majestic

Wait, really? There goes my idea of them hitting the reset button at the end of season 3.

Oh, right, I forgot about that particular piece of inanity. Michael's shown to be so heavily injured she can barely walk after coming down from an adrenaline high and then immediately proceeds to win in hand to hand combat against an opponent that is at least a full foot taller, has a lot more muscle mass and a good deal more reach than her. Because why not. And people complained about the Worf effect. The opposite ain't any better. And yes, the Romulans should have a working fleet, assuming they survived their inability to predict a supernova in some meaningful way in the 800 years between Star Trek Picard and Discovery Season 3. If the shows are set in the same continuity, that is. I don't really know. No, but at least the continuity no longer matters. I'm kind of expecting this season to end with them preventing "The Burn" in some way.

I'm done with Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. Children of Dune seemed to drag a little. Both not nearly as entertaining as the first novel, and both have somewhat anticlimactic endings after a lot of buildup. Guess I'll continue now that I'm on a roll. Onwards to God Emperor of Dune.

Wait, what? No way, I had a very manly crush on Sailor Mercury so obviously everyone should be dressed like Ami.

At least now I know that I'm not the only one. I too thought that was Amentep posting.

Oh, I watched it, because even though I gripe a lot and probably will hate it I still am the type of person that makes a fandom so easily exploitable. Well on the other hand, I'd pay for Netflix anyway, so I might as well watch what they were up to. Oh boy. Discovery Season three is going to be Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, just without Hercules as High Guard captain. And with a lot less force lances. Oh, wait, is there anything to say about the episode? Well... no, not really. It was 50 minutes of super pointless action, two minutes of feel-good from Dr. Dolittle where he turns out to not at all be what we expected him to be (surprise!) which makes all his interaction with Michael prior to that moment really dumb* and half a minute dedicated of the most ridiculous reason for changes to the universe ever invented. Well that makes turning the Federation into Trump's America thanks to a Romulan plot involving an ancient secret order embedded in the Tal Shiar and a terror attack on Mars using Android slave labour that managed to ignite Mars' atmosphere positively brimming with creativity and sense. Oh, and lest I forget, the two of them spend an entire montage scene WALKING from the crash site to a trading outpost / warp courier station. Walking. Even though Courier Book actually has portable transporters that show up being used in an overlong action sequence five minutes later. Really? * I can't stress enough how dumb this is. This is so really, really, really, really, REALLY dumb that it hurts. Wow.

Finally killed my first past (the Hunter's) in Enter The Gungeon. It took a while but I finally figured it out. It's not just the perspective that's weird, walking diagonally in the game, while possible, is actually really bad depending on which enemies you face. I think this is because enemies have perfect shot prediction. So whenever they fire while you're walking and you keep your speed and direction you'll eat that bullet (assuming their weapons have perfect accuracy, not all enemies or weapons do). But walking diagonally doesn't seem to be one direction, the game seems to register your key presses separately and combine them into a diagonal movement. While this really doesn't do anything strange to enemies firing single bullets or fixed patterns, it seems to throw off targeted spread patterns or enemies with rapid fire weapons. "Tested" this with the first boss in the game. Well, the first boss, there are three possible first bosses, but the Gatling Gull is the one where it is readily observable. When it spins up his Vulcan cannon and you simple walk up or down - given enough space - you'll essentially end up doding the bullets because the gun is really inaccurate and most bullets will by the time they would reach you over- or undershoot you. You dodge the entire attack simply by walking in one direction. The game predicts where you would be, fires there and the bullets simply vector off course. If you run out of space you simply dodge-roll and change direction. Try the same walking diagonally and the bullets will eventually hit you because they're fired off at where you wouldn't be and their own inaccuracy works in their favor. It could also be that my keyboard's WASD keys are really worn out and holding the keys down sometimes registers as rapid presses instead. I've had that keyboard for a long time. On the other hand I don't have any issues typing. So dunno. Or it could be something in the prediction algorithm that makes factoring in bullet inaccuracy easier for diagonal vectors, or maybe the perspective, where the bullets are and the location of the hit box has issues when walking diagonally. Or I'm imagining things and simply got gud, but that game went from problematic for me to beatable in a handful of runs - after like 80 wildly unsuccessful ones. Either way, it works for me, and that's what matters, right? Off to kill some more pasts and maybe unlock a new Gungeoneer or two.

