majestic

Oh boy. I'm sure it's unintentionally hilarious but I'm not going to sit through a 22 minute Info Wars video with a guy talking like the love child of Bonnie Tyler and Kermit.

Both games suffer from pacing issues in my opinion but I think IWD's are worse. Usually if I start up Icewind Dale the party eventually stops when Kresselack gives me the quest to deal with Lysan. Having to go back up, deal with her, go back down and then back up only to go to the 5 level madness that is Dragon's Eye usually makes me quit. In IWD2 on the other hand the biggest roadblock is the Ice Temple. The map is also way tpp large there are teleporters and some riddles for entertainment and the battle squares for the masochists among us (finished them once, then immediately installed the skip battle squares mod) but it doesn't work someow. It's just terribly boring. However for me it is easier to power through one boring area than two of them after the other and the Ice Temple still wins by not being as much combat oriented as KT or DE.

That was Icewind Dale 2, which I liked better than the first one. Which was, back then, a relatively uncommon position. It still is, I guess.

Well that can't be it, their shields were active, otherwise The Collector wouldn't have had to slice a hole into them to land on Snoke's flagship.

Yeah, that bothered me too. I mean, I get that Star Wars isn't science fiction, but the whole idea that you could just carve through heavily fortified ships in such a way seems pretty lame. It's the new "rule" behind Star Wars FTL travel: Do whatever you want as long as it makes for a dramatic moment. In ANH Han had to leave Corellia the conventional way and was almost intercepted by two Star Destroyers until he reached a place where he could make his hyperspace jump. In Rogue One Whatsherface, Whatshisface and the chinese box office tokens leave Jedha by jumping to hyperspace directly from underneath a collapsing wave of debris. In The Force Awakens Han hyperspace jumps directly behind the Starkiller Base's shields. In The Last Jedi on the other hand a hyperspace jump turns your ship into a relativistic kinetic weapon.

That was enlightening, you're a Thermian. Now I get it.

Yeah, it's basically in the 3-5% reduction range for games (well, the four games tested, and not in GPU limited scenarios like 4k) which isn't great but also isn't a catastrophe except PR wise. Indeed. Guess I was wrong, although technically not even Battlefront dropped by a full 5%, but it's close enough. They should probably test SWTOR. That game has a nightmarish amount of disk usage - enough to make people claim that it killed their SSDs.

I'd totally watch HUCK. Twice maybe. Once with N-word Jim and once with C-word Jim. In other words, just "binged" Jean-Claude Van Johnson. Not much to binge, it's about as long as a movie anyway. Felt a little silly giving standing ovations after the final credits rolled being all alone in front of my computer but hey, credit given where it is due.

Barti's reddit link has game benchmarks for Linux showing no decrease in frame rate after the fix. Since system calls are mostly IO operations that makes sense. It also won't measurably affect latency times in online games because the bottleneck is the lag on the line, not the actual packet processing. We're not going to see a 5% measurable performance decrease in actual gaming in my opinion - but I might be wrong and extrapolating from Linux gaming isn't exactly a safe bet for a Microsoft patch. What I'm really looking forward to is our databases at work dropping a 10+% in performance over night. Yay. Blargh. It's only good news for AMD if they can deliver. I doubt they can cover a spike in demand considering that their production capacity is rather limited right now. But here's to hoping they can pick up some of Intel's slack - a bit of competition would be good for us.

The 30% figure is not a "ballpark" as it is stated in the news articles but comes from a benchmark doing nothing but the sort of calls that will experience a slowdown after the fixes. It is a worst case scenario that doesn't apply to real life application/consumers and much less gamers - games are already designed in a way that avoid the sort of instructions that will experience a performance hit. Do not forgo the update. There will still be a performance drop and it is both a security and PR disaster for Intel and just the sort of boost AMD could use to (finally, I guess) get more than a toe into the server market because that is the area that's most affected - both security and performance wise. It's an absolute nightmare for public cloud services (Amazon EC2/AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc.).

I've read so much Star Wars EU that I have a hard time arguing the films on their merits (or lack thereof) alone, so I understand. Completely.

