Bjorn

That BG&E2 trailer was fantastic. If it wasn't Ancel helming it, I'd have a lot more cynicism or concern than I do. AFAIK, he directed both Rayman Origins and Legends (not just like his name on it or something), and that gives me a lot of confidence that he can go back to the well of something years later and still make magic.

One thing on animals, particularly the cage ones, is just to deploy all 8 (at max rank) every single time you're going to load up on a chopper or finish an mission. It doesn't seem to work by jumping straight to the chopper from the pause menu, but the other two ways it does. I think I'm at 80 percent on the animals list now, and I haven't farmed or tried at all to get anything. Just doing that every mission, sometimes all 8 dumped right under the chopper, has got me that far. So, are you to Mission 25 yet? I hit it tonight, and one thing I'll suggest is that it might be good if you've got a good couple of hours to play when you hit it. A series of events plays out after it that strongly encourages you to play through the next several missions in a row. I just played an hour later than I had intended because I wanted to power through it. Spoilering the rest in case you haven't got there yet:

The servers were garbage for me yesterday, but I did manage to get a few shots in at doing the event FOB. Those are fucking hard! Most of my runs ended within 2-5 minutes, but I did finally get all the way through one. I finally started using the sonar ability of my arm, which I never use in the main game, and it was pretty handy. I feel blind not having a companion to point out bad guys to me. I didn't try an actual person's FOB, but I can see me doing that now that I've got through an event one once. The rewards were pretty nice.

Derp, it was at the end of the page and I missed it. Man, I sure was a lot more willing to write walls o text in 2014 than I am now. Also, time travel message to bjorn of 2014, use some paragraph breaks yo. Edited to add: The naive defense is annoying. It's a "boys will be boys" excuse.

What did I miss? Some dev actually linked to an IT forum thread?

That looks pretty good, but I have to say that I'm pretty skeptical of any early stuff from Bioware after Andromeda.

It's crazy how big and complex this game is. I ended up going down a rabbit hole of just customizing my guns yesterday and like an hour flew by. In terms of complexity, this game feels like an MMO that's been around for years and had all sorts of systems cobbled onto it over time. I feel bad/dumb for not experimenting with more weapons, because all I ever take are the same handful of weapons with me, but there's this entire smorgasbord of stuff to play with. I love it, but it is really overwhelming. I did get to the FOB stuff yesterday. I ended up buying the $10 pack of MB Coins (2000), because I only paid $7 for the game when it was on sale a few weeks ago. I've had so much fun with it, it seemed reasonable to chuck another $10 at it since I got it so cheap. So now I have 3 FOBs and can send out 8 teams, which is more than there are missions my people can actually do at a time a lot of times. I didn't try invading or anything yet, but I might try the official Event invasion today to see what it's like.

Yeah, not sure how long its been since the divorce, but I've generally found that my dad has been pretty open to talking about stuff from the past the further its got (but it's been about 20 years now for them). I talk with him about stuff with my mom all the time, sometimes specifically to fill in gaps in my knowledge about their past and whatnot. Family mysteries are weird and fascinating. Mom discovered after her mother died that we were the lost branch of the family tree, that grandma had cut contact with her greater family (siblings, aunts, uncles, a whole huge clan of them) back in the 40s and never told either of her children that this whole big family even existed. I'm sure there was a reason, but if anyone knows what it was, no one will say. Mom and I went to a family reunion once, and she exchanged some phone calls and letters with a number of them after discovering that they existed.

I have no idea about animal captures, I just place the cages in a mission, usually all in one place before I extract because I forgot to place them earlier! It hasn't seemed to matter, I've got a variety of stuff even when all of them are dropped in one spot. I hate the side op that's on the R&D base. I've done all the other target ones I have, but I cannot find all the targets on the R&D platform because they are scattered around, even with trying to use night vision goggles to find them. I decided to lay off retrying missions or doing side ops until I get to mission 22 to get the FOB unlocked (and thus get more soldiers to send on missions and more resources coming in, that way the time spent trying to S-rank missions or knock out optional stuff is more profitable). I'll probably hit that today when I play. Not sure if I'll try the whole invasion thing or not. I probably will at some point, but I'll wait until I've got a FOB more developed.