Well, now you've done it. I hope you're happy. North Korea is called the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. And with that, I'll see myself out of this one. It gets old after 20 years, it's not just a cyclical discussion on this board. It was the same on Interplay's YYOP and before that on Black Isle's YOP. edit: Can we have Yrkoon and Crucis back? These threads used to be a lot more entertaining in the past. Does anyone know where they went? Le sigh.

This is a decidedly authoritarian streak and has nothing to do with the underlying economic system or one's political orientation. Media control (and therefore speech and "thought" policing) happen everywhere, in dictatorships easier than in democracies but even there. The comrades Erdogan, Berlusconi, Putin and Orbán are or were all fairly successful at it. How little difference there is between the left and right when it comes to having thought police streaks can be easily seen when one takes a step back and breaks out of their confirmation bias and opinion/filter bubbles. On the one hand you have a raging socia media (but mostly Twitter) mob of regressive lefties that tries to censor everything outside their established orthodoxy and on the other hand you have the alt-rights who preach the gospel of people (or collectives) calling themselves Tyler Durden and QAnon as the absolute truth. And both sides have plenty of hypocrites. As evidenced in this thread. Unmarked police disappearing people out of protests and since it was Trump not a comrade we suddenly need tracing, confirmation, more sources and put things in context. "Tyler Durden" posts something on Zero Hedge and it "looks dubious but has more evidence than Trump's collusion with Russia!" or some Twitter post from someone giving his location as Occupied Ireland posting a video of blacks harrassing some white girl with absolutely no context and Amentep asks for confirmation, more sources and context he gets called out because "the left gets aways with the same all the time." Riiiiiiiiiiight. Seems legit.

You could try Epic Tavern. But... it's an early access title that constantly has people complaining that it was abandoned, and developers saying no it wasn't. The development is definitely going very slowly on this one. I played it a couple of years back and it was okayish to fun. Essentially you run a tavern where adventurers gather and act as quest giver. Sorta.

Isn't that like Dungeon Siege?

Well what do you know, I just defeated the High Dragun in Enter the Gungeon and completed the Bullet That Can Kill The PAst. I promptly failed to kill my past because I realized too late that the boss turns patches of the floor into damage zones, but all in all not bad for a first go at that boss fight.

It is always the right time for Grim Dawn.

I have a terrible sense of direction. I get lost in shooters all the time, especially in old ones that have no automap feature. But Jedi Knight II was somehow worse for me in that regard. There I sometimes got stuck on a level because I didn't find the way to the end, never mind any secrets. Heh. Just yesterday I had to repeat a horse race in TW3 three times because I kept missing the path I was supposed to take and they accused me of cheating. Even though I didn't cut the track at all, more like took a wrong turn and rode a longer path than intended. And that's with a line on the mini-map.

Finishing Family Matters for the Bloody Baron by telling him about this wife's fate can lock you out of all sorts of sidequests, even if you found out what happened to his daughter you can't tell him about it, and it removes a smallish quest in Skellige that only pops up if Ladies of the Woods/Family Matters is unresolved at the time you do The Calm Before The Storm. It was originally a quest given by the Bloody Baron but was then later moved to pop up in Skellige for some reason - just not with the cutoff trigger changed. (I got this from the interweb after looking up quest cutoff points to be honest.) edit: And no, there aren't actual checklists like in the new Tomb Raider games, but the map shows undiscovered locations and a neat little counter how many there still are. It's checklisty enough for me to be bothered by it. I mean, it also bothered me in Romb Raider and that was not open world at all. There it was just ridiculous when Lara was looking for the last corpse to burn she missed while the cave around her was quite literally exploding in her face. Geez. edit 2: It's always been that way. Way back when I played Jedi Knight I kept replaying the levels until that counter at the end told me I found all the secrets. And bloody hell some of them were well hidden.

I fail to see the distinction between shopping systems in sandbox and regular RPGs, unless we're talking multiplayer sandboxes, in which a self-regulating economy is a good thing and a necessity. But we are talking single player games here.

