Bjorn

Some scattered, general thoughts: Those two black beasts are in fact right bastards. And yeah, this is definitely feeling more challenging than any other Souls game, at least in the first area. I honestly think I've died more getting to the first boss than I have through the same period of time than in the other games. Though I'm really liking the balance between needing to attack aggressively without crossing the line into being reckless. On my later playthrough in both all three souls games, I steadily became more and more aggressive, often going with shieldless builds. So having this game just be built for that from the get go is nice. This first area feels way more confusing to me than any area in the previous games. I keep having the nagging feeling that I've missed a branch, or forgot to follow up on some ladder or door. I just haven't got the mental map of it. Overall I'm very impressed with the combat. Everything feels so smooth, the animations, how combos flow together, dodging. The camera, as expected, completely blows. It definitely would have earned several assists if the game tracked exactly what killed you. I like the trick weapons. I ran through a couple of hours each with the sword cane and the axe on different characters. I ultimately felt like the axe is the superior weapon, but I'm really fascinated with the cane/whip. I'm sure I've missed something, but I'm not initially seeing good ways to sequence break for later playthroughs? DS2 was designed to be sequence broken, you could do some really neat shit out of order. I finished tonight though losing a bloodstain worth about 8K, which still feels like a bunch of souls to me at this point. I was about done, just pushing forward a bit more, sure I had to find another lamp eventually, and died to two of the half-changed beast things. I was tired and ended up dying again within 30 seconds of the leaving the lamp to two enemies I had never had a problem with.

I feel like a kid again having to wait to play. I had to go to town for a dental appointment and bought it on my way in, now I'm sitting in the waiting room just chomping at the bit to get hone.

gitgud (I actually love games that don't let you pause) Fuck, scanning these reviews and not-reviews is killing me. "Bloodborne is the best game I’ve played since I first played Demon’s Souls." "elegant, precise and irresistible" "There's no reliable, powerful ranged attacks or magic to speak of, and no shields — effective shields, rather — to hide behind. It's just you, a trick weapon, a puny firearm and your opponent" I do not get this hyped for fucking games anymore...dammit...

Congrats! And nice announcement as well

Thanks all! Definitely doesn't sound like a good birthday game, so I'll find something else.

I'm so going to end up buying this tomorrow. I was going to resist, going to wait until I had more time. Then I just took a little break from work and found myself browsing about 20 minutes worth of Bloodborne stuff without even thinking about it. Dammit.

The Order was pretty much universally panned, wasn't it? My daughter mentioned it as something to get her for her birthday, which I don't pay much attention to review scores anymore, but I do pay attention when no one has anything good to say about a game.

To be fair, you just literally described the modern state of D.C. Self serious and without insight.

The chicken recipe reads like the script for a Saturday Night Live skit lampooning AVFM.

I'm happy WSU is advancing, and would love to see them be the ones to bump off Kentucky (ha, yeah, right). Just simultaneously bummed about the 'hawks biting the dust in opening weekend for the second year in a row. Overall I'm super disappointed in the Big 12's showing in the tournament this year though. 7 teams made the tournament, and only 2 got past this weekend.

OMG https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ctarXVlDtXQ More on the story here.

Oh good lord no, I'm barefoot as much as humanly possible.

KU plays Wichita State in about an hour. Which just blows, nothing good comes from that matchup for me. KU is my alma mater, and a kid from my small hometown plays on the WSU team.

Content warning, this turns really violent if you havne't seen it before.

I really just wanted to relax with a game that didn't take much thought tonight and finally fired up Last Light. It turns out I find creeping around in the dark and stabbing dudes in the neck to be extremely relaxing. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

My dad started teaching me how to drive when I was 10 or 11. We were a farming family, and sometimes they needed an extra driver to help move equipment (this was driving like 5 miles an hour in a pickup down a flat trail road, so no traffic and not much risk). I started driving tractors when I was 12, and over the next 6 years spent literally thousands of hours in one vehicle or another. Before that, I had already spent thousands of hours riding around in vehicles tagging along with dad while he worked. He still has this adorable little stool that I used to sit on in the tractor and combine with him. I bought my first car when I was 14 (because people were fucking insane when I was a kid and let 14-year-olds buy and drive cars. What the fuck, adults?!). Driving is so hard wired into my upbringing that I literally can't imagine what it would be like not drive more days than not. And as far as public transportation goes around here, it's shit. There's some limited public bussing in both the cities closest to us, but it's not easy to get by without a car even if that's a thing you want or have to do.

It is more complicated, but I don't find it to be prohibitive. I think it's the kind of thing most people could handle, it's more complicated in their imagination than it is in reality. And the payoff is so, so, so nice. When I was still using a console to stream, I always had more issues using the PS3 as a media server than I did the 360. I had loads of issues with it losing authentication, or even just losing connection, to my PC. I finally just gave up. The lady and I share an office, and we each have our own PCs. I'm barely gaming right now, so most of our screen time is spent just watching an occasional movie, which the consoles work fine for. When I do want to game, I move my lady's PC into the living room for an evening or the weekend (her machine has a beefier GPU than mine). I always meant to build a dedicated machine for the projector, but then could never really justify the cost when it only takes me 30 seconds to move her machine one room over.

I bought a very similar mattress from a different company a couple of years ago, and I have to say I love it. It's been hands down the best bed I have ever owned. So yeah, if you're in the market for a bed, this type is definitely quality.

Eh, not so sure about that. I've got multiple few family members who would know the names Nintendo and Mario, but not anything else. And they play stuff like Angry Birds and Candy Crush on their phones.

I've had mine up for about the same amount of time, and I really can't imagine going back to a regular TV in my living room now. Bummer about your problems with the bulb and the lamp driver. I've turned into a real evangelist for just going with a projector instead of a TV. If someone's budget for a new TV is anywhere close to $1,000, it's totally doable. I'm surprised by the number of people who's reaction is that they can't imagine putting one in though, it's like it violates some boundary for them to imagine not having a regular TV. Since I put in a retractable screen, one of the most surprising things I've enjoyed about it is how a screen is no longer the focus of the living room when it's up, and it let us make better use of a bunch of space.

I watched her TED talk while I got some work done this morning. Ummm, wow. I've actually grown pretty cynical about TED talks over the last couple of years, but fuck, this hit hard.

Funny, I was going to post those this morning. I was browsing news right before bed last night, and ended up being up an hour later than I meant to reading through them. I wish I had something intelligent to say about them, but yeah, mostly just something that people need to read, hear what she has to say.

I did actually find an rss feed for the Rollins 'cast.

I've only played a few. NFL Blitz (on disc) and Parasite Eve were both great, Final Fantasy 7 was ass. But FF7 was probably ruined for me thanks to multiple playthroughs emulated, where I could fast forward through a bunch of cruft.

If someone prefers a console for any reason over a PC (initial cost, ease of hookup/management, existing friends lists), that's totally fine, I get it. I was that way most of last generation. But if you've already got a good gaming PC, I just don't see the need. $500 (console, extra controller, one new game) will buy me years and years of games on PC. If I was going to go out and buy a new console, it would almost certainly be a WiiU, because the overlap in games with PC is much, much smaller.