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260 responses to “Talk Amongst Yourselves”
Hello TAY. Having a casual new years break, back working on my own projects, actually had to make a new years resolution to play more games, as opposed to wanting to actually check them out but being too busy. So far this year, I’ve seen the opening 10 minutes of FFXV and spent far too much time messing around in code because dammit I’m too close to my goal to stop.
Happy New Year everyone! What’d you all get up to?
Not much myself. Had one drink, watched some YouTube and went to bed shortly after the New Year came in.
Then again, I just got back from spending Christmas with the extended family the night before NYE so I think it’s understandable why I had a quiet one.
Not a lot. Had a beer and watched two episodes of Mr. Robot, then went to bed.
Been meaning to watch that. Any good?
Yeah, I quite enjoyed it. Want to watch season 2 now, but I think it’s a Foxtel exclusive (could’ve sworn I saw they had 2 seasons on Stan months ago, but it’s not there now). Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to wait for the DVD release.
The streaming services do that… I went on a Supernatural binge a while back on Netflix, watched seasons 1-8, was ready to start watching S9 the next day… and they removed it. Just straight up no explanation ditched it, even though I had seen it there the night before (it even started auto-playing!). I recently went back to see if they’d re-added it, to find that they had removed the entire show from their catalogue.
Apparently it’s all Foxtel’s fault (Something bad happens, Rupert is to blame… are we really surprised?). They are crazy with the whole copyright thing, and won’t let the streaming services use them.
Working… Then watched the Fireworks over Melbourne from my brother-in-laws balcony. Got drunk on Champagne, then back at work at 10am on the 1st… Yaaaay for being an adult 😛
Almost forgot that it was a thing, til sending off a message to a friend I meant to try and organise a catch-up with then got a call back asking if I was doing anything. “Oh that’s tomorrow?” 😛
They were house sitting a place over at Annandale, close enough to see the glow of fireworks reflecting off the cloud cover but nothing directly. For the most part we were just drinking and playing board games, with as many fans on as possible (how do these people not have air conditioning oh my god dying). Particularly lengthy was a game of Articulate, which was pretty good. With how warm it was there and how long it had been since my last drink (felt fine and blew zero on my little tester thingo) I figured I’d just drive home, plus late night driving on empty roads is the best. Couldn’t help but play a little Space Pirate Trainer when I got home, which I’d just bought on sale before leaving. Annoyingly the aim of the guns on that is stupidly downwards, they give you an option to adjust the angle of the gun but the max is still maybe about 30º short of where it needs to be. So wrote the devs a friendly letter asking whether a fix would be possible, then went to bed. Stupidly didn’t think that I hadn’t drunk all that much water before I left, and should have had more before going to sleep especially after working up a bit of a sweat, so woke to a nice new year’s hangover all of two hours later 😛 Wasn’t even all that warm, but still felt hot enough to be unable to sleep. Grabbed something to drink but still couldn’t get back to sleep again for another two hours.
At least the only way from there is up 😛
Worked till midnight, then went home & slept. I’m fun 😛
NYE? Watched Gone Girl with my folks, and went to sleep at 10; got woken up at 1 by the drunken 20-somethings renting the neighbours’ place coming back from town. Woke up to news of a burst pipe in the wall of my parent’s bathroom, and spent the morning playing mahjong with my mum while waiting for a plumber to call back.
Water-damage aside, a pretty chill start to the year.
Took the week off which was the biggest break I’ve had in a while
Christmas in the bush with my family then a post christmas, christmas lunch with the in-laws after we got back.
A few lazy days at home along with a trip to the beach and a trip to the zoo
Gaming wise I finished farcry 3 and managed to get my darksiders 2 save back to where I lost all my progress (about 8 hours in) on NYE.
Also spent some time getting my cycling CQ fantasy league team done
Went to the in-laws place and watched Ant-Man and Guardians 😀
TAY. MUSIC! VIDYA GAMES!
Too good not to share, if you have a spare couple of hours:
SAH GOOD!
How is everyone?
Hey hey TAY’ers! Happy New Year and all that stuff!
I have a question for those PC enthusiasts out there. I’m looking at getting a desktop PC as I’ll be doing some landscape design, 2D and 3D. It’s been forever since I’ve built a PC, probably over 10 years, so I have no idea what I’m looking for anymore.
As I’m a PS4 gamer, I have little interest in PC gaming (apart from Planet Coaster perhaps) so I would prefer to settle on a GTX 1070 as I’m pretty sure that should handle my 3D work, but in saying that, I had an email from Scorptec with the following deal:
https://www.scorptec.com.au/systems/scorptec/25/371
Here’s where you PC people come in to play big time, why is this rig only $2k? Seems quite low considering half the price is the GTX 1080. I know the case is basic, there’s only 8GB ram and it’s a basic motherboard, but apart from the need for more RAM (I want 16GB), what are the downsides?
I’m thick in to research territory here, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, for those in Melbourne, what computer stores do you recommend for?
If you bought all the parts separately from them it’d cost over $2100, which is amusing.
Also if Melbourne, i’d highly recommend PC Case gear. They seem to be the best priced etc. But yeah. Unless you really need it, i’d stay away from an i7 and put more money into something else like a better motherboard with an m.2 slot or a bigger SSD, better cpu cooling etc.
I’m still getting there with my new build, i’ve got some stuff still waiting on being able to afford the rest (cpu, cooler, gpu etc..) but i’ve put together this i’m hopefully gonna buy most of the other bits this week for it so I can put together lol.
Huge thanks for the reply. I didn’t even consider looking at an i5, I thought i7 was the way to go. That’s nice to know that I can save some money there. Thanks for the list, looks like a decent set up and helpful in knowing the parts I’ll need.
No worries. If you’re not doing any heavy CPU intensive tasks like rendering, video editing etc that require hyper threading, you’re just wasting money going for an i7 imo. But if you are doing those tasks often or for work, then by all means shell out the $$ for an i7.
I think i5 is more than plenty for most people, hell I haven’t hit a bottle neck with my Sandy Bridge 2500 i5 which is a 2011 era CPU, I probably would if I stuck a 1070, 1080 or Titan X in my current PC.
Hell I could probably use the dual core i3 My NAS has, it chugs along decoding PLEX, torrenting etc & handles everything really well whilst staying under 50 degrees at load, it’s kind of impressive lol.
@hoi_polloi didn’t you say in the top post you’d be doing 3D work? I’d definitely be going for an i7 if that’s the case.
I did, but it will be more real-time than rendering stills. I used to use 3dsmax, but will be moving to a dedicated landscaping package which is why I think I’d spend more on a video card. I will put an i7 in if the budget allows, but I’d prefer to stay around the 2k mark.
There’s also the option of Ryzen from AMD on the AM4 platform, what i’ve seen their top tier 8 core is meant to rival the i7 6900K which is a $1500 AUD CPU. So their other stuff might be very competitive especially price wise. CES this week should tell us more, I hope.
Interesting, I’ll have to check out some benchmarks.
To be fair the 6800GT was a bitchin’ card. I had a 6600GT personally those were the days lol.
There’s video circulating from the press release of Ryzen the other week where they put it against the 6900k in real time with Blender & Handbrake, the AMD chip beat the AMD by a few seconds and such. Which is impressive since they’re achieving this with a TDP of 95w, where as the 6900k has a TDP of 140w quite a difference.
That is pretty impressive. Well I’ve decided to hold off for a few weeks anyway, so I’ll see what happens. Maybe some post CES sales on ‘old’ tech.
Also Intel officially launched their new 1151 CPU’s today named Kaby Lake, so yeah. The 6700k is impressive for overclocking, JayzTwoCents got his to a stable 5ghz on AIO liquid cooler. Impressive!
I wish I had kept up with desktop PC’s. The last PC I built was over 10 years ago. My last video card purchase was a Geforce 6800GT and who knows what processor I had. It was before i5, i7 etc. Hopefully these new processors drop the prices of the current ones.
