majestic

I started yelling at the open letter for spoiling the actual fate of Gamora and then I realized Yondu also signed. Crisis averted folks!

Different climate. When I went to Hurghada we landed to a crispy 45° in the shade... at 0900. But noly once during that vacation did I sweat my ass off like I do right now with 15+° less. I almost melted when visiting the bazaar in the city proper (and that was at night).

There's a fly in my flat. I feel like Walter White right now. With less drug cooking, but with cooking heat outside...

Fixed that for you. And yeah, there's a pattern.

Having four of the eight characters now in Octopath Traveler... off to get the others and start thinking about party compositions. Hmmm. edit: This talk about the new XCOM games is fun to follow. I keep thinking of the old ones where you opened the door of your landing craft and were greeted by a bunch of reaction shots and dead people before being able to take any action. Or the inevitable psi test where you find out all your best soldiers have the brain power of toast. Eh, or that time when enemy commanders mindscrew your heavy weapons guy into blowing himself and your squad up.

It is old. Maybe not in terms of release dates but in everything else? Yeah.

I started playing Octopath Traveler. The game is really enchanting. Loving the atmosphere and am currently on the way to grab my third party member.

What, Soldat rocks. Especially when you play it with friends.

Oh, English dubbed anime has more problems than just the quality of the voice actors. They're often censored and have parts re-written, or in cases like Bismark even have replaced entire episodes with newly created ones that fit better into the new narrative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6pwwzsAuI4

They keep being told how free they are and how they are fighting for their freedom overseas, so at some point they start believing it. To be honest I very much doubt that is true for Gromnir and given his occupation he was probably talking about certain laws. Freedom of speech I can imagine, for instance.

That comes up every now and then, and I'm genuinely curious - what sort of personal freedoms? I kind of want to see if that would be anything that I would care about (so that means leaving out the entire gun debate, that would just derail everything).

Yeah well, I just think using decline as an adjective highlights the innate silliness of the term when it is applied to convenience features. I grew up drawing maps, exchanging currency (both for weight and for different areas) and carrying food around. I miss none of these things if they don't show up in modern games. Funny how Grimoire: Herald of Incline has none of these things and is still celebrated. edit: Oh, and sorry, should have known better than to drag KKKodexian lingo here.

Is the map update out yet? I remember some very delicious whining from "haadcoah" d00dz that resented the very idea of the game having anything than a self-drawn map. I've no idea what you're talking about, brother. Care to elaborate a bit? http://www.underrail.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=170:global-map&catid=43:dev-log&Itemid=61 The incliners were whining their ass off. Because maps are decline! Errr. Sorry, KKKodex terminology. Games that actually have useful features such as automaps are decline because automaps take away from the hardcore experience of drawing a map yourself. Underrail didn't have maps in the beginning. Now it might have. Or not, hence me asking. I haven't played in years.

Sorry, but here's a parrot learning to laugh like Rich Evans: Parrot Rich > Metallica Dog.

Is the map update out yet? I remember some very delicious whining from "haadcoah" d00dz that resented the very idea of the game having anything than a self-drawn map.

I never really had a NES (I had a Master System, our parents thought having the same console twice in the family is a waste of money). My cousin had one and a friend from school so we ended up playing a lot, but playing and finishing a Zelda game was out of scope for simple visits. I do remember hellish platforming sections and dying liberally. And weird old ladies in small villages talking in annoying riddles. It's one of the NES games I always mean to go back to via emulation and finally finish it.

Terror From The Deep :>

In Eastern Europe we didn't got access to consoles you are used to. We are PC master race all the way While I'm not Barti I doubt that is what he meant by that comment. He wondered which Zelda title would actually resemble a Soulsborne game and came up with Zelda II, the red headed step child of the series (and the most difficult of them).

Well, I think that narrative coherence and non-linearity are on opposite ends of the same spectrum in an interactive medium. You can have non-interactive, non-linear storytelling that is still coherent like e.g. The Time Traveller's Wife or Memento but as soon as you allow the viewer (well, player in case of games) to actually alter what is happening you inevitably end up with a event progression that's increasingly less coherent based on the amount of freedom given. It's not a matter of the technology or budget at hand. Sure with unlimited size and money you could create a branching tree type of game where the narrative branches never collapse on a critical path but that would be having several narratives, not one coherent narrative. Since that is not really feasible the common solution is to have a directed network of choices - a narrative where everything eventually collapses on a single point before branching out to (possible) different endings. And yes - quite frankly, if you leave the directed network out of the design, the narrative automatically becomes more focused by virtue of being, uhm, the single focus or the narrative structure. Although that has nothing to do with skill trees. Eh...

Been rewatching TOS for a while now. The odd episode every now and then. There are a lot of people who think Spock's Brain is the worst TOS episode. Maybe even the worst of Trek - although that is, in my opionion, a tie between Threshold for sheer badness and These Are The Voyages... for the sheer unfairness of turning the Enterprise finale into a TNG episode tie-in (regardless of the overall quality of Enterprise). But no, no. The worst episode of TOS is The Alternative Factor. It's dumb, it looks stupid and for the most part makes less sense than Jar Jar's Kelvin Trek. I'd rather watch Profit and Lace on a loop than that. Gah.

If Luzianus was still here he'd post Cassandra's mugshot and a male skull overlay to show you how wrong you are. I wonder where he went...

Yeah, I have those too. The school I went to has a final "final" that I often dream of going to completely unprepared. Which always ends up confusing me because those dreams feel shockingly real. Well, and I really showed up - by far and large - unprepared to that exam. The part I usually dream about is accounting, something which I almost failed a lot of times in the five years of the course. Waking up it always take a minute or two to realize that not only did I pass the exam without a hitch but it's been almost 18 years now that I did. Every now and then I have an epic dream. Here's one: A friend of mine, his sister and a few old classmates need to go to class. So we go to our school. Next to the school where the McDonalds was are huge holes in the ground where steam or smoke bellow from underground. The school's main entrance was closed and the entire area more of a construction site than anything. We had to use a paternoster elevator to reach the scaffolding that lead to the only accessible door that lead inside. Once inside something strange started to happen to my colleagues and frieds: One by one they turned into talking watermelons. Obviously confused I told a teacher that my friends turned into watermelons and were still talking, which landed all of us in an insane asylum that looked just like my grandmother's house. In the meantime I turned into a pumpkin. Since we were all rather short by now the nurses and orderlies in the asylum all looked like the nanny from Muppet Babies, i.e. we cold only see them up to their knees: Knowing the house intimately we tried to escape. Got as far as the entrance when we were caught and I finally woke up.