Bjorn

I'd be curious about that as well. I've wanted to try a SMT game for awhile, but just have no clue where to begin.

We started playing this over the weekend, and after looking at Claptrap's tree, I couldn't not play him. I've often felt that the skill trees of Borderlands (at least one and two) were rather uninspired in a lot of ways. But Claptrap's is a thing of beauty. One tree turning him into a suicidal, explody trapbot, one tree focusing on supporting teammates and another tree that turns him into a slot machine with his bonuses and negatives changing ever 90 seconds. And then there's his special ability, in which he draws a random ability from a pool. He's by far my favorite character I've ever played in these games.

Oh man, some local asshat who's run a skeezy furniture business for decades decided to flame out in a blaze of glory, publishing a billboard sized rant in front of his store about Obama and hippies and the homeless and urban rats and the developmentally disabled and Obama and Marxism and and and... I always hated this place because their advertising was obnoxious as hell, and its not surprising at all that the owner turned out to be a racist dirtbag. But at least everyone knows now.

Odds favor I'll still have active characters whenever you do get it, since I've been playing Souls games more or less non-stop for like 7 years now. I'm generally surprised at how much more active the main game is compared to the DLCs. I don't know what a good soul memory is for them. I've been in them with as little as 300K and as much as 3ish million, and haven't noticed much difference in how much I get summoned, or how many signs I see. I don't know if more people are generally higher soul memory than that, or if they just aren't that populated. I'd love to help people co-op bosses down there, but yeah, I'm not going to kill massive amounts of time waiting.

Yep, the transition takes place right then...

I was really digging the Ivory King up until the Frigid Outskirts. Nice interwoven, twisty design. New puzzle type (with the knight collection and group fight). Challenging enemies. Interesting bosses. Good looking. And like you said, the idea of the Outskirts is really promising, it's just executed in an annoyingly bullshit way. What's funny is that area would be crazy good and tense even if you just encountered one or two horses, and put a bonfire at the end. It would probably be one of the more memorable locations if that were the case. As for the Loyce Souls, it's...eh. I don't think you need to get them for anything in the ending to be different. As far as I know, they only net you a soul and some equipment, and you can get the soul with a long range bow (the lady at the top of the stairs can apparently be shot). The souls have a much higher drop rate when you are a phantom, so it encourages people to drop signs for that fight. Which is a good idea! The same is true of the evil trio in Shulva, you can get some bonus drops from them as a phantom. I'm just not sure that's clear enough to encourage people to really hang out there and help.

Haha! The torch guy was always in the Crypt, but he wouldn't follow you. The torch guy in No Man's Wharf is new, and he's a bit of a setup for the Crypt torch guy much later. The Wharf one will scare way the freaky arm monsters if you take the time to let him follow you, so you think these passive torch guys are okay. And of course Crypt torch guy will totally fuck you out of a merchant. It's a hell of a troll move.

I finally remembered to copy some of my screenshots from my gaming PC to my office PC. I got to co-op with Jake and Chris! (I'm guessing not the Thumbs, but still funny to get pulled into this world). Chris rolled off a ledge and died mere seconds after this shot. Extra coincidence, this is actually with my character named Bjorn (I always have an axe wielder named Bjorn in any game that allows it). As a co-op partner, we got invaded by someone named FeminismIs****. I'm guessing the stars aren't a stand in for Good. I was backing away so I could get a screenshot of his name before beating him senseless....and I walked off a ledge and died. I've never been angrier about a self-caused death. Pickaxe Pete (I can't believe I forgot to shut the hud off, I should go back and take another) A perfectly timed 4-man elevator celebration: And this is me saying goodbye to my No Man's Wharf tour guide. Bit of a silent type, but very helpful nonetheless (the torch guy at the beginning of the level won't aggro on you and will actually follow you all the way to the ship)

Yeah, I live in the most *liberal* town in Kansas, often referred to as the San Francisco of Kansas, and it's still shockingly conservative in a lot of ways. They're just easy to overlook because it's not the rest of Kansas.

I've had my hope for it as reigned in as much as possible, but it's sounding really, really good.

Well that's certainly one way to lend credence to what was an otherwise anonymous source.

I beat it after just a few tries as well. It seemed like the real game was re-doing it with different classes, looking for secrets, finding unique maps, etc. But ultimately I didn't find the core mechanics interesting enough to care about doing any of that.

