And for the first time in a long time I wasn't at least 30% disappointed in it. The GTX 980 is a knockout. I paid $700 for my 780 two years ago and this $500 number wipes the floor with it. I could fry an egg on the old guard, but this puppy is almost cool to the touch!
Holy crap, you guys. Holy crap. Wanna max out GTA V? This card. Right here.
Remember, turning humanity into a collective hive-mind is a "victory" scenario.
But first things first, lemmie set the mood:
I may have been a early booster for Civ: Beyond Earth, but eventually I came around to the consensus. The folks who claimed it was an overpriced re-skin of Civ V became more right than I wanted them to be. But I really liked the dense and overwhelming tech tree and little things like how your military upgraded itself for free was a huge relief.
And unfortunately, Rising Tide is not the momentous step forward it's biggest detractors want. But it fixes my biggest and most personal problems I had with the game. So if I'm being perfectly honest... two of the best games I've ever had in "Civ" were with Rising Tide.
The most obvious changes are the overhauled diplomacy system and aquatic settling. What's something the original Civ, shackled to human history, could never do? Cities in the ocean! While it is a neat trick and potentially makes the most boring part of Civ worth fighting over, it's no where near as game changing as what happens when your supposed trade ally drags you into a war on two fronts.
Pretty and functional.
But lets get the little stuff out of the way. For one, the tech web is much more user friendly. Stuff like wonders and units are now color coded and there's a handy search bar if you just can't remember what to research to get those handy solar collectors. I always forget those. Also most techs give a little affinity xp instead of large payouts and you can combine affinities to unlock special upgrades and units. Want your gunners to be able to heal automatically every turn? How about a dedicated medic unit? They make defensive builds much more fun
AI players also won't bee line to the easiest victory anymore, resources are much easier to find, and you can mod your leader's traits to upend the vanilla game's draconian restrictions on health. I reached a point where I was sending out three settlers at once with a 40 health level when I was finished! They'll uh... probably patch that out eventually.
It also seemed like I was just making more money (scuse' me,"energy") in each game overall. Even jacked up the difficulty to see if that changed anything. Loosening the purse strings just made the game more fun. Though certainly not any easier. No, my biggest enemy is still not having a plan for the end game. But I haven't even touched upon the best part of this... slightly overpriced expansion.
I say slightly because the soundtrack is honestly worth $20 to me. Two more glorious hours of work from 3 amazing composers. Kirkhope, Knorr, and Cohen completely outdid themselves again. But they still aren't the best thing about RT. That would be the completely overhauled diplomacy system.
Diplomacy is now all about deals. Every Civ generates diplomatic capital that can be spent on deals with other nations. Give Bartra 10 DC per turn and have your outposts grow 30% faster. They'll also ask you for such an arrangement netting you more DC... but possibly giving them a severe advantage. The thing, the brilliant thing, is that these deals get stronger if you ally with that country. There are deals such as "every trade route that nets resources now nets 3 times as many" that are totally worth defending the weakest player in the game from a war on multiple fronts.
Polystralia was single-handedly bankrolling my entire military's supply line. I couldn't support a force half my size without him. The AI felt threatened by a couple players, saw how much the others feared me, declared war, then promptly hid behind my skirt.
I thought I had that game in the bag. For once, the end game became the most interesting part. I made peace with some leaders, bulldozed over others, and that was singularly the best game of Civ I ever played. Rising Tide made that possible.
I'll never forget it.
Though I wish the leaders would text me less in between turns. They're all really clingy.
That was your best work yet.There's nothing to say that hasn't been exhausted by every game critic alive. So here's my spoiler free 2 cents. The cameo I was holding out for happened and the arc of Handsome Jack came to a spectacular close. Then the whole final act happened and that was just super awesome gravy. I couldn't be happier, I don't remember a game that has made me laugh out loud this much. I really can't. Though Witcher 3 got some good jabs in.
You deserve better then what I've been. You may be a metaphor for my creative work ethic but that's no excuse. Two reviews are forthcoming this month and at least 15 posts total. May I loose a finger should this not come to pass.
Bethesda software remembers. And that got more asses in seats than anything they'd ever done, so they went with the same gambit on Fallout 4:
Aaaaaaaaaand... I love it. I love it, love it. That is the entire Fallout experience expressed over one minute of live action. I am all for this to become a launch tradition.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't picked up MGSV in earnest for over a week. I really think I'm done with it. Maybe it's because I work 50 hours a week now. Maybe it's because my love life turned around (finally) or maybe it's because turning metal gear solid into an open world completely diluted what I personally liked about it most.
The physical freedom adds too much tedium to be worth it. Taking out enemy checkpoints nets you paltry experience and they re-staff to quickly to ever be worth it. I'm sick of scrounging for supplies, I'm tired of the exponential cost of staff upgrades. I want some goddamn story progression! It's been 20 hours and I've hit a single (creepily sexist) story beat.
They also clearly couldn't get Kiefer to sit in on most of the facial capture stuff because Snake has characters talk at him 8 times out of 10 while he just sorta stares at the ceiling. Completely stone faced. It gets really hard to watch.
I don't know, I'll get to the end eventually. I won't let myself buy Fallout 4 until I do. That oughta to light a fire under my ass.
But then, they say, that's exactly when you should. The Movie/TV/Gaming front isn't piquing my interest of late. Sure, Colbert's back, and sure, he's amazing but why write what everyone else is writing about him?
