Astro Creep

I am so psyched for this patch! Phoenix looks really cool, though I have no frame of reference since I never played DotA1, but the changes to already existing heroes are crazy. The Lion and Meepo ult buffs are insane!

Yeah, they (Polygon) have done themselves no favors by lowering the score twice now. Their review-by-committee system is weird in and of itself, though. I'm also not a fan of arbitrary numbers being used to denote a game/film/album's quality anyways simply because of how many companies use the 7-10 Scale. EA could easily look at just the early impressions and say "Oh wow, look at all of these 9s! Nothing was wrong with the game, let's do another!". Or, and perhaps more likely, they'll use only the lower scores like these and deny bonuses to the developers like Bethesda did to the New Vegas team. It's just an absolute shame how this has turned out. The devs deserve much, much better than this. The game looks fantastic, and most non-server-related complaints could easily be patched out. But instead this debacle is the main focus.

Polygon just posted a second update to their review, I won't spoil the new score. Good on them for finally addressing the issues that they were previously arguing didn't exist on Twitter yesterday and Tuesday.

According to The Verge, EA is disabling "non-critical" features like leaderboards and achievements. Things that "justify" the fact that it's online-only in the first place. I haven't had this much fun (albeit mixed with secondhand embarrassment) reading about a disastrous launch since The War Z. It's an absolute shame that it had to happen to a beloved franchise like Sim City, but maybe this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. I was really looking forward to this, but all of the issues that the guys at Giant Bomb and the Thumbs highlighted during their streams were incredibly off-putting, and that wasn't even the entirety of what people are experiencing. EDIT: Sorry, it was The Verge, not Ars Technica

Yeah, EO is definitely in the top tier of Wizardry-style dungeon crawlers these days. Rodi, if you're enjoying 3, I think you'd have just as good of a time with 4. They took the improvements and additions (the overworld vehicles, better skilltrees, and such) from 3 and rolled them into the general framework of 2 to great effect. If you guys are hungry for more, I highly recommend Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey and The Dark Spire. The latter had a painfully small print run because it was a super-niche Atlus game, so if you see a copy anywhere for a reasonable price, snag it. Its art style is faaantastic, and features a setting that lets you completely replace the graphics and music/sfx with old-school pixel art and chiptunes.

I'll add everyone when I have my system on-hand, but for the time being, my FC is 2836 1108 4015 There's a pretty neat site called 3DStxt.com that lets you create your own page, and then use that URL as your Mii's message. Given how small the 3DS' community features are, it's a pretty acceptable alternative.

This actually has one of the most interesting implementations of Streetpass out of the 3DS' library. You set up a "model home" that you want to show other people, and when you Streetpass, that home and your character are sent to the Streetpass Plaza for the other player to check out at their leisure. Streetpass in and of itself is awesome, and I applaud Nintendo for making an all-in-one solution to the problems the previously mentioned DS games had, but I live in Iowa. I've met one other person who owns a 3DS since I bought mine almost a year ago. Not being able to take part in some of the features is pretty lame, but a lot of them are superfluous.

Giant Bomb is also doing a livestream with crew reactions and chat starting at 3:30 Eastern.

Just a heads-up, people are reportedly receiving PSN messages from Sony with a ten dollar voucher code for the Playstation Store. It sounds like they are going out in waves, so if you don't have one, you might by the time of the press conference.

From here: This is what I was going off of, there might be some newer terms that haven't, and probably won't, come to light.

That's what I find worrying about it. That's four mainline Destiny games plus four "Comet" games/expansions in eight years. They'll either have to do some serious B-teaming like they did between Reach and ODST(which worked out okay in the end), or they'll have another dev team work on the off-year "Comet" stuff like IW/Treyarch and CoD. But this is all just a bunch of ~wild speculation~ on my part, and I don't know what their current development environment is like.

No, I actually hadn't. That's fantastic news, though it looks like they can't even do anything with the IP until Destiny passes more than a quarter of a billion in sales(definitely not out of the question). On one hand, I'm excited for this, and it may be the thing that will get me to purchase a new system, but I'm also worried about what Activision has planned. It's pretty obvious that they want to turn this into the new Call of Duty, and the hype conference from a few days ago shows that. Being locked into working on this single FPS IP until 2018 is crazy, in my opinion. Add in that they can't even talk to publishers about other games of the sort until 2021 is utterly mind-boggling. Yes, they make exorbitant amounts of money, but the cost of keeping Bungie tied down for the next 8 years could very well lead to another Infinity Ward-like burnout.

I swear, every new bit of info that Bungie releases about this makes me think that my long-held dream of a Marathon revival is coming. Maybe not with Destiny, but eventually. They keep coming back to the basic story and design elements, and make various hints at it, but nothing ever happens. The Traveler looks like a moon converted into a ship(much like the UESC Marathon was converted from Deimos), and the little info released about the aliens sounds like they resemble the Pfhor(the Fallen in particular look like Pfhor Hunters, and what has been shown of the Cabal looks like Pfhor Troopers and Drinniol). There's a screenshot floating around that has the Marathon logo in it, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.

The class of card is something to worry about when reading or writing large single files, not something fragmented like downloaded games and their saves. The save is the only thing being written since the game had been loaded as far as I know. I have an old class 2, a class 4, and a class 10. I've tried Crimson Shroud, a large game by eShop standards, on all three, and noticed no appreciable difference between them.

Hey I_smell, you've probably seen this by now, but on the off-chance you haven't... http://www.giantbomb...xplain/17-7021/ It sounds like they really liked it, and looking through the comments, it seems like a ton of people are planning on giving it a whirl.