You didn't go back to shower after missions? (I also go back because I think it's neat to watch my base expand after a platform is finished)

I looked up what the conditions were. She appears after the second original Mother Base soldier is reclaimed. I looked that up, but I didn't look up what happened when you talked with her, which I suppose I should have. I had a glimmer of hope that after how the character was handled in GZ, that TPP would be a chance to do it over and better. Hahahahahahaha. Nope. I really like the missions where you end up having to chase down a truck or tank, they kind of end up stupid fun because even when things go to hell, it's not necessarily in the middle of a compound, just enough people for you to handle. After having my horse shewed off the road though, I thought I'd be clever and tranq him, then they couldn't shew him, cause he'd just lie there! I am smart and clever. Turns out that enemies will stop for a standing horse, but just run over what looks like a dead horse laying in the road. I felt pretty bad for good old D-Horse, shot in the face with a dart by his master, then run over by a jeep.

Like all things in Dark Souls, even the best NPCs come with both joy and sadness.

Oh god, I didn't know that was a thing. That sounds really fucking good. So I found the weird optional cutscene with Paz on Motherbase last night, and one thing I really didn't need out of this game was to rehash the grossest, most off putting thing from Ground Zeroes (or damn near any video game), including a soldier jamming his hand up Paz's vagina to fish a bomb out while Snake holds her down.

Yeah, it's a bummer in a lot of different ways. Like, I desperately want a sci-fi/space game that does exploration really well. And I think there are a lot of good ideas in Andromeda, just not enough time at the end to execute them or flesh them out. The combat mechanics in Andromeda are really good! And almost none of the encounters in SP really do a good job of showing that in an interesting way. @Gorbles Yeah, I kinda wish I was just getting into MP now. I think it is in an increasingly good place, even if it isn't ever going to get the number of additions that 3 did. Unfortunately I just have a sour enough taste in my mouth from the opening month that I don't have a lot of desire to go back to it. Unless the Quarian Ark actually shows up and they add Drell. That will at least get me back in for a bit, and is the main reason that I'm still paying attention to ME news.

Oh yeah, the 1.08 MP balance changes were also announce today (previously notes didn't have a lot of the details about MP). They cut max weapon bloom for automatic weapons in half. Some of the ARs might actually be fun now that they can hit something smaller than the broad side of a barn.

I posted this in chat earlier, but just had time to finish reading it. Kotaku has a big, anonymously sourced breakdown of Andromeda's development. It's interesting, but mostly confirms things already suspected. Frostbite is a pain in the ass to work with for anyone not DICE. Big change in direction and scope halfway through. Problems organizing work that was scattered around the globe. Understaffed departments, particularly in animation. Delays snowballed downhill.

Yeah, I knew the FOB thingie existed and hadn't got it yet, and I know I'm still unlocking or gaining access to other stuff (like I just randomly got the ability to climb cracks in walls, which makes going back to S-rank some missions way easier). It's one reason I've held off on doing every optional thing so far, because the tools to make some things more manageable are still rolling in. I might still farm some missions just to build up some cash though, because I feel bad that I'm basically taking the same weapons/items in on every mission when I know there's a whole toy box of stuff to play with that I just don't have. Also, I made my emblem look like a Dairy Queen sign, so my own head cannon on this is that it's all taking place in an alternate reality where DQ expanded into private mercenary groups to diversity its investment. I have a whole bunch of other stuff to make emblems with now.

Does money start flowing in eventually? Because as it stands now (finished Ep 12), I feel like I barely have enough to research the upgrades for stuff I use, let alone pay for all the things I might like to try and play around with. I was thinking about letting it run in the background while I work and farm the soldier dispatch missions, but didn't know if that was somethign to worry about messing with if money's just going to flood in past a certain point like a lot of games.

I'm really enjoying going back and knocking off optional objectives and S-Ranking old missions already, I can see me continuing to enjoy doing that. It's always possible that I'll burn out, it happens with lots of games, but mechanically it's so strong right now that it's just a joy to figure out how to get through each area. Or, if I do get frustrated, then I can steal a tank and go gonzo on a base instead to break things up! I did have an incredibly frustrating crash to desktop last night though. I had just finished Episode 12 (rescue Dr. Emmerich), saw the cut-scene from that, saw all my rewards and was reviewing the stats of the 65 people I had ballooned out of the mission, and the game crashed. The previous checkpoint was after rescuing Emmerich and I had to run through the final bit of the mission again.

I just remembered to do that last night, and I swooped into a hot LZ, minigun mowing stuff down while blaring Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer and it was very good. Now it's playing a traditional bag pipe song when I land. This also got me to listening to the in game soundtrack (the pop music tracks you pick up), which pair obnoxiously good with the gameplay. It's so good to have like 80s pop going while sniping, feels like some cheesy assassin movie.

I know I'm like a year and a half late on this, but MGSV is a very good game y'all. Like, holy shit, one of my favs of all time I think. I had bounced on playing Ground Zeroes, so lost interest in TPP, but after getting it very cheap, I'm just hooked.