See, I can understand that. Personally I wouldn't rate any of the new movies, Lucas or Disney above Return of the Jedi. Not because I grew up with it or nostalgia but because Return is still the gold standard for space battles and I love those. Games, books, movies, TV - space battles? Yes plx. But even leaving the Battle of Endor aside Return is still a more entertaining watch for me than Revenge of the Sith ever could be. I mean even as a kid I found the Ewoks more annoying than cute but Vader with his mask on has more screen presence and is more convincing than Hayden Christensen could ever be, and Return didn't have characters like General Evil McBadface Grievous or scenes that pointlessly drag on and on like Obi-Wan's lava lightsaber bonanza or Obi-Wan's car chase. Revenge was a cringe-ride with a few impressive scenes and Return was a fun romp with a few cringy scenes (oh hi Han stepping on a twig or Ewok twapping himself with a bola or Chewie doing the Tarzan). Right, so where was I? Oh yeah, most people seem to disagree. I'd enjoy the space battles more if anyone we cared about was in it, but the visuals and filming are quite cool. I also really like the Luke/Vader/Empire parts. But those are the only things. I find the entire Jabba sequences drag on and don't further the plot much - the whole barge sequence could be cut without losing anything - and there's so much Ewok stuff constantly destroying the pacing and dragging it down. They don't even annoy me that much, they just bore me. But I also have a lot of issues with the plot. Force Awakens gets crapped on for pulling another Death Star out of its arse but I find this one more irritating - it makes the victory in New Hope seem pointless if they can so easily make another, and since a single shot can blow one up it's not very intimidating. But I mostly dislike it for ignoring or handwaving things the other films set up. The whole first segment was just undoing Han's fate and restoring status quo. Luke didn't complete his training with Yoda -> Goes back and Yoda says it is. There is another Skywalker -> Oh it's just Leia, conveniently solves the love triangle. Badass bounty hunter? Killed for a joke. It doesn't even follow through on its own buildup when it points out Han's bad feeling about never seeing the Falcon again, both are unscathed. At least in New Hope R2 got hurt. The only heroic moment in Jedi comes from Vader. Many of the things these new flicks get criticised for were done worse in Return IMO. That blends things a bit. I disliked Revenge and would never have put it above Return even before VII was a remake of IV, but yes, Return of the Jedi is as guilty of a few terrible decisions as the new movies are. I think it is rightly considered the least interesting film of the original trilogy. I've heard people call it creatively bankrupt and while that is pushing it a bit it's not really too far off - It just isn't worse than Revenge of the Sith even though that film is easily the best of the prequel trilogy. I also never got the impression that Boba Fett is a bad ass bounty hunter. He says "as you wish" and had a really cool armor on that rivalled Vader's. The only thing he does in Empire is not falling for Han's garbage maneuver. That makes him smarter than the people Vader regularily chokes for being stupid failures. Yay I guess... but again, literally a billion people out there disagreeing with me on that one (of course he's a badass nowadays *shrug*). And while it might seem that Leia is conveniently Luke's sister the mistake actually started in Empire with Yoda saying "No. There is another." IF one follows that setup of someone else being a hope to defeat the Emperor/the Empire it can't be someone they asspull out of nowhere in the last installment, at least if the goal is to create some dramatic tension from it - which is one of the things that worked - in my opinion - perfectly in Return of the Jedi. I'd argue that the scene where Vader goads Luke into almost killing him by threatening the only family he has left (his surrogate family dead and his father having just delivered him to the empire) is such a perfect payoff that it easily outshines the love triangle. It's probably the beginning of the most dramatic moment in Star Wars as a whole (alhtough that could be Vader and Luke back in Bespin... maybe). At least until Lucas ruined it by needlessly adding a NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! where none was needed.

Uhm, Spiky Tiger per chance?

Also, a belated Merry Christmas to everyone.

You should've gone for Lethal Weapon then. Dunno, he's probably too old for this sh*t.

See, I can understand that. Personally I wouldn't rate any of the new movies, Lucas or Disney above Return of the Jedi. Not because I grew up with it or nostalgia but because Return is still the gold standard for space battles and I love those. Games, books, movies, TV - space battles? Yes plx. But even leaving the Battle of Endor aside Return is still a more entertaining watch for me than Revenge of the Sith ever could be. I mean even as a kid I found the Ewoks more annoying than cute but Vader with his mask on has more screen presence and is more convincing than Hayden Christensen could ever be, and Return didn't have characters like General Evil McBadface Grievous or scenes that pointlessly drag on and on like Obi-Wan's lava lightsaber bonanza or Obi-Wan's car chase. Revenge was a cringe-ride with a few impressive scenes and Return was a fun romp with a few cringy scenes (oh hi Han stepping on a twig or Ewok twapping himself with a bola or Chewie doing the Tarzan). Right, so where was I? Oh yeah, most people seem to disagree.

Still Playing Cuphead. Stumbled upon some bugs - game crashed right before the score screen when I finished the final run and gun level at a pacifist rating. Luckily it counted but I had to replay a level to get the achievement. Later on it didn't register my super meter usage during a boss fight, ended up having to replay it for the rank. Still not entirely sure what to think of it.

The thread also needs some DIO:

Steamworld Dig is on sale for the Switch, so I went ahead and grabbed it.

It would maybe have been more interesting if it didn't reference to things that we know absolutely nothing about. At the time it comes in TFA, nobody gives a damn about the Republic or what they did nor do we really know why the Empire is now called the First Order and how the Imperial Remnant's only oppsition can be the RESISTANCE. But even if we had all the information that's apparently available in books (yay) the speech was bad, and while I like Bill Weasly he was not the right actor for the role (or was given utterly insane directions).

I thought the Imperial Guard scene was terrible. Well, no, not the scene, the scene itself was fine. It just had some issues, like the sudden multiplication of guards and the fact that it looked and was coreographed like a Marvel Superhero battle. It felt jarringly out of place after the actually pretty good stuff between Kylo and Rey. Not really. Part 7 was a loose remake. This one pretended to be a remake with every development and then, for better or worse, dumped some twist on it. Oh yeah, they dumped some twists on us. Some of them felt like a big "well, screw you!" - taking the interesting parts of the episode IV remake and... discarding them with the grace of the proverbial bantha in a porcelain shop. Edit: Fixed spoiler tags, woops.

Yeah, I know what you mean, although my reservations are greated than the feeling that I liked it. I enjoyed watching the spectacle (and I was at a 4DX showing so a spectacle it was) and some of the scenes but others, well, there are some scenes and things in this film I hated more than everything Lucas did in the prequels and that takes some doing. I'll go into details once more forumites have seen it and we can have a discussion without killing the flow of our posts with excessive spoiler tags. One thing though:

I keep reading these illegal voters accusations every time there's an election in the US. Are there states where voting doesn't require some sort of photo-ID or are there no voter registries to check against? At least some way to track if a person is legally allowed to vote?

Played a bit of Cuphead, finished Inkwell Isle I and a few bosses on II, already grabbed a couple of A+ ratings. Great animations and music, okayish sound design, nice difficulty and tight gameplay, except for the parrying which feels tacked on and sometimes doesn't really work (although that might be my controller showing signs of its age). Why am I not enjoying this as much as I think I should?