prettyunsmart

I just realized that I used to work with one of the hosts. Not sure if that will make it more fun or weird to listen to.

I sat down to play this with my wife on Saturday afternoon. By the time we thought to ask what time it was, it was later in the evening and we were late for the movie we had meant to go to. Strong second for playing with another person. It made teasing out the details far more enjoyable.

Yeah, I've been feeling the same way. I have a few contracts in my quest log that I'm way overlevelled for, but I just don't feel like digging back in since the main story is over. I'll be more than happy to come back to the game when the expansions come around (assuming I hear that they're worth playing), but for now I think I'm done with it.

Do you mean the parts where you've got a room full of guys with guns and you need to take them out while hanging from a series of gargoyles? Those parts mostly feel the same, though I quickly threw all of my upgrade points into more armor, so I can mostly blow through them without too much difficulty.

As far as I can tell, there's a ton of preorder DLC that I'll never see, but the only references I've seen to it in game come in the form of a flashing banner on the main menu saying "BUY THE SEASON PASS!" and a few skins that are greyed out. I do wish I could use the Adam West Batman skin though... There haven't really been that many boss fights so far. A few large predator rooms, some vehicle fights, and a number of extended chase sequences, but no "we're trapped in a small room and this other guy has a giant health bar" kind of things as far as I remember.

The Adventure Zone has pretty quickly surpassed MBMBaM for my favorite McElroy related thing on the Internet. Too bad that I can't get my wife to listen, as she likes MBMBaM but is generally anti-fantasy and D&D especially. Has anyone else been listening to Mystery Show? It's another Gimlet podcast by an NPR alumni, in this case Starlee Kine, doing something sort of like they would on NPR, but a little different. In this case, Kine sets out every week to solve a mystery, but they tend to be pretty strange, mundane mysteries. The questions she's after are things like, "where did this belt buckle come from?", "how did Britney Spears get a copy of my book?" or "how tall is Jake Gyllenhall?" It's fascinating, funny, and oddly heartwarming at times, which isn't something I'd be into normally, but I really like it. If you're interested, listen to the belt buckle or Britney Spears episodes first.

I found that rolling back my graphics card drivers to the previous version actually helped stability a lot. I haven't even thought about trying to unlock the framerate, but at least it seems pretty stable now, with some occasional inexplicable dips in quality. In terms of gameplay, I'm having a ton of fun with it. It's been just long enough since Arkham City that I'm just generally enjoying doing Batman things. I'm also really liking the ways that they've switched up investigations. You'll have to wander a crime scene while watching an AR projection of a car crash to try to figure out what happened, or review CCTV footage to figure out where you can pick up finger prints. I am disappointed in some of the story stuff. Spoilers for about halfway through the main story:

Yeah. I'd probably be more bothered by it if I had payed out of pocket rather than having the cost bundled in with the card. I was ready to chalk it up to my outdated processor, but given the widespread issues, and how smoothly my PC runs The Witcher 3 (I know, one game's performance doesn't necessarily indicate how another will do with the same hardware) it seems like it is relatively messed up.

So this is out now. I got a copy when I bought my new graphics card, so I've been playing a bit this morning as a break from working from home. Seems alright. So far it really seems like just another Batman game but with a really out of place tank included. It sort of performs terribly on my PC though. I have a brand new 970 and a bunch of settings turned down and it still stutters like crazy. It could be my awful, underpowered CPU, or it could just be a messy port. Either way, it's kinda fun. I just finished a Riddler challenge which was like a Trackmania race in the Batmobile, so if there is more of that on the way, I'm on board.

Con: Stuck on an ice floe Pro: I have a fox buddy.

I plan on it, though I'll admit my adventure game backlog is probably the biggest chunk of stuff on Steam that I need to play. But I'm looking forward to it...after I finally finish the Blackwell series one of these days.

I was not a responsible adult this time around: Sunset Bioshock: Infinite & Season Pass (I never played Burial at Sea, and it seemed cheap enough) The Fall The Marvelous Miss Take Bioshock 2 & Minerva's Den The Dig Never Alone Ether One Abyss Odyssey The Long Dark Robot Roller Derby Disco Dodgeball Child of Light Pac-Man Chapionship Edition DX+ Metro 2033 & Last Light Redux

I think that's what surprised me most about the first episode. Some of what I had read about season two was that it was going to be drawing on a lot of the hard-boiled/noir influences that seem most obvious for a story about corruption in and around Los Angeles (Chinatown and Raymond Chandler being the ones that came to mind for me first). It didn't really feel like that at all to me. I guess I won't say more since this is the anticipation thread, not the episode discussion thread.

So, this game's out now, and despite the not great name, it seems pretty cool. I hadn't followed the kickstarter, but after reading some impressions of it and hearing it favorably compared to old cRPGs, I decided to check it out. So far it seems reasonably well written, nicely open-ended, and full of insane side content (I helped a talking clam find his way back into the ocean, investigated a set of evil talking statues, and helped a group of unemployed pirates find work). I'm a bit worried that the game's difficulty will destroy me later on, and that I'll build my characters in a way that is stupid and totally wreck their viability in the later game, but for now, it seems pretty fun. Is anyone else playing it? Thoughts?

I also have some worries about the viability of my CPU going forward. I have an AMD FX-6300, which seems to be a bit underpowered judging by the recommending specs of some upcoming games. Then again, I looked at the Tom's Hardware CPU hierarchy chart, and it looks like it's only a tier below the best CPU that my motherboard supports. I'm not exactly sure if its worth the upgrade, given that Tom's claims that you'll only really see performance improvements with a CPU three tiers higher. Maybe I'll just try getting a better cooling system and give overclocking a shot.

I think it turned out great! The game pulled off the thing you were going for perfectly, and that opening text scrolls was just...amazing.

Ok, I got to sit down and play the game and the minigame this morning.

I'm excited to check both of your games out. But my work machine is a Mac, so it will have to wait. Still, great work (from what I can tell through videos and all that)!

I have a 7850 now, so I'm glad to hear I'd see a good amount of improvement. I'm thinking that if I do that, and swap out my AMD FX-6300 for an 8350, I could leave my PC alone for the rest of this console generation. I can dream at least.

Thanks for the reply. How much of a performance setback do you think it will be? Will it still be worth the upgrade?

My semi-cheap PC is starting to fall short of system requirements for upcoming games (mostly The Witcher). I'm thinking of upgrading my graphics card to keep up, but I'm not sure if my motherboard can handle it. I'm looking at a GTX 970, hoping that it will be future-proof for the next several years, but the specs say it uses PCI-E 3.0, and my motherboard only has PCI-E 2.0. Will that make it incompatible? Will it lose a ton of performance? Did I buy a stupid motherboard? Damn it, this is complicated.

I'll pitch in a hair picture. Do you want a picture of the whole head, or just cropped to focus on the hair? I figure my stupid face could take away from my otherwise normal hair if included.

I have nothing smart to say about the episode, but I have two quick stupid things: I will never not love a scene where Ray Wise gets excited about Pop Tarts. A passing reference to John Dos Passos makes me feel like the MA thesis I wrote is slightly less irrelevant.

Slate has a handy video recap for people like me who don't remember what happened in the first half of the season!