Keyrock

Yeah, they really needed most of their lineup out by now, preferably a month or two ago. Regardless of what Raja Koduri said, there was no way they were going to be competitive with Nvidia & AMD on the performance end right out of the gate, so the one advantage they could have had was beating Team Green & Team Red to market, and that doesn't look like it's going to happen.

Ouch, that will likely mean that AMD is first to market with RDNA 3. In the long run, I can't see Nvidia losing their market dominance, their position is too strong. Still, having a month or two with essentially no competition on the new GPU front (Intel's ARC is still coming... At some point, but they're not competition at the mid to high-end yet) will be a boon for AMD, if RDNA 3 arrives October-ish as is rumored.

Speaking of Skull & Bones... Zero gameplay, but a cool cinematic trailer nonetheless. I'm a big fan of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag and Rogue (which might as well be called Black Flag 2) and ever since Black Flag came out there has been this thought: What if Ubisoft dispensed with the stupid and convoluted Assassins & Templars storyline and just went whole hog on the pirate adventure we all want? Is this it? Also, going by that trailer, I can make an Asian lady skallywag, to which I say "yes, please". My question is "can I sail a junk?" The lack of a solo campaign is a bummer, but not necessarily a deal breaker. It depends on what you can do out there besides battle other players. Sid Meier's Pirates didn't have a real campaign and that game was amazing.

Yes... Metaphorically. Metaphorically...

It rained all morning and the skies have been overcast all day. The silver lining it that it has resulted in a surprisingly cool & comfortable July day here in Cackalacky. A cigar and some delicious beer on the balcony, what more can a man ask for?

My dad is in Poland attending to some business and he has been sending me pictures of some of the delicious looking food and beer he is consuming. This inspired me to make the half hour (each way) drive to the Polish deli in Pineville. Szynka myśliwska (hunter ham, double smoked), boczek cygański (gypsy bacon, super duper heavily smoked), ser podlaski (a popular variety of Polish yellow cheese, I don't have a better description) with horseradish, tomato, white onion, and ogórki małosolne (Polish pickles, małosolne translates to low salt) on rye bread. Plus, the obligatory Polish lager to make it a proper lunch. I have kabanosy drying: It's going to take all my willpower to give them the 4 or 5 days necessary to reach peak deliciousness and not devour them early.

Yakuza Kiwami 2 Just typical Yakuza things.

I had to search what ginja was. Sounds lovely. Anyway, Na drowie!

New Victorian Era Robot Waifu trailer:

I finished AI: The Somnium Files all routes, it took me about 35 hours. Gameplay is a mixed bag while the writing is excellent. Gameplay takes 3 forms. The majority of the game plays like combination point & click adventure and visual novel. You travel to a location where you cannot move, except that you can turn in place, though not quite the full 360⁰. The majority of the progress comes from talking to the character(s) in the scene, but you can also click on various objects. This game continues the tradition of some of the better point & clicks where it's worth it to click on objects everywhere even if that doesn't advance the game at all because you sometimes get a pretty funny description or interaction. The second type of gameplay takes place inside a Somnium, hence the name of the game. A Somnium is a dream state inside a subject's mind, not unlike Inception, that you can enter to gather information that they may be withholding or repressing. Here you have full movement and it's basically a puzzle with resource management, that resource being time. This is my favorite gameplay type in this game and is also where the paths branch, as some Somniums have multiple solutions. The third gameplay type are the action scenes, which consist of cutscenes with QTEs. There is a decent variety of QTE types, but these are still the weakest gameplay sections. Thankfully, these occur the least often of the 3 gameplay types. Writing is easily this game's strongest point. The plot, once you get to the later paths where deep truths are revealed, is so bat*** crazy that Hideo Kojima would be proud. The story starts out as a fairly straightforward murder mystery, but as you get deeper it gets more and more demented. The really impressive thing is that the plot remains logical and consistent through multiple timelines. To be clear, the whole thing is completely ludicrous, but within the rules that this wacky world sets for itself, everything makes sense. All of the timeframes, the motivations, and the clues sprinkled throughout the many paths all fit logically with all the different paths. When you get the full story, which is quite different than the early stories, everything works, and it all works in the early stories too, even the information you didn't have at the time. Thoroughly impressive attention to detail was paid to make sure everything fits across multiple levels. If you're the type of gamer that skips through dialogue to get to the action, this game is not for you. If you're like me and you like a ridiculous, convoluted, but nevertheless logical mystery, you will probably like this game a lot. I'll definitely be picking up the recently released follow up soon. In a perfect world, it pops up on Game Pass, like it's predecessor and several other Spike Chunsoft games.

