Gwardinen

That cat has it so figured out.

We all share the same sky. Our part just rains a lot.

The last part of that story is also kind of strange: "German news agency DPA reported that prosecutors were considering whether to bring charges, and if so, against whom." Who do we blame for the machines we create killing us?

Magic gay conversion therapy. That sentence seems so ridiculous that I presume I should be laughing at it, but actually it's just sad.

That's actually a really interesting point. The criminal is the one who's trying to build something, who actually has faith in the future and is trying to move beyond his shitty past into a semi-respectable venture. This isn't stated explicitly at any point, but I get the impression if Frank were given the option to go straight while retaining his wealth (or the wealth he had before this all went sideways), he probably would. He doesn't seem to enjoy wallowing in the nihilism, as you put it.

Pretty good thread title indeed.

I really liked Taylor Kitsch in Friday Night Lights (and boy is that show way better than I ever expected it to be in general, especially as a non-teenage non-American) and I feel he's never really gotten to shine in anything else, so I'm right there with you hoping this provides an opportunity for him. One of the things I liked about season one was how successfully it managed to portray the 90s without bludgeoning you with it. A favourite phrase for me and the friend I watched it with was "You're the Michael Jordan of being a sonofabitch." It's both a neat phrase and a very 90s phrase, but without being over-the-top hey we're set in the 90s guys.

Did anyone else think that trailer looked like it was for an under budgeted fan film version of Heroes? The lighting, camerawork and costumes all seem kind of garish. Even getting the token cast member from the original seems like something a fan made web series would do.

From what I can tell, more than 50% falls below that margin. Edit: Actually I was treating it as if it was £25,000, it's £35,000! That means more like 75% is below the margin!

Both of which were noted to have a number of issues at launch. Arkham Origins was so buggy that the main developer eventually simply stopped patching it in favour of making DLC - how much of this rests on Iron Galaxy is just less obvious because 1) the other platforms were also kind of a mess, 2) the game in general was not as good and 3) the main developer was not Rocksteady, so there was no track record of well made games to compare departments to. Bioshock Infinite, meanwhile, had a number of stuttering and performance problems on PC that were eventually fixed, but until then the developer was making recommendations to do hacky shit like increasing PoolSize. I'm not categorically saying this is all Dave Lang's fault (though, you know, I wouldn't rule it out with that guy), but there is a tendency for ports done out-of-house to be a bit dodgier, and this is a lot dodgier.

That's all fine, but I imagine it's not a mystery to you why exclusives are the main point of differentiation between platforms for most people. Ultimately the game is (with the exception of bad ports) going to be the game on every platform. Someone playing the Witcher 3 on PS4 is not having a wildly different experience to someone playing the Witcher 3 on Xbox One. On the other hand, someone playing Bloodborne on the PS4 is having a wildly different experience to someone playing Bloodborne on the Xbox One or PC, because the game does not exist on those platforms. Hence, when you only have the money to own one platform, which games that platform will allow you to play is probably going to top the list of things you care about when choosing.

There are a few additions to the predator sections ("stealth"), mostly just to make it slightly less about just gliding behind each person in turn and doing a stealth takedown: There are now multi-target "fear" takedowns. If you can get 3+ people (depending on upgrades) in the same area, you can do a fast (but noisy) takedown of all of them more or less at once. After you've done this it needs to be "recharged" by doing a traditional stealth takedown, à la Splinter Cell's tag & execute ability. Some groups of enemies now include a medic, who will revive unconscious enemies when they come across them. Enemies will now gradually set up more fixed defences as they get more worried, like mines and turrets. It wouldn't shock me if there are a couple more tweaks that are revealed as I go through the game, but I'm not exactly spending a lot of time on it at the moment due to some of the more egregious technical problems. Honestly if I could just get the textures working right I might just hack my way around/deal with the rest, but with half of the textures in the game just never loading in anything higher than the default melted plastic render I can barely tell what some objects/people are meant to be. The PC port on this occasion was done by Iron Galaxy. Favourites of Giant Bomb they may be, and DiveKick is a funny game, but it seems these things do not automatically translate into high level technical chops.

