PSNOT 3.0 - Let's Talk About University of Kentucky, Baby!

Wrencrest said:
My neck and back are sore. When I touch my collarbone where the seatbelt was its tender. I have had a slight headache for a while where my neck is sore. I'm goig to my doc Monday. I dont think its bad but will get x rays. Insurance is paying me out and giving medical and lost work time money so I should be covered. Thanks.
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In other words, totally your fault.
 
Oh sorry yeah not my fault. Bitch in black tundra turned in front of me. I tboned her. Didnt see her until the airbag hit me in the face. There was a lot of big trucks blocking her view. She turned anyway.
 
For some reason the upcoming Art of The Iron Giant hardcover book dropped from $32 to $17 on amazon today.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1608878880/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

If you want an idea what the book is probably like, here are a couple done by the same author and publisher.

Puss in Boots

https://www.amazon.com/Art-DreamWorks-Puss-Boots/dp/1608870340/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470533543&sr=1-7

and Rise of the Guardians

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Rise-Guardians-Ramin-Zahed/dp/1608871088/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

 
MyWorstNightmare said:
Have you given your thoughts on Tricky T? Are you addicted, or will you give up on it?
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It's a bit addictive, yeah. You definitely can't play it like tetris despite the tetrominoes being the stars of the game. The infinite survival is the hook and I guess was what the original mobile game was. Build as tall of a tower as you can jenga style and every 10 or so pieces the CPU throws a shitty mutation at you to try to mess you up (oversized pieces, slippery pieces, little monsters that pick up your pieces and throw them off the edge).

It's all very luck based but it is a solid challenge. The trophies for it are for placing 99 pieces (the gold is for doing it without dropping one which is tough).

If you decide to play, my only advice is to learn how to build out to give yourself more room to work - figure out how pieces can go one square off the edge and then counterweight them with pieces on top. Once I got better at that I could get a consistent 70-80 pieces, but I still haven't hit 100 (despite hitting 70 without losing a piece and then everything fell apart).

The puzzle parts of it are ok but ramp up in difficulty way too quick so I had to take a break from that. Versus is stupid fun.
 
Deadpool is $13.59 for XBox One and $17.59 for PS4 with GCU at BB.

Game was crap right? 

I was going to Game Stop tomorrow so placed and order for the XBox One version (Wish they had two copies).  Will trade it and another game I just finished.

Trades currently for $22 with PUR.  

Also same price for cash at GS not sure when that ends though.   I wanted two copies but between my 2 local BB only one copy for XBox One.  

 
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jimbo8574 said:
Deadpool is $13.59 for XBox One and $17.59 for PS4 with GCU at BB.

Game was crap right?

I was going to Game Stop tomorrow so placed and order for the XBox One version (Wish they had two copies). Will trade it and another game I just finished.

Trades currently for $22 with PUR.

Also same price for cash at GS not sure when that ends though. I wanted two copies but between my 2 local BB only one copy for XBox One.
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No, I thought it was fun enough, especially if you like the character's brand of humor.

 
The first No Man's Sky update is pretty substantial: http://www.no-mans-sky.com/2016/08/update-1-03/

