RaZ0r! wrote on May 7, 2020, 15:24:
Witcher 3 wasn't massively successful until very recently when the TV show was created. I'm not so sure Witcher is an influence here, but it could be.

That's an understandable point of view, but the Wicther 3 sold over 20 million copies BEFORE the show came out and even before the fairly successful Switch port. Sure, that's not GTA V numbers, but it's still a huge, huge success.

Strangely enough, I just finished this game. It had been sitting in my epic backlog for years.

To be honest, I was left with an overall feeling of "meh". The characters were pretty well done. The premise was fun and once you reached a certain point (do you still have to hold back spoilers for a five-year-old game?), movement and escape became less troublesome. Combat was fine, if tedious.

My main complaint was really that once you were two hours in, you had really experienced everything the game was going to offer. Combat never really changed. You never became powerful enough to change the nature of how things worked. Your weapons did little more damage and the foes you faced absorbed a little more damage. Nothing changed the entire time.

Yet I finished it; not something I do for every, or even most, games these days. Why is that? Well, the missions - especially the main storyline missions but also many side quests - were pretty interesting and widely varied. The primary story itself was intriguing enough to make me curious as to how it would end. Finally, and this goes back to my complaint, I was always waiting for "Phase II" of the game where combat etc. improved or changed just a bit. That never came, but I can't say I regret my time playing the game.

I know sounded negative here, but I'd still say it's worth a play if you've never given it a shot. You can find this well-supported high quality game for dirt cheap now, so there's little risk.

I only recently tried PoE1. I really tried to get into it, and I can't put a pin into why, but I finally dropped it about 15 hours in. I just didn't look forward to coming back to it in the limited time I have for gaming. Now compare that to DOS2 which I just started and wow! I have to tear myself away from the game (despite really struggling to be successful in combat). It's just so clean and polished and, well, fun.

One thing I noticed right off after having tried PoE so recently was the simplicity of the character development models. Whenever I leveled up in PoE, I had no idea where to put points to actually make any difference; completely the opposite of DOS2 where it's blindingly obvious what a point in each of the different areas will help with.

From the FAQ quoted directly above:

What games will be included in the beta?
All games tagged with local co-op, local multiplayer, or split-screen will be included.

I don't see LAN mentioned anywhere above or in the linked support document.

Fleabag isn't for everyone, but the wife and I thought it was hilarious. We're eagerly waiting for the next season.

I'm certainly no guru, but here's one man's experience.

I had been using Dell business class IPS monitors for years and years; first a 24" 16:10 ratio and then a 30" 16:10. I LOVED these monitors. When I finally decided to upgrade I hesitantly went with an Agon AG352UCG G-Sync monitor. It uses the same panel as a number of other 35" ultrawide MVA monitors with a resolution of 3440x1440.

I say "hesitantly" above because I was VERY unsure about stepping away from my beloved IPS panels and into something that was potentially not as good. All I can say is that I have been happy in every single way with the decision. I use the monitor for 95% business as opposed to gaming despite having actually bought it for gaming purposes. The colors, clarity, and precision are all everything I could have hoped for.

Monitors are subjective and I know some of the reviews of MVA panels mention various uniforminty issues, etc. I'm either not as sensitive to those problems or they don't exist in my unit as to me it seems perfect from one end to the other. I'd have no problem recommending one of the several monitors using this panel. I'm typing this message on it right now and it prompted me to re-examine the angles and colors. They still look good to me.

For what its' worth I originally powered it with a GTX 970. That was "ok". The G-Sync kept everything playable even with lower framerates, but when I upgraded to a GTX 1080 a few months later it was a marked improvement. I'm no GPU expert but the improvement was actually way more than it should have been given the actual difference in GPU power and I suspect strongly that a big percentage of the difference was actually the higher memory count in the 1080 over the 970. So if that's true, it's a good reason to consider a high memory card, even with a smaller GPU if going for something with 3k or 4k resolution.

This looks WAY too much like The Last Stand flash game to not have some kind of shared history (same dev, or something). The game mechanics, the pegboard weapon holder, etc. It's exactly the same.

Not that that's a bad thing. That was a fun flash game.

I don't know. I think they mixed it up a bit too much here. If it's going to be based on the comics, then base it on the comics; if it's the MCU then do a better job of making it look like the MCU. This was too much of a mixed bag. I rather liked that the characters acted and talked like their "comic" based counterparts (i.e. Iron man being a little more of a team player; Thor in full Asgardian talk mode, etc.) but then there were way, WAY too many homages to the MCU. I like the MCU, dont' get me wrong, but if you're going to go there, then the characters have to look and act like the charcters from that universe.

Same with the set pieces. All MCU based.

Don't mix it up. Pick one or your players are going to feel the discord. We're all used to seeing these characters in the MCU now. If you set them in that universae but have them look and act different, it just feels weird.

Thats said, as the trailer went on, I started liking it better. It looked like a fairly decent storyline. I guess it all depens on the "fun". I'd love a good super hero co-op game.

Creston wrote on Jun 10, 2019, 05:38:
Sugar should absolutely be treated the same as smoking. It ruins your health.

If you're saying that we as a society should increase our awareness of the impact of sugar on our health, I'm on board. I couldn't agree more; it's used far too often in far too many things. If, instead, what's being implied is that we are all too dull for our own good and we need some bureaucrat big brother (local/state/national government) looking out for us and determining our behavior, I'll politely disagree. Work to make people aware of the impact of their choice (i.e. inform them) and I believe most people will eventually change their behavior. It's a slow process but it's a lot better than setting a precedent for absolute government control over every aspect of our lives.