I’ve never seen the appeal of Micro-ATX cases, why’d you go down that route? A larger case gives you more flexibility (you could go for a cheaper air cooler, which from what I’ve read cool just as well as the AIO liquid coolers for a fraction of the cost), but if you want portability you’d probably be better off with a mini ITX?
That being said, my last build was the size of a small building, so I can’t really talk.
They’re a good in between, & some mATX cases can be small but still rooomy. I like the idea of being able to have a GPU & then another PCI-E device like a fancy Intel 750 series SSD for example, can’t with an ITX board 😛 Also my current ATX case takes up way too much room tbh, also the fact a lot of premium cases now don’t come with an ODD bay annoys me, I still use my ODD to rip CD’s & with my NAS to rip blu-rays.
Originally I wanted to go ITX but I couldn’t find a case I liked, I was going to get the ITX version of that case buuuuuut since it’s discontinued it’s doubled to tripled in price from retailers, and I picked the mATX version up for half RRP 2nd hand in immaculate condition with original box & accessories, so that was nice.
Depends, in my situation, an AIO is better than an air cooler, if there was more air flow in the case an air cooler would be a much better & cheaper option sure. I originally wanted to go a low profile air cooler, but that wasn’t going to work. The H80i v2 fits well in this case anyway & came recommended by YouTuber JayzTwoCents in a build he did in this exact case a few years ago.
Since this is the internet and we don’t agree, I want to argue with your point; however, I can’t fault your logic… so I am going to fixate on the fact that you spelled roomy with 3 o’s.
TAKE THAT! BUUUUURN.
For the ODD, would an external work? If you aren’t using it often it might not be worth having an internal one taking up space, particularly given the small form factor.
Haha, well that’s just how I roll, so deal with it 😛
It’s a slim slow load ODD, which takes up the same room in this case even if it’s not there so yeah 😛 As for external, like I need more stuff hanging about lol. Plus there’s even room on the ODD tray behind it to house a 2.5″ drive if I want, but saying that there’s 4 spots on the back of the motherboard tray for that lol.
Heh, I went mini-ITX for mine, managed to pack a 1080, a H100i cooler (with required 4 fans) an SSD and 2 mechanical drives into a Phanteks Enthoo Evolv.
That was a fun build!
RAM is a bit low. Isn’t 16 GB the norm now?
Is that expanded or extended memory? You’ll need expanded to run X-wing with speech enabled. Ah those were the days.
Stop! Stop!
[CRUCH!]
Goddammit! Look what you did to my hip!
So to my surprise there was another 2x xp event for Titanfall 2. Managed to regenerate twice again. Currently at r9. I finished regenerating all my primary weapons so I can start using my favourites. I also managed to regenerate all Titans (even did Tone in a single night), so now I’m not sure which Titan to use. Try and get all stat achievements or just stick with my r12 Northstar.
Got Uncharted 4 as one of my new games for Christmas and finished that a couple of days ago. Not sure what to think of it. When I finished Uncharted 3 I thought it was great, but that the series had given me all it could. 4 managed to prove me wrong, but that was mainly because of the grappling hook. Without it, I would have found the game stale. Funny enough, I had shifted my hype from Uncharted to Tomb Raider. Instead, Rise disappointed me while U4 managed to surprise me.
However, I still don’t know what to think of the game. I think it’s great and one of the best, but I still don’t find it as groundbreaking as a lot of people have made it out to be. One big problem I had with the game was how obvious and scripted all those CoD moments were. Everything around you explodes or falls apart, but the geometry falls in such a coincidental way that you can keep running and get out of the situation. Most hilarious moment was where a column falls down in front of you, slowly, so that you can climb up it to avoid the falling ground. Every single moment where you’re caught off guard by a sliding slope either ends in you jumping, or jumping and throwing your grappling hook.
The hook got so much usage I find it funny people would complain about Batmans overuse of the Batmobile but had no problem here. There were many points where you can see the rope around the branch to get to the next area, even if a simple ledge is all you needed. Drake retracting the rope so quickly was funny, especially at the end of the game where you had to hook swing off a point and then hook onto another point despite the rope flaying behind you.
I was caught by surprise over the couple of areas that had multiple paths to move through. They were fun to explore, even if I got sick of every ledge being highlighted white. Also like the added stealth elements that didn’t make the game easier but did give you some room to move around.
I’m conflicted on the story, I found the first few chapters to be so terrible in pacing and story. First off the game begins 2/3s of the way through the game, shifts back to child Drake, skips ahead to young adult Drake, then skips forward another 15 years. Just to explain why we haven’t heard of Sam before (and I laughed at Sams ‘death scene’ considering the player KNOWS he can’t die there).
That being said, the ‘betrayal’ scene is one of the best I’ve seen. Uncharted has tried the betrayer plot twist several times in the past but this is the first time I thought it genuinely worked.
I’ve also heard the controversy around Nadine and I was keeping a close eye on her. I think I found the problem with her. The problem with her is that she’s the games villain who never gets her comeuppance. She kicks your ass early on (and my main problem with this moment is how obviously scripted it is), she annoys you with her men, tries to blow up several digging sites, kicks your ass a second time, gets her treasures and then… walks away. There’s no final battle, nobody clocks her face in, she gets what she wants (while being a bitch about it) and gets away with it. I wouldn’t mind if during that second fight it wasn’t scripted and you beat her (cause of the DLC), but nothing bad happens to her.
Yeah, she says she lost so many men, but she gets enough gold to make up for it.
I was also annoyed at the shift in tone with Rafe. He’s presented as a desperate, but also level headed guy. He gives you an out and tries to keep Nadine under control. Even having concern for Drake during the betrayal scene. Then suddenly for no reason he turns into an asshole and tries to kill everybody. Then you have a fight with him despite him being better trained at fencing than you are. He presents the Nadine fight you should have had, you have to beat him, but the story shows him coming out on top. If he stabs you, you die. You have to beat his gameplay before the story takes over. It doesn’t work for Nadine cause there’s no gameplay to beat.
On top of that I tried the multiplayer. It’s fine, but finding a game was really difficult. Seems likes everybody else had moved on as well, with the remaining people being those who have unlocked everything.
Also tried Survival and it reveals to me that I’m just naturally better than most people at picking up on new things. That’s not bragging or anything, I was playing with people who have put in many, many hours. Enough to get to top rank and get special player icons. Yet, these people were constantly dying. My scores were usually double to them. I once picked up the same person 3 times in the same exact spot cause they couldn’t avoid a shotgun blast. We kept losing (cause enemies scale with player amount) and eventually they left, leaving me with just the A.I. buddy. I then knocked out the final waves of the 50 amount by myself. I only died like, 2 during the 50th wave too.
I think it’s a great game, the visuals were amazing. Especially the island scene, which has taking over Uncharted 1. So now I don’t think there’s a point to playing Uncharted 1, just go from 2 to 4.
Morning Tay. I am addicted to Stardew valley. This means I need to ask everyone a very important question.
What do you name your animals?
Mine are all named after sounds they make with the exception of the dog.
Also, the kitchen is at a standstill due to the fact that the cosmetic parts of the cabinets is very freaking expensive.
Man, I really need to dedicate more time to Stardew Valley… I love every time I pick it up and play it, but I haven’t even gotten to getting my first animals yet 😛
I keep restarting… And now I’ve learned that there’s multiple layouts to pick from for your farm?
*Sigh* time to restart… again 😛
Hehehe. Not to digress too much but that question reminds me of the silly yet effective prank I pulled on my brother while playing Pokemon.
This was back in the good simple days when there were only 151 Pokemon (Mew still counts as she was in the cartridge but locked away for promotions).
My starter was Charmander and I named him as such in title case. Fast forward a few months (you most likely can guess what I did by now, :-P) when my brother and I were battling over the game link cable.
Brother: “Aw, Charmander. How cute.”
[Charizard appears]
Brother: “WHAT ON EARTH?!”
