Tank

I read this and didn’t understand it, asked my kid (who built my system and calls me an Apple-nerd) says you’ll be fine. I’m loving how many things I missed that I have been able to check out on steam.

I swear to god, the amount of times I get run down by my own car…

Oh yeah— I was using that until I scored an iconic katana! And good to know for next time when I go back to girl V. I actually hacked the card and got the cash, which was a great way to get some scratch at the top of the game. That’s the other benefit to doing the gigs, they rack up a lot. I was up 200k by the end of the second act and was kitted out in good stuff.

I really wish the romance options were better. Panam and Judy are both great characters, River is such a soft beta bitch I can’t stand him. But there’s basically only one option for you regardless of gender and orientation. (Aside from the joy toys and the one-off with the corpo chick if you’re a dude.) Claire, Rogue, Mitch, maybe even Goro could have all been filled out a little more. Also don’t love how once you lock it in, your paramour just becomes a texting buddy. That said, on the good side, making a point of doing all the fixer gigs. While they rotate between mission type, lots lots of fun little mini stories hidden in them, and really good loot.

DMT rave cowboy from space is how I identify for sure lol. I’m looking a little more the part these days… See below. After my first play through I tried the corpo beginning and it just felt to anti-cyberpunk. Didn’t feel right. Doing a street kid this time, and it’s kind of a generic background. Nomad is what I did before and it def has my preference. The beginning is about 3 times as long as the either two classes, and all the stuff with Panam’s crew hits a little closer to home. I wish they had better mechanics for the other classes the TTRPG offered. Netrunner skills are definitely there for you to toy with, but the lack of cyberspace outside of the Alt Cunningham story is disappointing. It would be cool if you could go full Neuromancer and just play as a netrunner while the street samurai did the action. Less exciting of a game, but they could have done more. Fixers make more sense as giving jobs. Rockerboy, night quite as playable and they cover it with Johnny— but a cop or media character could have a lot of interesting stories too. Problem was, they needed the core story to stay generic for all classes I guess. Playing male this time too, and like most games, I find the male voice actor just too affected and droll compared to the female. While I prefer my nomad female to my dude streetkid, this play through has been a lot more in depth. Last time I didn’t do many of the Fixer gigs, or random side missions. You really miss out on a lot of details, not to mention they take you to more locales. I’m really appreciating Night City And the visuals more. The weather mod I installed has really helped too. The extra exploration and taking my time has helped me get decent weapons and armor, and stats. Just starting Act 3 and feel like I no longer need to loot. If you get the Voodoo Boys on your side, congrats to you. First play through I had to kill them all, this time I walked out of the meet, but we weren’t friends. Not sure faction alliance works outside of story missions. I’ve accidentally killed so many people of each faction that it doesn’t seem to make a huge difference. Maybe they see/attack you faster if you piss them off in a story mission? I need to go back to 6th street to find out. I was doing their drinking/shooting completion and accidentally winged somebody and they all turned on me so I killed the whole block.

I tend to avoid walk-throughs when I play games unless I am truly stuck somewhere. It just feels like you are killing the experience to just know everything going in. That said, on second play throughs I m more inclined to check as I am interested in seeing what I missed. To that-- I decided to google up some armor that looked cool that could a little more permanent for me. Also, I got my hands on a gun named Skippy-- which is basically like what if Microsoft Word's Clippy was a lethal weapon. It has provided great fun, but a thing just happened with it that if I had read about it in a walkthrough I could have avoided. So now I am mad at this game again.

Oh my

Give him the stick.

