I've skipped out on No Man's Sky since it is a first person game and I tend to dislike such games. Still, I do think it's a very pretty game. I have heard that it's been a bit of a disappointment. At least one Youtube personality I am subscribed to was not happy about the game.
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Allan Glenn. 1984-2005 RIP
Under no circumstances should Quentin Tarantino be allowed to befoul Star Trek.
I played a little of the new Deus Ex yesterday (just 30 minutes or so). Looks really fun so far but you do need a pretty high end PC I think.
I think I'm about 5 or 6 hours in and it's really, really good! It has some surprising AI moments, too! If the cops chase you and you run away, cops in another part of the city are on high alert but don't know it's you they're after so they leave you alone. I entered a shop and stole borrowed something. The owner called the cops and started shooting at me. When the cops came they saw him with the gun and assumed that he was the ... borrower. They attacked him, leaving me alone.
So highly recommended if you completely ignore the shitty micro transactions.
if you completely ignore the shitty micro transactions.
That caveat pretty much goes without saying these days.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
I grabbed The Last of Us (remastered for ps4). I haven't had much chance to play through the single player campaign but what I have played looked awesome. Like seriously awesome. Fast zombies are crap, though. I hate fast zombies.
I finally got around to trying No Man's Sky ... for a few hours.
Overall, my impression is ... "meh." Maybe it gets interesting at some point, but I'd have to keep playing to find out. And right now, I have about as much interest in doing so as I would in watching paint dry.
When will LucasArts get off their duffs and re-do X-Wing and TIE Fighter for modern systems? For that matter, Ambrosia Software should make a more ambitious, 3-D game along the lines of the Escape Velocity games.
Dangit, I want a good space combat/space exploration game!
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
I have played all of about 3 hours of it, Sunday night while I should have been sleeping. So far, my overall impression is positive. It feels like the game they learned how to make while working on Civ V. Some of the systems that sometimes get patched in with an expansion pack are in the base game this time around. I dig the big new feature, making the map itself is an important part of city planning, and thereby forcing city specialization. I like that they finally went ahead and broke the tech tree into a separate science and cultural trees, traversed with beakers and culture, respectively. Diplomacy is more transparent than it was in the last game.
On the negative side, some of the systems are poorly explained and documented. For example, I had placed three envoys in city states before I figured out where the hell I was getting them from, because the help menu Civilopedia has a lot to say about how to use envoys but not a damn thing to say about where they come from (pro tip: you accumulate X amount of "envoy points" or whatever each turn based on your government type).
I'm not sure how I feel about the way every tech on either tree can be "boosted" by performing certain in game actions. Also not sure how I feel about making workers into disposable units with three improvement charges, or caravans that automatically make roads as they trade. I think I'm going to like them once I get used to them, but for now they're just weird.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
I'm playing Skyrim Special Edition on Xbox. I've got it modded to heck, with mods to improve the graphics, add more trees and other vegetation, increase the size of the cities and add more citizens, add more quests, etc.
I admit that I used a "cheat" mod to level up my character's skills. Why? Because I've played "vanilla" Skyrim a half-dozen times or so. While it's indeed fun to slowly go from some nobody who can be slain by the lowliest of Bandits to the legendary Dovahkiin who slays Dragons with ease, I don't care to spend the next several weeks endlessly mixing potions to build my Alchemy, endlessly slaving away in the forge to build my Smithing, etc., etc. I wanna get out there and beat up Bandits, slay Dragons, and generally make Skyrim a safer place -- instead of wasting time building up skills like "Light Armor," which I never intend to use anyway.
I've gotta say, when properly modded up, Skyrim SE looks fantastic!
One especially nice thing is that in the vanilla game, it was all but impossible to get a good-looking character -- Elves look like emaciated Vampires and most Humans (especially Nords) look like they're about 80 years old and wearing 5 pounds or so of eye liner.
But with a few of the proper mods, I've not only got a Breton Dovahkiin who smacks around hapless Bandits with ease, she looks fine while doing so.
