Bjorn

I know I should be excited about the Royals since they managed to have a winning season last year, but my apathy for them is at an all time high. I haven't been to a game since early in the 2012 season, the longest stretch I've gone without attending a live baseball game in probably 15 years. Aaaaand, they started the season 0-1. Go Royals.

I like how the speakers are clearly labeled L and R, just in case someone managed to install that monstrosity upside down or something. I also actually had one of the magnifying attachments for my Gameboy. But not that one.

The Aldia Hammer does have scaling. I also have other weapons without stat scaling, like the Malformed Shell, and its base damage is reduced when scaling. I've checked every weapon I have, and only these two infuse this way. I'm starting to think they are bugged in my game, as I can't find any evidence of other people experiencing this. Every forum I've found talking about the Skull just insists it needs to be made Raw. If this is a bug that can randomly happen to some weapons, it's kind a fucking broken. I don't remember the exact stats, buy my Skull is something like 522 Physical and 171 Lightning. And it can still be boosted by sunlight blade since it's a lightning weapon . This resulted in a couple of OSKs and a bunch of 2 shot kills in PvP (to be fair it was the Bell Tower, which is not a bastion of competence) until I started feeling bad and put it away. I don't like PvP fights that end in less than 10 seconds. I spend more time on loading screens than I do actually fighting. As for the lack of stat scaling, it's actually awesome on the Skull. As far as I know, if made Raw, it is the hardest hitting physical weapon in the game (maybe high level Mundane or high Dex/Str S ratings might beat it). But you can get access to using it by two-handing it with just an 18 Str. There's really nothing at the 18 Str level that is even comparable to it, and there aren't many things at the 35 Str level that match it as well. The downsides are it's crazy low durability and the expected slowness of using one of the Great Hammers.

I really need to try raising my Adaptability. It's at a 3 (fuck yeah, I'm agile as a drunk moose), and I've never put a single point into it. I just haven't felt like I'd be able to make any kind of objective judgment about its value like I can damage, defense, spell selection or stamina use. If you want to play around with a large weapon, farm the Malformed Skull from the big guys downstairs in Sinner's Rise, upgrade it and infuse it to your liking. Shite durability, but I just used Spices to lower the cost of Repair down to 10. Make sure you check out infusing it. See this if you want to watch someone go totally boss with it. Huh, weird, I just did some searching, and I'm wondering if my Malformed Skull is bugged, or if everyone who has used it is being quiet about infusing it. I have 2 weapons that infuse in unique ways. The Aldia Hammer and the Malformed Skull. Both of them do not have their base damage drop when infused with an element, and in fact the base damage increases slightly. I originally thought that the Skull was intentionally designed this way, to offset its extremely low durability. Then I found the Aldia Hammer, and its the same way, but is otherwise an average hammer. And all of the other super low durability weapons get reduced base damage when infusing, as do other weapons without scaling. There are clearly a fair number of people who have tried the Skull, I can't imagine that by now people wouldn't be talking about its unique infusion ability if it was that way for everyone. Can anyone who has it check in their game?

There's some interesting pushback to reclaim the usage of cunt, which really came up a lot when the Oxford English Dictionary added a bunch of Cunt-derived words and phrases recently. Pretty much all the swear words associated with the penis can be used both positively and negatively. It does seem like it would be a net benefit if the swear words associated with the vagina could have similar parity.

Holy crap, that video was terrifying and captivating. The end was actually amazing.

I don't think I've ever had PSU envy before. All my hardware is well over a year old now, so I doubt I have any real relevant experience.

We'll just replace you with a jazz hands pole dancer with your face on it.

Fuck-fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck is objectively the most fun swear to say. My wife's father once asked her to stop taking the lord's name in vain, so she started substituting God Balls for Jesus Christ. Her dad never asked her to tone her language down again.

There's definitely a learning curve, but once you start getting the flow down, it's really an amazing combat experience.

Honestly I think a lot of the arguing was because it was dealing with lesbian characters. The misogynistic and sexist part of gamer culture (at least the vocal commenting part of our community) was simply angry that this game existed and that it was receiving near universal professional praise. And they lashed out any perceived weakness they could find.

In order to mine Goldblums, you actually have to use the pickaxe in Spelunky to destroy blocks. There's a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that a Goldblum will appear.

That's the best collection of comics, thanks!

