Don't Listen to the Haters, Rising Tide is Incredible.

In the beginning, I only liked Beyond Earth.  There weren't enough leaders, the draconian health system kept your colony under 7 cities at the best of times, and the trade route system was OP as fuq'. The trade route thing was fixed pretty quickly, but  Firaxis needed to take a cold, hard, look at their game and make several changes to it's foundation if it didn't want to just be a re-skin of Civ V.

They've done it. They've really done it. I'd like to finish a few more games before my formal review, but I am having a god. Damn. Blast. 

The soundtrack ALONE is worth $20.

Time Warner quintupled my speed. Just Because.

I've recently been paying way too much for internet. I figured paying a little more each month beat waiting 8 hours to play GTAV again. But that's stupid. $77 a month just wasn't worth 4 MB's a second.

Now, magically, it's idling between 15-20 MB's a second. Holy fudgeballs. 

They didn't loosen the faucet. They knocked the faucet clear off with a monkey wrench. Bravo, Time Warner. Never thought I'd type those words.

I wonder why Beyond Earth isn't advertising Rising Tide any...

Oh, right. South Carolina is facing old testament style flooding! Seriously, a quarter of that state is under water.

Either way, I'm down for $30 Firaxis, looks great.

Sounds good too.

Armikrog Lives!

I willed it... and it happened! Armikrog has made it to market and while I have no idea if it's any good; I still stand by Pencil Test's* open and jovial relationship with us backers through the mildly tumultuous development.

Still, the fact they finished a stop-motion anything in just under 2 and a half years is cause for applause. The soundtrack is already got my toe a' tappin' and that sucker can't download fast enough.



*Douglas Tennaple has had almost nothing to do with the studio outside of preliminary design work. So if you're boycotting the game to boycott him... you're spitting on the wrong artists. Though I in no way find your desire to do so unreasonable. Not in the slightest.

Flash has gone out of control.

Aaaah-aaaaahhhhhh!

Since the last update, web browsing has become a consistent pain in the ass. I used to let flash player run free, sucking up all the memory it's digital little heart desired. No longer. Every other tab would freeze Firefox and demand I open task manager and disable it, least I loose my precious downloads. Sadly, uninstalling and reinstalling both my browsers and flash have given me the exact same results.

Come to think of it, it's been like this for a while now. If I had a problem with firefox, disabling flash would fix it 99.9% of the time. For now, I'll only run it on Hulu and it's a shame I have to end it like this. We've got along famously for years.

But you've changed Flash. I feel like I don't know you anymore.

Inon Zur plays the piano.

It ain't Fallout 4 news, but damn if it didn't put a smile on my face. Zur is the Hans Zimmer of gaming, which is kind of a back handed compliment. They both kinda fade into the background for years only to snap out of their funk after a while with something truly original. His work on Fallout hits the brass ring of theme writing. Something simple, yet effective. Something that can handle bombastic swells, yet can also scale back to something quieter and intimate.

It's a really good theme and I'm glad he kept it:

  

Well I guess I have to see The Martian now.

The best ideas seem obvious only in retrospect and The Martian is a phenomenal idea. It's a survival story, it's a ticking clock story, it's got an ensemble, and it's also a one man show. If ever there was an opportunity to have cake and eat it it's now.

Rotten Tomatoes thinks it does. That praise is so glowing you could read by it. I'm so fuggin' pumped.