I don’t know what was funnier, that I did the same for Bulbasaur and Squirtle in that same battle or him trying to strike a balance between having a heart attack while not letting the Game Link cable run out.
😛
Happy new year! I completely failed to play any pokemon while I was away. 😛 But I did get nearly 400 pages of Lovecraft read, caught up on some movies, and played a bunch of mahjong, so not gonna complain. Got back on Sunday night, so spent all of yesterday playing FFXV – found Pitioss dungeon (after consulting a wiki to learn how to get to the sidequest objective in that area) and lost 6 hours to that nightmare… but glad I did it. Really cool design to the dungeon, but the movement system is way too unpredictable to do it justice.
The Guild has sent me to advise you this act will not go unnoticed…..
…..The Guild just sent me an email; nothing to see nor report here…..
😛
Omg, most of those stories were freaking amazing. Been reading them more-or-less chronologically, and some of his earlier work was absolute drivel (looking at you, The White Ship, and to a lesser extent Celephais), but Sweet Ermengarde and Herbert West: Reanimator were hilarious in their cheesiness, and The Music of Erich Zann was an absolute masterpiece. Even Cool Air, which I’d never even heard of, is a really neat little tale. And The Thing on the Doorstep, The Lurking Fear, The Rats in the Walls… so good.Truth be told, I have not read any of Lovecraft’s books.
It is tempting to see what the hype (for want of a better term) is about but I scare easily so I let the matter rest.
There are some interesting reads that aren’t particularly scary – The Terrible Old Man, The Statement of Randolph Carter, and The Cats of Ulthar (in that order roughly from “relatively tame” to “kinda scary but really neat”; then again, I find it very hard to be scared by literature, so ymmv). Then there are the more classical styled tales like The Tree that are fairly straightforward on the surface, but have a really subtle subtext that changes your entire perspective of the story.
But I very much prefer tales where he manages to write an oppressive atmosphere, a creeping horror, that just draws you in – stories like The Lurking Fear,Dreams in the Witchhouse, Erich Zann, etc; even something as conceptually simple as The Picture in the House (guy takes shelter from a storm in a house, finds a book with a picture depicting cannibalism in Africa, meets house’s Jame Gumb-esque owner) is dripping with atmosphere and latent malice…
Which LC are/were you reading?
I’m working my way through this volume, so reading most of his solo work in roughly chronological order. Over the last week, I’ve read The Terrible Old Man through to Call of Cthulhu, and am currently halfway through Pickman’s Model.
Oh man, you’ve got some good ones coming up, have you read any of them before? My favourite 3 stories of his are probably At the Mountains of Madness, Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, so enjoy those!
Yea, it was my second reading of Call of Cthulhu – that being the first Lc book I ever read – and Lurking Fear and Rats in the Walls; have also read Mountains of Madness, Haunter of the Dark, Dreams in the Witch House, Whisperer in Darkness and The Thing on the Doorstep, all of which I absolutely loved. Looking forward to Charles Dexter-Ward, tho the dream tales I’ve read thus far have me a little more cautious about Kadath, despite all the praise I’ve heard for it.
I think Dreams in the Witch House would be in my top three thus far – being fairly logically minded myself, I feel it perfectly describes the descent into madness that comes with trying to make sense of beings like Nyarlathotep. Lurking Fear‘s up there as well, purely for the reveal of Arthur Munroe’s death that undoubtedly influenced nearly every modern slasher flick in existence. 😛
Okay, small PSA for everyone: I’ll be in the USA all this week covering CES.
Let me know if there’s anything in particular you’ve heard about that you want me to hunt down/try and get hands on with.
Ryzen, even though i’m team Green & Blue, I wanna know more about the new AMD stuff mainly pricing for Aus! It’s unlikely Nvidia will announce it at CES (according to JayzTwoCents) but the 1080Ti. Also Silverstone if they have anything nice for the Fortress line coming up, especially in the ITX/mATX size range.
Also have fun!
Get as much detail about anything Nintendo. Be interesting to see if the Switch has learned form the train wreak that was the Wii U.
Switch stuff will be on the 14th. There’s the presentation on the 13th (US time) but there’s also a hands-on event in Melbourne that weekend, which I’ll be attending. You’ll hear all about the Switch the Monday after.
AWWWWWW! I WANNA HEAR ABOUT IT NOW!
😛
#obviousnintenboy.
Jokes aside, I’m pretty much agnostic when gaming. Have en eclectic mix from Atari 2600 to PS4 and PC.
Am interested in the Switch but the Wii U has made me wonder if anyone in Nintendo still remembers how to make good games now.
Too few at launch and too far and far between after. Don’t get me wrong, Splatoon and Yoshi’s Wooly World are fun and well made but the rest of the library is mostly multi-platformers thus giving very few reasons to sell the console.
Old school I know but (to quote Spock), that is the logical way (to evaluate a console).
Bayonetta 2 was pretty special, I thought. And Mario Maker really wasn’t the same game on 3DS with all the limitations it had there. But I understand your reservations. Really hoping that there’s plenty of third party support, lest the Switch ends up with several dry months on end between first-party releases.
Not only that, it wasn’t the kind of game for those who wanted to keep their friend, 😛
Make sure you grill them hard about region locking and whether they’re going to be so proscriptive about their content policies with it (the number of Wii U and 3DS games recently that were censored or altered was distressing). I want to know if it’ll actually be the PS Vita replacement I hope for or if I can just skip it entirely. Wii U was the worst gaming hardware purchase I’ve ever made.
Reading through some of the older TAYs is weeeeeiiiirrd.
Kept coming past comments thinking “Who is this idiot”… Oh wait, that was me *shoots self*
Also don’t know why I decided to go through old posts… Guess I was trying to figure out exactly when TAY started slowing down… Funnily enough it seems to be around when the first PAX happened. Iiiinteresting.
Familiarity breeds contempt? 😛
Who’s this idiot? FETCH THE OAR OF THORNS!
I think that’s coincidental. The reason TAY slowed down was that major site re-design that made it nigh-unusable on mobile. It also had a number of bug fixes and introduced notifications, and that in turn reduced the amount of spamming that happened to get past Taybreaks etc.
Jeez guys, I take a TAY break (a TAYcation? HoliTAY?) for a few months and y’all disappear? Where is everyone?
Edit: I’ve gone down the rabbit hole, I think we need to agree on a term here. What I’ve come up with so far:
TAYcation
HoliTAY
SiesTAY
SabbaTAYcal
GeTAYway
We didn’t go anywhere, you just were not paying attention.
Just some of the highlights you missed:
* @weresmurf found some lost making-of from Star Trek TOS and TNG, the highlight of which Shatner and Stewart discussed character and story ideas with Gene Roddenberry himself.
* @welbot found a technique of overclocking that improved performance with far less heat generation
* @alexwalker allowed guest articles to be published by us.
* A group of us even got to do a pod cast on retro games with @markserrels.
Man, you should have been here.
But… it’s page 1… on a Wednesday!
All of that sounds awesome though, pretty sad that I missed it! Which retro games got discussed? How retro are we talking?
Oh god. Where to begin.
Needless to say, Chrono Trigger and a few other SNES classic were played.
But the real fun came when @markserrels somehow procured a working Magnavox Odyssey. We had to be gentle and wear gloves but holy cow did we have fun with those old simple games!
We even took a stab at the Sword Quest games via an Atari 2600 emulator and tried to crack the hidden code in the comics! Atari really knew what they were doing back in the day.
But, yeah, you should have been there.
I did?
No need to be modest; getting a i6700K running at 8GHz with an air fan is nothing to sneeze at.
😛
True as that may be, are you sure that was my doing?
Oh god. I’m going to have to stop this joke here; I have no way of filling that gap with comedic effect.
To everyone who took part, thanks. Made my return to work a laugh. Best of luck to the rest of the year to all of you.
lel i mean, I know I’m good, but didn’t know I was THAT good 😉
Sorry. I should be back to chatting soon. Just ben taking a break.