My daughter and her husband started watching S3 last night. She watched a lot of TP a few years ago with me. He's never seen a single episode of any of it. But the cultural knowledge of some things had seeped in, the way it does. So he knew that the Log Lady was a character He's a Navy guy. His brain just filled in Log as, "she's the woman who keeps the (written) log" and when she showed up cradling her log and said "My log has a message for you", he lost his shit, mind blown. I'm happy to have a little insight into what a weird fucking thing it is to try and start watching Season 3 with no frame of reference besides a few weird things that have seeped in.

Not just Major Briggs, but the 16th time someone has looked up Major Briggs fingerprints in 25 years. Implying that perhaps other Major Briggs "bodies" may have appeared from time to time. Completely unsupported as of now, but since Coop has had multiple doppelgangers running around, possible that Bad Coop was for some reason using Briggs body as a calling card for certain killings. The mystery of the golden shovels couldn't have been solved in a better way. I'm super impressed with the character arcs from original TP to S3 that have so far been shown, in that the people who have changed have done so in believable, if surprising ways, while the people who have remained very similar are very believable as well. I'm so used to feeling in shows where something picks up many years later, people just don't feel like they are where they would have ended up. I cheered when Ernie Hudson showed up. I like the guy a whole bunch.

1. So what? This is just filler, distracting hand waving avoiding the specifics of looking at Twin Peaks. 2. Everything about this is supposition filled in by your own imagination 3. Okay, so what? Literally, what does this have to do with how women are presented in Twin Peaks? A man who's defining characteristic is being an asshole sometimes isn't an asshole. Alert the press. 4. Why isn't Preston's walk ridiculous? Nothing you said doesn't make it not ridiculous. Your just making suppositions to explain the ridiculous, not making it not ridiculous. 5. WTF? You really read a whole lot into stuff, don't you. And of course, your read is the correct read. There aren't other ways to read this. 6. Supposition once again, there's not yet anything to prove this (I agree it's a possibility, and one I've mentioned myself, but it's still purely supposition, and one that presumes the worst of a woman character I might add, while almost all your other suppositions assume the best from male characters). 7. More supposition. And at the end of the day, the wife is murdered. Her arc is finished. Her character gone. The husband has many chances at redemption left. The implication is that one is fucking dead, and the other is in jail with at least some life ahead of him. 8. 1 dead man = Multiple dead women. Please, think about that for just a second. That's what this point heavily implies. Edited to add: Actually, there have been multiple murders in the show already (a surprising number of bodies actually, for 4 episodes). But I think the way you made this point came off as the way I originally presented it. I also think there's been a pretty major difference between how the killings have been shown that one could talk about (the mechanic guy is killed off screen, while the Darya killing is incredibly graphic, and that serves a narrative role, but narrative justifications are generally not all that interesting for examining the way that writers and directors handle violence against women and men differently). 9. Jade is naked, Dougie is not. Why is it "perfectly appropriate" for a prostitute to be naked at the start of this scene? Not reasonable. Not believable. Not possible. But, "perfectly appropriate". If you don't respond to anything else, I would really like to here your thoughts on this. 10. Oh, look, a woman sacrificing herself to advance the story arc of a man in fiction. Color me shocked. Your post is mostly filled with distracting elements that have nothing to do with the subject at hand and wild supposition that you've internally accepted as truth already. I'll trust that you'll take the same consideration that you asked of others and really give some contemplation to what it was this post was actually communicating, and the kinds of assumptions, suppositions and presumptions of objectivity that you poured into it.

I am so incredibly glad that I quit playing MP on this. I mean, it bums me out that it's not as good and isn't getting the support of ME3MP, but they've crossed over from bad to insulting. Two and a half months after release, they still haven't released a real expansion (ME3MP was coming up on its second major expansion at this point). But, they did just add 5 new Rare weapons....literal reskins of the 5 common weapons with slightly more damage, an S tagged at the end of the name and no other changes. 50 more rare card drops to dilute the pool of getting interesting stuff. In theory I'd be fine with reskinned, better versions of the Common weapons, but introducing them as part of the overall item drop pool is just really crappy. It's just trying to drag out the time to completing all Rares by another 20+ hours. And they have an entire system and currency in place that's perfect for this, the Mission Fund store. But instead of enabling them to do interesting things like selling reskins or giving limited opportunities to directly buy URs or something (which is what it was originally advertised as being for), instead it just got used for dribbling out one new piece of gear a week to give the impression of ongoing additions.