Really Bruce, you defeat your own agrument by saying The Witcher 3 is your favorite game next to Baldur's Gate 2: The Monty Haul where every rural village merchant has unlimited gold, almost always buys literally everything you have in your bags (except for items with no sell value) and you find loot that makes the game a snap right out of the first dungeon. What risk and reward mechanics? BG2 becomes only challenging only if you make it, either through modifications or arbitrary restrictions you put on yourself. It has all the rewards, but none of the risks. Beyond the initial learning phase where you are dumbfounded by the game rules, but for me that happened in the early 90ies for 2nd edition AD&D, so I can't comment how that would be for someone whose first contact with the ruleset was BG2 (or BG1, as it were). Breaking the system and making the games easy is half the fun. I love it when a build comes together. Granted, that's probably more true for ARPGs, finding something that works with the new season, patch or expansion. I don't mind broken mechanics or unbalance in games to be honest, it was my biggest beef with the ongoing support for both Pillars of Eternity and Deadfire. It's a single player game, just leave the "balancing" at home. As long as none of the classes are so broken that you can't win the game playing it then leave it alone. It's the checklists that cause the OCD to kick off though. If the game had no checklists and you would simply find out about interesting things by randomly wandering into the area or actually reading the notice board descriptions instead of just wildly clicking on them to get a waypoint it wouldn't be so bad. I had a lot of time in Morrowind as well, a game that lets you unabashedly break it. By the time I started the main quest in Morrowind my character was literally invulnerable. It's not like the gameplay was hurt much by it. I never finished the main quest in Morrowind, but not because it was "lel 2 ez" after becoming invulnerable, but because Bethesda's writing is... on the exact opposite side of their ability to create fun worlds to explore. So I just read what happens, was glad I didn't bother and that was that. Crafting I don't care much for in single player games, and more often than not it's either completely pointless or too good to skip. Multiplayer games of course have the advantage of being able to trade with other players, and if it nicely fits into the game world and requires player collaboration then all the better, i.e. I thought EQ2's original crafting system was fantastic. Not for me, I'd just rather simply buy the finished products, but if someone wanted they could really just roleplay (and level) as carpenter. On the other hand, the crafting system in EQ2 also was designed so that a few bad dice rolls could destroy your very valuable components. Or kill your character just in case your forge explodes in your face. That said I fully realize that my inability to let checkboxes lie unticked is my problem, not the game's. At least, and that has The Witcher 3 going for it, it doesn't look like the game's narrative focus was diluted by being placed in an open world. At the expense of making the open world feel tacked on to what could have been a chapter based game like TW or TW2. If this were a chapter based game you could have Velen first, on a much smaller map, then go to Novigrad and finally to Skellige with an introductory chapter and an epilogue later. You'd then be able to follow Ciri on her way, and not just look for her everywhere your whim takes you, and you wouldn't need to untangle a web of interlocked main quests and wonder why a level 6 main quest sends to into a level 10 main quest area until you realize finishing the level 6 quest actually locks you out of level 14 content. I mean, what in the what now? How did that mess happen unless making the game open world came later in the development cycle?

Well, as they sing, even old jokes deserve songs: That thumbnail hat me immediately with the Sailor Soldiers but really, who exactly do they make these videos for? I wonder if any of the dancers knew why they were wearing skimpy sailor costumes of if they assumed they were just there for the eye candy candy in a song about an old and infantile joke. Sailor Moon is probably older than the girls in the video (on that note, can't believe that was almost thirty years ago, time really does fly). The amount of overlap between metal fans who appreciate Nanowar's parodies and people who have seen the anime or read the manga can't be that large, can it? Also, nitpick in the spoiler:

