subracore

Really enjoyed the game overall, the last few sidequests dragged a lot because they didn't line up well for me and I ended up going to the mountain top four times over with a trip back to Snaxburg in between each and I was super ready to wrap things up. Felt like a huge idiot when I did Snorpy's side quests last and found out about tripwires carrying fire/ice, would have made catching those big popsicles and banana splits a lot easier without them....splitting.

Coastal New Jersey, almost universal mask usage inside grocery/retail where it’s mandated, probably 1/2 to 3/4 outside in town or on the boardwalk. Closer to zero on the beach itself, naturally. Many people (not enough) seem to be taking it seriously since we got hit hard early along with New York but we’re already seeing an increase in cases linked to indoor gatherings and parties recently after a few weeks of some of the best progress among the states.

Thankfully our state government is taking it pretty slow and my job is taking it even slower. Indoor dining is still not allowed and with things trending in a worse direction I hope it will not be for a while. I have already had multiple guests ask me why I’m wearing my mask when it’s “just them” and I’ve known them for years and several picking up orders deride the mask requirements over “a hoax”. I want to stress it’s by far the minority of people that are like that but it’s wild reading about potential long lasting heart or lung damage in recovered COVID-19 patients in the morning and then getting that thrown at you while you’re trying to make rent for the month.

It feels awful hoping restrictions like that stay in place with so many of my coworkers and friends in the industry still unemployed and the extra UI benefits running out tomorrow but I sure prefer that over many of us getting sick and possibly dying! What a ridiculous country we live in.

Cranking up the campaign difficulty in Total War: Warhammer I/II gives the AI tons of free money so they wildly outnumber you which is actually great because you get lots of fun desperate battles and you'll vastly outplay the AI once you know what you're doing in the tactical battles. Turning the battle difficulty above Normal/Hard changes a bunch of combat stats which distills down to your melee units being largely useless as even elite troops will take way too much damage when matched up against AI chaff or low tier units. However your ranged units are mostly unaffected by the anti-player balancing on harder battle difficulties so playing any of the wonderfully diverse factions degenerates into the same strategy of mass ranged units while cheesing the AI as hard as possible.

Wow. Reading through Schreier's article and some of the tweets from former Ubisoft employees is pretty horrific. Please change the disclaimer at the start of their games to be "Designed, developed and produced by a multicultural team of various beliefs, sexual orientations and gender identities that were regularly sexually harassed, abused, and ignored or even punished for speaking out"

I wish I could say I was shocked by some of the allegations - like how could men who host meetings at strip clubs, choke coworkers and grab their genitals, push them to drink excessively and drug them without their knowledge keep working or be promoted??? - but the rot runs deep and is everywhere in this industry and many others. Thankfully some of this is getting out there but letting a couple of the worst offenders go and quickly trying to pivot to business as usual is clearly not enough; everyone in a supervisory or managerial position is complicit in building and maintaining an abusive workplace if they did not actively try to correct these problems. Yves and many others at Ubisoft were either enabling this behavior or (if we're being naively charitable) dangerously incompetent - in either case completely unfit to continue leading and protecting those that continue to work at the company. They would all have to go for me to be comfortable in buying another of their products, so I think it's pretty safe to say I'll never purchase another Ubisoft game.

I'm towards the end of the final chapter now and it's a little hard to pin down exactly how long I've played as the Switch won't display that for another 5 days but I think I've spent around 7 hours with it doing all the side activities in between each battle. It feels short only in that I really enjoy the set piece cook offs and wish there were a ton more of those to do rather than the okay puzzle/speed matching boards and the pointlessly easy hunts.

It is a little silly that the back half of the game has been a lot of opponents getting perfect dishes with level 3 gems in every slot but forgetting to include the secret ingredient and losing half their points. I'm not sure if there is actual variation in what they come up with as I've rarely lost and had to rematch but the fights where the opponent didn't lose 200 points off the top were a lot more enjoyable.

Also Thrash's fire sauce and super fire slow cooker are hilarious since the main judge for his chapter always wants pure fire. Starting off every match with 8 level 3 fire gems building up while you go hunt sure took out the guesswork on how to get that dish started.

Overall a really engaging and charming game well worth the $20.

Wow, playing through the Witcher 3 at the beginning of this year really did no favors for Horizon: Zero Dawn or Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Mass Effect is definitely my favorite series of the last generation and I still think Bioware did a fantastic job in the first and especially in the second making character conversations dynamic, including great camera work and character animation. It felt like such a step above the locked in, npc staring at you while spouting lore and not emoting present in Bethesda RPGs and many other contemporaries. But from playing the first couple hours of Andromeda it doesn't even compare favorably to the previous entries in the series, much less games coming out in 2017. Horizon has its issues with lip syncing but Aloy at least reads as a human being rather than a dead eyed mannequin awkwardly acting out every scene. The romance scenes have got to be amazing in this one for sure.

The Falcons owner dancing in the box, rushing down to the side of the field and then looking like he wanted to die was pretty hilarious.

I'm playing through the witcher 3 right now and boy that scene does not hold up well in comparison. Real flashes of emotions!

http://www.twitch.tv/sa_jadestar/v/42499989

Here's another example of this happening with a stun lancer that has burning applied.

They fixed the bug where Chryssalids cocoons corrupted your save fairly quickly so hopefully they'll catch this one soon. Ironman is always a trap at release before they fix the bugs.

Serial + Autoloader + Ex mags is obscene, by the end of the game my sharpshooter had well over a quarter of the 520 total kills of the XCOM project. Nothing better than throwing in a tactical grapple mid killstreak to get an angle on more enemies.