Alessa Firetress ponders the mysteries of life. For example, why would a Bandit (pictured in background) be so stupid as to attack someone who's literally wearing the bones of the Dragons that she has slain as armor?
Whiterun is lovely this time of year.
Did I leave the oven on?
It wasn't my intention, but after I finished creating the character, it occurred to me that she looks rather like Jennifer Lawrence. While that wasn't a conscious decision on my part, I'm not complaining about the result. [I'm not so sure I like the new "focusing" feature though; it means that if you're looking at the background, your character is out of focus; if you're looking at your character, the background is out of focus.]
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
I went and bought Skyrim and you weren't kidding, TLR. It's beautiful. I've only begun to look into the mods, just have a few texture mods so far. I'm slightly annoyed as several bugs from the original remain.
I've only found one of the bugged quests so far. If you find Leifnarr's body before accepting the quest Flight or Fight then you cannot complete it.
I'm not sure why I thought these would have been fixed but I was hoping maybe they had.
I would encourage anyone playing any Bethesda game to use the unofficial patch mods.
__________________ The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. -Eugene Wigner
I went and bought Skyrim and you weren't kidding, TLR. It's beautiful. I've only begun to look into the mods, just have a few texture mods so far. I'm slightly annoyed as several bugs from the original remain.
I've only found one of the bugged quests so far. If you find Leifnarr's body before accepting the quest Flight or Fight then you cannot complete it.
I'm not sure why I thought these would have been fixed but I was hoping maybe they had.
Yes, definitely download and install the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch. It bugs me no end that Bethesda apparently thinks so little of its customers that they couldn't be bothered to fix even the most glaringly-obvious bugs when they remastered Skyrim. Fortunately, the USSEP fixes most of them (even so, I've found a few remaining bugs). And the USSEP is a work-in-progress, so they're constantly updating it to fix more bugs.
Unfortunately, the USSEP adds a bug or two of its own: the most annoying, in my opinion, is the bug that makes certain glass display cases glow bright blue ...
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
I've added mods that increase the amount of vegetation, so there are lots more trees and grasses. This makes the land of Skyrim seem a lot more realistic, a lot less barren -- though it can be a problem when dealing with a dragon, since the vegetation may obscure your line of fire. I've also added mods that make the snow look more realistic -- and man, it feels cold when your character is caught in a blizzard and the snow is up to her waist!
I've added mods that make the dragons tougher and more varied. So you might find yourself under attack by a dragon that spits electricity at you, for example. And the buggers are faster; hitting a flying dragon with a bow is dang-near impossible.
I've added mods that add a lot more variety to the weather, and that make NPCs respond to the current weather. During a rainstorm or a blizzard, for example, they'll go indoors. The mod also lets you adjust the saturation, so with a little tweaking, you get gorgeous landscapes; the area around Whiterun is beautifully verdant, sunrises/sunsets are gorgeous, and sometimes you just want to stop and stare at the incredible night sky.
I've also added a mod that considerably increases the number of NPCs. So, when you walk into Whiterun or into a bar, there will be a lot more people wandering around. When you're wandering the wilderness, you may happen across a traveling merchant or two (and, sensibly, they'll always be accompanied by a heavily-armed bodyguard or two). You can also encounter wandering adventurers. Last night, I decided to clear out a large ruin inhabited by Forsworn and Hagravens. As luck would have it, a large adventuring party happened to approach the ruin at the same time I did, so I joined them. With their help, the ruin was cleared in no time. Best of all, while they were happy to help me kill Forsworn and Hagravens, they didn't take any of the loot. That was super nice of them.
My favorite mod, though, lets you reassign the default clothing and weapons for NPCs. Now, finally, I can give Mjoll a set of decent armor and not worry that she will have unequipped it the next time I visit Riften!
[I also added a mod called "The Paarthunax Dilemma." I haven't gotten to the point where it kicks in yet, but supposedly, it will allow you to confront Delphine and Esbern about their bigotry and remind them they they serve you, not the other way around. I'm so looking forward to telling them just where they can stick their bigotry regarding Paarthurnax.]
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”