  • The Three Paths – there are now new, unique “paths” you can follow throughout the game. You must start the game on a fresh save, with the patch, as early choices have significant impact on what you see later in the game, and the overall experience.
  • The Universe – we changed the rules of the universe generation algorithm. Planets have moved. Environments have changed biomes. Galaxies have altered shape. All to create greater variety earlier. Galaxies are now up to 10x larger.
  • Diversity – Creatures are now more diverse in terms of ecology and densities on planets.
  • Planets – we’ve added dead moons, low atmosphere and extreme hazardous planets. Extreme hazards include blizzards and dust storms.
  • Atmosphere – space, night time and day skies are now 4x more varied due to new atmospheric system, which refracts light more accurately to allow for more intense sunsets.
  • Planet rotation – play testing has made it obvious people are struggling to adjust to this during play so it’s effects have been reduced further…
  • Terrain generation – caves up to 128m tall are now possible. Geometric anomalies have been added. Underwater erosion now leads to more interesting sea beds.
  • Ship diversity – a wider variety of ships appear per star system, and are available to purchase. Cargo and installed technology now vary more, and ships have more unique attributes.
  • Inventory – ship inventories now store 5 times more resources per slot. Suit inventories now store 2.5 times more per slot. This encourages exploration and gives freedom from the beginning. We’re probably going to increase this even further in the next update, for people in the latter game phases, and will allow greater trading potential.
  • Trading – trading is deeper. Star systems and planets each have their own wants and needs, based off a galactic economy. Observing these is the key to successful trading. We still working on adjusting this based on how everyone plays, but all trading values have been rebalanced across the galaxy, giving a greater depth. A bunch of trade exploits were uncovered and have been removed
  • Feeding – creatures now have their own diet, based on planet and climate. Feeding them correctly will yield different results per species, such as mining for you, protecting the player, becoming pets, alerting you to rare loot or pooping valuable resources.
  • Survival – recharging hazard protection requires rare resources, making shielding shards useful again. Storms can be deadly. Hazard protection and suit upgrades have been added. Liquids are often more dangerous
  • Graphical effects – Lighting and texture resolution have been improved. Shadow quality has doubled. Temporal AA didn’t make it in time, but it’s so close
  • Balancing – several hundred upgrades have had stat changes (mainly exo-suit and ship, but also weapon), new upgrades have been added.
  • Combat – Auto Aim and weapon aim has been completely rewritten to feel more gentle in general, but stickier when you need it. Sentinels now alert each other, if they haven’t been dealt with quickly. Quad and Walker AI is now much more challenging, even I struggle with them without a powered up weapon.
  • Space Combat – advanced techniques have been introduced, like brake drifting and critical hits. Bounty missions and larger battles now occur. Pirate frequency has been increased, as well as difficulty depending on your cargo.
  • Exploits – infinite warp cell exploit and rare goods trading exploit among other removed. People using these cheats were ruining the game for themselves, but people are weird and can’t stop themselves ¯\_(シ)_/¯
  • Stability – foundations for buildings on super large planets. Resolved several low repro crashes, in particular when player warped further than 256 light years in one session (was only possible due to warp cell exploit above).
  • Space Stations – interiors are now more varied, bars, trade rooms and hydroponic labs have been added
  • Networking – Ability to scan star systems other players have discovered on the Galactic Map, increasing the chance of collision. Star systems discovered by other players appear during Galactic Map flight
  • Ship scanning – scanning for points of interest from your ship is now possible. Buildings generate earlier and show up in ship scans
  • Flying over terrain – pop-in and shadow artefacts have been reduced. Generation speed has been increased two fold (planets with large bodies of water will be targeted in next update)
  • Writing – The Atlas path has been rewritten by James Swallow (writer on Deus Ex) and me. I think it speaks to the over-arching theme of player freedom more clearly now. Early mission text has been rewritten to allow for multiple endings.

Also:

Next up we’re adding the ability to build bases and own giant space freighters. Temporal AA and my new cloud rendering tech should be coming soon too. It will really change the game again, and enhance it visually.
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Just got the evil ending for Furi, now I need to knock out the additional good ending's boss. Not sure if I'll do the speed run/S rank stuff or even try furier. Those of you who played it--once you'd beaten the game was it worth while going back through? I'll at least get to The Song since I missed her optional ending, just don't know if I'll try going further or not.

I didn't figure out boost until the 9th boss. Maybe using it will make the game go a lot faster. Somehow I got the impression that boost worked by holding the right analog until you're glowing orange and then hitting attack at the same time. Now I know that you trigger it, then release R and you retain the boost until you either hit or get hit.  :whistle2:

Unless something amazing comes out in the next few months I think Furi is going to be my PS+ GOTY. Fantastic combat, love the music, and the cinematography is really cool. 

 
Thermopyle said:
Just got the evil ending for Furi, now I need to knock out the additional good ending's boss. Not sure if I'll do the speed run/S rank stuff or even try furier. Those of you who played it--once you'd beaten the game was it worth while going back through? I'll at least get to The Song since I missed her optional ending, just don't know if I'll try going further or not.

I didn't figure out boost until the 9th boss. Maybe using it will make the game go a lot faster. Somehow I got the impression that boost worked by holding the right analog until you're glowing orange and then hitting attack at the same time. Now I know that you trigger it, then release R and you retain the boost until you either hit or get hit. :whistle2:

Unless something amazing comes out in the next few months I think Furi is going to be my PS+ GOTY. Fantastic combat, love the music, and the cinematography is really cool.
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FYI, if you didn't start a new game yet, you should be able to just select "Continue" and pick the other choice for the additional boss without having to play the whole game again.

I had a blast playing through the full game multiple times, especially once I got into the groove of using charged attacks to drastically cut down on how long each boss fight took.

 
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Vigilante said:
FYI, if you didn't start a new game yet, you should be able to just select "Continue" and pick the other choice for the additional boss without having to play the whole game again.

