Durckad

Pretty sure Johnson is willingly putting his entire head in the tiger's mouth. Dude is a weirdo true believer.

Outer Worlds is alright, a true 7/10 game. Everything works fine, the combat is alright, the RPG mechanics are alright, and the characters are all alright. There're some fun quests and some fun areas, but the story is surprisingly good. It starts out sounding low stakes but the implications are kind of far reaching. Very similar to Quantum of Solace (the movie) where the initial reaction is "Really? That's it? That's what this is about?" but if you think about it for a bit, it is kind of a big deal. The best thing about the game is it's black and irreverent sense of humor. The world of the Outer Worlds is incredibly dumb and ridiculous and most characters treat it as such. There's still stakes but the humor doesn't detract from them, IMO. Worst parts about the game? The actual combat and gameplay is very samey. Most of the enemies fall into some pretty standard roles and you end up fighting them over and over, just with increasing numbers of hit points and amounts of damage they deal. It gets a bit bland well before the end, though it doesn't get bad per se, it does start to verge on being boring. Totally worth playing for the 30-40 hours it takes to complete. It doesn't hang around much longer than it needs to, but it does start to feel a bit old near the end. Never played any of the DLC so can't say anything about that.

Yeah, the last gen consoles were pretty seriously buggy, but Cyberpunk was still very buggy on PC and current gen consoles. It still had some pretty obvious, albeit not game breaking, bugs a good 6-8 months after release. Don't get me wrong, Cyberpunk is quite good now, but it's release state was absolutely abominable and that shouldn't be understated just because we like the game in its current state.

Pretty sure this is less GTA predicting the future and more... reacting to the present ie Sarah Palin's "you should be able to hunt wolves from helicopters, dontchaknow." Though the illegal immigrant thing is, admittedly, a bit of a step beyond that, even for Palin at the time. Just a daily reminder that, yes, conservatives have always been this monstrous and stupid.

Not sure I agree. For one, I don't think it's an especially good strategy to say "Hey, our presidential is secretly being puppeted by the previous president you kinda like." For two, I don't think liberals are as prone to the same cult of personality worship that is currently afflicting conservatives. And even if they are, the left does not view Obama as favorably. And the Never Trumpers? They spent 8 years hating Obama. This is a good way to potentially turn them off. Have Obama be involved in the campaign? Fine. Hint or outright state he's "the power behind the throne?" Uhhh, no.

Some conservatives call him Obiden now, hinting at that very possibility that Obama is the secret mastermind behind Biden. Bannon is one such dipshit.

Don't underestimate the power of the humble cheeseburger.

If only you could play the entirety of Cassandra Gemini on the jukebox, then you could really make some friends. I fucking love The Mars Volta. If you forced me to pick a favorite song of theirs I guess I might have to pick... Or maybe the aforementioned Cassandra Gemini. Or Cygnus Vismund Cygnus.

Not a big fan of MMPB's but that's just fucking sad. So much waste and for so little reason.

Pretty sure that cremating Kissinger is what will kick off the zombie apocalypse ala Return of the Living Dead.

This sounds promising. I might have to drag my dumb, lazy ass to the cinema for this one.

Voices can be fine, but I can understand why some/most might not want to do it. As a DM, I do try to give the various NPC's distinct voices and cadences for their speech (whether I'm consistent with them is another story entirely), but I also don't have to speak in those voices for the entire session/campaign. When I used to be able to play an actual character, I did try doing voices in a couple of campaigns but I would always get tired of doing them after a few sessions. For one, depending upon how different the character's voice is from your normal voice, doing those voices can get incredibly tiring on the vocal cords if you're constantly doing it. I would agree with Gertrude on frame of mind being more important and emphasizing backstories can help get them in that frame of mind quite a bit.

Agreed with all the gushing above about Prey. It's a great game, one I would love to replay if I had more time for gaming but I don't and I have a huge list of unplayed and unfinished games in my library that need... something done with them first. Prey is honestly more of a direct (and better) successor to System Shock 2 than any of the Bioshock games. The worst part about it is that it took the name of an already existing, and very different franchise, for nebulous reasons.

