Bjorn

If you like awkward humor, Mortified might be enjoyable. It's grown ass adults reading excerpts of their teenage diaries live to audiences. I listened to an episode of it today because it was featured on the Heart podcast, and it was terrific. Normally I don't like humor built around awkwardness, but this was oddly delightful because it was people reveling in the absurdness of what it is to be a teen, and it's real, versus the manufactured awkwardness of a sitcom or Ben Stiller movie.

There's also rumors/hints that an expansion is coming very soon. The devs have talked in the past that they are working on one, and have started dropping teasers on their Facebook page about something. Edited to add: Apparently at one point they were talking about doing a Motorhead themed expansion, as in Motorhead the band. Although I can't tell if that was a joke, serious or if that's what they ended up making.

After the Volus of all things got added to MP, a lot of people did mockup what an Elcor companion would look like.

Victor Vran Diablo-like ARPG that depends on entirely gear and loot rather than classes to build a character. It's really good, and we really liked it. I don't have much else to say. The story is typically dumb ARPG flair with a dash of Van Helsing thrown in. I honestly think the balance of some weapon classes is badly broken, the game could use some more polish/tuning, but it was a ton of fun to put a bunch of hours into.

4K video from a few weeks back, also showing off a section of the game (in alpa, so assuming it doesn't get cut/changed). It looks really, really, really fucking pretty. Also, it was apparently clarified that the male and female protagonists are not the same person this time, it's a brother and sister, and you're playing one or the other, and the one you don't play is off faffing about the galaxy doing something (that you will probably encounter at some point).

My understanding of DS2 and its DLC is that the director of the game changed mid-course, and the DLC represents the only content that was entirely under the control of the second director, as much of the base game was already built when he took over, so you're seeing a distinct difference in skills and philosophies between the two.

Congrats and good luck Danielle! It looks to be a great crew they've put together there.

Do you have a desktop, or just use a laptop? You could also always strip the drive out of it's container and just install it in a desktop if you wanted, it most likely is a standard drive.

That's really fucking rad.

We got our first Legendary weapons last night (their version of unique items), and I've found yet another thing about their design I like. Legendaries scale with character level, so they are always relevant. There's no problem of "Oh, neat, I found this awesome piece of gear" and an hour later it's junk that you get rid of. The way weapons work is that you have your typical common, uncommon, rare and unique categories. However, unique/legendary don't necessarily always trump rare, which I think is good. Legendaries get two stats plus a unique ability. Rares get two stats, but can have a third stat added to them with crafting. So rares can be good for customizing a really specific build since you can control the third stat, while legendaries are good if their unique ability is something your build finds useful.

It's more linear, by and large. You have a hub, with spokes going off it, that have a pretty natural order to clear. The weapon upgrade system is less complex (far fewer upgrade stones). But otherwise, it's still pretty obtuse in ways.

Your line about just wanting it to be over is exactly how I felt going through the last half to third of it. I had such high hopes for that game. And there's still a few parts in it I think are absolutely terrific. I had American Nightmares installed for years before I finally deleted it a couple of months ago, realizing that I just had no interest in any more of that style of gameplay at all. I still think you can see where Alan Wake was at one point in time intended to be an experience much more like Silent Hill or Deadly Premonition, with open or semi-open access to a small town. And at whatever point in development they shelved that to make it linear kind of ruined the game. That might have been what they needed to do to get it out the door at all, but it gutted the sense of place and exploration, both of which Alan Wake needed badly.

Voodoo Vince is returning in an HD remaster! I remember really just digging the hell out of Vince, it was one of those games picked up because it looked cool knowing nothing about it, and it was a great 3d adventure/platformer game.

Both? It's got three control schemes, Controller, Mouse and Action. I've only played with controller, because it's my preferred way to play ARPGs (click, click, clickity click lacks a sense of...weight to me). But Mouse is supposed to be traditional Diablo, and then Action is supposed to be some other variation that I don't know how it works at all.

Don't worry, in a couple of months, they will deny that they ever made that post.

Far less annoying than what I remember of other ARPGs. I think the structure of the entire game matches the first area, which is you have a Hub that has to be explored and then a number (5 in the first area) of smaller dungeon areas that can be entered and cleared out. So far we've cleared out the first hub and 3 dungeons and have picked up maybe 25-30 pieces of total gear. It feels pretty reasonable. The "town folk" area is very small, all the vendors, stash and quest givers are within a few of seconds run of one another. So no annoying runs all the way across a town to do something. No crafting so far, just transmuting, which is combining multiples of the same thing to make a better thing. I haven't unlocked it yet to see if it has any annoying slot machine elements to it, or if it's just straightforward. Each area has five challenges that can be optionally completed, which give rewards of cash, experience or better loot. They give you something else to do, or encourage playing around with different weapons and seem fine so far. Oh, and you can jump in this game, which adds some minor verticality to the maps. Mostly seems to be used to hide hidden chests so far, but it also makes exploring and backtracking quicker. There's a narrator who comments on what you're doing (he's unnamed, I'm guessing he's the big bad eventually), and in the first hub we found a hedge maze. He gloated about how were we ever going to navigate the maze. Once one of us jumped over a wall, he just mumbled, "Fine, be a cheater."

"pre-production"

I ended up deleting Alien Isolation off my machine to free up some space, because after the first couple of real encounters with the alien, I just new it wasn't at all what I was interested in doing at the time. I do wonder if I should have left it installed and modded it though, I was really digging just wandering around.

Fun fact, Congress sets, through law, how many justices are. And there's one precedent for Congress shrinking the Court to prevent a president from even having the opportunity to add a member to it. Which, given the Court's role in government for the last century, it's terrifying to imagine a Congress who decided to try and cripple it.

This is me in a good period, just go balls to the wall....usually until I hit a wall. The last couple of years has involved a lot of introspection for me to come to terms with the fact that I've been dealing with bouts of severe depression for my entire adult life, something I managed to deny all the way until a couple of years ago when I stretch got so bad I had to get meds and do something about it. That stretch came as close as anything to causing a lot of shit in my life to unravel.

TOS and TNG are my main references for Trek, I never got into the later series. TOS I'm sure was just an established crew. In my memory, I was thinking that TNG started with mostly Data and Riker being new, but scanning a few character bios, they might have mostly been newer to each other than I thought. Maybe that still felt different because all the characters still had to exist within a military command framework, which provided a foundation of expectation for relationships. Whereas in DS9 it feels a lot different since you've got multiple overlapping groups (Starfleet, Bajoran government, and civilians), and even within those you have further divisions in some cases.

Hahahahaha. That's not even satire. Just truth.

I won't be backing 3 like I did 2. I don't regret that I backed 2, ultimately I got something enjoyable out of it even if I never finished, and they do a great job with their backer emails and updates. But I certainly do not have the enthusiasm to back another one of their games (though of course we'll see if Torment ends up making me feel differently when it comes out). I'm split on what I think about there being unique content locked behind the asynchronous multiplayer. On one hand what they described sounds cool, but not necessarily in a fixed campaign single player game. If it were something procedural or random, I think I'd be more excited about the idea of setting up a buddy to be a false prophet or blaming my cattle murdering on him.

So Wasteland 3 was announced today. I'm oddly, but tentatively, excited about this. It's odd, because I managed to quit twice on Wasteland 2. W2 just had some problems, and I think chief among them is that its mechanics and narrative really supported a 20-30 hour experience, but they made a fucking 70+ hour game. Each time I quit, it was because I got to about the 30 hour mark, and just found myself getting bored. I'm really hoping that the lessons they learned from 2 will let them make something that's a bit more diverse this time around.