Dewar

Regarding cooking with a cinnamon stick, if you're going to try and do this yourself, it can take quite a long time to get any decent amount of flavor out of the sticks. When we make an alcoholic drink called Hot Apple Pie, it takes several hours sitting just below the boiling point of alcohol to get any real cinnamon flavor.

I have never seen anyone that is both attempting to be punk and is effectively punk. I feel like as soon as you're trying to be punk you've already failed, which is why I see PA's paragraph about Hatred being punk to be negative and condescending.

I think we agree, I'm just looking at it from the angle that most punk bands I'm aware of where they scream about being anti-establishment and may even feel that they're anti-establishment, but they're still all pasty white guys.

I don't really think it compares to Grand Theft Auto, except maybe in the bad press it gets. I imagine, much like Postal, someone was wanting to make the game that the rest of the world didn't want them to make. Not trying to get into a discussion of power dynamics in the press, but I feel like someone on that dev team was honestly feeling that they were going against the established hierarchy by putting out a game that's basically saying "fuck the police" but instead of police it's SJW's. That's what I mean by anti-establishment, I'm talking about artistic intent, not necessarily about reality.

I guess I don't get the same meaning from the word punk that you do. When someone says something is punk, that to me says "anti-establishment" which this is, and something I want to stay away from, which this is.

There are 8 figureheads, you can run three different (or not so different as evidenced by Pepyri) missions for each figure to help them, as well as undermining missions against other factions. You have faction rep that must be kept up week to week, and get various advantages including a unique ship module at the top level. Station missions build the power of the system faction that you do them for, and can eventually cause a station to flip allegiance if you do a ton of them. Also, you are building your own faction rep with Empire, Federation, or Alliance, if the missions are for a system faction that is aligned with them. The problem there is it takes a lot of players working in unison to get anything to happen, where the new Powerplay missions are designed to be influenced by smaller numbers of people. Pepyri, I'm a bit disappointed that all three mission trypes for Aisling ended up being identical as well. If they don't improve it, I'd imagine it's going to fall pretty quickly as the majority of people go to where there's more variety. Edit: Your quota will go up as you obtain higher ranks Pepyri, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds.

Hmm, I wonder what Aisling Duval's "Security Increase" ability does.

I didn't find PA's post particularly objectionable either. Though the link to games journalism and Hotline Miami was a poor choice, In the end, I think excessive uninformed preview coverage is the real problem here. If everyone had just covered Hatred when it had come out, everyone would have realized that it's just not a great game, and the violence isn't even really that edgy, and it would have disappeared. Since we've been exposed to months of articles about how it's going to be the most offensive thing ever, even though no one writing those articles had actually played it or had any information about it. in short, report on what's happening, not what might be happening in six months. I'd say the same thing about the next Call of Duty, or Assassin's Creed, or whatever.

If you're really interested in the difficulty and length of Long War, I'd read up briefly about what Enemy Within adds to the game (Meld, Genetic Enhancements, Cybernetic soliders, and EXALT) so they don't catch you by surprise, then start Long War. I still haven't made it to the point where Meld has even mattered in a Long War game, but if you do manage to hold it together that long you can really screw yourself if you haven't been collecting it since the start.

Meat that tastes "moist" generally has steeped in it's own juices and fat. If you put enough liquid in, you start to leach those juices and fat out of the meat and into the liquid, akin to a soup. So if it's dry I'd say run it for less time, put in less liquid, or use a fattier cut.

It's pretty tough to earn enough to buy the whole single player Dungeon of Nax that awards cards that can then be used in multiplayer, but this is technically true. This is the first pack that they've announced that can't be bought with in-game currency.

Hmm, I feel like I care about the houses just enough, but I'm also the person who doesn't understand why so many of these space trading games want to throw in player avatars and walking on stations, I'd rather just be the ship. Did you care about any of the people in XCOM? Because I find the houses in this mean a lot more to me than XCOM soldiers did. Not necessarily disagreeing with you, just trying to figure out how we see things differently. My two tips for combat are to position yourself where you will get the first hit (which requires experience and a little bit of guessing for enemy movement distance) and knockbacks are extremely powerful. Optimally, you want very few (or no) enemies to be able to damage you each turn, even if it means giving up DPS to use a lot of stunning or blinding attacks. I'm not a big fan of most of the items, I generally only grab healing potions, steadyhanders, and the later game items that give you back HP when you damage an enemy. Armor upgrades are definitely important. Remember that while the first one is expensive, it makes the next one cheaper, and the last one super cheap. Finally, if you're only getting to use heroes for one or two fights, you're bringing in your heroes when they're already too old. If you can start someone in the battlefield at age 20, you should get 5 fights out of them which gives you a better chance of getting a relic when they pass. There is both tech to make heroes you search for higher level, extended life, higher birth rate, and higher XP gain, but I think those are all post 100 year upgrades.

