sweetz

The Last Remnant. I have 95 hours recorded in that game and it's an embarrassment every time I see it on my Steam profile.

Basically, being primarily a PC guy, but having played a few PS1/PS2 JRPGs when younger, I decided to buy the game to essentially support more Japanese games being brought to PC - since other than the old (bad) ports for FF7 and FF8, we weren't really seeing Japanese games coming to PC at the point in time that TLR came out.

I put around 20 hours into it that I enjoyed well enough, but started to get tired of it at that point. I should have just stopped playing, but having already "invested" 20 hours in the game and with a tinge of OCD coming into play, I felt it would be a waste not to finish it. Well, damn my psychology, because I had no idea it would take another 75 hours to get to the end.

I had to actively force myself to finish it and it was a huge relief when I finally did (and only with the help of cheats, because despite putting that much time in the game, I still couldn't beat the end boss). What's "funny" is that despite having spent that much time with the game, I honestly remember nothing about it. You could show me an unlabeled screenshot for the game and I wouldn't be able to identify it as belonging to The Last Remnant versus any generic "Asian styled" MMO or RPG unless I recently looked at other known screenshots for it.

I wish I could break myself of the "need" to finish games, but I've since repeated the same pattern with The Witcher 1 (in which I should have just stuck to the main quest), Final Fantasy 13, and Amalur as several others have mentioned. None of those was as bad The Last Remnant, but I still had to push myself to finish them after tedium set in past the 20-30 hour mark.

Here's the difficult thing for me: When you talk about "race" are you talking about skin color, or about culture?

If all we're talking about skin color, then what you're talking about is essentially palette swap right? The characters would behave generally like all other characters, in a manner appropriate to the world, but look different, yes? While more facial variety wouldn't be unwelcome, it's a complaint that, like the actual change, seems a little superficial. I mean that's in the same realm of "I wish there were more hot chicks, or fat people, or guys with sweet mustaches" isn't it? I realize that skin color is considered a bigger difference in our culture than those other physical traits (and shouldn't be) - but ultimately it is simply a physical trait and the culture of the world of the Witcher isn't the same as our culture. So if the "wanting to see more diversity in games" sentiment boils down to wanting a little model variation, well sure that's fine, but if that's all "diversity" amounts to, giving it this much attention seems to be making a mountain out of a hill.

If we're talking about culture, how should "black culture" (which I know is an utterly ridiculous term because obviously people don't behave and believe the same things homogeneously based on their skin color - but I'm not eloquent enough to get the point across more succinctly that using that short cut) be represented in the world of the Witcher? As said, it's not like the culture of the world of the Witcher particularly represents modern "white culture" either and if it's being pegged that way simply because the people are white, I'd say that's a bit hypocritical.

Patrick once wrote a somewhat similar article spurred on by similar comments but, unless I grossly misinterpreted, he essentially denied that criticism was trying to exert any influence on creators - which is ridiculous. If the end goal of criticism isn't to affect change in the medium, then what's the point of it?

Thankfully Austin fully acknowledges that criticism is the critic trying to exert their influence on creators. That said, a good chunk of this article is dedicated to what seems to be just arguing semantics. Yes, you are not "forcing" a developer to do anything - and I don't think commenters who use the world truly believe that either. They are obviously just trying to embolden their argument using a stronger word than "influence" - but you understand their intent regardless of their diction. If their wording was changed to "stop trying to influence creators", would it markedly affect your reaction to or interpretation of that comment?

Regardless, a tough thing about criticism is this: it's kind of inherently arrogant and selfish. You are basically saying that people should listen to your opinion and enact changes in their creative works based on that opinion so that future works better aligns with what you believe makes a good game. Convincing others that your opinion is the one that deserves the stage and mic provided by a major website is obviously going to be tough.

Just finished part 2...and yeah, I wouldn't even call it ok, let alone good. Rock, Paper, Shotgun's review and followup article succinctly cover part 2's myriad problems.

Regarding the notion that Tim Schafer has "lost it", I think the problem is attributing the success of a collaborative work to one person in the first place - yet that's what we all tend to do. Same with George Lucas and Star Wars (and it's downfall).

The volume of games you'd have to do that with for it to be lucrative would more than likely make your abuse obvious rather quickly. Though not clarified I'm sure they have some internal number for how frequently a person is allowed to make refund requests before it's deemed fishy.

@hayt: Maximum size, not free space. More capacity = more NAND chips = more channels that can be accessed simultaneously. In theory performance will degrade if you're accessing a bunch of data that coincidentally all happens to be stored on the same NAND chip, but that's extremely unlikely to happen in practical reality since SSDs spread data out for wear leveling, and even if it did, it would still blow any HDD out of the water.

@hayt: Yeah prices on SSDs have really come down in the last couple years and Samsung is still what I'd get. Go for the 850 EVO - and do get the 500GB if you can. A nice effect of how SSDs work is that the bigger they are, the better they actually perform.

Firefox 38.0.1

The comment page selector on the bottom of comment threads (for Quick Looks, Bombcast, etc.) is always showing page 1 as being selected - regardless of actual page selected. The one at the top of the comment thread is working correctly.

The next page arrow is correspondingly affected. I.e. if I'm actually on page 4, and I press the next page on the bottom page selector (which shows 1 being selected), I then get taken to page 2 instead of page 5.

Well the point is if he has a limited budget overall, the $200 difference to get a 980 would be better spent on an SSD instead. An SSD will make a far bigger improvement to his overall PC experience than he'd get out of a 980 over a 970.

I just went through this difficult choice myself; I've been putting together my own PCs since the DOS era and I have never seen such a huge selection of motherboards for a single chipset as I've seen for the Z97. It seems that every board maker has at least 15 flavors of board. It's kind of ridiculous how thin they're slicing the pie.

Anyway, I ended up getting an Asus Z97-AR, which is the same board as a Z97-A except a little bit cheaper by not having a VGA or DVI video port (doesn't matter when using a separate video card anyway) and including a couple less SATA cables in the box. I'm happy with it.

One big problem with your current parts list: no SSD. The difference an SSD makes to your overall PC experience is huge. Unless you haven't upgraded in over 5 years, it will probably make bigger difference to you than either the CPU or GPU.