP, PP, and a skill point when you level up. Unfortunately, there is no game world to explore, in the traditional sense. You have a hub area and you teleport into instances. That's it. This killed the game for me as exploring the world is the most fun part of a MMO for me and that doesn't exist here. No matter how varied you make the instances, it's not the same.

I made a chicken, bacon, onion, and tomato pizza. Pairs well with a michelada. Everything pairs well with a michelada.

So that granite chin is not immortal after all.

But what about?

Already have. I did this exact experiment with LotRO a few years back.

That's not a fair comparison. Nethack is vastly superior to most MP games these days. I was a ZAngband man myself, but that was exclusively SP.

It's time for my biennial attempt to play a MMO. Since this is a terrible idea, I figured I might as well double up on the bad ideas and play a MMO on a console. With that in mind I looked into what MMO I can play on xXxBOxXx that doesn't completely suck, which narrowed things down to 3 choices: 1) Black Desert 2) Elder Scrolls Online 3) Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis Choice 1 is a no go, I may be crazy but I'm not crazy enough to try to get into a Korean grindfest MMO. That leaves choices 2 & 3. I decided to go with choice 3 since I loved the Phantasy Star games and SEGA will never make another single player PS game because we can't have nice things. So this is the closest I'll ever get to Phantasy Star 5. I decided to go with a Bayonetta-esque sexy librarian look and I named her Eunice, because why wouldn't I? For a 10 year old MMO it looks relatively good. I'm sure it's gotten several graphical upgrades along the way. Also, Eunice does not skip leg day, she throws some serious plates on the squat rack. I'm playing a gunner so that I can live out my John Woo fantasies.

To be perfectly honest, Stadia lasted a year longer than I thought it would. Soooo... Good... Job? Companies keep putting the cart in front of the horse by trying to make cloud gaming happen when the infrastructure isn't there yet. I mean, if you live in Mountain View, CA there's a pretty good chance Stadia will run beautifully on your 8 Trillion Terabyte bandwith internet. Not everybody has that internet.

Ironically, they were running a campaign in an eerily accurate dystopian future setting.