Hmm, so I haven't been able to get my pass to Anchenar, even though I'm up to Knight with the Empire. The mission showed up once before the update, but I thought it would involve having to make the trip right then and I was logging off for the night. Now it hasn't come up again and it's not even clear if it will come up in the same way as before given how they've changed up the mission structure. I still don't understand why they decided on real-time mission counters, it's such a pain in the butt seeing a good advancement mission but not being able to take it because I need to log off for the night.

While regent isn't probably the best word to use, those others seem like they'd be fairly clunky. In the end, they needed a word that was gender neutral so that limited their options. I prefer that since your character is unable to leave the throne room, you are basically considered incapable of ruling these kingdoms, and others have been appointed in your place. Not 100% accurate to the meaning of the word, but it's something at least.

I played through the entirety of New Vegas a month ago and didn't use VATS once. I'm not sure if it made it a better game or not, but it did keep me from doing the overpowered hybrid combat of opening up with VATS to instantly kill 3 enemies and FPS-ing the rest. It also caused a weird situation where there wasn't a single perk available that I was particularly interested in because so many were VATS related. Also, I love the "future the 1950s thought we'd have" style of Fallout. In my opinion, there wasn't enough of it in Fallout 3, and I'd be really disappointed if they got rid of it entirely. It would really just be another crappy post apocalyptic game to me at that point.

Nice, time to get my vanity Imperial Courier.

I want Splatoon, I have no Wii-U and I must splat.

Well, it's coming to that time of the year where I guess I should be jumping back into Dota before the international. I'd imagine the Thumb's group is going to get more play? Or is it totally dead?

Endless Legend AI is dumb as a knob. It always disappoints me that I even bought it, because I don't really ever get the chance to play it online.

I was lucky enough to fall in with a good group of chaps when I was wandering around the internet trying to find some people to friend when I first bought my Xbox 360. The group has waned quite a bit since then, but we can still generally muster around 6 people to play together on things. I never do voice chats in games anymore, it's either party chat on Xbox or Mumble on PC. I'm a bit shy, but I'd be willing to hop in on Teamspeak or something and play games together. I'd love to take a shot at Heroes of the Storm maybe. (I assume there's a multiplayer thread about it already?)

Yay, thanks to the big sprint tip, I just beat it on Experienced. It involved two agents getting killed and the third running around the level like a chicken with her head cut off, but Central and Monst3r just barely squeaked into the mainframe room before someone saw them. My alarm level would have probably been 9 or so if it could go up past 6, and I didn't have a single armor piercing weapon, but I did it. Also, the insanity of that mission showed me how flexible things can really be when things go to hell, so I think I'll be able to do a little bit better next time. For now, I'm going to take a break though.

I wonder, since they're talking about going the resistance route, if there will be room to tell a few more personal stories of your soldiers. In the interview, it seems like they're trying to shift away from a military complex sending hundreds of marines into the grinder, and that could be one way of doing it.

This makes me curious about the particulars of Australian (and a I guess European laws as well.) If you were to buy an off-the-shelf computer game, open it up, install it, and then want to return it to a game store, would they have to accept it? What about opened Xbox One games? While I realize that our consumer protections in the USA are garbage, I've also been trained by them (as well as my own guilt I guess) to assume that anything I buy that doesn't work right is my own fault, either because I'm not using it right or I didn't do the sufficient research ahead of time to ensure it was what I wanted. For better or worse, if I bought an early access game and it never completed or came out broken, it feels like that's my bad for taking a risk.

I don't understand why this policy "should have always existed" when you can't bring a game back to Gamestop if it's been opened either. I mean maybe I'm just not the sort of person who returns things in real life very often either, but I don't understand when this became a thing for online software sales.

I have a friend who's been playing a lot of CK2 lately, and I'm considering buying the $30 in DLC I missed and jumping back in. I still remember some of the bruises I got from EU4 though, so I dunno.