Might do some drawing again soon. Is that what you want?
Yes. Yes, it is.
Also, there was some talk of Bobs Burgers bookmarks a while back, was that ever a thing?
Also, still playing OW? What do you think of the reworked Symmetra? I, for one, hate her.
I made those already =P
As for Symmetra, I don’t mind the rework, but I still need to get used to using the shield
So like… can I order some? I’ll be your best friend =D
As for Symmetra, I think her shield generator has too much range – on maps where it’s hard to flank, she can place it so far back that you basically have to barrel through their whole team and hope you can get to it before they pop you.
I need to find an affordable way to print them off. When that happens, I’ll let you know.
As for that, that’s when you need a sombra or a Tracer to murder it.
All of those are acceptable.
Welp. Just bought the CPU, PSU & cooler for my new PC. Should arrive either tomorrow or Friday \o/ Next week probably get the fans & optical drive, then all I need is the second SSD & GPU and it’s complete. Then I can focus on peripheral upgrades! Which is just the monitors & maybe a new keyboard.
La La Land is real good.
real good.
I hear @dc thinks exactly this!
Haven’t seen that yet. Doesn’t start here until tomorrow.
On a side note, Passengers is good, totally recommend it. Also, Assassin’s Creed is crap, seriously, don’t waste your money.
LOLWUT. Centrelink think I owe them $2,200 because I held 2 jobs over 3 years ago with EB Games & Dan Murphy’s & that I didn’t report my income correctly. Well I think this is a load of shit since I handed in my payslips to both Centrelink & Salvation Army Employment Plus like I was instructed to along with reporting my income every fortnight on my Centrelink profile as instructed which either left me with less than $100 a fortnight from Centrelink (sometimes as little as $1) or nothing at all. I only had these 2 jobs for maybe 3 months, over the Christmas period, Dan Murphy’s was 3-5 days a week & EB Games was 1 – 2 days a week, I earned over the course of the few months maybe a $1,000 more than NewStart & with NewStart it was sort of enough to get by.
Now they sent me a letter this morning all “Since you’ve been employed & off Newstart for over 12 months we will give you $2,500 for being a good boy & if you stay in this position for another 12 months we’ll give you another $4,000” haha what the fuck, first off they’re trying to punish me, now they want to reward me?
Centrelink are utterly useless. Also, since when do they give bonuses for staying employed?
They have for a while, but I think it’s for people who had been on newstart for quite a while, I was on it for a little over 3 years, always hated being on it. But yeah I dunno.
Yeah they are useless, a mate of mine said they reckon he owes them 2 grand & he hasn’t been able to work in over 2 years due to hand injuries that required operations. I’ll get it figured out in the end. But what I can figure is, I would’ve gotten a maximum of 4 or maybe 6 payments over that period, none of them were anywhere near full Newstart allowance lol. Idiots.
The whole Centrelink debacle is incredibly stupid. It seems like no one thought to check their data-mined information before sending out thousands of letters which is an utterly absurd mistake.
Hope you manage to get it sorted quickly.
I’ll get there. My problem is I work 6 days a week most weeks at the moment, like today & tomorrow are meant to be days off, i’m now working both those days, so I have limited time to deal with anything & we all know you need full days to deal with Centrelink.
There was fuck up in the programming to catch out Centrelink cheats. So a whole bunch of people have received letters claiming they owed Centrelink money. Last I heard, they’re still asking for the money though
Centrelink? More like Centrestink, amiright?
…
I’ll see myself out.
They need worse then that.
Sounds like the program was fucked up before it even began.
More then likely
Anyone wanting to know any details on the Nintendo Switch @wisehacker @mrtaco @scree @greenius etc just found this little nugget on Vooks’s site. It’s not much, but it’s something.
http://www.vooks.net/fcc-filing-reveals-network-power-details-nintendo-switch/
In other news Android users can now pre-register for notification for Super Mario Run.
Dead to me.
Sounds fine to me
What on Earth? What is this trend of soldering everything into place making component replacement cumbersome?
If Nintendo is following the same playbook as Apple then Nintendo had better read the post-it note showing how consumers were far from impressed with Apple.
So, anyone here playing Dota? If yes, what’re your impressions of 7.01?
Where’s the scribbletaku at?
Dog ate it.
@alexwalker: TAY is still not showing up in the RSS feed and I noticed today it doesn’t seem to get a link auto-posted to Twitter by the Kotaku AU account either. Makes it hard to keep track of which one is current.
Thanks. I’ll see what’s up.
God damn it Umart. The CPU I ordered is now “out of stock” yet it clearly states on your website that it is in stock at the Gold Coast store where I ordered it from, but that’s okay it’s in stock at your Milton store just transfer it from there for me, alright.
Because I have nothing else to post, here’s pictures of my dog and the Neighbours cats I’m feeding.
http://imgur.com/a/ujyxf
Your dog looks like s/he is ready to trash-talk some 12 year olds on xbox live…
… in other words, glorious.
He, but most people think he is a she.
Haha it’s the opposite for me, everyone thinks Chilli is a male, I guess because Red Dog..
It could also be eyelashes. He has nice eyelashes
“Welcome to Tech Support, we noticed your internet connection is a little ruff”
@virus__ A good summary of centrelink debt issues that a friend shared on facebook
http://heeris.id.au/2016/centrelink-data-matching-mistakes/
Cheers mate!
Yeah this is exactly how I saw it when it came about & what dad was talking about the other night. I know i’m in for a shit fight, but I should get there.
I just have to try & get a hold of my pay slips from Dan Murphy’s, which will be interesting since I don’t even know where to ask now everything has changed since I worked there & now Employment Plus had them on file, but they’re now gone from this area after losing out on their contract with the gov’t. At least EB Games is easy since they emailed them to me every fortnight & I still have those sitting there in my email.
It’s a nightmare, but what can you expect from this government who think they’re doing their utmost best, when in fact it’s the total opposite.
To any programmers/game devs, an interesting discussion/reflection on the evolution of Destiny’s asset management system (ie. why their build process was so, so terrible).
Just singed up to switch to NBN! :0
Unlimited 100/40 connection via HFC network, and it’s $15 a month cheaper than what I pay for 500gb adsl/phone line!
SO HYPE!1111!!!!!!!!11!!!!
JELLY! 🙁
*si-………..gh* – ADSL2+ 😛
Congrats buddy, you deserve it 🙂
hehehe I know the feeling! I didn’t expect I’d be getting it anywhere near this soon! Even though I got the message yesterday saying I could switch, I thought it would be too costly to make the switch for me at present. Finding out I could do it for $1 up front was just golden!
Once it’s active, I can finally cancel my phone line with Telstra, so one less bill to pay! Can’t believe it’ll be cheaper per month than what I pay now! 😀
Indeed sounds like a really good deal!
I’ll have to check the map again but last time I checked months ago, NBN planning was spreading in the direction opposite my place, towards those nicer small village areas that look like sections of the neighbourhood only the rich would be in 😛
Just checked. Jan-Jun 2019… welp I guess I should be happy it is actually happening at all at least
heh damn :\ But you’re right. At least you know it’s coming, and the fact they even have the months there means they’ve actually got it properly scheduled, not just “we’ll get to it eventually”
So jelly… my address only just got announced as ‘planned’.
In November, mine said it was planned for the next 3 yrs.
December rolls around, and suddenly orders had been sent to begin construction!
Yesterday I got an sms from my ISP saying I could switch! 🙂
I have been “planned” since the beginning. I’ve pretty much given up =P
They updated the map in December, so a lot of places that had no eta now do.
No, I checked recently. “planned”
Bummer 🙁
I’m not bothered by it anymore. I live in a safe labor electorate and we’re pretty used to getting shafted =/
Woo! Still waiting for my suburb to get put on the list, myself. Had a bit of a chuckle at Exetel’s ads all over the place – “The speed you want, at a price you can afford, in a suburb near you.” Not actually to your suburb, just somewhere adjacent. 😛
Huh, just rechecked, and my suburb’s been added to the “Planned” list, but no date other than “we’re committed to completing the rollout by 2020.” Not sure if real progress or empty placation.