Please define protection.

If someone is shooting at you from inside a crowd a people does that give you carte blanche to mow down the civilians in your way to get at them? That feels like splitting hairs here. In any of the scenarios, a "bad person" is identified, usually within a large group of innocent people. At what point are the deaths of innocents justified to take out the "bad person" and how many? Is there a number that qualifies as "excessive?" Is the death penalty justified even if guilt cannot be 100% proven because it MAY remove a bad person from society?

When that type of logic is used, what makes that government any better than the terrorists it's killing?

Oh, I'm aware, but I just thought how "interesting" it was that that type of logic became so commonplace in the US post-9/11, both IRL and in pop culture, and how it was used to justify war crimes and imperialism. And how quickly it's seemingly making a return now.

Call me naive, but I would not blow up the human shields. We regularly excoriate cops for using excessive force that results in the deaths of civilians or the US government in its use of unregulated drone warfare to bomb "terrorists" ie civilian weddings and family gatherings that may have contained one "evil fuck" so I really don't see how this is any different. oh hai jack bauer. what war crimes will you be committing today?

Pick your preferred rapist and murderer I guess.

How long until Republicans put forward "compromise candidate" and "moderate conservative" Ramsay Bolton as a potential speaker?

Not really. It's based on Stellaris which is more 4X with real-time elements. Basically, the game proceeds in "real time," not turns like most 4X games, but you can pause (or increase/decrease the game speed) at any time to issue orders and muck around with stuff. Also combat requires far less direct control and twitch-reflexes with the strategy coming down more to how you've built your ships, assembled your fleets, and other broad choices you've made. Stellaris is a fantastic game but it's not really an RTS. Note, I have not played Infinite (but I will, oh yes I will...) so I'm not sure exactly how much different it is from Stellaris, but everything I've read and heard is that it uses much of the same foundation with some tweaks to make it more Star Trek-like.

Probably the smartest way to play. Unfortunately, the last few times I played, I went for a "straight through" playthrough ie every world, beginning to end, no warps. It gets incredibly tedious, especially world 7 which just sucks. Play smart, not stubborn, kids.

Yeah... a lot of early 3D games just... do not look or play all that well especially anything 3rd person or containing any platforming. Wonky cameras, blurry textures, weird UI's and control schemes. Companies and programmers were still figuring out how to do this new 3D thing properly. FFVII comes from that era and it really, really shows. It spends so much time showing off its no longer impressive graphics with wide, swooping camera movements during combat while the actual gameplay is not that much of a change from FFVI. Without a mod, the 3D models are simplistic and often ugly and the backgrounds are a blurry and muddy mess. Game changing (literally) when it came out, but just.... hard to look at for long periods of time now. I do think the cinematics hold up though, even if they are a bit simple in design. I think there are some NES games I would happily replay today and I don't think nostalgia factors in, namely Super Mario Brothers 2 and The Legend of Zelda. The original Super Mario Brothers is also good, just a very tight and focused platformer, but it's not a favorite of mine. It plays well, but it lacks some of the additional variety of 2 and 3. 3 is a bit too sprawling, even though I love it, and I just tend to get tired of it before I get even close to the end. 3 crawled so Super Mario World could sprint, honestly. And, while I do love Adventure of Link, I will be the first to admit that it is not perfect and that some of my fondness for it may be nostalgia related. Also, the brutal difficulty and unforgiving nature make it hard to play nowadays.

I guess I'm going to be the naysayer in this thread and say I do not miss the mmp format much. I've had so many mmpb's fall apart from the simple act of reading and yes, they are cheap, but also, they are CHEAP. Trade paperbacks are great, like a nice medium between mmpb's and hardcovers. I love all of my hardcovers but they are very definitely 1) expensive and 2) heavy and suck to move. Trade paperbacks fit nice next to my hardcovers (they're usually around the same size), they're not as heavy and ergo are more portable and usually are a bit more durable that mmpb's. The one shining benefit of mmpb's are their portability or, I guess, if you want to bring a book someplace where it might get fucked up and damaged, then I guess a mmpb is also a good choice.

FIFY.