Zeusthecat

Family Matters.

I went ahead and tested this out. First, I found a bushy area to stand in where I observed a steady and consistent frame rate drop. Then I started with everything maxed out and v-sync on and lowered various settings individually to see which ones had the biggest impact. With everything maxed it was sitting at a steady 37 FPS. With Graphics Detail set to low and everything else maxed it rose to 47 FPS. With Anti-Aliasing set to 4x (8x being the max) and everything else maxed it jumped to 53 FPS. Lowering it further to 2x maxed it out at 60 FPS. So it looks like for me anti-aliasing is the biggest culprit when it comes to low frame rates in Dragon Age Origins. Luckily, it doesn't ever really get below 25 FPS so it's not really too much of an issue. Just kind of irritating and a little weird that a GTX 580 can't manage to maintain 60 FPS for a game from 2009 that doesn't seem like it would be too graphically intensive.

Someone didn't carry the Taylor series out far enough.

Good thought, I'll test it out and report back. Maybe I'm just being over confident in my setup but it would surprise me if this game was so graphically demanding that it would necessitate lowering some of the settings to reduce frame rate drops in certain areas. Even with some of what I've read about Bioware games allegedly being poorly optimized for Nvidia cards, I would expect a 580 to crush this game.

I'm 30 today. Yay.

Because it's the only 2014 game I played this year, my GOTY by default is: Watchdogs Non-2014 GOTY candidates (sorry, I can't just pick one): GTAV The Last of Us Remastered Dishonored Grim Fandango The Walking Dead Season 1

I recently finished Dishonored twice. Once on normal (non-lethal low chaos) and once on hard (super murderer high chaos). This game is absolutely phenomenal and has some of the most satisfying gameplay I've ever experienced. Things that are awesome about this game: Banter between guards and other NPCs is very entertaining. Peeking around a corner to see things like a guard throwing a rat into one of the light walls and then busting out laughing were always a treat. The controls are about as close to perfect as I think a video game of this type can get. I never had any difficulty blinking all over the place and quickly switching between various powers and weapons to do what I needed to do. The weapon and ability variety was very well balanced. I used pretty much every power and weapon at my disposal during my high chaos playthrough and I love how each situation could be solved by using multiple different variations of powers and gadgets. The boat guy called me out for being a cold blooded murderer and alerted enemies to my location in the last level during my high chaos playthrough. That was awesome. I dumped a guy into a bathtub of goo to help a witch brew some stew. Sorry Slackjaw. A bunch of dudes + a rat swarm + grenades + freeze time = a lot of dead guys and me feeling like a badass. Also, I finally decided to set up a Twitch account and start streaming because of this game. It was fun and there were definitely some cool moments that came out of that. I also did a dumb thing and streamed the last two missions against the Truman Show soundtrack (one of the best motion picture soundtracks ever!!!). When the video was archived, all the audio ended up being muted so I deleted the video. But to my surprise, it magically appeared back in my Twitch archive last night with the audio fully restored and it ended up turning out kind of awesome! I'm attempting to upload it to my YouTube channel but not sure if it will get rejected for copyright reasons. We'll see. But this game is great and everyone should play it!

Passing kidney stones has been the worst physical and psychological trauma I've ever experienced. I can't imagine any mortal wound causing that much pain.

i'm going to stream some Dishonored with the Truman Show soundtrack playing in the background. Starting right now. http://www.twitch.tv/xxzeusthecatxx Edit: Derp, I'm dumb. Copyrighted music and whatnot. Lame.

I shaved my beard off last night. First time going beardless in a few years. I'm worried about how this will affect me psychologically. Like, I don't recognize that person looking back at me in the mirror any more. Is that just me without a beard or did some weird looking pseudo-doppleganger switch places with me as the last piece of beard came off? I don't know. I kind of strongly identified as a dude with a beard and now that that part of me is gone I guess I'm a different person. So out with the old Zeus and in with the new Zeus I guess.

But they at least wore pirate hats with skulls on them right?

Yeah, the dowsing rod was super cheap so I picked it up immediately and found hundreds of arrowheads within minutes just by messing around. The Milkman Conspiracy was so good too. I can understand being frustrated by it when you get stuck trying to figure out how to get the next thing you need but I absolutely loved the classic adventure game aspect to that whole section.

That was fun! Not sure if anyone here managed to check it out but there were at least a few sweet kills during the first half of the run. Also, live streaming is fucking weird. I figure I should say something but I'm pretty sure most of what ends up coming out of my mouth is just dumb.

Lame. I'm going to attempt some streaming again tonight for a couple hours starting now. Dishonored Mission 6 - Hard Difficulty. http://www.twitch.tv/xxzeusthecatxx (that link works for me at least)

I finally got set up with Twitch and did my first livestream last night with Dishonored. Now that I think I have most of the kinks ironed out, I'm going to give it another shot and am going to do another session right now. If anyone is interested, my channel is here: http://www.twitch.tv/xxzeusthecatxx And I'm playing through on Hard difficulty.

I hate the phrase "sweeten the pot". It is such an irritating combination of words.

Sweet. I will definitely be picking up the PS4 version but I'll most likely hold off for a bit as I'm laser focused on murdering my Steam backlog right now. However, if they actually do pull through and implement heists in GTA Online then I'll pick it up immediately.

Yeah, what Bjorn said. I was able to hand the Pendleton brothers over to some dude who said he would cut their tongues off and force them to spend the rest of their lives working in the mines that they owned and operated. This one was really the only case that I had to sit there and ponder whether it would be more humane to just kill her rather than going the non-lethal route.

I just had to make a choice between assassinating this lady at a party or knocking her unconscious and bringing her down to some random dude in a basement who proclaimed his love for her and promised he would whisk her away, never to be heard from again and that he was hopeful that she would one day "learn to love him". I'm not sure which is a crueler fate but I ended up deciding to let her live. Surprisingly, none of the guards at the party seemed to care that I was carrying an unconscious woman down to the basement and I was able to just casually stroll down there and hand her off like it was no big deal. I feel like I did a gross thing.

I enjoy interactive media. I am an interactor.

Coincidentally, I just started playing this game a few days ago and it is super fun. I'm used to the shitty stealth mechanics in other games so I was caught off guard a bit by just how solid and fun it is to try to sneak through each level undetected in this game. I am attempting a full non-lethal playthrough and so far it is going great. I love being able to take my time observing the enemy patrol routes and coming up with a plan for sneaking past them/choking them out and then execute it and have it all go exactly how I wanted. I was never able to really do that effectively in Assassin's Creed games and I just find it really cool that this game does such a good job of presenting situations that I feel like I am in complete control over. Every time I've fucked up, I feel like it has been 100% my fault for doing something stupid. I also really like the random banter between guards and other characters in this game. Most of the conversations actually manage to come off as fairly natural and there is a good mix of random, goofy shit along with some conversations that flesh out some minor plot elements or other interesting information about the world.

I finished Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. It was a pretty good game and I mostly enjoyed it but it was still probably one of my least favorite Mario games. The platforming was fairly solid, the soundtrack was decent, the art style was interesting (but too busy for my tastes), and the boss fights were all pretty great. I just could never get over my frustrations with the baby Mario and egg throwing mechanics. Those last two worlds had too many irritating parts where I had to keep backtracking to find the eggs I needed. And having to jump around like a mad-Yoshi to try to get Mario back whenever I got hit was absolutely infuriating on some of those later levels. But despite that, it was still a pretty good game.

That is GOTY material right there. For all the edginess, vulgarity, and violence in video games, they have really dropped the ball when it comes to drug culture.