I had a blast playing through the full game multiple times, especially once I got into the groove of using charged attacks to drastically cut down on how long each boss fight took.
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Yeah, I did do continue. So far I've made it to the 3rd stage of that boss, I think. I really do like how well the patterns work in the game; it's great to figure out how to beat a boss stage and then die later on, but then blast through all the previous stages you've beaten quickly and easily and get back to the new part to figure out.

 
I just noticed two bruises on my hips this norning. Probably from the lap belt. Also a slight bruise on my shoulder and under my pec(boob) where the shoulder belt was.
 
Noticed Best Buy did a stealth change on my Iron Giant Collectors Edition blu ray order. Now listed as the standard blu ray at the same $10 price. Not surprised it was fixed, but just a heads up in case you want to change your order to Amazon for free shipping etc.

 
Took the kids to see Secret Life of Pets today... marketing did their job on this one; if you've seen the previews then you've pretty much seen all the funny parts.  Kids loved it though.

 
Think I shared this in Discord last night but I got to try out my brother in law's VR setup. It is definitely cool and immersive gaming but a lot of the actual functions are still clunky, definitely not worth the high buy-in at this point.
 
Oh, and had some Target clearance impulse buys today... $14 Toy Soldiers War Chest, $6 Skylanders Swap Force, and $16.50 Skylanders Trap Team.  I got the last of the Skylander starter packs on PS4 but they had all platforms.

Not the greatest deals but this was one of those wth days.

 
alienation postmortem:

alienation is either one of the better terrible games I've ever played or one of the worst good games.  I can't tell which.

those of you that've played it for the requisite 30 minutes know that it's a Helldivers x Diablo mashup but it somehow misses what makes both of those games good.

helldivers was stupid fun - but that was because of the seemingly endless onslaught of attackers that could always summon infinite reinforcements.  it was designed to piss you off in the most hilarious ways including the infamous friendly fire mechanic which made you really think about where you were shooting and how to deal with objectives.  it was also repetitive beyond belief and too dependent on an active online community which they realized too late.  

diablo 3 (the only one I've played thoroughly) is an awesome loot game with unique classes that all have very different capabilities.  once you've run through diablo 3 once there's pretty good motivation to keep plugging through the endgame content because the loot drops get to be pretty interesting and you can build your toon up to be an insane glass cannon that can tear through the highest difficulties in the blink of an eye (but if things fall apart you die almost instantly).  it also has some neat bosses and a fair variety of environments.

so, alienation takes:

- the multplayer and aesthetic from helldivers without the hilarity of failure

- an extremely watered down loot system and character variety from diablo

and wraps it up in a shitload of really good looking explosions and level design that was clearly lifted from dead nation.

sounds pretty uninteresting, right?  well yeah.  it kind of is.  you have to dig pretty deep to find the entertainment, but it is there!

basically, there's three classes and they are just barely different:

- biospecialist: the most fun if only because his three unique powers are genuinely useful.  he has the requisite heal and two different nanomachine powers that are a good mix of offensive and defensive.  

- tank: I don't know if they just don't know what a tank is, but the tank is not very tankish at all.  I think the name comes from the shield power which is an obnoxious, directional damage soaker that has limited uptime and becomes somewhat offensively useful at the third tier.  otherwise his two other powers are semi-lame damage dealers that feel pretty useless later in the game.  For some mysterious reason the tank also has half the primary weapon range and burns through ammo twice as fast which I guess would account for a damage boost, but in practice it's just completely awful.

- saboteur: another poorly executed idea, this one has the cool missile strike that surrounds everyone with death from above, a strange but semi-functional limited use melee attack and invisibility which I tried for hours to find a use for but mostly came up empty (if someone drops midfight you can go invisible and revive them without much resistance, so I guess there's that)

Otherwise, every class is identical.   Why they couldn't have thrown more variety in is a total mystery.

The actual gameplay is fun enough.  It's similar to dead nation in a lot of ways, but the most annoying way is the reload problem.  Everyone complains about it.  Here's the deal with this: the game seems to be designed to go through this decision flowchart all the time:

Am I fighting?  -> Yes -> Use primary weapon

Is primary weapon out of ammo or close? -> Yes -> Reload and swap to secondary while it reloads

Is secondary weapon out of ammo? -> Yes -> Switch back to primary

Did I run out of ammo at some point? -> Yes -> rush/melee/mash all your buttons and try not to die

This can slightly change with the third (Heavy) weapon which can be situationally useful until you pick up some good gear and then it rarely makes much sense.  The exception to this is the tank who can only get a long range weapon in his secondary/heavy weapon which just makes it another reason why the tank is a pain in the ass.

