Hurlshort

The ones you order online nowadays are pretty amazing. It might not be available outside of the US, but I ordered one through Nectar a few years ago and it was a good price and sleeps great. It cost about half of the one I bought from the store before that and it feels the same.

I'm glad to hear you guys are moving. My wife likes to remind me that we are all atrophying at this point in our lives. So use it or lose it.

I'm down to 2 small boxes of DVD's that my kids still watch pretty regularly. I've got a spot on my bookshelf for about 5 collector's item games, and that's it.

No, not really. The trailer was already better than the movie.

I lost access to Elf on Amazon the other day. I bought it 15 years ago on Prime Video, and suddenly I couldn't play it. Considering I use it to kill a bit of time on the last day of school before winter break, I was bummed. I thought, I can go and file a ticket with Amazon, or I can just re-buy it for $12. I bought it and enjoyed the last day of school with the kids.

Midnight Suns is eating up my time pretty well. It's pretty easy on normal. I've reached the 2nd act and the fights are a bit more diverse, but it is still pretty easy to win. The only loss I had was one of the personal missions where you and your dog take on the world, but I was able to reconfigure my deck a bit and win it easily the next time. It was also recommended for level 16 and I was 12, so I'm going to say normal mode is a bit easy. I'm enjoying trying to hook Captain Marvel up with Blade. Those are some socially awkward lovebirds.

I wouldn't do it at 99/1. I consider my life worth more than that, and money certainly doesn't buy happiness.

Strange fact: The teenager that was mauled to death at the SF Zoo a number of years ago was one of my wife's former students. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jan/18/animalwelfare.usa Lesson: Don't taunt the tigers.

I believe Starfield has sold well, so I'm not sure it is the disaster that Redfall was. It's basically Skyrim in space, so I don't know why it wouldn't meet expectations. I guess being a new IP might be the only difficult sales part.

It lets me skip the ads after 5 seconds, so I don't really care. They have to make money somehow. Of course I also don't watch anything longer than 5-10 minutes on YT, so I probably don't use it like some of you.

I feel like her response, which was amazing, was wasted on that show. 😆. I mean, she gives this great answer and they are like, so how about 'dem Bears?

I tend to agree. I love what Rockstar does, but I realize they are operating on a different scale.

I mean, it's called Door Kickers. That's not a real stealthy way to enter a room.

I've been hitting Midnight Suns pretty hard. It's pretty rewarding building up the characters. I have a training portal that lets me level up characters, and they get to really flex their powers in it. The combat scenarios are still a bit repetitive, but I think I just need to do more story missions to advance a bit. I'm over leveled for the story currently. There is a lot of customization of outfits. Some looks pretty cool. I wonder if the DLC is worth it. Seems a bit pricey for extra characters.

LC, you'd probably spend 100 hours in the ship builder.

Did you and Majestic like other Bethesda titles? I don't remember how you two felt about Skyrim and Fallout 4. They all pretty much follow the same formula for me. I enjoy the initial exploration, I get bored of it at a certain point, and then I revisit it a few times over the years. Starfield definitely fits that bill. Although I do prefer the setting to their two Fallout games.

For the new year, I bought a new road bike. I've had my Specialized Roubaix for 6 years, and I've put 20k miles on it, along with a few major crashes. So it was definitely time for a new bike. I went with a Specialized Aethos. It's a pretty good upgrade and has the fancy electronic shifters. I love it so far. I'm still using the old bike for my commute, but the new bike will keep me happy on weekends and for races. https://www.specialized.com/us/en/aethos-comp---rival-etap-axs/p/199444?color=335127-199444

The Great Space Potato Saga of Keyrock is definitely a selling point for the game.

You were exercising restraint earlier?

I agree, but I'm not sure what the solution is. Just adding more fights would just make it grindy. Minigames around the Abbey seems terrible too. Better puzzles, maybe.

I never figured out the point of them. I mean, you can shelve a couple companions there and get some more resources, but it seems pretty useless. I assume it will be some developed feature in 10 years or something. To be fair, owning a house in Skyrim was pretty lackluster until some of the DLC expanded it, so it is possible it will become cool. Everything about Starfield kind of seems like it needs more time in the oven, really. Which is pretty typical of Bethesda.

I finally got into Midnight Suns, and it's no surprise that I love it. The combat is a blast. Firaxis continues to nail the turn based combat stuff. I'm enjoying the storyline of The Hunter and his mommy issues. I'm also glad to see that the Marvel heroes are pretty different than their MCU counterparts. Plenty of parallels, but the Avengers are a lot more down to earth in the game. That being said, Blade and the non-Avengers are still the standouts for me. The base exploration and friendship building stuff is decent. It feels a lot more pulp comic bookish than movie based, so that is good. I still think they could have done almost the same game without Marvel and it would have been as good. I'd argue that Xcom Chimera Squad was just as good at creating memorable teammates and unique combat, but I'm sure they felt they could reach a wider audience with the Marvel IP. I don't really agree and it seems like the sales numbers were underwhelming, so hopefully they realize they can stick with their own IP's going forward.

Ugh, just looked at the polls and it's crazy how Trump pulls in numbers: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-r/2024/national/ So yeah, I guess it is him.

Are we sure Trump is going to be the candidate, though? I mean, he's not even going to be on the ballot at this point in a number of states. He's not been part of the primary process. The primaries stretch out until July and who knows what will happen before then.

As was already stated, Steam awards are voted on by the public, so they aren't quite the reviewer circle jerk. Also as much as Keyrock doesn't care what gets an award, publishers do tend to look at that stuff, and that directly affects what games get funding going forward. So I'm bummed when a game like JA3 doesn't get the recognition, despite knowing that it was better than everything else that got awards this year. Hopefully the sales numbers were big enough for awards to not matter. It's always good to remember that Fallout: New Vegas got shafted by Metacritic ratings and Obsidian nearly was shuttered because of that. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/obsidian-denied-bonus-over-new-vegas-metacritic-score-studio-head/1100-6366337/