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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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Played Dead Island, may wait a bit before playing DI: Riptide

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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Started Destiny 2 and it is definitely a very fun game.

Far easier in all the right ways than the first one, but just as challenging a shooter as it was previously.

Anyway.

I joined a Facebook group, as I often do for games and today it took a weird turn.

Yesterday I learned from one of my fellow players that there was an item in the game that had a design look very similar (on purpose) to a symbol that was recently adopted/perverted by Nazis.

Well, Bungie was taking steps towards removing it - including shutting down the servers last week and today to scrub the item from the game (as well they should).

That sparked a big reaction (predictably) from all the closeted Nazis on the FB group and soon started all the posts about how the millennials are ruining everything and that it's just a symbol and not really a Nazi symbol (as I said, they adopted/perverted it).

I got tired of all the millennial bashing and pointed out that a lot of millennials serve in our military, have died for our country, and have earned many Medals of Honor doing a lot of sacrifice that some turd on a couch bitching about servers being down because "libtards" can't take Nazi symbols in their game.

It spiraled immediately and in less than 10 minutes, the admins had shut it off.

Still, it is sad how quickly people are to jump to the defense of Nazi shit.

Just interesting that even a game that happens years in the future (a completely unlikely future) with blasters and magic and aliens is still impacted by fucking Nazis.

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Pender will beat off to anything....

Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Switch.

I had it on the WiiU, beat it, sold the system, figured I'd give it another go on the Switch.

I think the game is ok, but the rave reviews leave me confused - I find Bethesda games to have more whimsy and things to discover. Breath of the Wild just feels empty. It's fine as a "I want to chill out and just wander around" game though.

For a bunch of people always laughing about "triggered" "snowflakes," that demographic sure are a bunch of easily triggered fucking snowflakes.

Fuck every single one of them until they die of internal injuries.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

Pepe did nothing wrong.

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...fuck you, JFelix, fuck you into the ground. - Ericubus

No, but the Nazis did.

I finished this the other day.

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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I enjoy those Tomb Raider games far more than I expected.

I only played the first one, but I liked it a lot. WAY influenced by Uncharted, but that's not a bad thing. Quite a bit of Torture the Female porn, which is less good. And the near total lack of puzzles was very very very very disappointing.

But still, it was a fun game with some good setpieces and fantastic environments.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

I really enjoyed both games they reminded me of the early Assassin's Creed games with having to solve each tomb. I hope they keep making them.

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

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I've been out of the game game since petering out on Elder Scrolls Online (which I probably dumped 200 hours into). I have several waiting in the wings, but need to catch up on some TV first. Punisher, Stranger Things, MAYBE the Walking Dead, and really want to check out Mindhunter.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

Playing the free trail of Wolfenstein II.

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Pender will beat off to anything....

The fact that the Xbox store doesn't have a wishlist function is unbelievable. How on Earth can a major storefront for one of the biggest players in the game industry not have something so basic and universal?

I can't tell you how many times I've browsed the store, seen something that caught my eye, and wanted to bookmark it for later so I didn't forget about it.

But you can't.

I perused the store for a while last night on the XboxO and saw a few things that caught my eye, games I'll probably buy in the future if I can remember that they exist. With so much out there, though, I'll forget them if I can't save them.

So stupid.

I ended up buying The Solus Project, which has been on my Steam wishlist for a while. Now I have it on console. I'm also interested in Subnautica, Firewatch, some turn-based strategy the name of which I've already forgotten (it's set in the Roman Empire), and a crazy looking open world historical RPG that looks like a fun, buggy mess. I've also forgotten the name of that one already.

Fuck this shit!

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

Domina.

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In space, nobody can hear you in space.

I've been playing Megaton Rainfall lately. You play a character with superhero capabilities, and your job is to protect humanity from aliens. It's a ton of fun, but it really needs a villain option - because blowing up cities (which you accidentally do all the time) is insanely fun. Also, this game goes from tech demo to "wow-this-is-deep" in a matter of hours (you can fly around the Earth at the start, and a few levels later, you can zoom to any point in the universe).

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In space, nobody can hear you in space.

I just looked it up. It was Numantia.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

Ah...yeah, Domina is more of a management-type game. Loads of fun, though.

