Korax

ALL SORTS OF 'EM. Well, one sort of them (the DS1-style wall that you reveal by rolling into/attacking), but there get to be a decent amount of them as you go on. Right now this seems to be narratively different from human/hollow form in previous games. You stay looking human the whole time, but using an ember enkindles(?) you. You can actually go hollow, depending on a few certain actions, and it shows as a gradually advancing decay of your appearance, similar to the progressive hollowing in DS2. This is even more nuanced than it seems at first. When doing nothing, the whole HUD fades, and when using weapons and shields it will all come back, but if something smaller happens, only the bit in the HUD related to it shows. Did you fall and take some damage? The HP bar shows up long enough to let you know your current health. Have you been running around a lot? Stamina shows up when it starts getting low. Same with using or switching items and equipment - the icons pop up to let you know they're switched, and then fade again.

Yeah, we thought it was pretty good at the time.

Tales of the Arabian Nights is one of my favorite board games. And no, as much as it seems like there is some skill to it, there's really not. One of the first things I tell new players is that there's technically a win condition, but it's there more so that the game will end at some point rather than being a specific goal to attain. During one of my first games, I had Piety, and found incredible success in praying at everything. Piety hasn't been half as useful at any point since then. A friend once had Weapon Use, and decided that meant he would be good at violent actions, but it turned out that Seamanship was somehow better at getting him through fights. And sometimes you just have some bad luck. During one game a player ended up Ensorcelled, Insane, and Enslaved, so someone else chose where he moved, someone else picked his reaction to encounters, and someone else took all the rewards from encounters.

It's been a while since I played, but dipping back in for a little bit might be fun. If memory serves, the jewelry store often has a metal detector on the front door. Search around outside for a switch box to turn it off. Couldn't really say what to avoid, other than the usual stuff for pubbing in online games - people are going to be dicks, especially if they think you're bringing them down. I have found some cool people, but you're probably better off playing with folks you know. And I quite enjoy the Hotline Miami heists. They're loud from the get-go, and have some great music.

Saturday should work just fine. As for the insane number of feats, it might be easier to just look at the feats in the core rulebook/whatever book has the class you're going for in it when starting out and then taking the time to peruse the other feats once you have a better handle on the mechanics.

I'd be in for some Pathfinding. I've been itching for some high fantasy adventure for a while now.

The Saints Row games have had some pretty detailed character creators, and in SR1 I was able to recreate myself accurately enough to cause confused double-takes when friends would glance at the TV as I was playing. I eventually ended up dressing myself in a dumb purple pimp outfit and rolled around the city in a tricked-out hearse firing an SMG out the window. If you want to play around with (cheat at) games, you should take a look at Cheat Engine. It's a memory modification tool that lets you search and modify/lock values in RAM and even set up scripts to run in the background as you play.

I messed around with Tabletop Simulator a bit more over the weekend, and I agree with the assessment in that article. It's great for letting you move pieces around in a virtual space, but any information management is extremely clunky. You want a character sheet? Load an image of it into the game to get a weird textured slab that you might be able to draw on with the pen tool, but not very well. Alternatively, put it on the web somewhere and view it on an in-game tablet's browser. Something like Fantasy Grounds is much more suited to pen-and-paper games.

I fiddled with it a bit when it was in Early Access. It was neat, if understandably clunky. From what I've read in all the dev updates, there's been a lot more stuff added and polished.

HNNNNGGG http://store.iam8bit.com/collections/no-mans-sky/products/no-mans-sky-explorers-edition

I was just coming here to recommend it! When He Died and Sweet Bod are jockeying for my favorite track, but Touch-Tone Telephone is pretty catchy, too.

