JasonM

Finished watching Season 3 of Psycho-Pass last night, now I just have to watch First Inspector to get fully caught up. This anime isn't perfect, and it's a lot of 'trying to seem smart' going on, but I must say it's one of my most favourite animes i've watched in a long time. Season 2 was a low and got me questioning whether to continue, but the movie + three minimovies between S2/S3 brought me right back, and then season 3 just continued keeping me hooked and feeling closer to the extreme high point that season 1 was. It's not as good as GITS(:SAC) was (Although S1 is definitely up there), but it's the only sci-fi anime that has hit in the same way for me. I hope there will be more after this.

Goodell now has dirt on everyone in the NFL and is going to leverage that insane amounts of powers in only ways that Rogel Goodell can. By using it as pettily as he can on people that talked shit about him personally.

Fair enough, tbh. I'm afraid I don't know much in the way of good third party controllers that are cheaper, most are often more expensive because they play towards the 'pro gamer' market with higher quality components and some doodads like triggers on the bottom of the controller. You could check for 'Nacon' or 'Hori', I think they are the modern day licensed 3rd party controller maker? Either that, or find a second hand option?

Just watched the games, and fuck me, why can't they just win a game without making me feel every emotion under the sun. Lamar is absolutely mental. After that fumble on the 1 I thought the Ravens were completely smoked this game, and they just somehow managed to pull it back in the most Ravens way possible. This year is anxiety inducing, but i'm all aboard for it.

You can get a replacement battery for around 10 dollars on Ebay, from the cursory glance I did. No de-assembly (beyond opening the case) required, just a case of plugging in a new one and closing it up. Guide: https://ifixit.com/Guide/DualShock+4+Battery+Replacement/22074 Ebay: Link (1000mah LIP1522 are the original types, but there are higher capacity third party alternatives if battery life is a thing you want to improve.)

What is wearing out? With a few tools and YouTube guides you could replace nearly anything on it. That is bound to be cheaper than any first or third party controller. And having fixed a few PS4 controllers, it's quite fool proof unless it would require soldering, which is not a common thing.

Only management sim i've ever played where I read scout reports was Eastside Hockey Manager. Where star ratings didn't mean much in the way of actually telling you how good a player could get (Managing in the NHL, the first 2-3 rounds are 5* prospects more often than not), and you had to actually read the scout report to get a good indication where a player's true potential was at. In FM though, never have I felt the need to. Even with the more vague 'ghost stars' (or however one calls it) being given to players under 23 to make their true potential more up in the air, the development in FM is still very simple and there's no reason not to just sign every 5* kid you come across because you'll probably be swimming in cash after 3 or so seasons when you sell your first wonderkid to PSG for a tenth of a billion. But in FM, all these additions haven't really done much to engage me in scouting and recruitment. And all the additions have felt more like extra busiwork and more menus to slog through, rather than true improvements to how scouting works and requiring you to go below the surface. It feels SI is caught between two worlds, one where they want to make FM as accessible as possible, but again, going about it in the wrong way by making things more obtuse and cluttered. And it doesn't hit for new players, who have no idea what's going on, or existing players, who just get frustrated with losing control without it actually being more efficient.

It's an extremely interesting rumour, and probably throws a spanner in what most people expected to be Guanyu Zhou being the most likely choice for his fat stacks of sponsor money. It's not a certainty that Herta would qualify for the superlicense, since his Indylights season was on a small grid, which awards less points. Although I suspect the FIA would probably grant him an exception due to covid and his results in IndyCar proper. And with F1 wanting to expand into the US market, having a young American second generation star headlining an American led team would go a long way to helping toward those goals.