I heard that, but it never actually worked for me. *shrug* As for neutrality; this isn't necessarily a defence of the game, but it does once again fit into Geralt the character. Pretty much all of the books at some point or another have Geralt try to be neutral, fail due to conscience, and piss off a whole bunch of people.

My recommendation, as gross as it is, is to leave the default 30fps cap on (it's not even surfaced in menus, anyway, you have to edit an ini file to unlock it). The performance is just way too up and down if you try to run it at 60. I love me some 60fps, but I'd rather have a (somewhat) stable 30 than a constantly fluctuating 40-60. I say somewhat because it still stutters or lags like a motherfucker at some points. Also PhysX fog/smoke seems to kill performance, which is a shame because I quite like the look. Additionally you need to tweak the ini file to raise the Anisotropic filtering from 4 to 16, for some reason, and as far as I know there's no way to fix the problems with textures at the moment. Sometimes high res textures will just not load and you'll end up staring at an incredibly low res version of a wall/box/whatever. Much like Unreal Engine pop in problems, except it never pops in. This was especially egregious for me when a main character showed up for the first time in low res form and I could only tell who it was because of the voice. Additionally, don't believe the benchmarking tool. It's not representative of gameplay performance. Which makes it pretty useless as a benchmark. All of this is a real bummer because the game itself seems good! I think Iron Galaxy really shit the bed on the PC port.

I was complaining in IRC the entire time that it would have been fine to just call it Horizon. The stupid subtitle adds nothing. I think Day9 and Aisha both did fine with the material they were given. Presenting a press conference is inherently dumb and somewhat obnoxious, and it being the first year the PC Gaming Show didn't really know what it was doing, and Ubisoft is always bizarre.

I'm not sure that's entirely true - I'm pretty sure there are some act 1 side quests can be lost by proceeding, but they're ones you're just fairly likely to have already completed. Also there are things like items that people could talk to you about if you hadn't done all of their quests, but if you complete their side quests they are no longer around to tell you about them. I'm not sure whether these items branch off into actual quests themselves, though. Specifically (potential act 1 spoilers): That said, I'm not really too worried about these things, despite having missed some of them myself. There's so much content in this game that I'd rather play it naturally and see what I see than spend even more time trying to make sure I don't miss anything.

I found it funny, but I am also in large part German. So the possibility remains open!

I see where some of you are going with the idea that white males in the games industry being able to dress "dumpily" is a privilege, and in that way you can see this article as punching up. That's a fair point. The reason why I would never have written an article like that is that I don't think that's a privilege that needs to be attacked, I think that's a privilege that needs to be extended. I don't have a problem with white guys wearing whatever the fuck they want, and I don't want to change the fact that they can. All I would want is for everyone else to also be able to wear whatever the fuck they want, so I don't think we need more critique of white guy fashion, I think we need less critique of everyone else's.

I disagree. It would be pretty easy not to want to finish that game based on gameplay at this point in time. One of the things that has people excited about MGS5 is that it's Metal Gear with modern, tight feeling controls and interface.

Most of this discussion is happening in the Ferguson thread, which was recently revived in talking about Charleston.

Yeah, probably. The protagonist from MGS3 is (probably) the protagonist in MGS5, and MGS3 is basically his origin story as a hero, while MGS5 is potentially intended to be his origin story as a villain. They'd probably work fairly well together. That said, while 3 (particularly the later versions of it) have decent gameplay by MGS series standards, it's still a fairly far cry from modern. You might find it somewhat difficult to get into if you never played any of them at the time. Edit: As Smart Jason said, though, MGS5 basically seems to be a pretty direct sequel to Peace Walker.

The little I heard about the upcoming film adaptation of the Martian led me to be interested in the book. I'm reading it now, and it's really good! This xkcd strip is not exactly inaccurate, but somehow it translates into a really riveting read, and it's surprisingly funny to boot! Hopefully the book does not take a nosedive in the second half, and the film does it justice.

Yeah. Isn't Snake a silly guy? Haha. Check your batteries.

Yeah Spaceteam is good shit. I should try to get people to do that again more often.

Me too, though I'm bummed that it's still that far off full release. I played it a little a few months ago and then decided to wait on really diving in myself until it was at least some version of "done". I feel like I've made the right decision for me, but I just wish that time would come sooner!