Bjorn

So some fans made a live action trailer for Skin Game. It's a bit cheesy, but really charming. I don't know if they are just guessing, or if they have insider knowledge, but it definitely has what might be spoilers in it if it is at all accurate. I know that Butcher does have a fair sized group of beta readers who help him make sure that continuity stays accurate across the series, so it's possible that they had his permission to do this and had some knowledge of the book. At any rate, possible spoilers (though I still watched it and enjoyed it). http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x8ZUvrIQWuY

There's going to be a Nutella Bar in New York. I just cannot buy Nutella and keep it around the house, otherwise I'll eat the whole thing within a couple of weeks with Nutella and PB sandwiches. I let myself buy a jar about once a year.

Company apologies without any action to show that they are actually willing to change are meaningless, so I'd say being skeptical is perfectly reasonable. They were able to take the time to patch the game to fix a bug that allowed you to create male looking characters that were tagged as female (and vise versa), thus allowing same sex relationships.

So have you all seen the stories about Emily Letts and her abortion video this week? Things like this make me weep for America. And I'm talking about the vile pro-birthers, not Ms. Letts.

I really haven't paid a lot of attention to armor values, other than when I've needed fire resistance or some specific affect (like more Faith/Intel or a spell slot). Which is something to think about. Some of the gear that gives special bonuses have stat requirements, but most of the time you still get the bonus even if you don't have the stat for it, the armor value just isn't as good. I've tended to just wear whatever I think looks cool and is the right weight. I really like the Smelter chest piece, but no other parts of that set. There are very few helms I like. Most of the time I just run without one. I like running around bare chested with Havel's gauntlets and a nice set of pants for my punching build.

If we're being all hypothetical about building shit, let's make a real life NintendoLand. A sprawling several thousand acre theme park dedicated to all things Nintendo. Mario rides, Zelda themed mazes you can explore, the most baller arcades you have ever seen, giant live action recreations of some of their games most iconic moments. Mothafuckin real life Mario Kart Races! Animal crossing petting zoo. Imagine all the fun stuff you could pack into a water park that was Nintendo themed.

I finished it, and completed probably 90 percent of the sidequests (I shouldn't have...so many quests). The game as a whole was very uneven for me. I thought the combat system was great, up until it got way too easy. It went from being an interesting challenge to just button mashing over and over to slog through each area, with very little if any risk. I eventually just broke it as much as possible by creating a bunch of gear that guaranteed every other hit was a critical just to make it go by faster. I remember absolutely nothing about the story. Like, I remember a fighting arena? A town with spiders? Something about crossing the sea towards the end. That's it. I don't even know who my character was or why I was fighting. Which is a bit odd for me, I can usually at least remember the basic story of a game. It all just felt like a paint by numbers fantasy adventure to me. What sold me on buying the game was actually the demo. You got some extra piece of gear for ME3 by playing the demo of Reckoning, so I downloaded and played it. The demo was completely rad. I finished it and immediately wanted more. And that's what I got, was more. The demo had shown everything the game had, and the rest of it was just another 30+ hours of that. Which it turned out wasn't what I wanted at all.

The only super rare stuff that is really appealing to me are the Onion knight set (want bad, want very bad but it's another one time spawn) and the unique pieces of gear that drop from

Yeah, the Monastery Scimitar. It's one of 5 possible (maybe more?) random drops from a red phantom who only spawns once per cycle starting on NG+. And it the bonfire you need to Ascetic also respawns a boss. There are tricks you can use to save ascetics, but that's not the kind of thing you should need to do. I'm honestly a bit frustrated with some of the rare equipment drops. So you want something to be rare, cool. But to make something so rare that it requires burning dozens of Bonfire Ascetics for a chance to get it? That's kind of ridiculous.

Except for phantom range and lag. Usually when I get tagged by an ultra weapon, there's a good foot or more of space between me and the weapon. Also the higher level meta has discovered that a particular scimitar is the king of parrying. The parrying frames start as soon as you push the button and last a bit longer than most other parry items. One way for Str builds to counter-act parrying is to two-hand ultra weapons. You can't parry a 500 hammer being dropped on your head. Hidden weapon is also fun to use on ultra weapons. Carry an Avelyn in your left hand to distract them, then crush them with that large club.

There should be an HL3 gamejam.