Aw bugger. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
I have to laugh at some of the ads I’ve seen too. Especially ones that claim to have the best rates etc. My tweet about this got liked by NBNSP today. I looked at their profile, and it says “An Internet Service Provider with the best unlimited plans in Australia”
Go to their site and look, and for the plan I’m going on, they’re charging $130 a month! :0
Mine’s $59! Best my ASS!
Who is that with for $59 a month? That’s a wicked deal.
MyRepublic. It is indeed a wicked deal! By far the best plan I’ve found yet.
It’s $59 a month if you go with a 12 month contract, or $69 without contract.
You can also pay $69 a month for a special gamer connection, with static IP and supposedly lower latency, but I can’t imagine it’d be that bad without forking out the extra $10. I don’t play like I used to though. Perhaps if I was playing in Quake or CS Tournaments I might consider it, but my friend gets pings of 10ms on his Telstra HFC connection, so I can’t imagine mine would be much worse.
I have to laugh at Telstra’s deal though. He’s on 100mbit down (which he pays extra for) and 2mbit up. He only gets 200gb/month, and if he goes over, he gets capped at 64kb LOL
All for the princely sum of around $110 a month!
Oh yeah them! My mate said he’ll be switching to them when the NBN rolls around. I’m getting connected next month to the NBN i’m gonna ditch Telstra, for something better, probably MyRepublic. My only problem is I still need a landline phone regardless of where I go, because parents & that’s the only number that we like some people being able to contact us on lol.
You can port your landline number to MyRepublic afaik. I opted for no phone cos I only use mobile, and while the phone line would be included in the package, I just have no need for it, so went without. Can’t wait to cancel my Telstra account for that!
Oh that’s cool! Sweet. Cheers 😀
Heads up to anyone who has an inclination for metal:
Gorguts, Ulcerate, Departe, Psycroptic, King Parrot, and Hadal Maw are part of various Australian tours throughout Feb and March.
To add to this list – Refused/Sick of it all, Killswitch Engage/Fallujah, Opeth, Meshuggah/Thy Art is Murder
So Umarts pricing on Kaby Lake is well interesting.. The i7 7700k is cheaper than the i7 6700k but the i5 7600k is more expensive than the 6600k, what..? Also still no sign of my CPU being in stock, jerks :/ I feel like I should contact them and ask them to transfer my order to a store with stock..
There’s 2 different versions of the 7700. One’s 4.2GHz, and one’s 3.8. The latter is cheaper, but the former is more expensive (just)
Same deal with the i5. One’s 3.8 and one’s 3.5.
This was the 7700k I was looking at lol. I mean I know i’m silly just not that silly 😛
well the pricing I’ve seen shows the 7700k is $505, and the 6700K is $499
Yeah the pricing has now changed on the Umart website, the 7700k went from $470 to $505 which is weird cause that made it cheaper than the 6700k at $479.. Likewise the 6600k is $365 where as a 7600k is $355 atm lol.
@trikeabout SHIT JUST GOT REAL
http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/DP%20Sayre/video/25337753
http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/DP%20Sayre/video/25337808
http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/DP%20Sayre/video/25338081
Be careful out there CMDR o7
Haha was coming here to post about this. 😀
Scary…
So far, they haven’t done anything harmful. And only seem to target people carrying UA’s… Time will show how long that lasts.
You can’t tell me that big flashy thing isn’t harmful!
One report is that pilot was pulled out of hyperspace, and then refueled by the alien ship… which is interesting.
Shame the gank brigade will probably doom us all.
Allegedly it does nothing… Still eerie as hell, and I’m keen to see where this goes.
There’s theories now flowing that this is not Thargoids at all, but more the titular “Guardians” (Hence, apparently, the name of the last update) but I don’t buy that theory just yet.
I’m headed out there tonight, try and get a hold of a UA and see if I can trigger anything. Chances are this is the early display, before they go full force and kill everyone on sight 😛
The pilot probably now has space cancer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/5mafgq/galnet_symbol_looks_very_familiar_now_doesnt_it/
!
… fuck!
Ugh… too much downtime today…
It’d be better if there was some cricket on… Bloody Sydney.
2TB SSHD acquired! Planning to install it over the weekend, and reinstall WD2 with the 2 weeks of unused quota I have this month.
Also ran through the D3 Anniversary dungeon, which was cool – loved the mob density in some of those areas, especially the penultimate level. Then did it again on with a fresh witch doctor to get the Butcher pet – used a gem of ease-socketed ancient 2h-axe to just rush through it – made it to Diablo, who got one-shot by one of my dogs as soon as he landed. 😛
Read that as 2TB SSD and was all “FUCK YEAH!” then I re-read it and wasn’t as enthusiastic lol.
I was more concerned about storage space than load times, given Destiny requires about 55GB free before it will even let you update it, for whatever reason. Wanted 2TB minimum to future-proof a bit, which essentially ruled out pure SSDs because of the expense. Tho FFXV’s load times have made me start questioning that decision… 😛
I’m getting a 1TB SSD as a D drive for the next PC, because why not 😛
Overwatch peeps! What do you all think of the PTR changes? Link below for reference.
https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20464895
Sigh. My 3 mains all got nerfed.
So to summarize:
NNNNNOOOOOO000000OOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh no 🙁
I think Ana definitely needed it. D.Va probably did too, although it remains to be seen whether it was too much or not. Road’s hook need to be fixed but I think the Line of Sight breaking thing might have been too much.
I am looking forward to the triple tank meta being broken though!
Seems fair. Apart from the lack of a Symmetra nerf.
Not sure if she needs it yet. I think the main reason she has been such a problem is because McCree isn’t being played. My friends and I had been struggling with her but I played a couple games as McCree the other day and just constantly flashed and fanned the hammer or a couple of headshots and she was dead. The enemy teams ended up switching off of her because she couldn’t do anything.
Imo she’d be less of a problem if there was a cooldown on jumps so you couldn’t just constantly bounce all over the place. Even if it was just one second.
But yeah I’m pretty crappy with McCree so I’m certainly not going to be helping things at all if I tried 😛
Yeah I see what you mean, not sure if I agree about implementing something like that for jumps though. I wouldn’t want to reduce mobility in such a fast paced game.
McCree is my bae. Only 30 points or so from a golden weapon and will be getting his <3 who do you play mainly?
Whoever gets rolled up when the character select screen appears 😛
Haha nice 😛 wet your feet in competitive much?
Completely dry!
I forgot the other modes were a thing. I was running through dedicating a night of play to my least played character til I’d gone through the whole roster, to try and get a grip on all of them more than I’d managed from my initial playing. Then found out about the extra loot boxes you can get for wins in arcade mode so jumped in there while the winter boxes were going. And now both of those are over I’m back to just doing random stuff to see how I go. Guess I should check out competitive, but I’ve got no clue who I should use for that.
@mrtaco Reaper is reasonable, and will make a comeback if the changes to D.Va make it to the live version. He excels on KOTH maps. All of Lijiang Tower, all of Nepal and all of Ilios except for Ruins (he can be used here but the larger line of sight usually makes a Soldier or McCree a better pick, unless the enemy team has a Winston.).
I would just jump into it and have some fun if I were you. I am generally on at some point over the weekend and I play every Mon/Wed night from 6PM-9PM WST if you want someone to play with. My battletag is Vex#11983
Won’t let me reply to your other comment. Competitive is a lot more fun to be honest, provided you don’t get obsessed over your SR.
In terms of who to play, knowing the whole roster is a really good start because then you can just fill. At the moment the meta is 3 tanks, ana, another healer and soldier, so picking something in that you can’t really go wrong. That will hopefully be broken up soon to give a bit more diversity and then just playing whatever the team needs.
Actually from the looks of things it seems Reaper might be my best character. At least he has the highest win rate. I feel like I do fairly well with Zarya too, though that depends a lot on my team mates and whether they stick around or just disappear.