I'm alternating between The Witcher 3 and sucking at Enter the Gungeon. Enter the Gungeon kicks my behind in ways no other bullet hell game has so far. It's slower paced than other games of its kind that I played (e.g. Starward Rogue) but something makes it way harder for me. Might be the perspective, I keep running into bullets and yelling "no way that was a hit" at my screen and I get regularily hit by projectiles that I could swear would be absorbed by a wall or an obstacle when they pass right through (or rather, along the outer edges of the obstacles). And sometimes they pass right along the edge and being arcing afterwards. It just breaks my head. Or my eyes, not sure. The Witcher 3 on the other hand... I put off playing this game for a long time because I was afraid I wouldn't enjoy it. And lo and behold, I don't. Which is not the fault of the game, it looks good, it plays well enough (especially when compared to the first and second games) and whenever a main quest is up the writing and quest structure are top notch. But that feels like it's 5% of the game. The remaining 95% is ticking off open world checklists and running around BEAUSE LOOK AT THE WORLD WE DESIGNED DOESN'T IT LOOK AWESOME oh and here's a level 25 chimera in the middle of a level 5 area, haha, thought you could complete the checklists all at once without backtracking? Silly Witcher! Hey I found cool crafting schematics. *craft craft craft* Oh look over there, an item in a tree stump. Oh wow that's better equipment, thanks random loot generation system! I also really don't like it when games have merchants that don't buy all your loot or when they have limited amounts of gold available. Game does both, obviously. Oh, I get that having limited gold on merchants is a way to limit the overall amount of money available in a game and could be interesting for "balance" reasons (never seen that work though) but why can't I just sell my loot haul to anyone? Because realism in a game where your horse can teleport on a whistle, just NOT when you're on it? Riiiiiiiiiiight... Really wish the game was more structured like the first one. But that's just me not liking open world games. Which exacerbates the little things that annoy me. Like having to visit a sign post to fast travel. Why, just why? So you can't teleport out of combat? There's already a check in the game for when you can't save, just use that for fast travelling. Or openening the map. Ugh. Please. Oh I know I could just follow the main quest, but these games have a habit of having side content loop into the main story, so that's not really an option, right? I mean even if I would be able to come across a checklist and NOT tick it off completely. Silly brain.

Turns out he was out of Nutella ice cream. So sad. But instead he had yoghurt with honey and sweet milk, which I promptly tried and found just a little too sweet for my liking, but overall still pretty good. I'm used to the place not having all the ice cream he makes all the time. He's only making ice cream with the fresh fruits he can get. And mango. So while he has mango flavored ice cream all the time because there's no way to get fresh mangos here things like strawberry, peach, blueberry and various melon flavored ice creams are only available during certain times through spring and summer. I admire the guy for his dedicatio to quality, really. Strawberry ice cream is such a staple that most places keep making batches of it even with imported or bland tasting greenhouse grown strawberries. Or worse, with artifical strawberry flavor. Ugh. Now he certainly didn't run out of "fresh" nutella which in the end can only mean he didn't make a new batch because he's going to close down for winter soon. I had hoped he'd keep open a little longer because of the lost time during the lockdown but apparently not. Ah well, can't have everything, right?

We have a small Italian ice cream and coffee joint right around the corner and he always has nutella ice cream. Mmmmm... I think I'll get some tomorrow.

He liked to go on Twitter or the KKKodex and post unprofessional, angry and possibly drunken rants about former colleagues and co-owners long before he was (wrongfully) accused of sexual misconduct. So, no, it's not just any one thing. He worked hard on that reputation. This is not a judgement on what he said, lest I bring the rabid MCA cultists down on me. He could have been right and Feargus really is a Saturday morning villain who almost sank Obsidian so he can high five around the office for having told off Microsoft (although in that case, how come Feargus is still CEO at Obsidian now that it belongs to Microsoft?). It's just completely unprofessional to rant about it on the KKKodex while boasting about his filled-to-the-brim war chest. So, guess it's time to change the topic because otherwise posts will begin to disappear and threads will be locked. 's a bit of a touchy subject 'ere, 'n all.

Oy, tell me about it. The last time I upgraded my graphics card I ended up having to bend the frame of my case a bit. Quite nothing like having to apply force near or on the most expensive parts in your computer.

Every now and then YouTube recommends me older things. Sometimes I realize that I missed a few things. Like this: Watched the other episodes but not that one. Had me rolling on the floor for a while. I should probably consider subscribing to more channels.

The common excuse given is that publishers fear that if the digital storefronts were cheaper than regular retailers the retailers will buy less boxes (or negotiate to pay less) and they'd lose out on the business, or they fear that the retailers would cut them out entirely and take their business elsewere. You know, just as if trading with digital goods is the same as trading real goods. It's the 21st century, you'd think corporate suits would eventually wisen up to the new reality of distribution, but no. A download is sale lost folks. In more than one way.