Xbob42

It has its own unit of measurement. They're called Trumps. He likely has at least a triple-Trump jammed up there and that's not good for bowel health.

My greatest dream is that he splits the GOP vote and they lose terribly and have decades of infighting before all dying of diabetes.

I don't have too terribly much to say about the gameplay yet. Combat feels much refined and the alternative abilities you get with your secondary weapon by holding LB have been fucking great so far (the off-hand axe you can equip early on just has you pummeling the shit out of someone until you run out of stamina or let go, which I love) and I'm loving the new stun system where if you break their guard (accompanied by a stun meter on bigger enemies... kinda like Sekiro?) you get to perform a stun attack, which just outright kills weaker enemies, and deals a shitton of damage to bosses. Visually the game seems pretty mixed. Like the two games before it, it has moments where it just looks amazing, and a lot of moments where it just kind of looks like a visually blurry open world game. I imagine this is much worse on last-gen consoles, but it hasn't been too bad at max settings on PC. It does feel like something isn't right though. Things like trees in the background will be blurry, even at 4k, with AA on or off. And I don't mean depth of field or anything, I have no idea what's going on, but it can really kill the visual quality when I notice it. It's not terrible or anything, but it really feels like it's lacking consistency at times. I really like the skill tree. I had no issue with FFX's skill tree and I don't really care about "looking ahead" to plan a route on every skill tree. I consider that shit a huge waste of time when you can just spend your points as you get them. See something you like? Get it. Not doing it for you? You can use the reset skills button in the menu whenever you want. Personally I'm a bigger fan of surprises, seeing a cool new ability pop up that I didn't expect, rather than sitting and meticulously looking at little videos for each ability like in Odyssey. But this is something I imagine will be really subjective. That said, I mean, it takes a split second to spend a skill point, it's not a big deal. This isn't FFX where you had to manage spheres and all those bullshit. And Assassin damage was just fine in Odyssey. If you wanted to assassinate, you'd spec into assassination and equip assassination gear. I played on the hardest damn difficulty possible, was NOT specialized into assassin damage and was able to assassinate most people easy. Especially with things like critical assassination, and the teleporting multi-chain assassination, or the active ability combat move that would use your assassin damage, which would finish off just about anyone that you didn't immediately kill. But even then, anyone with half a brain cell, even if the entire fortress was alerted, would figure out how to get out of sight, re-stealth, and get back to assassinating when the coast was clear. Hell, it was so OP you could do that in mid-combat against multiple mercenaries as a way to heal and squeak out a quicksave. I think a lot of people just get pissed off that they can't tap one button and auto-win, which I don't get why BECAUSE THAT WAS SO FUCKING BORING IN OLD ASSASSIN'S CREED. Ahem. There's also a stealth difficulty option in this game on top of a combat one, which is extra nice. If they can quickly clean up some of these technical issues, I think it'll be a damn fine game. The combat alone has been a ton of fun so far. The first active ability I chose was the one where you tackle an enemy and then just alternate between LB and RB to beat the shit out of them with your bare fists. Good times! My second was a Panzer Dragoon-style ranged ability that targets a ton of enemies at once, and then fires an arrow at all of them simultaneously. Watching your bow with like 8 arrows on it is hilarious. Also, they seem to be leaning more into proper boss fights now, which I'm a huge fan of. I've been loving them in Origins and Odyssey, but they felt like they intentionally put them way out of the way there, with only a couple being in the story proper. I ate some magic shrooms on a random island and hallucinated a challenge where a bunch of people wielding magic rodes and shit were shooting fireballs and energy beams at me, but I ran away since they were dramatically higher than my level. It was visually cool, conceptually cool, and a great way to add things like magic-wielding enemies into more of the game without it breaking "muh immersion" too much. Obviously, the end of every AC is about almost literal magic anyway, but since no one ever beats them they don't know that! Seriously, I didn't beat Origins or Odyssey yet (I still intend to, but I enjoy doing all the random shit too much and then get distracted by other games after so long) and I looked up the modern day cutscenes (that I, and I alone in this universe, enjoy) and boy is the ending of Odyssey fucking crazy.