If they found ways to more easily integrate information in ways that make the work easier and quicker to do, then i'd be down for it. But between the scouting meetings being added last season, and now these staff meetings being added this season, it's just becoming more of a chore to do the things you want to do. Give me context menus or w.e. out of the inbox, gimme those options on the fly rather than pulling me into a whole new screen where I need to spend a bunch of minutes clicking buttons just to get everything done. I never bothered with the scout meetings, did them once, realized how much of a ballache they were to do, and never bothered again because just doing things the way I used to do them was significantly more efficient in terms of time AND results. The same issue exists with the press conferences, I just resorted to pressing 'second from the left' and shotgunning through the conferences. And it's just busiwork, it doesn't feel like it has any real bearing on the gameplay unless you go out of your way to cock it up, but then it's only negatives, no real positives to get out of it. I feel they have the right idea of trying to trim things down and streamlining it, but they're going about it in the exact opposite way they should be doing. They should have people click less, make less screen transitions, go into less menus, etc.. Not into more like they're doing now.

FOF8 is a really good FOOTBAW sim, but I must preface it by saying it's very obtuse and compared to FM very hard to pick up and just play. Also, if you look around, there's 2021/2022 to find. But again, it's not a very forthcoming and 'logical' seeming game, with a QB like Mahomes (seemingly) lower rated than other QB's, but once it starts simulating it all comes together. I'd wait for a sale though, or find a 'free trial' somewhere first, to see if you can get over the jankiness.

Think he'd honestly ace any role, even the role of Shuri.

I was writing a whole rant about this, but I decided to delete that because why bother at this point. F1 don't care, they'll get a fat fuck-you sack of money, and #WeRaceAsOne will continue to be pushed in our faces as they'll continue having parades in nations where Human Rights are barely a concept let alone a thing. PS: Losail is a shit circuit in MotoGP with little to no overtaking, so be ready for a parade in F1.

I think the way FH4 implemented it worked really well. Ten challenges with narration as bobfoc mentioned. Also lots of Horizon is about doing outrageous and cool stuff. I don't think an actual game that's solely based on a specific format will work though, FH works because of how flexible it presents you the challenges, races, open world, etc. Where you are never wanting for options to fill your time with. Maybe in the past, with games like Stuntman or Driver you could take risks because costs were lower, but I feel nowadays games like Horizon show you can give everyone a litany of challenges and options is much more bang for buck (They even had Lego and Hot Wheels DLC!) than anything a new studio could make. And it's probably more financially interesting for a show like Top Gear to lend their likeness to that, rather than build their own game. Also by all accounts the Grand Tour game is a massive pile of crap, and why would most companies even invest in such things because unless you got the talent, resources, and framework, you're gonna have a super hard time making something that will turn a profit. Selling TGT or TG to a proving racing game franchise like Forza, though, that's profit for minimum effort, and near impossible to ruin goodwill with gamers, especially if it's a free update in the case of the Top Gear challenges in FH4.

It might be a bit too dated nowadays, but if you can get New Vegas then that's a really good game. Compared to Fallout 4 it's pretty dated and there's lots of stuff missing that were odd choices in the year 2010, let alone 2021, but for good reasons it's regarded as 'the best' of the nuFallout games. Although I feel F4 gets a bad rap and is probably by far the most polished modern Fallout game. You could also check out The Outer Worlds (2019), which is Obsidian (the developers of New Vegas) making a new IP in the same vein as the Fallout titles. Space-cowboy-ey with lots of choices and freedom of how you tackle the story (Apparently you can just kill near enough everyone you come across and still finish the story.) It's a bit short though, and it's not a full open world but rather with hub worlds (which personally I find more enjoyable). The gameplay of TOW is very close to Fallout 4, though, so it might be right up your alley. It's on MS Game Pass if you have a PC or Xbox system.

Fuck.

It's genuinely interested how worried Mercedes are this year and to what lengths they're willing to go to fight for the championship. Not even in the Ferrari cheat-engine years did they get this rattled, but all the stats for the year are showing that Red Bull is probably the mightiest car with only bad luck and freak incidents keeping the title race close. Also, this might backfire and Bottas is likely to start from the pit lane for breaking parc ferme, if they can't prove this engine change wasn't a necessity for safety reasons.