Starting from scratch is my favorite thing to do I think my favorite part of the game is going from start to around level 100. And no, you can't respec in Bloodborne. Which, I'm of two minds. I like re-speccing because it gives you a ton of flexibility and you can correct for mistakes. But during DS2's heyday, it was also annoying because it let every fuckwit tryhard respec into whatever the newest OP build was as soon as it was discovered.

I noticed that some weapons are still getting shredded anyways as well. Great Hammer's 2HR2 still just destroys durability, lost 8 points killing a single Heide Knight with 3 pancake swings. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK the Frigid Outskirts. I'd rather go skinny dipping in Blighttown again. I've tried it 5 times now, twice by myself and three times with NPC help (haven't seen any people to summon). Either way I can get to the boss, but it's time consuming. But also either way, even once I'm at the boss, I just get destroyed. I may need to look up some strategies for it. Apparently you can also de-spawn the horses if you kill them enough. If I'm bored and just want to zone out, I might just summon the NPCs and camp the spawn points for awhile. The Ivory King himself is an interesting fight. I had assumed rescuing the Loyce Knights was kind of optional, but if you're soloing him, not so much. You need at least 3 of them. He was one of those weird fights where I died 5 times in a row (twice without even seeing him spawn), then the 6th time it was just a perfect fight and I destroyed him like he weren't nothing at all. The Old Knight Ultra Greatsword is my my favorite UGS. It's 2HR2 is a thrust that knocks enemies on their ass, which I did not know. That's just something that doesn't get old in PvP. And since it's an incredibly rare weapon in PvP (I have never seen it used, nor have I seen it show up in any PvP videos), people are not prepared at all for that R2. I was intending on cosplaying an Old Knight and doing low level invades at Heides...but I'm just a terrible invader. I feel awful when I run across some poor schmuck who clearly doesn't know how to PvP at all. I invaded once, and this dude took off running from me, aggroed an Old Knight and Heide Knight, ran into the dragon's firebreath, barely lived, ran away from that, and ended up impaled on the Heide Knight's spear. I just watched. I just watched, stoically, as he did my job for me. I've got a couple of screenshots I should upload later from some co-op and PvP sessions. Found some interesting character names last night.

That sounds about perfect. The lady is nervous about playing a co-op horror game, but if it's not a huge time investment she's much more willing to give it a try.

Yeah, it looked like Final Exam was radically different, but it's a brawler with local co-op, so I'll buy pretty much any of those unless they're just broken messes. How long did Obscure take you to finish?

Yep, that's where I stalled out in the dungeons. I think I only tried him a handful of times before deciding I didn't really care about the dungeons that much.

Some other recommendations: Witches of Eastwick Stepford Wives (2004) Stepford Wives (1975) The 2004 is pretty interesting in some ways, at the very least worth watching the opening 10 minutes or so to see Nicole Kidman as a tv executive in charge of the Misandry TV Channel.

I just downloaded Obscure and Obscure 2 last night (since I finally bought them on sale a month or two ago). Looking forward to trying them in co-op. I also hadn't heard of Final Exam, that just got put on the wishlist.

I played through Never Alone in co-op with the lady this evening. It's...okay. I was hoping I would enjoy it more than I did. I'm glad I bought it, I'm happy to support efforts to make games that draw on interesting cultural backgrounds and attempt to explore something different than the norm. It's just mostly a pretty average platformer in terms of gameplay. The animations of the girl and fox are charming as hell, and the environments are often beautiful. And there's almost an hours worth of little documentary clips that discuss various parts of the history, ecology, lore and culture that the game draws on. Those were all pretty fascinating.

The one thing I definitely noticed is that dead bodies no longer cause any degradation at all. That will matter more for some weapons than others, as some weapons are a lot more prone to score another hit or two right after an enemy has died. I was able to go from the starting bonfire of the Ivory King through to freeing the Loyce knight on the other side of the broken bridge, with 2 failed co-op sessions (I died once and the host died the other time). I was swapping between 3 weapons, and ultimately had to use one repair powder. I'm sure that wouldn't have been possible before the patch.

It went live on PC yesterday, but it looks like it hasn't yet for consoles? I'm not sure when it will. So I discovered Dark Souls 2 version of the bonewheels last night (Ivory King spoilers).

Is there an article about the weird/creepy body re-use in The Old Republic? I tried to do a couple of searches, but didn't come up with anything.

Tig has a habit of just hanging out on the back of my office chair.

You're a man after my own heart.