Yes, "low" for the site, but not low as an absolute score, which is what they're presented as being. If there was a game site that was extremely selective and only ever posted really good 9 or 10/10 games that then gave a game an 8, there are a couple ways that can be seen. In one sense, it's unprecedented, it's the lowest review score they've ever given, and it's the worst game they've ever played (that they've had an official opinion about). Or, you could see it as an 8/10 which is still really good, because it's an 8 OUT OF 10 AND FUCK EVERYTHING I'M OUT

That assumption only works if Polygon reviewed EVERY game and you had that full spread to work with. If they had rated every single bit of My Pony Dress-Up Hair Stylist shovelware that's released on the 3DS eShop, I'd bet that "average" score would be a lot lower. Smaller sites like Polygon and Giant Bomb have the luxury of mostly choosing what they review, so why would that include a bunch of stuff they know is likely to be garbage? Better to play things that are likely to be good and get the occasional clunker than burn out on the impossibility of doing everything and making that spread. All that said, I agree that scored reviews have all sorts of problems. There's the problem we've shown of differing individual interpretations, and they allow for the continuation of internet console war dick-measuring. I generally prefer to get my games critique by listening to people actually talking about them in casual conversation. If only there were some way to get that without creeping around strangers' windows hoping to eavesdrop at an opportune moment...

Except that a school's letter grade system is built around the idea of "passing." 50% is only "low" when 60% is the minimum viable score to be accepted as a pass. It's a system where 70% is considered "average." But this isn't school, it's product quality assessment, and there's still half a scale that exists below "F." 50% is "okay." 50% is "there were some things that were done well, but it's nothing spectacular." 50% is "this thing isn't a broken piece of garbage, but it's also not an orgasmic revelation." I would be fine buying a 5/10 game because I know it means that I might find a couple things it does interesting, and it's not going to be a frustrating waste of time. Give me a 1/10 or 2/10, and I'm going to know that it has significant problems that I might want to consider before seeking it out.

I'm getting better at this, but my body is betraying me. I can regularly get to 100+ seconds, but as soon as I start reaching around 120, I get excited at how well I'm doing and suddenly juice up some adrenaline, making me all nervous and shaky, which inevitably ruins whatever groove I was in.

FIVE OUT OF TEN IS NOT A LOW SCORE PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS AND LEARN HOW FRACTIONS WORK (This isn't directed towards the hosts, as Danielle did point it out, but holy shit did I just start shouting aloud to myself when that email started)

Just think of all the great things that people will find when searching for "Pokemon S&M!"

DraQu, one of the top players, just managed to beat 500 seconds: More than that, collecting the crystals powers up your attack by turning it into an even larger dagger hose. Get 10 to power up the first time, then something like 70 for it to become a screaming torrent of knives (at about 2:30 on that video above). After that there's some sort of homing shot you can do, but I'm not sure how that works. It's also good to know that the crystals have some differing behavior depending on what you're doing. If you're shooting the normal stream, they drop and continue traveling with whatever momentum they have. If you stop shooting, they will magnetize towards you. Every time you fire the shotgun blast, they get knocked away from you. Like everything else in the game, they make some pretty identifiable sounds that can let you know when they're close or when you pick one up. Oh, and those spider-skull things suck them up and turn them into more enemies, so kill those as quickly as possible.

STEP TO MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Yeah, it's click for shotgun blast, hold for constant stream. And even if they don't spit out skulls, it's probably better to kill those things, because they can still frag you if you run into them and they drop those upgrade gems when you take them out.

Update: I need to get better at managing the skull swarms. I tend to focus on everything else and then get overrun by them.

I always put all but one soldier on overwatch and lead with a grenade/rocket. Splash damage + armor shredding usually means that the rest of my squad will just eliminate the enemy group before they get a real chance to act. Central does indeed lament the loss of his sweater, but I think Nick confused him and the medical guy with regards to him being a former alien ally. Oh, and your game doesn't count if you don't play with this mod installed: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=622790698

I've missed a couple times with a skulljack. Never when it was a story objective, so I can't say for sure if that's a factor, but it's happened.

The Last Tomb Raider game was sort of halfway to what Rise ended up being. There are some sort-of-open areas, but nothing as wide or detailed as in Rise. There was crafting, but using generic "salvage" that you got from everything, rather than the specificity of hide/wood/cloth/etc, and it mostly just applied to weapon upgrades. There was a fairly detailed skill system, but I think Rise adds even more to that, especially with how exploring the optional tombs gives you special skills beyond what is normally available. Something that Chris might be more interested in is the Endurance Mode. It's rather unfortunately relegated to a $10 DLC pack, but more or less just throws you into an area of the game to let you explore and survive as long as you can.