I’m useless as Ana anyway.
D.va, I would like something done, but not sure what. I find she can be too easy to kill for a tank. She’s no where near as good as Rein or Hog
Her shield makes her pretty good for front line defence of your group though. Especially if you can manage to gobble up ults like Hanzo’s, Pharah’s or Roadhog’s with it. Also everything Junkrat has to throw at you.
Happy 2017, TAY!
Failed to accomplish planned house maintenance, succeeded in playing plenty of Assassins Creed Syndicate (or, as I call it when I forget “Syndicate” – “London Stabby”), and did my open water scuba – which was super awesome.
I’ve only done one of the ‘dodgy’ open water scuba things when overseas and it was cool.
The kind where they chuck you in a pool of 30 minutes and then take out out diving
PS4 backup time: 8 hours. HDD install time: 5 minutes. OS install time: 5-10 minutes. Restore time: 90 minutes before it fails. Boo.
Oh well, I’ll just make do. Looks like the only loss (VoG memories aside, tho I’m pretty sure I backed them up somewhere earlier) was a night of Diablo3 farming, which was easily solved by reacquiring my Helltooth set… tho I can’t seem to get the gloves to drop…
Oh, and also played through The Last Guardian over the weekend. ;_;
That’s easily fixed. Play the game.
Again.
…..Now…..
😛
Oh sweet bliss of 24 degrees
Boo! The wall next to my desk is 47 degrees.
Pretty steep.
Forecast for tonight is -6. 🙁
That would have sounded divine the day before I made that most.
Not so much now
Spent 30 minutes on the phone to get a human at Umart today, eventually got somewhere, all to be told “yeah those CPU’s are fast moving stock, we won’t be getting any until the 16th, we can offer you a 7600k for the same price IF your motherboard supports it.” Which I wanted to do until I saw that Gigabyte require you to have either a CPU or RAM present in the motherboard preferably both though, to flash the bios to the latest one supporting Kaby Lake. I’ve never flashed a bios & I don’t feel comfortable doing that on such an expensive motherboard.
In the end I just asked for a refund which they were more than happy to do, and were sorry they couldn’t fullfill my order. It’s funny a lot of my friends have had awful experience with Umart, me i’ve had nothing but pleasure with them. Last motherboard I bought arrived broken, they let me switch it out for another more expensive model.
So I ended up ordering the same parts from PC Case Gear, had to pay $24 more than Umart but ah well. Now here’s hoping they’ll arrive by Friday. They say 2-5 days via Star Track, so fingers crossed!
Woo, my order has been shipped \o/
What was the price difference between your CPU and the 7600k? Might’ve been worth just taking your motherboard to a PC store and asking them to flash the bios for you.
If it seems like I know what ‘flashing the bios’ means… I don’t. I assume it’s a sex term?
$10-20 depending where you get one. But it’s kind of pointless of pairing one with a Z170 motherboard, since i’d miss out on the features like the extra PCI-E lanes that are available etc.. It’s a straight forward process of flashing the bios, but apparently Gigabyte need a CPU that currently works with the board installed, so eh.
Also I don’t actually have any local computer stores any more which is kinda sad.
Bit late to the party, but Gigabyte high-end boards have dual-bios. You can flash one. If it works, boot from that one… 🙂
That doesn’t help you with the chicken/egg of needed a non-Kaby Lake CPU in there to flash it to KL but just so you know, it’s a pretty stress-free affair flashing a bios these days.
Oh that’s right.. Yeah, I should’ve checked that. Well I do have a Skylake CPU, it’s in my HTPC/NAS, but that thing is a pain to take apart. I’m thinking of putting it in a new case, this one whilst awesome is just too small really. That’ll teach me for getting one of the smallest & awkward ITX cases lol.
Also I don’t see the point of a Kaby Lake CPU in a Z170 motherboard when I’d want to utilise the 24 PCI-E lanes & other neato stuff that comes with the incremental upgrade & for that you need a Z270 board. Like that motherboards will have 2 or even 3 M.2 slots, which is sweet. More M.2 the better I say!
X58 FTW.
*pulls PC out from under Triceratops*
Fuck yeah! X58 is only what, 8 years old? 😛 I was looking at picking up some 1366 socket hardware a few years back for fun, but it was hard to find D=
I’m running a 980X, 24GB DDR3, 2 x 120GB V-series SSDs (series 1) in RAID 0, 2TB of spinnies and…
…a GTX 1080.
With a 3440×1440 Asus monitor.
It’s fine. Especially in winter when the house is toasty but only when the computer is on.
Nice. Would still pretty well in modern games!
I hate dealing with external applications
I hate integration
The only thing more fun is when there is a 3rd party between you and the other application supplier
Super fun day
Anyone else playing D3 on PS4? Been having a blast gearing my WD (hit a 13 billion crit last night, and discovered the stupid fun of the Manajuma’s set with Hex + Angry Chicken :D) but have noticed some weird performance issues in Grifts…
It feels like D3’s PC launch-era network latency, tho nowhere near as frequent – occasional rubberbanding (like once or twice per night), corpses continuing to take damage ticks for a good 5s after they die (happens maybe once every GR, which is nice for continuing a massacre bonus between packs, I guess)…
Not sure if Blizz added some stealth netcode to prepare for adding seasons later in the year, or if it’s the 1.15 patch’s PS4 Pro features screwing with the performance under load on the old system, or if its the new HDD…
Thinking about it. Will you (metaphorically) hold my hand?
Sure, if you like. It does take a bit of time to finish the campaign to unlock Adventure mode and rifts, where I find half of the replayability; and gear sets (which are the other half) don’t drop until level cap (70) and I think only in Torment difficulties. That said, it’s quite a bit of fun to build around any legendaries you find, or alternatively I have a bunch of gear I’m not using (and not a lot of spare space :P) I could give you to get you started in T3 or higher… or not; up to you.
I think it’s something like $30 on PSN atm, if their promo’s still running, but yea… only if you want to, and know that it can be a very slow start (tho there are ways around that – I’ve raced “level up” notifications to 70 a couple of times in coop with a couple of Gems of Ease :P).
So Silverstone have gone full retard with RGB. They debuted RGB fan grills at CES.
@alexwalker did you get to drop by the Silverstone suite & see any of their things? Linus’ video “5 products no one asked for” which cnetred around Silverstone was rather amusing. I like what he showed off from them though.
No, I didn’t get to see their suite at all; I only just got to do a full lap of the 10,000+ booths on the show floor. Hoping to see more at Computex this year though, if I get to go again. (And Silverstone will be there for sure.)
Ah fair enough 😛
I used to like Silverstone because they actually had shit that was elegant and not festooned with flashing multi-colored lights for ‘gamers’.
Yeah. They used to have some rather elegant cases. They showed off one new case at CES, which was a new take on the Sugo series, vertical motherboard & GPU with windows. Looked more like it belonged in the Fortress line up imo. But one of the first cases in 4 or 5 years from them I liked.
I don’t mind the use of lighting in cases, but at the same time it’s not something I overly care about. If I every do a watercooling build i’ll use lighting cause that seems logical, otherwise meh.
I’ve taken my Rift around to friends’ places for demo nights three times over the past week. Almost getting not terrible at them 😛 Had a small disaster before the last one though, tried a fix for a tracking bug which just made things worse, and did something dumb during the repair install that lost me half my games so had to leave the PC running for a couple of days to download everything again since my backup hadn’t been updated since before I got Touch. Oops.
Started getting back into Splatoon, since someone’s holding a tournament next weekend so I figured I may as well actually play the game instead of just turning it on to check for gear every day. WHERE ARE YOU FUGU TEE? Also finally got back into Elite again, I am reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally rusty though. Which totally doesn’t help in trying to get a grip on my twinstick setup. Probably better with just a single, but twin is fun.
So, how’s about them pollie perks, eh?