Guuuuh. I can do this! Let's see... a court ruled in favor of the backers in a shady kickstarter campaign. That's pretty legally awesome, now those KS'ers will have to at least try to make their product first.
M. Night returned to form with The Visit, or did he? BMD says yes, Movie Bob says hellllllll no. After Lady in the Water that man isn't getting another penny out of me for less than 87% on rotten tomatoes. No less!
Tod Howard promised Fallout 4 would have little animated shorts explaining the game's relationship with the special system, but damn... I didn't expect a style parody this good:
Zap2it's got a great interview with my new favorite character actor Pedro Pascal. He's great in Narcos and he has Games of Throne's best death scene (two year old spoiler). My man crush is strong with this one and his story of getting into Javier Pena's character is worth your 2 minutes. Zap to it.
Snappy installation, reasonable 20 gig install, stable frame rate so far, completely intelligible story with a tinge of sci-fi horror... this must be a Kojima joint. Great stuff so far. Though your buddy in the hospital is too competent an actor to not also be Kiefer Sutherland*. Everyone else sounds like they're reading thier lines before thier second cup of coffee. Love the game, but I'm going to rag on Kojima's story telling and actor direction so hard. That's just going to happen.
One more week and my first, and only, Kickstarter shows up on my hard drive. A lot of people have that one game. The game that got them so young just thinking of the title screen make them feel a little better. The Neverhood is that game to me. The thing that finally comunicated to my dad and sisters that not all games were completely insipid. That was really important to me.
The dev blogs were nice, but Armikrog wasn't real until I saw that screen shot. Just like that, I'm home again.
I mean, here we are again. A game has rave reviews on the ps4 but nobodies said a word about how the PC version is. Is this another case of a less than reputable company cashing out on pc pre order-
Whoops. My finger slipped. I own MGSV now. At least ground zeros is free...
Let me be clear, the fact that this show is a train wreck is completely intentional. This is a small town civic tragedy that will suck you in and will not let go. In 1988 A judge demanded that Yonkers NY. build 8 affordable housing projects in order to integrate it's blizzard-condition white populous. In the hands of a lesser crew, the lines of good and evil would be clearly drawn: projects development good/small white town prejudice bad. Unfortunately, that is not something David Simon has ever done. Up to, and including, this miniseries.
You care about the families, young and old, that are forced to live in NY's decrepit projects. That's the easy part. The fact you end up rooting for the achingly naive mayor Frank Wasicsko's quixote-esque quest to stop a federal ruling is not. Oscar Isaac is so quietly endearing he could have been lobbying for the deportation of infants and I'd still hear him out.
There are no easy answers in the first 2 episodes, I dare say there's no answers at all. The entire situation sucks. Hard working middle class people will have their property values thrown into the sh**ter against their will. But their childish belly aching towards their impotent public figures burns away any sympathy they're owed. The town hall meeting in episode 2 pulses with an anger that's hard to define. It feels like you're there, when it ended I was completely worn down. But again, the most lovable character in this show ran on a platform to keep Yonkers white. If Game of Thrones didn't teach you a lesson about history not having any real villains, this will.
Like nearly all of Simon's work, this is more of an historical record than entertainment. The fact it's also rapturously compelling is a bonus, I guess.
These days I'm working a lot and it seems I've had more money than sense. 22 year old me would be ashamed at how many damn good games I've left barely half finished. I vow I will not purchase another until I finish at least one of these suckers.
Transistor: combat was too tactically deep to bother to be much fun, but the soundtrack will probably get me through it.
Dying Light: I played Dead Island into pulp 4 years ago and DL wasn't the drastic step forward I apparently needed it to be. But that grappling hook is something else.
Pillars of Eternity/Divinity: Nobodies a bigger fan of Obsidian's writing than me, but there's just something about those isometric RPGs that just snuffs me out. I'm gonna try one again, I owe them that much.
The gist of the TMFU reviews are pretty meh. But that's just it, as a lifelong soundtrack addict (they help me write) I know I can never judge a soundtrack by it's movie. Great movies have terrible soundtracks and vice versa.
You can totally judge them separately, because composers are usually brought it in for the last couple months of production to crap something out. Except famously in Morricone's westerns, I'd say that paid off pretty well:
So while TMFU doesn't make much of an impression; it's soundtrack is a quirky, yet fiery, triumph. It's just so shamelessly 60's. It takes everything that was huge in European pop at the time and makes it all work.
Come on, how 60's was that? But it isn't all harpsichords and bass guitars. It has time for Russian folk music, jazz flutes, and finger snaps. Daniel Pemberton has out done himself, each track is like an isolated essay. It plays more like an experimental instrumental album than cohesive theme based fare. Though it does have a heroic theme, and I love it to bits:
Pemberton couldn't have gone big, tried for a Bondian feel, but resisted. It's sad, subtle, and humble. It illustrates a work-a-day operative's life rather the glamour of Bond's gentleman spy bravado. You've also probably figured out I didn't just throw up Morricone's pocket watch theme for no good reason. Pemberton is obviously a humongous fan and mixing the spy thriller with the operatic western was a perfect choice. It's climax even uses vocals, Morricone vocals... you'll know what I mean when you hear it.
It's the best soundtrack I've heard in a good long while, so good I ended up writing about it. So good I'm recommending it to people who don't even listen to these things. Just trust me, if you avoided all those videos above, do me a favor. Hit this last one and try not to enjoy yourself.