We need to get you a show on the History Channel. Edit: Some context for our non-American forumites: The History Channel is a TV channel whose content is largely comprised of shows talking about crackpot conspiracy theories. I'm not gonna lie, I find some of those shows highly entertaining, but I watch them with a shipping container full of grains of salt.

Why are you bringing Roe v Wade into this? SJWs and the Woke movement, while often overstated and used as a sort of Boogeyman, are at the very least tangentially related to potential censorship in vidya games. What does Roe v Wade have to do with anything in this thread? If you want to vent about that there's probably a thread in Way Off-Topic for that.

I would have gone in the other direction. Have the game zoom in on the ass of every character talking: Miranda, Jacob, Jack, Grunt, Thane, Harkin, Dr. Chakwas... ESPECIALLY Dr. Chakwas.

I reached another full ending in AI: The Somnium Files, this one much much happier than the other. I found the killer and brought them to justice (read: shot them in the head) and there were warm feels. There are still loose ends to tie up, though, and that is likely not the true ending. While I did solve the specific case I was investigating, there's more to this...

I just reached another temporary dead end in AI: The Somnium Files and what I wrote earlier about the game not being as dark as I expected... I'm sorry for doubting you, Spike Chunsoft. The path I just took... The pile of corpses... Pile of pieces of corpses. I'll never doubt you again Spike Chunsoft.

Smashed burgers, dirty water dogs, and boiled peanuts. No apple pie, but other than that, that's pretty dang American.

I'll take that as a badge of honor, than you.

I don't have any sort of hard ban on any of these companies, but in practice, I rarely if ever buy games from them. In the case of Ubisoft, with the exception of stuff like Rabbids or those dancing games, all their major franchises are essentially the same. They're not bad, but if I played all of them I would get super burned out. My solution is to pick 1 to play every 3 or 4 years. Activision/Blizzard hasn't made a game I've had any interest in whatsoever in decades. Similar story with EA, ever since Bioware stopped being the RPG company we once knew and loved and became just another cog in the EA machine, churning out uninspired, formulaic games, I've not had any interest in any of their games. Heck, EA Play comes bundled with Game Pass Ultimate, so I have access to dozens and dozens of EA games at no additional cost right now. I have exactly zero installed. If any of these companies were to put out a game I desperately want to play, I wouldn't hesitate to purchase it. I'm not holding my breath.

I got one of the endings in AI: The Somnium Files, it was super duper sad... Well, I reached 2 endings, but 1 of them was a full ending with roll credits and the works, the other was just a temporary dead end. The story progression is similar to how it works in Zero Escape; there are branching paths which will sometimes hit dead ends. You have to go on a different path and do something to unlock the way forward on the previous path. If you choose to go all the way to get to the true ending, you wind up hopping back and forth between parallel timelines, I'm assuming it's the same way in AI:TSF. Spike Chunsoft, like myself, are apparently proponents of the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

AI: The Somnium Files is delightfully weird. It hasn't gotten as dark as I expected. There's still time, I guess, plus I shouldn't expect every Spike Chunsoft game to get as dark and deranged as the Zero Escape games. One minute I'm cracking stupid jokes to an AI in my eye, the next a teenage internet idol is explaining the Anthropic Principle to me. Never change, Japan.

What better way to celebrate America's independence than by drinking Mexican cerveza out of a German stein?

As someone who appreciates rasslin' heels, I now want KD to join the Suns, win the championship, win a 3rd Finals MVP, and then cut a sweet heel promo burying the state of Wisconsin and letting everyone know the superiority of Vermont and Northern New York cheddar cheese to their Wisconsin counterparts. Side-note: While I would not seriously disparage Wisconsin cheese, I think northern New York (think very close to Canada) cheese can take the Pepsi challenge with it.