*scowl*
Utter pisstaking. When held up against the cuts to services and the complete douchebaggery over the Centrelink letters (with AFP letterhead, WTF?!?), it’s disgraceful. When considering it against the offshore non-processing and interment camps, the inability to just pass marriage equality, the reversal of action on climate… etc etc. Gah. It’s disgusting.
And I just remembered the jobs several ex-ministers have gone on to. While collecting a pension. Double dipping? Only if you’re not a politician.
Sigh.
I see a lot of commentary about parliamentary pensions, and some of them can certainly be a bit obscene. The more important pollies salaries, here and across the developed world, don’t reflect the importance of their jobs though – especially when compared with the wage growth among private sector executives in the last 25 years. Their entitlements and pension go a long way toward bridging that difference though. Unfortunately, entitlements and pension or not, we’re not being blessed with particularly competent representatives.
Centrelink though, are running an invoice scam. That it wasn’t immediately stopped when the problems were identified amounts to malfeasance, from those in charge.
Is it worth comparing with private sector execs? Executive wage growth vs. general wage growth has been anomalous and well beyond absurdity. Apart from bridging that particular gap, there’s not much sense to it.
Tricky game comparing public to private when the motivations, expectations, and standards are entirely different.
Is that the motivations, expectations and standards being entirely different part of the problem? Maybe I’m way off-base, but I feel like there are plenty of parallels between corporate management and public governance, and we see bureaucrats and elected officials continually screw up things that are routinely achievable by the private sector.
Wage growth of executives has certainly been absurd, but companies have shown time and again that they’re willing to pay overs to hire a successful senior executive from another company. There’s clearly value to be placed in high performing executives.
Not to specifically bag the government, as much as I enjoy doing so, it’s worth acknowledging that some of the pollies sounding off about this are among the worst offenders, on both sides of the aisle.
The “penalty” of repaying “incorrectly” (or, “fraudulently”) claimed entitlements with interest isn’t a penalty at all – it’s simply a correction. It’s time to grant amnesty for all past entitlements, create a politically independent review board, tighten up the guidelines and then remove from office anyone who breaches them.
If I, or anyone else in private employment, were to organise an interstate trip, organise a relatively unimportant meeting and make a significant personal purchase or investment, then try and claim all my expenses, I’d be lucky to survive with a severe dressing down.
Or, footy grand finals! Jesus! PM (or deputy), Leader of the Opposition, Minister (and Shadow Minister) for Sport, perhaps, as representatives of the government, could claim it as a work function. Anyone else is there primarily to schmooze as members of their respective parties, and as personal entertainment – and if the parties want to pay for that, then go for it – but it can’t come out of parliamentary entitlements.
Unfortunate that they’re called entitlements though, isn’t it? I reckon Joe Hockey would be persona non grata around Canberra at the moment.
They’ve been looking into it since last year. In other words, dragging their feet to get more perks =(
It’s a belated Christmas present, or something special to ring in the New Year; waking up every morning to the news that some dumb bugger has over extended themselves with the cookie jar.
Ideally we’d end up with independent review of parliamentary expenditure, an anti-corruption body a la ICAC, and clarification of terms that precludes this behaviour in the future. But given the foxes are in charge of hen house security measures, we might – at best – see a lone minister step down and the remainder will offer a meek apology for “not living up to the standards we expect of ourselves”.
Like others it’s absolutely infuriating. The Coalition has Bronnie and Labor (at the time) had Slipper who not only got his perks but also continued to collect the wage of a speaker despite standing down.
And here’s people like me who do the modest thing and even leave deductions out of my own tax return to ensure I’m only covering whole business expenses and not only partial business expenses.
And the irony, it’s starting to worry my accountant. Just last time he could not believe I had no stationary expenses despite me explaining I bought in bulk the prior year thus didn’t need to.
When I nip out for supplies I also do some personal shopping so that rules out claiming travel.
All it takes is one little mistake and sole-traders like me are merciless audited.
I sounds like crap, because it is. I’m sorry that you have to be so cautious.
So CES 2017. Some cool stuff, some stuff not so interesting. Was hoping to see more cool & affordable computer cases that challenge the market, rather than MORE tempered glass & RGB LED integration.
The Deepcool Quadstellar case was pretty neat I will admit. Way out of my pricing though. The SG14 from Silverstone looks promising, looks & feels more like it belong on Fortress name of their cases though.
Hopefully more stuff will filter out in the coming days from the likes of Linus (LinusTechTips), Jay (JayzTwoCents), Paul (Paul’s Hardware) & Kyle (BitWit)
Been playing through Mass Effect 3 and grabbed all the DLC for last year’s christmas. The DLCs are pretty fun, though at times frustrating in certain sections.
This Shep is an Engineer, uses a pistol, SMG and Sniper rifle only, yet in cutscenes he always somehow has the default assault rifle 😛
I told you, it’s magic. Gun magic
I prefer him using the sniper rifle his girlfriend got for him rather than a shitty assault rifle, and it has the same fire rate except it’s 10x better.
It just keeps pulling me out of the immersion when that happens, that and the random crashes
No no, it’s the same gun, it just looks different in cutscenes!
Nothing I can explain away abou t the crashes though, sorry.
Figured I might as well check my ISP to see if NBN is ever going to happen
Your address is expected to have NBN available from TOMORROW
That was interesting. Might need to check it out. Is it locked to particular providers or what? I haven’t done ISP research for a long time
@welbot who did you go with?
https://myrepublic.net/au/
What are they like? I’m thinking of ditching iiNet as it’s not even a shell of what it used to be.
Not sure yet. Still waiting for installation.
First impressions were not real favourable, as I sat on hold for like 20 mins before I spoke to someone when I first called, but perhaps they were really busy. More time will be needed to judge that. On the positive side, they have a 100% Australian support team, so you don’t get put through to someone in the Philippines who barely understands you. I see that as a massive advantage, and depending on how long I need to wait to speak to someone if I require support, I could even forgive longer than average wait times for that. Obviously, if I have to wait like an hour to speak to someone every time I call, I’m not gonna be real happy, but with any luck, I won’t need to. It will be good knowing that at least they will understand me, and I will be able to understand them though 🙂
After the signup, they’ve been as efficient as I would expect so far. The modem was mailed to me in a reasonable time frame, and now I’m only waiting for the tech to call to arrange installation of the line. As stated elsewhere, I believe this is done by NBN Co tech’s, thus outside of the control of MyRepublic, so even though I’ve now been waiting a week, I don’t believe it’s their fault. According to NBN Co, my installation is in the queue, and progressing, but I don’t know when it’s likely to be yet.
That’s fine though. As much as I’d love to be on now, my ADSL is going to remain connected until I cancel it myself, so I won’t be without internet at any stage.
I haven’t yet ready any negative reviews about people who are connected with them, but I also haven’t really searched, and given I never have/had any issues with TPG, my experience with them contradicts just about every review I’ve ever read about them, so I’m going to just wait and see for myself.
I did get a flyer in the mail from both TPG and iinet the other day due to NBN now being available, but man.. I had to laugh. TPG flyer boldly boasted unlimited data and phone on NBN for $59.95 a month. Then you turn it over, and find that it’s only 12mbps! LOOOOOOOL
I faster speeds than that on my ADSL, and it costs less! (Ok so phone would be more, but still..) MyRepublic offers the same thing, but on 100/40… Even if the support is a little slow, as long as the connection is stable, I’m more than willing to put up with it for that deal! 😉
Shouldn’t be locked to providers. Though it might depend on what kind of connection you have. I’m not 100% on that, but I would guess if you have a HFC connection, there may possibly be providers that only cater to traditional connection types. Generally though, you can search using the ISP’s website, and it’ll tell you if they can service your property.
