majestic

I watched the first episode. It's pretty much what the reviews suggested, perfectly average and not very exciting. Something that struck me halfway through was how much of an immersion-breaker The Forests of British Columbia have become. It's hard to believe they're on an alien planet when one's been seeing them trees on TV for two and a half decades. But yeah, that's not really the show's fault.

Tower of Time just managed to do something I haven't seen in a very long time. It crashed and took Windows with it. I mean terribly made games have been crashing to desktop every now and then (yes Bioware, looking at you here) but the OS hasn't gone poof like Francis in a long while.

I tried the ReBoot reboot on Netflix. I wish I hadn't. It is... terrible. Agonizingly so, actually. Why not just finish the series? Make that third film as planned, get as much of the old crew together as possible and do something to please the fans instead of turning the show into a cheap looking Tron offshoot with terrible animation, terrible direction and terrible actors in terrible live action sequences that have absolutely no place in the show's universe.

By intervening openly and forcefully.Obviously it would be a political suicide for some but it could have been done when the war was just beginning. Yeah, sort of like Libya. What a paradise that place became right after the moment . Remember: if brute force doesn't solve the problem, you aren't applying enough. You know you're right when Michael Ironside agrees:

Does Dungeons & Dragons count? Because that could easily be the worst of the bunch.

Halo didn't age horribly, it was always that bad. It's main claim to fame was being one of the first console online multiplayer FPS. Something which I, as a member of the PC master race who has been playing shooters online since Quake, can only sneer at.

DooM was pretty okay action trash for the most part, with a terrific FPS ending sequence.

There's one surprising thing though, considering Mike's love for Star Trek it's strange to see him make fun of the technobabble that much. Not that I disagree with that video - I laughed a good bit when they released it. And yeah, I'm that someone for whom that stuff means something dear Rich Evans. /SW nerd

Yeah that one was awesome. Anyhoo since we're (finally!) back to TLJ and bashing it, here's the grandiose HISHE:

What, you didn't like using a skill and failing repeatedly even though you had a 91% chance of success resulting in super annoying reloading orgies? The most annoying thing about Wasteland 2 was the way how Angela disappeared from the party, never to return. She was the only character I had with Brute Force which exacerbated the reloading orgies. Punching something repeatedly for 9% success chance until RNGesus decides to humble you with a good roll was not something I want to repeat. Took a while to train a replacement.

Went back to For The King after being disappointed in the time limiting "chaos" system of the beta version. It still has the annoying mechanics but at least side questing, rewards and defeating enemies can actively decrease chaos and prevent it from happening (if the world is at 0 chaos and you get -2 chaos from something the next two chaos-ups on the timeline disappear). On the flipside the more interesting character classes are now locked behind a progression mechanic. Ah, well...

The combat system I can agree on but the character system in Wasteland 2 was a confusing mess of interdependent stats and skill bloat where you had no chance to know what was useful and what not going in the first time.

Blizzard's not been able to create compelling narratives since Wrath of the Lich King concluded. SC2's single player campaign was all style and no substance and D3's campaign was so compelling that I only ever completed it once and the only reason to go back is to grab an early Leoric's Crown. Diablo, Diablo 2 and StarCraft were much less flashy but much more memorable by comparison. I can still recite the Halls of the Blind poem and remember ever line from Deckard Cain in Diablo 2 as well as the mission briefings of StarCraft. I barely even remember what StarCraft 2 was about. The one thing I do remember is the pain of the hefty face palm when Kerrigan transformed into a being of pure light and energy with... wings. I half expected Raynor to tear off his shirt and start to sparkle afterwards. Still, I spent hundreds of hours on Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm. They still make great gameplay but I think it is for the better that they focus on genres that are all gameplay and no narrative. At least for as long as Stephenie Meyer and E. L. James are co-authoring their stories.

...thing. magic_the_ac2.zip

Sure... magic_the_ac1.zip

Here we go. magic_the_ac2.zip

Backed some stuff up to free space on my hard disk. Wound up finding some old stuff from a little after Interplay shut down and we were scattered in the wind like so many brown leaves. Figured some of these might get a chuckle or two from the oldies (except maybe tarna's card, that one is sad now. ). Lord Tingeling made them back in 2004... Will have to double post because the file attachment limit is still 1 MB. That's also pretty 2004. magic_the_ac1.zip

Wait, you're really Tom Selleck? Wow. Had no idea we have celebrity here.

Spielberg made Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. How's that not in y'all's "worst Spielberg movie" slot?

Rewatched Six-String Samurai. Formerly ruled by the late King Elvis, Lost Vegas - the last remaining holdout of the American Dream after the United States were defeated by nuclear fire - calls out to all musicians to join an epic rock'n'roll battle to determine who succeeds him as The King. Among many others, Buddy, a virtuoso with both the guitar and the katana, heeds the call and makes his way across the wasteland, but Death, ever determined to claim the rock throne with violence and heavy metal follows him everywhere... Actually officially available for free (well, with ads) on YouTube, although the video quality is not so great: And yes, it pretty much is as awesome as it sounds.

He was in an impossible situation anyway. I'm not even sure it is possible to replace an iconic lead vocalist, especially one of a caliber like Bruce Dickinson, without the new guy getting a lot of flack. Regardless of whether it is justified or not. Part of the problem is also that the next album almost invariably ends up being a degenerated hybrid where the songs feel as if the vocalist doesn't fit, especially if most of the album was finished prior to the vocalists departure - say hello to Iced Earth's The Glorious Burden, where the only good songs were on the bonus disc that were specifically written with The Ripper in mind or Nightwish's Dark Passion Play. Kamelot is a weird case as they managed to find a replacement that pretty much sounds like the original.

You're right that it at least remains - arguably - useful as long as there are planets you can use it on. I was more referring to the tile blocker removal cost reduction that comes with taking the perk. That's a lot of credits saved at a crucial time when you pick it as a first perk (especially when combined with a governor with cheaper tile clearing). So if you want to use Mastery of Nature it's pick up early or lose out on the in my opinion more useful part of the perk, the edict is a little too situational and a tad expensive. There's a bit of irony hidden in the perk as well, now with the changes it would have been a good pick pre-2.0 where colonizing planets even if they were small could provide a much needed border expansion. edit: My current campaign is going well. The Contingency activated, which wasn't very surprising, the game seeded a lot of machine and materialist empires, and more than half of my own population is made up of power drilling synths. Of course it activated right after a galaxy spanning war between the largest power blocks happened. The unchecked devouring swarm empire on the other end of the galaxy didn't help the matter either. Three of the sterilization hubs spawned close to me and are already bombed out. It's both funny and sad seeing the other side of the galaxy unable to deal with a single hub. Even with the help of an awakened empire next door.

Good that they're reworking the Ascension Perks, I hope they have a good look at some of the others as well. A few of them are barely useful or were nerfed to oblivion with 2.0. I hope Paradox manages to make choosing perks interesting throughout the entire game. At the moment it feels like perk choices are only meaningful in the early game. Let's take Mastery of Nature, for instance, which one either picks up as the first or possibly second perk, or not at all. Interstellar Dominion is like that as well. It helps in the early game especially xenophobic empires to expand and claim easily while influence is at a premium, but picking it as fourth or fifth perk? Nah. Well and then there are perks like Share Destiny...

And that's after they tuned the necessary XP for level ups down. Twice. In other words, happy grinding. At the end of the day this is a JRPG style game.