I actually can't remember if anyone has actually died during launches, but I do recall many sales gone bad and a few people being robbed/stabbed (not sure if they survived) for their consoles on launch day, even in the UK.

Best Buy called me about my order the other day, asking when I'd like to pick it up, whether it'd be curbside or in-store, etc. When they asked if I had any questions, my verbatim question was: "Will you have any opaque bags so I don't get beat to death if someone sees me with this thing?" to which the guy chuckled and said "of course." I cannot even fathom shipping these things without covering them up. Fuck, man, wrap them in brown paper or something! People die on console launches because of thieves. I can only imagine some fight turning deadly as a porch pirate spots one and the owner of the package opens the door at the same time they're trying to steal it or something ridiculous like that, not to overlook the metric shittons of these that'll just straight up be stolen, a fair few likely by the people delivering them at some point in the chain. Hell, Best Buy made sure to give me an opaque bag when I picked up my Dual Sense the other week for crying out loud. Although that might've been because I was walking around the store with it for a while and some 20 foot tall Asian kid was following me like a lost puppy before finally asking if it was in fact a Dual Sense, and asked where I got it from because he clearly wanted to buy one.

God I can't wait to feel the tension loosening slowly on the trigger as the person I'm choking slowly loses the ability to fight back.

So when Trump and his followers are yelling about how he won and we need to ignore all the "illegal" votes, that means we're not there yet?

Yeah but they finally figured out "What if we just... Ignored the votes?"

Between attempted coups and rampant, unchecked nationwide gerrymandering, voter suppression and the complete destruction of respect for facts or accurate news, they feel less important and respected and meaningful then ever.

Also why are we hand wringing about votes when the votes clearly no longer matter?

I mean I'm down for slaughter the police as a replacement.

Attempted coup by these ghouls aside, I still enjoyed watching Trump's hurdle tick over to 100% in Pennsylvania:

I just kind of hope Trump leaves at the same time that Biden's limo rolls up, and they just run him over on the way to the garage.

Look, man. I'm all for the first-amendment, I don't believe in any of that safe-space bullshit, and lord knows I'm not normally bothered by words as you may have seen from my many Blue Lives Matter Facebook posts talking about black-on-black violence, but don't you dare use the L-word around here! We are WINNERS! We will be referred to as such under any and all circumstances! Having a setback does not make your a l***r! It just means you're taking a little longer to win!

These people always make a good case for cannibalism.

Like most AC games, it's about scope and certain scenes just looking fantastic. Or I guess I should say Ubisoft games. Obviously it's been a bit since Odyssey hit and we've entered heavy RTX land since then, but I still really like some of the vistas, like seeing each individual light source for a city dozens of miles in the distance at night. I dunno about best looking technically, but there are definitely excellent moments. RDR2 doesn't count since it's not a video game, it's a movie you control remotely. Waiting for each scene to render out at Rockstar HQ and then come back before Morgan moves just really makes it dramatically less impressive to me personally.

Ah right, I forgot it was only 825, which was already disappointing in itself.

We really should have laws concerning advertising your storage as 1TB when you're hitting like 66% of that.

His "phone" being a TV remote kills me for some reason.

MS-13, which everyone knows stands for Microsoft-13, the vaccine-generating gang led by Bill "Bad Hombre" Gates to abort our straight marriage!

I couldn't help myself. I literally had to stop playing the game I was playing to make this. Figure someone else probably made it by now as fast as Twitter is, but I had to anyway.

Oh yeah, you can definitely tell the difference. The new one almost just sounds like only NPCs and characters produce any noise whatsoever, and they don't seem to be affected by the environment they're in.

"Sorry Don, this one's only for 2-termers."

The thing about interactivity is that I believe all those systems and simulations take a toll on performance. Being able to fight anyone (instead of give a thumbs up) or hijack any car (with the car being destructible and having reflections that are also influenced by the damage) or quickly switch perspectives to things like drones, I imagine at least, adds up. Not for RT specifically, but with RT already being so heavy, I figure any little performance hits add up. Again, on top of Ubisoft just sucking shit at optimization.