That's a major bummer of an amount to lose! I think they managed to make the things even more terrifying. On my third one I finally figured out what the visual cue is to tell the difference! I did hit Rank 3 in the Company of Champions yesterday, finally! Once I had the flow down, it only took about 6 minutes per stone running through Belfry Sol. If you really like Fist weapons, then this is a thing you should think about doing. Details about the final reward: So armed with that, I joined the Dragon Covenant and engaged in some dueling. People do not appear to expect a single character to be armed with a Lightning Avelyn +10, a bare fist, a great shield and a Katana. I was batting about 50/50 with this build, which is really good in dueling PvP for me. The Avelyn would force characters to get up close to me, and it harassed the hell out of mages. I actually killed 2 mages only using the Avelyn. Once they were close, switch to bare fist in right hand and katana in left. If I got right up on them, my fist would stun lock them until I ran out of stamina, and if they tried to back off, the strong attack of the katana was there to impale them. Beating people with fancy weapons to death with my bare hands is the most satisfying thing I've done in this game so far. The Avelyn continues to be my favorite weapon in all of the Souls games though. That thing gets expensive, but lord it is awesome. Double so since you can manually aim it now.

We should make our own cryptocurrency, with multiple denominations. Each value can have one of the Thumbs portraits on it.

Thanks, unfortunately the only PC invasion that counts is if someone uses a Cracked Red Eye orb. The red soapstone, dragon eye and Bell Keeper invasions won't drop an Awestone. And no one has figured out if the Awestone drop rate is tied to the regular drop chance or not. I've got the Covetous Gold Ring +2, plus 2 pieces of armor that increase drop chances, I've tried using Rusty Coins, and I'm almost always human. The only Awestone I saw drop happened before I had the Covetous Gold Ring +2. Oh, I did finally get one other rare drop though! I finally got a Greatbow! I was breaking up the monotony of killing Bell Keepers by going and killing some of the Greatbow archers in the area (the room that has 4 of them in it), and on the final cycle (no more respawns) the next to last one dropped a Greatbow. Unfortunately my current spec can't use it, but I can't wait to try it out once I respec when I get 50 Awestones. The two Greatbows are both super hard to get. One is a rare drop, and the other takes either NG+ or using an Ascetic on one of the Primal Fire bosses.

That's just gross.

Thanks for those thoughts. I wonder when the decision to tie the worlds together so tightly happened, if that was something they wanted to do early with Infinite, or if it came later.

It's funny how we perceive risk though. You couldn't pay me enough to jump out of an airplane and I damn near had a panic attack doing the at World's of Fun (in hindsight, it was amazing, but fuck, getting up there almost broke me). But I've raced cars at 100+ miles an hour without a second thought.

Ugh, if anyone has any interest in the Company of Champions Rank 3 reward...it's brutal to get to. That's pretty much what I've focused on this weekend, as I really, really, really want that reward and its the only way to get it. If you want to know what it is... I'm SL123 right now. I've run through multiple late game areas and other areas I think would be likely for an invasion, and nothing. I've gone through multiple areas that have enemies that can drop Awestones, have probably killed upwards of 100 enemies with the drop chance, and have received 1 Awestone from them. So that leaves NPC invasions. I've exhausted all the ones the game has. The most useful ones don't respawn (tied to sidequest that has 2 paths). I did respawn a couple of bosses to get their NG+ reward and they have an invader in their areas, but I don't want to ratchet up the difficult for required areas in future playthroughs. So that leaves basically 3 areas, the two bell towers and the Doors of Pharos. The bell towers are way faster than the Doors, so I've been focusing there. The first bell tower can actually spawn 2 invasions if you are offline, but the second one is a brutal fight once you've dropped some Bonfire Ascetics and you have to rekill the boss everytime to use another. Sidenote about killing that boss: So really, the second bell tower is the only option. Difficulty seemed to stop increasing at NG9+. I think I've got it at a +15 right now. Them little bastards can almost one shot me with an arrow, and any other attack can OSK me. Ended last night with 34 stones, only 16 more to go. It almost feels like From expected/intended these two towers to be possible farm spots though. One has 3 Skeptic's Spices, and the other has 3 Simpleton's Spices, so if you need spices, they're the places to burn Ascetics.

If it wasn't attached to the wall, those jazz hands would be crushing the windpipes of everyone in the room.

Thanks for the thoughts on the DLC for those of you who've actually played it. I do have a question. Huge spoilery stuff about the ending of the DLC:

I had to look her up, and now I think I'm going to have to listen to some of her stuff tomorrow! She strikes me as the kind of artist I would enjoy.

I had wondered if 3 was fun in co-op, kinda like how RE5 wasn't a good survival horror game, but my daughter and I had a blast going through it (basically completed it twice going back through areas to unlock stuff). But I never got around to actually trying 3 out.

Nope, you just get a cool animation, as far as I know. You can also cut off some things that are not tails. I miss cutting off tails as well. Given that new stuff appears through NG++, I keep hoping someone discovers something like that. Or the fact that an animation exists for it means that From could add stuff at a future date.