I haven't lost any of my units yet (I'm a dirty rotten save-scummer) but I've seen screenshots of unit lists where it actually states that they're flat-out dead. That might not be the case for everyone, though, I don't know (and don't really intend to find out). This game has been a blast so far, it's exciting, intense, and just all-around fun. For my first runthrough on Hard Classic, I'm going to stay as far away from the Serene's Forest guides as I possibly can, then replay on Normal Casual to mess with the various pairings and see what comes of them.

There are two types of "pairing". Note: Stats are italicized, unit modifiers are capitalized. Duel The first is two or more units simply standing next to each other on the field. The attacking character gains a stat boost, the size of which depends on how many allies are adjacent to them at the time of attack. There are a few extra features to Duel, one of which is Dual Strike(both characters attack). Another is Support Block, where a Support character negates damage done to the one being attacked. Pair Up The second is when two units combine to occupy a single square on the map, and effectively function as one. The first unit (Lead) gains a stat bonus depending on the class and level of the second unit (Support). The Lead unit can also carry the Support unit as if the Support unit had the same Movement value. This is very useful for Mages or other characters with a low Movement. Pair them up with a mounted unit for the greatest effect. Both systems increase a Support rank, which influences marriage options and offspring stat growth. Note that not all characters can have a relationship just anyone, except for the Avatar. A great resource for this stuff is Serene's Forest. It's full of charts and formulas that go into pretty deep detail about all of the systems that are tucked away in the game.

Honestly, if you have even a fleeting interest in purchasing eShop games, a 4GB SD is what you should have at the very least. Fire Emblem is around 1.5GB (the actual cartridges can hold up to 8GB, so even this is relatively small compared to what could be done). If you have a spare 4+GB card lying around, the process to dump all of your save data is as simple as copy-pasting the folders from the root of the original card to the root of the new one. From an American perspective, picking the eShop release over a physical cart was an incredibly easy decision. Shipments of carts have been delayed for periods ranging from a few days to a few weeks at some retailers.

Thanks for the recommendations! I decided to pick up Guards! Guards!, and I'm halfway through Reaper Man at the moment. Gotta say, Death might become my favorite fiction character ever if things keep up. Yeah, Kirby's work was phenomenal. It's really disappointing that the only paperbacks that are readily available in my area are ones with covers like this: http://www.lspace.or...-of-magic-2.jpg There's just no excitement in that cover style. Also, I found out just a few days ago that there were a few animated miniseries that aired back in the 90s. Bit of a neat coincidence, since I had Christopher Lee's voice in mind when reading Death's lines in Mort. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB85j6EfotA&feature=share&list=PL63A2ADA5525B939E

Conelrad put out a B-sides album of sorts today, name-your-price as always. If you've never heard any of their work before, Sure is the Risk Made is the one you should listen to first.

I'm in pretty much the same situation. A small apartment means shelf space is precious, so I just have a single shelf for my favorite books. Everything else goes on my Kindle Keyboard. I love love love it, though the lack of a backlight makes reading on night walks or before bed troublesome. With as much as I use the Keyboard, there's really no excuse for me to not have a Paperwhite. I just hope PDF support goes beyond just basic compatibility in the coming years. The scaling options have been atrocious on every device I've used.

This seemed like a pretty intimidating series to get into, considering the sheer volume of mainline books and spinoffs, but I had heard great things about it for years. I finally picked up Mort a few weeks ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I grabbed the rest of the Death-related novels, so I hope to break into the rest of those when I have the chance (I'm catching up with the Book Club, and I've fallen down the Warhammer 40k rabbithole). What would you guys recommend after I finish those? I've heard a lot of good things about the Watch series.

Would it happen to be one of the Loaded games for the PS1? That's the first thing that came to mind when I watched that trailer. I really dig the grimy, rusty aesthetic of this, and I'm an absolute sucker for top-down shooters. Might have to pick this up soon.

Yup. The game completely opens up right after the "Here's some money, go buy a gun" section. There's a tiny tutorial about outposts, but those aren't necessary to take over unless you care about fast-travel. I was really surprised at how quickly it happened, given what I heard people saying about how it's more hand-holdy than 2. Last night, I was hunting buffalo with my bow, stalking one as it wandered into a field next to a road. I suddenly heard a jeep driving by, and I must have been too close to the road, because the two guys in it started hootin' and hollerin'. I sprinted into the field and fired off what turned out to be my last arrow at the closest guy and missed. I then tried to take out my suppressed Skorpion to pick them off, accidentally pulled out a mine, and threw it without realizing what I had done until it was too late. The entire field is set ablaze, and I run like hell, not caring about where I'm going or what I might meet on the way. I just had to get away from the rapidly-expanding inferno. I saw a vast expanse ahead, stopped for a brief moment, and looked down. It was a massive pit cave like those guys with the squirrel-suits jump into, with a pool of water at the bottom. I figured that was my best chance for escape. I dove in, and was treated to a crazy high-dive animation. At the bottom was a system of caves, which I spent the next 20 minutes exploring. I had a few doubts about it going in, but that experience was one of the most exhilarating things that's ever happened in any open-world game I've played to date. I haven't tried Far Cry 2, but given how much the guys have talked about it, if the experiences it creates are half as great as that was, I absolutely need to play it.

It really, really is. I preordered it last year based simply on a trailer, and having only played the GBA "Eye of the Beholder" remake, I found it incredibly easy to get into. For $3.75, it's an absolute steal, especially on Steam now that it has Workshop support.