majestic

Grabbed it. Will most likely never play it, but free's free and all that.

Heh, silly Democrats trying to convince people to vote for them. They should just shame people into stopping to be conservatives. Be better. Stop being a disgusting conversative. It's for your own good. So did that work? Did I properly shame you into being progressive? Yes? Great. Who wants to be next?

The ancient Egyptians knew cats had a deep connection to the Gods, maybe Bastet brought them here. Mainstream acheaology would claim that cats were worshipped in Egypt because they protected their granaries and temples from vermin but them showing up as a geoglyph in Nazca clearly suggests that cats were a gift of the aliens.

Well, it looks like the leftist fasco-socialist corporation Twitter locked another account in their fight against Freedom™.

Well if those covers count...

Killed the Soldier's Past. Two down, two more to go in the quest to unlock the final level. Managed to unlock the Paradox too. I'm getting better I guess.

Fake News err Faux News eeeerrrrr Fox News is calling Trump a fascist. Good, good. He'll probably be removed from Sharp_One's signature now, right?

Plus Netflix used to be a lot more inclined to experiment a little in the past, a sign of the times, and massively increased market pressure. I generally don't mind slower plot pacing, I very much liked e.g. the BSG remake until it became clear the writers had no idea what to do with the show somewhere in the middle of season 3. Not everything needs to have the break neck pace of Dark Matter or Agents of SHIELD. But the first season of The Man in the High Castle really just... drags on. You'll see soon enough. Once you're done admiring the impressive production values, the aesthetics and the generally good acting you'll probably notice that the first season is simply a few episodes too long. Things happen at a snails pace, sometimes nothing happens at all. There's this whole subplot with Karl Tanner (I'm sure he has a real name but he's just Mr. Drinks From A Skull from GoT ) as bounty hunter that goes nowhere, for instance - and he shows up in three episodes. In a way this is the inverse of what happened in Game of Thrones where characters teleported themselves over vast distances because the show didn't have enough episodes to show their travels. Here Juliana needs way, way longer to go to the place she needs to be for the final episode because the showrunners had to get to ten episodes per season. Heh. Well at least that's my impression.

The Man in the High Castle is a special case. The first season is, let's say "mixed", the middle parts really drag on. It pays off to keep watching. If only to experience the strangeness of rooting for SS Obergruppenführer John Smith (played magnificently by Josh E. Sawyer Rufus Sewell) as he uncovers - and tries to foil - a conspiracy with the goal of assassinating Hitler. Makes more sense in context. edit: And John Smith's Japanese secret police counterpart Kido (played by Lt. Wang from Space Above and Beyond) is pretty good as well. They're terrible people doing terrible things, yet you can't help hoping they'll succeed. The show's pretty good at painting the alternative as even worse. Well at least that was my impression. There's also the rebel movement but they're all boring in addition to being terrible people.

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.