I really like Rust, but it's the usual online survival bullshit of attracting the absolute worst of the worst and bringing out the absolute worst out of people. It has a nice gameplay loop, but otherwise it's just infuriating to spend hours with a friend to create a nice little base and do a little bit of exploring, then a gaggle of shitheads come to burn it all down, steal your shit, and leave you with nothing but a regret for putting so much hours into all of it. It just kills my enjoyment, the stress of losing everything doesn't add to the excitement it just worsens the frustrations when it inevitably happens. And the only way to prevent it is to join in on the madness and be just as big a cunt as everyone else is being to you, and that just isn't how I want to play games, I prefer achieving goals through cooperation, not throwing salt in other people's eyes and making their hours of effort worth nothing. /rant Anyways, here's my own addition to the list. Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous are two CRPG's that take a hard turn towards providing an as-close-to-tabletop experience towards the players as possible. With a level of obtuseness and detail that is mindboggling even after spending dozens of hours in the games. I love plenty of modern RPG's that are streamlined and enjoyable, but Pathfinder and it's hard-tabletop focus is a delightful change of pace, and I can spend literal hours on character creation and level up's trying to figure out which feat, skill, or ability my Rogue-Ranger DPS-er needs to be as efficient as possible, whilst figuring out what makes them synergize the best with the rest of the party.

Battlefield C-Section as performed by a blind man with tremors?

I forgot that the Chiefs/Ravens game was on Sunday, not a MNF game. So I watched it this morning and somehow didn't get spoiled. What a game, what a result to finally get one over the Chiefs in the craziest way possible. After those two early picks, I had no hope Lamar could get it done but they got it done in a way that only the Ravens can do it. They just can't make it easy on themselves, can they? Man, what a rush that final quarter was, though. The entire game was wild.

If you want a game that doesn't play with that, and if you want a CRPG, get Pathfinder: Kingmaker. You get a timelimit on most major plot points and if you don't get there and do the heroing in time, you actually game over.

I loved Horizon: Zero Dawn when I finally ran through it at the start of the summer, really beautiful game, fun story, interesting setting. It's one of the top games of its era and developed by a non-major developer on top of that. But when I finally got into the left part of the map (after going through most stuff on the right 'kiddie pool' side), my heart just sank completely because of how 'fuck you' big it was. I pushed on, because the right side of the map had been quite big compared to the starting area but they had filled it with lots of things to explore and look at, so surely that theme would continue on, right? Nope, just a massive fucking wasteland with no real features occassionally dotted with not very interesting spots of interest. Complete disappointment, and worst of all the travel times were tripled/quadrupled compared to the other side of the world map. It didn't help that acquiring mounts felt a hassle (I didn't invest XP into getting a free one, stupid me), so I ended up finding the closest fast travel location and still having to leg it for 5 minutes to get to the mission area to do the mission. (Of course, that was if I had unlocked that fast travel point, else I still had to leg it there to unlock the point for future use) So this one's to you, Horizon. I loved you, I genuinely did. But 40% of your map was fucking atrocious to deal with. Special consideration to AC: Odyssey, which turned the grind of traveling from X to Y into an artform.

Speaking of Killmonger, i'm kinda sad that they killed him off in Black Panther because I feel he could've easily came back ala Daniel Bruhl/Zemo and be a recurring character whose got a loose code that can see them bend themselves into working for the heroes at some points whilst also furthering his own agenda.

Dipping hard into the Matt Fraction run of Hawkeye, and sign me the fuck up for it.

Leeds fans in being cunts shocker

You'd feel that Alfa or Ferrari would put in some efforts to keep him on the grid. Might not be the best talent they have, but he's still arguably the best Italian driver they have right now and there's no real big talents in the pipeline either. Sure, they have Ferrari and anyone who performs well for Ferrari is basically a honorary Italian in the Tifosi's book, but Giovinazzi has performed more than admirably in the Alfa Romeo despite it being a bottom tier car. And days like these show that he has legit pace in him.