Yeah, the Mace is the superior weapon, but I still like the club for hollows, particularly when you are going through an area where you might aggro multiples of them. That wider R1 swing is super useful. Someone finally nailed down how Soul Memory matching works. That goes a long ways towards explaining my experiences with moving in an out of range during a couple of my characters. Sometimes signs would suddenly all disappear or suddenly an area would go from being empty to having a ton of signs. I had been assuming that it was a percentage system, but having fixed ranges makes sense.

Are you sure about that?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Do you mean when you fail a co-op mission? Because successful co-op restores all your equipment to new (as long as it isn't actually broken).

Maybe we just fundamentally disagree here. Weapon breakage makes complete sense to me in a Souls game. Is the new system perfect? No (particularly not as it is bugged), but I do think it adds a good mechanic to the game to have to worry about equipment degradation. Breaking your weapon on a boss is a seriously butt clenching moment if you don't have a backup loaded into a quickslot and you have to find a moment to rapidly switch out. Without the faster degredation, this would almost never happen, and it would be the loss of a unique experience. And the current system is better than having an unknown random chance for a weapon to break. Also, as you approach the end game and get some of the nicer rings, several of them are fragile as glass. Getting smacked around too much or hit with any acid/corrosive attack can shatter them without warning. Which can be crippling when you are near the 70 percent equip load break point and you are suddenly fat rolling.

It's definitely an animation that conveys, "I am a lord and this is your smackdown. Bow down before me and appreciate your smiting." If it didn't take me so long to get a character rolling, I would role play way more different characters. The only one I've done so far is Donatello (not able to be seen in this picture is that his armor actually has a turtle shell on the back):

Durability on the PC is quite a bit worse than on consoles. Certain weapons in particular just get shredded (Halberds and Twinblades being the worst). Using a Stone Twinblade, I could barely go through 10 of the easiest enemies without it breaking, and it has 120 durability. I liked it on the PS3, when it was working correctly. Upgrade materials aren't as rare as they seem at first, and it encourages you to mix up weapons and use a couple of them. There's also the Repair spell, which I spiced down and used extensively when I was running a 20 durability Malformed Skull. Durability was really meaningless in DS1 except for weapons with special attacks. Now it actually has a purpose.

Clerics also get lightning, which is pretty much the king of PvE. My first character was a Fth/Str hybrid and it was a ton of fun. I did not realize how much harder some bosses are when you can't sling lightning bolts like Zeus though.

Rapid durability loss seems to be tied to framerate on the PC. Loss when hitting a dead body, phantom or "fading" body can as much as triple depending on the weapon at 60FPS vs 30FPS.

I wasn't necessarily going to listen to it today, but then I saw that and had to start it!

My experience with the mechanical push mowers is that they are great for a tiny percentage of people. If you have the right grass, flat ground and do a good job of keeping your yard healthy and weed free, they do great. So yeah, for most people, not that good of an option. When my wife and I got together, she swore by her mechanical one. But she kept an immaculate yard. Since then we've moved a couple of times, and she's never been able to get it to work well again. She's put it down to having different types of grass.

Yeah, I spent $800ish on a new build last spring, and have yet to find anything it can't run at or near max quality (admittedly there are a few games I haven't tried that might push it). But that build looks plenty powerful to last for awhile.

Because including hetero-normative relationships in a game isn't a form of social commentary at all.

Congrats on finishing it! I had actually forgot how frustrating the Hollow can be the first time you are there. In my first playthrough I found it relatively early and was stupid excited because of all the So I didn't really mind that I had to go through it a bunch of times.

Yeah, I like that they went for a different type of world, but ultimately I agree with you that it could have been built/designed even better. DeS was supposed to take place over a pretty good sized land as well, which is why you had portals in the Nexus to take you to all those places. They were trying to split the difference between DeS and DS1, and it works in some ways, not so much in others. I've tried a handful of times, but haven't been summoned. I've seen people claiming that when fighting the LGK on NG, PC players are never summoned. It only happens on NG+ and beyond. But you can be summoned into NG+ even if you are only on NG. I don't know how accurate any of that is. If it is accurate, that's probably why I didn't get summoned, not enough people in NG+ there yet. So, I'm pretty sure that Santier's Spear is fucking broken and doing more damage than it's numbers say it should. That or other Twinblades are broken and not doing enough damage. After doing some testing against it and two other Twinblades tonight, it was able to consistently out damage both of them, even though it has lower AR values (tested with physical only damage and with infused split damage). I did a Reddit post about it to see if anyone could confirm, but so far it hasn't got a lot of traction. If you're curious about some of the numbers and specifics, you can check it out.