Where would we draw the line? Sitting and gaming too much "ruins your health". Too much pizza "ruins your health". Should we have somemone in the statehouse telling us "You! Yes, you -- only 2 hours a week of gaming", "3 slices of pizza a month".

Then again, we're already halfway there...

Ahh the Deathadder... My love/hate relationship with the three I've had that all failed in the same way is well documented on the Razer support site. I finally gave up and refused to buy another one. I really miss my MS Intellimouses(mice?) and their nearly identically shaped successors, the Deathadders but I finally had to move on.

Prez wrote on Jan 29, 2019, 08:38:
For me it comes down to refusing to reward anti-consumer practices, and platform exclusivity is a big one for me.

This... exactly.

I hope that the Epic store actually does become decent (right now it sucks is so many, MANY ways). I have no emotional attachment to Steam, but it just works, and works well. I can play many of my games on Linux. Games are downloaded and updated very quickly. Cloud saves work (usually). For me at least, it's "discovery" mechanisms allow me to find great things I've never seen before and that I would never have found without Steam.

If Epic can get all of these same things right, then awesome, but forcing me to choose the far inferior platform (for now) in order to buy your game means I'm that much less likely to do so. I've avoided many PC games I was interested in in the past that were on sucky platforms (hello Microsoft exclusives, I'm talking to you).

I only made it halfway through FC4 and I skipped FC5 altogether. That said, I rather liked the idea of a bright colorful "natural" post-apocalyptic mad-max-ish setting. Now that I've had a break from it, I could stand heading back in for the somewhat shallow story and combat of the series again in this particular setting. I'm far more willing to suspend belief for this kind of thing than I am a wide-ranging super powerful christian cult in the middle of Montana.

Andrew Garfield was a bad Spiderman in bad Spiderman movies. My girlfriend thinks he was the best Spiderman (she's really wrong)

While the Amazing Spider-Man movies were mediocre (at best; the second wasn't even that), I really felt the Garfield Spider-Man was the truest to the comics. That's all subjective of course, but for me, Spider-Man was a minor super-power except for two things: his super nerdy but super cool almost world-class science and mechanical ability, and his spider sense. Those two abilities vault him into being a major power and they're also the things are downplayed to the point of being absent in the Holland versions. It seems like they're using Iron-Man style suit abilities give him big powers in the new movies, which is NOT the Spider-Man I loved as a kid, at all.

Prez wrote on Nov 27, 2018, 11:45:
I am absolutely LOVING the utter shitshow that Fallout 76 has turned into. Bethesda has received a free pass for far, FAR too long.

While I think it's stupid to sue over it being a "bad game", which is what this amounts to, I totally agree with the above statement. I LOVE Bethesda but their last few games have been given WAY too much of a pass. People complain about the absolute crappiness of the port, the bugs, the decades-old bugs in the engine, but we buy it anyway. I'm guilty of it too.

Just this past week finally got around to buying Fallout 4 GOTY and I can't believe how bad it is before mods. Even with mods, I feel exactly like I'm playing Fallout 3 again. I'm only a few hours in and I'm really not sure if I'm going to keep it up.

My hope is that Fallout 76 is so raked over the coals that it has a positive impact on Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI.

Scares the crap out of me that we now have media outlets that are so ridiculously powerful and influential that due process on those mediums actually makes sense; and worse, as non-elected and non-governmental entities they have no real incentive to agree to it.

ForgedReality wrote on Nov 4, 2018, 15:28:
Witcher 3 is the best game ever made. Change my mind.

I'm not going to change your mind, of course, but I can't say I agree. I was so ready for the game to end by the time I was halfway through that I rushed through the remaining content abandoning my normal OCD tendencies to finish every quest and visit every location. It was a great game, to be sure, but not on my all-time-greats list.

Never even heard of this but that looks fantastic. I love turned based tactical and the world looks fantastic.

Regarding China's regulation burden and indies... Almost all regulation hits the small businesses much harder than the larger ones. This is why large business will often not only refrain from opposing new regulations, but sometimes actively collaborate with government in imposing them while claiming they're doing so as "good societal citizens" when in truth it's just to get rid of smaller competitors who are usually more innovative and agile.

We bought my wife a Surface 3 a few years back and that has been the best individual computer purchase I've ever made, and that statement is coming from someone who builds all his own non-laptop PC's and uses Linux exclusively when not gaming. It's just been a rock-solid little device that she uses constantly. We have the docking station for it (plugs into the multipurpose/power port of the machine) and it's just amazingly convenient to use it at either her desk with a big 30" monitor or anywhere in and out of the house as a portable device. I've never had a laptop move between docked and mobile so smoothly, but maybe I've been unlucky in the past (or maybe it's just my linux laptops being finicky).

I'd buy another Surface for her in a heartbeat.

I tend to play games quite a bit after they've been released so I'm only just now in the middle of my "Rise of the Tomb Raider" playthrough. I think my time with it is suffering from comparison, as I had literally JUST finished Horizons Zero Dawn before starting Rise. I know they're not really "exactly" the same genre, but there are too many similarities for the Tomb Raider game not to suffer (massively) in comparison. Sure there were collectibles in Horizons and even fast travel via campfire, but it all felt so much more natural and integrated there. Even the classic Tomb Raider schtick of climbing and vaulting was smoother and more natural in Horizons.