I have just about finished an essay for which I pulled an all nighter for and now I get my Bombcast fix. Now the question is sleep or bombcast. I suspect that this choice is harder than it should be.
@Ryan Steam allows you to go offline, pretty much no matter what. Sometimes it's a bit picky, but if you are logged in when you lose connection, or you know you are going to lose connection, you will absolutely be able to just switch to offline mode. On top of that, Steam never stops working in a way that prevents you from playing your game. Like... ever. I've never been unable to play a steam game because of steam. GTA IV has some god awful DRM that got difficult a lot.
Also, while today may be launch day, even in the beta, throughout it as far as I know, the exact latency and cropping and server issues persisted. This isn't a day one thing, it's been an issue with the system for a while. I feel like writing it off as "launch day hiccups" feels a little too easy on Blizzard. This kind of thing goes beyond minor issues and pushes well into the "hey, people cannot play your game, and when they do, the experience isn't great" spectrum, which is simply not ok.
I live in the US, I have comcast high speed internet. But because my household is so full of people who use internet a lot, I only get 60 GB a month. So as a result, if I run out of bandwidth early, which happens a lot when games today are 15-35 GBs, I can't enjoy the thing I payed $60 for, and I get NOTHING out of that online connection, at all.
About elective mode in D3, you can pick 6 skills out of all of them, and arrange them as you see fit, there's no limit. I use two offensive skills with my Monk.
I'm with Ryan on Fez. Blindly wandering through the terrible map looking for doors gets old quick and I have zero desire to write notes or solve codes when I'm playing a video game. I respect what the game is trying to do but it's just not fun.
Hmm don't know what to make of the Max Payne 3 talk. Everything I've seen and heard sounds goddamn amazing, like exactly the game I want, but these guys seem to have some issue with it which they can't actually articulate for whatever reason.
Max Payne and Hitman discussions = one of my favourite editions of the bombcast.
Neat little fact about the Hitman series: Hitman: Contracts takes place immediately after the opera house mission in Hitman: Blood Money and before its following mission. 47 is shot by someone who recognizes him and, wounded, goes on a trip down memory lane while being operated on by a local in his hotel suite. You play missions related to previous games, like the first one which takes place immediately after the ending of the first Hitman game.
Anyways, that's why at the beginning of the mission after the opera house, Diana says she's glad to see he's recovered, or something along those lines.