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.