So you can work around the clip size problem by upgrading your weapon.  With enough bonuses slotted in you can get the clip up to 80 bullets or so which makes your primary weapon a functional skirmish -> reload -> skirmish weapon, but to do that you usually have to have either a rare drop with a lot of slots or suffer a bit in the damage department which can suck on the higher difficulties.

There's also some variety issues - much like helldivers, there's basically three different 'types' of enemies, each with their own minion, mid-tier and large forms.  they're mixed in to every mission in some fashion so by the end of the 5th or 6th mission you've pretty much seen all there is.  no bosses, but there are some missions that have some pretty crazy setpieces, most of them requiring running to extraction from tons of explosions and enemies.

But, once you're in postgame it does get pretty fun.  I got my saboteur up to level 30/190 (which isn't too far from max I think) and I was able to hang on the highest difficulty with a team once I had all legendary gear slotted up.  So it still has the postgame draw of diablo where it's fun to run with a high level team and tear through stuff, but flying solo still sucks (unlike diablo which works so well solo at high levels).   It should also be noted that even the legendary gear isn't that unique - some weapons have procs in them (e.g. if you melee there's a chance you'll also throw a grenade) but the only proc that seems useful is when you shoot a gun X happens - I ended up with a primary weapon with a proc to throw a boomerang with every shot and it made the weapon insanely overpowered.  Which was fun.

trophywise nothing interesting, just grinding and some luck.  fortunately they added the 'master' difficulty after you finish the story and it's easy to drop in to a mission someone else is running and soak up xp to finish off levels if you don't want to grind them (I finished up the last 6 levels to 30 in about 10 minutes with my tank that way).  I did do the two couch coop trophies solo with a dead partner since my wife is not interested in slaughtering aliens.

so for those of you that played it for a bit and stopped, I don't blame you.  there's not much else to do.  for everyone else, if it gets cheap it's fun for a while and the explosions and chaos is pretty entertaining for one run through but don't expect it to be as good as anything else housemarque has done.  I will say this: playing in Hardcore mode is _definitely_ the best way to play the game, but I wouldn't recommend it until you've played through once.  the risk/reward of hardcore mode and the insanity with the horde comes in or when someone accidentally aggros a big group offscreen is pretty intoxicating.  it almost sucks that you can just pull down your ps+ save and get back to where you were if you fuck up, but since death comes so easy it's probably a fair trade.  it is pretty entertaining when you're on a team and you see someone go in to their inventory screen and a second later they're dead for good.

this is one game that would've benefited immensely from a good post-launch support plan - if they could've added additional classes, powers, bosses, or just about anything else that could've made things more unique it would've probably had a much bigger splash for me.  I'm glad I played it through to the end since I love housemarque, but I'll certainly be a little more timid about their next venture.

 
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Crunchewy said:
If I don't update am I locked out of online or anything else? I haven't tried the jailbreak yet. I don't play online games much on Vita, but high scores and such.
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Everything related to PSN quits working. Trophy syncs, the story, PS+, scoreboard, etc.. There's some update blocker that works for a limited time. Otherwise until PS3/PS4 update you can download games to those and then use CMA to transfer the game to your Vita. After those update, they'll only allow CMA with 3.61.

 
Did you have freezing issues during the final battle of Mass Effect 1 Avenged? Kept hard freezing the system or causing partial freezes and stutters during the 2nd form of the fight. Took the advice to disconnect from PSN and switch off from rapid fire weapons for me and my squad mates and that prevented any more hard freezes that required a system reboot, but there were a couple of times during the 3rd time through the fight for the Insanity difficulty trophy that it seemed to come really close to a hard freeze as the screen periodically paused for 2 or 3 seconds.

 
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Thermopyle said:
Vita 3.61 is out. "Stability" update.
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I'm starting to wish Sony would officially drop support.

God forbid people play Hot Shots Golf or Wipeout on their TV. No no no, buy those PS3 copies instead.

Hopefully this update doesn't drain batteries for the actual Vita.
 
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Hulu no longer has a free service, sort of.  You'll have to go to Yahoo View to watch any recent episodes.  Because that'll last 6 months before they pull the plug on that with their sale and restructuring.

“For the past couple years, we’ve been focused on building a subscription service that provides the deepest, most personalized content experience possible to our viewers,” Ben Smith, Hulu senior vice president and head of experience, said in a statement. “As we have continued to enhance that offering with new originals, exclusive acquisitions, and movies, the free service became very limited and no longer aligned with the Hulu experience or content strategy.”

That said, Hulu is partnering Yahoo on its new ad-supported streaming site Yahoo View, which will allow users to watch the five most recent episodes of shows NBC, Fox and ABC eight days after they air. Select shows from other networks (TBD), as well as next-day clips will also be available to stream for free.

 
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