I mean look at this tool…

Well I dove back in using Vortex for mods. Running some bug patches, a few retextures for characters, a weather mod, and a few other visual tweaks along with some retextures for the romance-able characters and the new official patch. I can't say it's a night and day difference, but it definitely feels less glitchy. I'll never love the lack of third person (the mod is really sketchy still), I also still think they provided overkill with options for the graphics, meaning you have to be a video scientist to get this thing to look good consistently (some scenes look amazing, some are horribly subpar). The police still have the annoying glitch that makes for spawning in an unfair way (as in appearing right behind you in a closed space when you have a wanted level). I tried installing some mods that are supposed to balance the vehicles and give you customizing options, but given there are only a few racing missions and readily handy fast travel points, buying, collecting, and modding cars seems to be a zero sum game. (To be fair, I have the same issue with GTA which is a "car game" technically). One mod that has made a huge difference (for the way I play) makes it so if you kill somebody in an enemy area using a silenced gun or a thrown knife, it will not trigger all other enemies to go into combat mode. The stock game only lets you stealth kill with grabbing from behind, making silencers utterly pointless. It seems like a mistake, but I guess it's the same logic that makes for a in-depth character creator for a game that never lets you see your character to offer a stealth mode where you can't perform a stealth kill. All that said, aside from only being first-person, really my only big complaint about the game is that it uses DPS. I hate hate hate hate equipment/armor leveling in a game almost as much as first-person. It's good I can't see my character because he looks like a clown given that after a battle, I loot, and equip the highest rated gear, which of course always looks the stupidest. I don't understand the point of it. Just give me weapons and armor with stats that I can buff and upgrade as I see fit and level up and have more money. DPS effects global leveling, so it creates this other issue in that enemy level scaling in this game is also trash. It doesn't adjust enemies to your level. Certain missions just have enemies at a certain level. Regardless of skill or gear, these enemies can one-shot you until you hit the same level as them, then it's suddenly balanced. The game does you the favor of giving them a skull on their stats to let you know it's pointless to fight them. Beyond all that, I am getting sucked back in. The core story really is good and well written even if the voice acting sometimes falls short. I'm playing a different PC class and gender/sex than before, so I am noticing small but subtle differences. Also chipping skills differently than I did before, which has made some interactions turn out differently. The earliest was, playing with more points in intelligence, I was able to hack the credit chip given to you to buy the Flathead in the first mission for Dexter. I went in and shot my way to keeping the thing so I got to keep all that money. Also, as a dude, I was able to have a random hook up and bang the corpo chick from the mission in a sleazy hotel. Lots of little things like that. Doing a lot of the rando NCPD missions early on too helped me get in the money a lot quicker. I also realized that the regional fixer missions aren't given to you, you have to find them on the map-- i missed that before and thought they came in randomly, so those too are offering new experiences, and ways to level up and get money ahead of the bigger story missions. Off to meet the Voodoo Boys next. Last time I played I ended up having to lill off my contact and made enemies of them, going to try and not do that this time. If this patched version been the game released, along with a 3rd person mode, the OG background start points the initially promised for different classes, more romance options, no DPS and crap enemy leveling... it could have been my game of the year. Well no, because it came out the same year as Last of Us 2, which is the greatest game ever.

Yeah that’s the problem with space. They def needed more missions over surfaces. HUGE missed opportunity that they didn’t do a walker assault or something akin to the trench run. All the famous starfighter OT stuff that was designed to show speed went ignored as inpiration. Huge missed opportunity. You really only got that feel when you could strafe a capitol ship.

(That said I set you up for a round of this a few days ago and you didn’t go for it).

WHAT HOLY GOD YES

I remember the MAtrix game where you played as Jada Pinket Smith on the pS2 being the first one “forcey” mechanics. I loved that game. It, like Control and Outcast, was very satisfying and gratifying to stomp squads of enemies at once. Force Unleashed too.

You should check out Control if you like TK action. I wanted to love squadrons, I got an occulus just to realize a life long dream of flying an X-Wing. The VR realization was great, when it wasn’t glitching out on me. The game itself… it was all right. I was bored by the end.

And this is why I don’t read DC.

I forgot Unleashed. I actually loved that one too. Playing it in the Wii was fun because you could do a lot of Force and lightsaber gestures.

10. ESB Walker Assault, Atari 2600 9. Super Star Wars, Super NES 8. Dark Forces, my OG Mac 7. Tie Fighter / X-Wing, my Dad’s PC 6. The Phantom Menace, PS2 5. Jedi Starfighter, PS2 4. Rebel Assault, CDROM 3. Shadows of the Empire, N64 2. Battlefront, PS4 1. Lego Star Wars, Wii Jedi Outcast is a well made and fun game, but I’m not replaying it over and over or having memories made with playing it. I missed the boat on the KOTOR games, and they are too clunky for me to play for the first time now. Maybe when the remasters come.

Readership has been dropping since the comics boom of the 90s imploded. The amount of new readers is measurable, and consistent and not great. Marvel learned this when they adjusted everything to be closer to the movies by merging the Ultimate and 616 universes, expecting all those Avengers ticket sales to bring in scores of readers… but it didn’t. That means their focus is on retaining readers instead of finding new ones, and this causes the issues we’re all saying we have— no easy entry, need to much fore knowledge, no standalone stories, etc.

The problem with this is they are doing a dedicated “youth” line, it’s often b-list talent and isn’t canon. I mean, that doesn’t mean a huge deal to me, but Met’a point is back in our day, we could read X-Men and while it was technically an adult book, there’s was never anything too inappropriate for kids. It’s like movies— in the 80s, you got Disney movies and the occasional family comedy film. Beyond that, we watched whatever was PG. E.T. was all ages without being pedantic.

You not cookin. WHY TUESDAY AFTERNOON, even I have shit to do.

..

please add Driver's score to Tank's please, Krawlie is not the man.

Without our friend Zerimar here, there hasn't been any good talk/advice/gossip around relationships and dating. Is that because everyone here is old and married at this point? Cause now that I am at max vax I am getting back out there. I'd be fun to talk about dating stuff-- but if it's just going to be me talking about all my rejections I'll be annoyed.

Gotta say... this reminds me very much of the feels the TFA trailer gave me... after a couple decades of seeing my favorite childhood thing go to crap, they suddenly get it right.