majestic

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.

We're currently having a lively debate about tax-funded esotericism after it became public that a certain hospital currently under construction that already has to deal with major cost and time overruns has been "energetically cleaned" by a quack claiming to be able to "permanently protect a building from negative energy" by creating an "energy ring" around the estate. For the small change of only 95k €. 's pratically a steal, right? Can't have that negative energy seeping into already sick patients and all. Perhaps that'll raise public awareness a bit, because so far there's been no outcry that hospitals wasted good money on Grander water which is very much on the same level of quackery.

The random soul readings are backer content, hence the wildly varying quality. They're not even really part of the world building, so you could just ignore them.

Finished my rewatch of Enterprise. I know I've posted a lot about how terrible the first two seasons were, but to be fair to the show one also needs to point out just how good the fourth one was. I'd put the season in Trek's top tier. They finally hit their stride and started doing stuff a Trek prequel of the era should have been doing all along, and I enjoyed the format of shorter storylines spanning a few episodes (the Xindi story in season three, while good and much better than what came before suffered a bit from going the full duration of the season). Well, here's to hoping STD will take an equal turn for the better. Hopefully before it gets cancelled. Although ENT always at least had likeable characters (and continued the Trek tradition of having great doctors. Uhm, yeah, maybe except Beverly and that Pulaski thing).

Got the No Khan Do achievement in my current Stellaris game in the most underwhelming and hilarious way possible. The part of the galaxy where my empire is still had a small patch of utterly unexplored systems beyond a neighbouring empire that my federation "liberated" a while ago. The small, unexplored patch was bordered by a marauder empire on one and a fallen empire on the other end. Sometime during the mid 2300s I got the message that the Great Khan unified the tribes of a marauder empire that I never heard of. It was right in the middle of the unknown regions. The Great Khan was, uhm, stuck between hostile marauders and a fallen empire and promptly proceeded to get his entire fleet trashed, effectively killing the first marauders and his own in one fell swoop. 'Twas easy pickings from there.

I've played a couple of hours of Vaporum and I'm bound to finish it eventually - once I finish one of my Stellaris campaigns. *sigh*

As long as the work is self-conscious about it there's a chance for it to be good. One of the things I don't agree with Jay is on Kung Fury - he didn't like it, I found it hilarious (it is referenced in their Turbo Kid Half in the Bag episode I think). At the end Kung Fury is still the product of someone's love for 80ies action and sci-fi flicks and it has the Hoff, because of course it does. That said I'm not going to either dismiss or watch anything based on an io9 review.

You're like the love child of Karzak and Caelis, and if you don't do that on purpose then maybe you should re-think that. You've got a real gift here.

I too saw Annihilation on Netflix (based on Mike & Jay liking it) and I was left both impressed and a bit disappointed. The disappointment was not from the actual movie but my own expectations. The film was great, having the potential to become a classic, it just wasn't nearly as thought provoking for me as I thought it would be based on the comments and reviews I've read and seen. Anyway, very much recommended for fans of classics like 2001.