Xbob42

This would be an easier thing to accept if I saw anything resembling that actually coming from these people. My father-in-law is one of these types. Went from a relatively "normal" (i.e. Obama is Muslim and therefore we should be scared for some reason) right-leaning dingus several years ago to a full on Trump-worshiper today. Loves talking about his "black friend" who says that things were easier back with segregation and even slavery because it kept things simple and people knew their place. The difference between that and someone who arches an eyebrow at the things I'm saying but votes pedal-to-the-medal Trump and his types is... a distinction without a difference. At this point I'm not convinced you can even be a good person while still voting for this bullshit. "He's a good person except for his hatred of the negro" means he's not a good fucking person.

Pompeo lookin' to get his ass beat.

In before Microsoft swoops in and buys them, and then From Software, and then forces Bluepoint to remake Bloodborne exclusively for the Series X, with a weird Switch port a year later.

Not if we kill them all first!

Yes, it would be super unstable vertically without the stand. The bottom isn't very flat.

Jesus Christ this thing is way too tall. It's at least 85% as tall as my PC tower, except I'm worried it'll fall over. And it's too long to lay flat where I have it. Gonna have to tape it to my desk for stability.

I'm playing on hardest combat and stealth difficulty. Hasn't been terribly difficult, and I think that there's unfortunately still some bugs related to combat and stealth. Have had a few enemies just stop fighting a few times and stand there, and some enemies even on master stealth seem really dumb.

I also thought a lot of it felt like the Witcher 3 in how it looks, which is probably why I like the vistas so much. A lot of the music fades into the background in that typical Assassin's Creed way, but what I assume is the main theme (or at least what I consider the main theme) is a very lovely female vocal track that I absolutely adore, and that fits the setting so well. I haven't noticed any bad or annoying music. Also, there's these things called world events, and while I can't really distinguish how they're different from just normal quests so far to be 100% sure, they feel like spontaneous things that pop up or just exist as you get near, but that also remind me of the Witcher 3. Like a pair of guys who are clearly terrible vikings, they're trying to light their own house on fire to simulate a raid, but they have no fire. So you can initiate the world event by just chucking a torch onto their house, which lights it on fire. Then they say they've left all their valuables inside to make it seem more real, but they're too weak to bust down the door and can't remember where the key is, and shenanigans ensue. The tone of each world event has been wildly different, with many being lighthearted and some being serious, but the interesting bit is that they seem to be multi-part affairs. So you finish it, and then maybe you'll come across the next chapter later, so that you can continue to follow the story of these characters without necessarily having to clog up your quest log or "power through" a quest chain. Exploring has definitely been worth it so far. I'm fleshing out my active abilities nicely, and some of the abilities you get are quite strong. Rather than scaling, it looks like they've just given each area its own power rating, so if I go into a place with super high level enemies, it can be rough to deal a lot of damage. It's not as bad as previous games where your attacks literally do nothing (allegedly, in my experience things were highly resistant to damage but still killable), you can still kill, it just requires precision and some strategy. While my basic attacks might not be able to do a ton of damage, I've got a harpoon attack that yanks and enemy to the left, and if they happen to run into a wall, a hazard, or another person, it deals massive damage, even if they're higher level. So I've been using that to make headway in zones I'm probably too low level for otherwise. That makes said ability that I got from a hidden tome feel all the more rewarding. It still requires adrenaline and has a cooldown, so it's not like I've broken the game, but I'm more than happy to use it every time I fill up my adrenaline gauge. They've also dramatically reduced the amount of loot that drops, including gear. Depending on how you view loot drops, this might seem like a negative at first, but it has made gear upgrades much more enjoyable to find because they're rare. I'm not looting 900 corpses after every fight, only a couple enemies at most might have anything at all, and usually it's some minor junk items, a tiny amount of currency, or maybe a rune to slot into my gear. I don't think I've seen any gear drop from random enemies. So when I do see it pop up as a reward out of a chest or a quest reward, it's very exciting. Especially since, and I might be misremembering here, but I don't think there's levels associated with gear anymore. Gear is just gear, you can upgrade it and put runes into it, but you don't have to worry about leveling it up to keep it relevant like in previous titles. So you choose your gear based on your playstyle or visual preference, rather than just having to go into your inventory frequently to make sure you're equipped with the highest level stuff, which did become a big chore in Odyssey. Further, I would like to reiterate that they seem to be going much further into boss fight territory, in a way I really enjoy. Fought an old man who wanted to die an honorable death to show his son that our kind doesn't just die in bed, coughing and sick. You obviously expect to walk over and engage in basic AC combat where you can probably jankily assassinate him before he's even pulled out his weapon or some nonsense, but a fucking enormous health bar (and triple stagger bar) pops up and this dude starts half his fights with me (I died many times, he was way out of my power range) by jumping 10 feet into the air and fucking burying two fishing spears into my torso. Unfortunately, I think a few little cheap tricks need a once-over to make sure they don't break fights. On like my 10th attempt I noticed my secondary weapon's spinning attack staggered him each hit without fail, and filled up my adrenaline, and using my adrenaline attack restored my stamina, so before he could recover I was back to staggering him. I was able to cheese him like this and just felt like I robbed myself of a cool fight because I found it amusing. Not every enemy is so easily staggered, but I can see now why putting things like super armor on enemies after a time to stop this kind of cheese is good for the overall health of a game. Save players from themselves, y'know? I played it all yesterday, and am happy to jump back in today.

I think my favorite part of all that was someone making a drawing where a guy was holding up a phone with an image that had a cock on it that said "9.5 inches" as evidence against Hunter Biden, while another person commented "is all this evidence just supposed to make Republican men want to kill themselves?" as they were discussing how he just goes around the world fucking hot women while driving fast cars.

I continue to enjoy the skill tree, but I also continue to prefer to be surprised by a game rather than have all the features and abilities and everything laid bare from moment one. Surprise factor is a huge part of why I enjoy video games, so I guess I like that in just about every aspect it makes sense in. I think that's also why I absolutely ADORE the ability system using tomes of knowledge. They're locked behind hidden areas, and sometimes puzzles or just behind a ton of guards, and give you a new active ability. Reminds me a lot of Metroid in that way, actually. Obviously they're (so far) combat abilities rather than new traversal powers, but it really tickles my surprise bone, if you catch my drift. And while I still don't think this is the most technically amazing game, I am finding myself taking plenty of screenshots. Dunno how well screenshot then imgur compression crushes them (+no HDR) but I really enjoy all the different lighting and sprawling vistas. I like how we're getting longer and longer draw distances with more and more detail, so a distant mountain goes from some N64-looking thing in Skyrim to a much more pronounced and filled out bit of terrain in Valhalla. I also enjoy the wide variety of environments. All these are just from a single play session. I am very much enjoying myself. Between this and Yakuza Like A Dragon, really not sure where I'm gonna find time to even open up my PS5 tomorrow, but I'm sure I'll start Demon's Souls as well and be swamped by too many games.

Vote for a loser? I dunno, guys. He's the incumbent who lost against Sleepy Joe Biden. The attack ads write themselves.

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.