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In space, nobody can hear you in space.

I checked. It's Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and I won't be buying it after all. The game's lead designer is a GamerGate troll and loads of people bought it simply to 'stick it to the SJWs.'

The game's piles of bugs already had me hesitant. That puts me over the edge.

The game has been criticized for not having any people of color in it. The developers contend that it's a deeply researched historical game, and having people of color would be incongruous to the history they are trying to recreate.

This is a legitimate argument and one I respect. HOWEVER, when the devs behind the Witcher 3 got the same criticism, they handled it with dignity and moved on. This guy, meanwhile, has spent months and months trolling people, complaining, griping, crying, posting pictures of Martin Lawrence of mock the complains.

Methinks he doth pretest too much.

Really left a bad taste in my mouth.

While it's perhaps foolish and self-defeating to deprive yourself of a game you might like for this -- there is a lot about it that sounds appealing to me -- I'd just as soon not encourage people like this. It's not as if there aren't dozens of other worthy games for me to play.

So there you have it. Shoe's uninteresting video game & politics rants of the day.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

This is a first-person exploration / survival adventure game. You crash on an alien planet and must explore your surroundings while surviving against the elements, putting together a new transmission tower, and uncovering the mystery of this place.

I'm really enjoying it.

I have no idea if there is any "action" per se, but roughly four or five hours into it I have yet to encounter any kind of enemy. The enemy is the environment. The planet has two close moons and an interesting day night cycle, where temps in the middle of the day can spike to fatal levels and during the night can drop below freezing. You'll get hypothermia or overheat.

You need to eat and drink and sleep. You have a very limited inventory, so you can't just carry around everything you find. You have to be selective.

The game doesn't hold your hand as far as pointing you to your goals. You have a vague waypoint and that's it. You have to genuinely explore. I've gotten turned around in the alien landscape several times. Once I was out in the open when a meteor shower struck, raining deadly blasts all over. I had to run 200m to find shelter and almost got killed in the process.

This is good shit.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

That looks interesting.

Recently I've had my son play the games of 'That Game Company', namely Journey, Flower, and flOw. This is, of course, to give him some more relaxing games, with less anxiety. Do you think The Solus Project would fit into that category?

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-These are the demands and sayings of Ericubus.

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten. - George Lucas 1988

It's laid back insomuch as I have yet to deal with fighting monsters and having to have uber game skillz -- I did finally encounter an enemy, but you have to avoid it rather than fight it -- but as the game goes on the mood and atmosphere gets pretty creepy and ominous. If he gets really into the games he plays, I'd worry about it getting a little intense. When I was playing late last night, I kept looking around the dark room just because the atmosphere was so damn heavy.

Your choices for him are REALLY good, by the way. Really, really good.

If The Talos Principle was available on console, I might recommend that. It's a first person puzzle game, a la Portal, but with a really relaxed atmosphere and rarely requiring lightning skills. Some of the text stuff in it is probably too philosophical for a kid, and later puzzles get really challenging, but if you want to step up the things that challenge his brain while still keeping a vibe like Journey, etc., it's a good one.

How old is he again?

The Witness is on consoles now. It's quite challenging, but since it has open gameplay he could wander around only solving the puzzles he wants to solve. It's a first person game set on a colorful, gorgeous island. You wander around solving these clever little maze puzzles. The game gives you zero instructions, so you have to figure out everything, even how the puzzles work, on your own. But since it's wide open, if he's stumped he can just go wander in other places and do other puzzles.

You'd really enjoy it too, actually.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

Thanks, Shoe.

He's 9, will be 10 in a month. If you knew him you would laugh at the 'too philosophical for a kid' comment. The fucker gets it, which has been uber reinforced through all the reading he does. Now, interpersonal relationships and social queues he is lost, completely. He knows the intellectual side of it, like this expression means this, and always scores well on written tests about it, but in reality he usually makes the wrong call because it is not intuitive for him and he must process it all through his conscious brain. Just imagine thinking, "OK, that expression mean this so I should react like that", and you'll see how difficult it can be for him. When he lets his guard down, and doesn't try to think about his reactions, it can get frustrating for the other person, as he tends to seem like he is not reacting at all, when he is just thinking about whatever he was just asked, or he will talk through a simple question when the person is just looking for a yes or no.

