Mal

Vermintide L4D with a robust economy of sorts. Oh man, you can easily find yourself lost in trying to get the best loot which is more or less tied to a die roll. You can somewhat stack the odds to your favor with finding and finishing the level with tomes or grimores. Those give you better die to roll with but in game they take up inventory space and with the grimores, reduce the party's total health. There's also a forge that allows you to forge a higher tier weapon (with 5 lesser weapons), upgrade (for an ability) or to melt down for some upgrade currency. An alternate way to get better weapons is with an alter where you can use excess upgrade currency to get a new weapon. This economy is pretty neat. The melee combat is satisfying. Depending on your weapon and if the skaven is wearing armor, you might find yourself having to aim for their heads if your weapon cannot penetrate armor. Anyhow, I think my dwarf need blue tiered weapons to handle Hard. An extra ability would help against the rat ogre. Most my hard mode game overs was due to not being able to beat the rat ogre.

With that price, they should redo the backgrounds.

I might need that in my life.

I got it as well because of the voucher. As for if it is worth it... the combat looks nice. So it has that going for it. I actually want to be a mage since the magic looks so badass.

I finished up the first season of Marco Polo. Like prequels, historical fiction is mired in that some events are predetermined since they did happen. Spoilers: Marco Polo and Kublai Khan will live. Maybe in real life not in the exact way in the show or even historical records but they did happen. Even the stuff that seems improbable or silly which I think may give the show some of the bad ratings. Despite the above and some acting/directing problems, the show is entertaining. All the sets and costumes are fantastic. It's fun to see how well the producers and director work with what they have to pull off some some shots (e.g., crowds, expansive spaces). I'm totally fine that everybody somehow knows how to fight. I like questioning if the people in the show is based on somebody real. I guess the only other complaint is how this shows blows HBO nudity out of the water. You sometimes questions if it is all necessary but at the same time I am questioning if I am just being too prudish. Like of course the Khan of Khans will have a Halls of Five Desires! Of course there is some badassery of a naked woman taking out three armed soldiers! Blah, if you want some fun historical fiction, you got it right here.

Time to use my Christmas money since I have a feeling that my PSU isn't doing too well. So time to get that out of the way in my road of upgrading my computer. Maybe by next Christmas I can pull off a CPU-Mobo-RAM upgrade. At that point, my tower will be mostly complete save for a new case.

I'm currently watching AGDQ and I have to say, this game is perfect for such events.

They could price it at $0 and most people would have to spend at least $600 to get to minimum specs. Ideally, a consumer should have hardware beyond minimum spec. So we're talking GTX 980, 980 Ti, better or their AMD equivalents. Then there's the CPU and by extension the mobo requirements. Welcome to early adoption. If someone is butthurt then pretty much have their own ignorance and fanboyism to blame... not to say Oculus didn't set up some false expectations by saying a target price of $300-$400 and getting bought out by Facebook. Maybe they'll an package together that excludes the games and the Xbone controller within the next six months and get the price to $450-$500?

FF IX store page is up. http://store.steampowered.com/app/377840 Sometime this spring. It starting to hit me how bummed out I am that they lost all the original assets. The backgrounds could've looked so much more pretty.

Seems like North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb. Kim, if you need snacks, you can just ask.

There seems to be rumblings about microSD coming back for the S7 line along with some other neat features like large battery capacity. Rumors, nothing more yet but I guess Samsung phones are back on the table.

Well, if those guys want to be independent from the government then they are kind of free to do so. I see to recall several enclaves or whatever they are around the country where the people inside more or less hates the government so they lock themselves in their own little world. They don't really do anything so the government doesn't do anything about them since it isn't worth the trouble. They do their thing and the rest of the country does ours. I'm with Ethan, we should pretty much throw the book at them. Though compared to Waco and the like, we got some pretty unmanned toys. I wonder how they will fare against unmanned vehicles watching and interacting with them. Since they are American citizens and this is a law enforcement spat, I recall tear gas and the like is fair game... of course it is easier to just let them sit in the refuge until they get bored and run out of snacks. Very different context but the closest I can think of of that is the Korean American business owners protecting their properties during the 1992 LA Riots. They were largely left high and dry by the LAPD while the rioters had a bias of targeting Korean Americans and their properties. Left with little choice, some choose to arm themselves with some going up the roof and thus the term Roof Korean was born. They did get in trouble for their response.

So I gave the Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara a spin and tried the two games within. Where were these games in my childhood in the arcades? They easily rank with and may outclass the X-Men and TMNT beat them ups. Like holy crap, an inventory and/or spell selection!? There also seems to be a RNG based loot drop as well... and a shop!? These games might be the River City Ransom of the arcades. Now to try to invest some time into these games to see if they really hold up. So far, first impressions are really good.

*Two CPUs otherwise, damn. Highly unrealistic for 99.95% of people but damn! I just wonder how would communicating with each other during a gaming session work since it's all from a single machine. I'm ignorant on how VM networking work.

USHER IN THE END TIMES WITH MARSHMALLOWS

It's never complete until Tactics gets a PC treatment. Might be hard to get it to work with a mouse though? Edit: Seems like this port will have a speed up toggle like the FF VII PS4 port has. Nice.

For $5 for a beat them up classic, I say why not?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQgAJe_0XGw

X1 has no games.

I gave the games that FMW gifted me a whirl. Dokuro is a mobile port but it's nice and cute. Gonna see where our skele-knight takes the princess. Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe is pretty awesome and I think it's my first Adult Swim published game. Really polished. Not what I was expecting (Mario versus Tetris). Then there is The Long Dark. As a bit of an outdoor-y person, it's a bit odd to see gamey fatigue like this in a survival game. The sped up time and the distance traveled isn't lining up in my head. The distance and elevation gain I did was a simple day in real life. Sure it's cold as hell and there's snow on the ground but I think it's doable. Morale might take a huge dip but it's physically doable. But yeah, that sped up time jacks up my perception. The game physics too since I personally have a tendency to go up (and down) on ridges to get a better view of where I'm going in real life. Sometimes in less than ideal slopes. Not really possible here so that's a bummer. With that all said, this is a game and I like what I see. Time to Brian Robeson this shit. Edit: Chew killed me in my desperate attempt to kill him for food. I don't think rifle rounds work on bears...

As part of a balance breakfast, I got The Long Dark, Dokuro and Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe from Frosted Mini-Wheat! I can get to relive the long, dark and cold night where I (along with the rest of the class) nearly froze to death! At the same time I can shake Mini Metro with SPPD and Dokuro. Deep dark fantasy.