But I digress...

With video games it is the anxiety of dangerous situations that is usually not good for him. He is so hyper aware of the situation his brain goes into overdrive. For most people, this can trigger a 'zone', or zen state, where you allow your subconscious mind to do more work and just go along for the ride. For him it just gets more and more overwhelming. So fast action FPS or sometimes even racing games get him in a state of anxiety it is hard to come down from.

Puzzles, on the other hand, are fine. He loves the challenge and will normally not get frustrated, just keep trying until he figures it out, so The Witness seems like a good one to go to next.

With Flower, after the first time he played it, it was like taking a chill pill. He was so calm and relaxed it was truly therapeutic. Same with Journey, he hasn't tried flOw yet, but I used to play that a lot when it first came out, so I think it will be the same effect.

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-These are the demands and sayings of Ericubus.

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten. - George Lucas 1988

Based on everything you describe here, I think The Witness would be a good choice for him.

Visually, it's just gorgeous, with a unique look that has a real sense of wonder to it.

The puzzles may be perfect for him. They require you to pause and think and figure out what the rules are before you can even begin solving them. It sounds as if that's something he'll sink into. And then the puzzles themselves are structured in a way so that it's easy to start most of them, then the difficulty builds. He'll enjoy the challenge. If any of the puzzles begin to vex him -- they can get maddening -- you can literally just walk away from them and go do others somewhere else on the island.

And even the island itself has puzzles hidden into the landscape that take a unique eye to spot.

There is no real "danger" in the game. No enemies, no tense situations, no stress, no drama. It's all quite passive.

The game goes on sale for 50% every now and then, so maybe keep an eye on it. It's $40 now, but it sells for $20 pretty often.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

I'm nearing the end of The Solus Project and it's been GREAT.

At one point I'm on this mountainous island trying to get inside this big structure up on top, working my way through valleys and crevasses to find a path upward. I'm getting turned around pretty badly. The game has no map and landmarks are starting to look the same to me.

A storm rolls in, and a massive twister forms in the distance. I'm caught out in the open. I dash for cover and take shelter underneath a stone bridge as the twister lashes overhead. I weather the storm, but by this point I need sleep. I hadn't come across any sort of cave or shelter anywhere nearby, so I huddle up where I am and sleep.

I'm awakened in the midst of a hard freeze. It's frigid out. Even with my warm torch, it's like 12 degrees out. I continue my hike, because otherwise it's turn back and make a long journey back to the caves where I came from.

I'm out on this mountain ridge. The wind is blowing hard, so my body temp is going down. I descend a slope into a low area that had been dry before, but now the tide is up. I get soaked. Now hypothermia is setting in. I have to find a heat source.

I'm frantically searching the mountains for heat and shelter, but there is nothing. I'm ages away from anything. My body temp is dropping fast. I'm losing health. Finally, I see a red glow in the distance.

I race for it, my health ticking away, just about ready to die, and find one of the glowing heat crystals scattered. I get close to let it dry my clothes and start to raise my body temp and hopefully get me past the hypothermia.

It halts just in time, just as I was on the fringes of death. Ten more seconds and I'd have died.

I sleep there for the night, find a cache of food and water nearby, and continue my ascent up the mountain.

This game is great.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

Snagged it on sale for Xbox:



If you've played any other games in the series you know what to expect. This is a FPS action RPG with a wide number of options when it comes to how you play, how to accomplish missions, etc.

For example, I'm playing it as a stealth game and am focusing on not killing anyone as I run through it.

There is a central open world 'hub' city (Prague) that is well realized and full of stuff, and you have missions to various locations that are generally pretty interesting places to be.

Lots of choices available as far as how you build out your character. You can be a gun-toting badass with amazing powers, a ghost who slips in and out of facilities, a supreme hacker, etc.

It's not catching me as much as Human Revolution or the original - I only briefly played Invisible War and didn't care for it - but I'm liking it.

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"Hitler had a pretty good idea there." - Eric

Skyrim Special Edition is on sale for $20. Even though I put around 140 hours in it the first go around, I could have another go with it.