I just received my modem in the mail! Now I just have to wait for the tech’s to call to arrange installation of the connection in my house…. HURRY UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How long has it been. A bit of research on them it seems like they are really slow stating 5-20 business days for a connection. That was a post launch thing so not sure if they are better now
About a week now I guess? By the sounds of it, the actual tech visits for installation are out of their control, and fall under the NBN co banner. I got a tweet from them yesterday, and they were able to check where my request was at, so I’m guessing the delay is due to the demand on the NBN techs? Could be wrong, but that’s the impression i get from what they said. 5-20 days is actually fairly standard for all ISP’s though, even for ADSL when you’re setting up a new account. Though, with ADSL, it usually falls on Telstra to do the setup on the exchange side of things, and that’s where it generally turns to shit.
I should add that the delay doesn’t really bother me much. Partly because it’ll work out better payment wise if they take a little longer, but also, my ADSL is staying active the whole time, and it won’t be automatically cut off at any point. There is info on the MyRepublic website which mentions auto cancellation upon connection etc., but I think it might only apply if you’re with another NBN provider. I’m not getting a phone with my connection either (I could as it’s included in the plan price, but I just don’t need one) so perhaps that has something to do with it too. I guess if you’re going to transfer your phone number, they may need to cancel your old one to let you keep the number.
I specifically asked about cancellation though, as I wanted to make sure I wasn’t without internet at any stage, and they said it would be my responsibility to cancel my TPG account, as well as my Telstra account for the phone line once it’s all installed, and that suits me just perfectly 🙂
ELITE! Took on a surface mission, paying 1.3mil to shut down a generator. It was a pretty small base, only three or four defence turrets to it, perched on a small ledge just inside a HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE crater which contained some ~1.2km deep valleys. Only problem? It had a landing pad. And on the landing pad was an Asp, a member of the System Security Force. Learning from my last attempt at killing a power generator (“wtf why are those rockets launching so high and flying over the ridge and killing my ship?”) I dismissed my Sidewinder and crept into the base in my SRV. Milked all the scanable data points for everything they had, spent a little while stuck on my back because the docked ship wouldn’t let me activate my thrusters to right myself but a few restarts glitched them into firing, then it was time. A stare-down with the generator, waiting to take the next step that would trigger all hell to break loose.
With a volley of fire, the generator blows up and alarms start screaming, the Asp is woken from its slumber and takes to the skies like an angry hornet. I scoot out of there as fast as I can when suddenly I see a purple-pinkish explosion on the ground in front of me, accompanied by a terrifying WHUMP. Holy shit he’s got railguns. With this revelation I begin to panic, and figure the depths of the canyons might provide me with some cover. Turns out, it’s not such a smooth run down. The planet surface can be incredibly bumpy, with so many tiny little hills to get stuck on while trying to make my way down the slopes. For the most part I’m avoiding the big hits, but the bumpy ride is taking its toll on my chassis. Eventually I get to the bottom and… it turns out the huge canyons are much more huge than I realised, and there’s plenty of room for the Asp to buzz around overhead. Better keep on moving! First though, I’m in need of a hull repair. Got enough materials for seven of those, hopefully I won’t need to use them all before I can get clear.
Following the canyon through, I find a slightly less steep side and figure it’s time to try and climb out of there. Only it’s much steeper than I realise, and so much progress is slowed by getting airborne with all the bumps and low gravity. Eventually I get to the top and find smoother ground, where I can properly try and outrun the Asp. By now he seems to have thankfully run out of railgun ammo, except now I’m hearing different popping sounds. He’s got cannons. And it seems there’s some flak cannons too. Better not stay still for too long.
The smooth ground I’ve found is the inside edge of the gigantic crater we’re in. But as smooth as it is, there’s still some lumpiness to it, which keeps sending me airborne and seems to make me an easier target. A couple of times he gets a lucky hit and my shields go down, so I start to swerve off course to try and shake his aim a little while I try to recharge. Only I lose control and end up going into a spin. I kick things into reverse and execute a perfect Easter Show precision driving team manoeuvre, and suddenly I’m driving backwards up the 50-60º hill at full pelt. No idea where I’m going and unable to turn around far enough to see, all I see is the angry Asp ahead of me chasing me down. By now I’ve got the hugest grin on my face and can’t help but let out a cackle. This is the stupidest fun I’ve had with this game in ages.
The chase went on for maybe an hour, hour and a half or so. He got some lucky shots in which drive my health right down but I got through several hull repairs just in time. A few times I’d spot things on the radar, and cheekily stopped by some meteorites to harvest materials, or a crashed satellite to take down some skimmers and scan some data. Eventually though I figured I’d just have to call my ship down and hope he didn’t blow it up before I could get there. Thankfully he seemed entirely interested in my SRV instead, and with a couple of large loops I was able to throw him off long enough to board my Sidey and get the hell out of there. By this point I was some 30km away from the base, though looking at the land and trying to figure out where I’d been, I must have done a huge loop to end up where I was. Maybe some 150km worth, at a guess.
Tldr made off like a bandit trying to escape being blown up by a space ship in a surface vehicle, had stupid fun. I like stories 😛
That is epic.
Meanwhile, I’m mostly sitting outside Bluford Orbital in an Anaconda collecting and distributing rares for the Mobius group attempt to get a base in Colonia…
I really wish I bookmarked/could remember the name of that base or system, it was a pretty cool spot. Might have to poke around the map and see if anything jogs my memory.
Now though I’m starting to check out the engineers. Building up rep with the small recipes I have a bajillion units for, then hopping over to the next gu-
TEN MILLION CREDITS OF COMBAT BONDS ARE YOU CRAZY
You like shooting. 🙂
Once you’ve unlocked them, you can rank up by providing more of the same. Farseer and Elvira you can rank up by selling exploration data at their base, f’rex.
Oh yeah I forgot about that.
Dude I am so rusty. Between the huge amount of time I’ve taken off as well as trying to use the twinstick setup which I never really got the hang of before my break, I’m getting my arse pretty well handed to me. Had one escape from the combat zone on 1%, another on 2%, and a couple of others where I was in the teens and hadn’t even managed to take down one ship when I had to leg it. Dropped back to my single stick config for a bit and got the hang of things again, and now seem to be doing a lot better with twinstick than before. Got about 2.5mil so far I think from those couple of hours last night. This is gonna take forever.
1% Club dude! 😀
That is cool and gets me interested in the game but I know I don’t have the time for it
Eating and sleeping are over-rated.
I think my daughter has that playbook
It’s January. That means it’s time for another installment of…
NegativeZero’s New Season Anime Impressions
Watching the new season so you don’t have to
Akiba’s Trip
Anime adaption of a particularly silly game. Basically the premise is that there are people that are infected with some kind of virus which makes them attack people. It dissipates when enough their bodies are exposed to the air. We never got the first game in English so I don’t know if this was the original plot, but the sequel which we did get had this make much more sense (sort of) – they were vampires and you were exposing them to the sun. Anyway, basically this is about people in Akihabara ripping off people’s clothing. It was dumb fun as a game. The anime is just shit. I won’t be watching any more of it.Ao no Exorcist: Kyoto-hen
Straight continuation of the Ao no Exorcist / Blue Exorcist series. Pretty generic shounen action anime from a few years ago. I enjoyed it well enough, though it was never particularly amazing. Honestly the main thing I remembered was that they somehow coaxed Megumi Hayshibara out of retirement to voice an incidental character right at the end, which was surprising. Basically the setup is that the main character is literally the son of Satan and a human chick, and he wants to kill his dad. If you’re hurting for a fairly generic action anime it’ll probably be worth your time, but you will need to go back and track down the first series. Not sure if this will be a regular for me or not yet, as I said it wasn’t amazing and I definitely don’t feel like I’m excited to watch more, but I don’t mind either if it’s reasonable.Demi-chan wa Kataritai
The setting basically has it that there are people who are genetic mutations, demi-humans. The main character’s a high school biology teacher that wants to interview them and write a thesis or something. And naturally it turns out that some of the first year students are – there’s a vampire, a snow girl and a dullahan. I enjoyed this. It’s not great plot-wise but the characters (especially the Vampire girl) seem reasonable and it has good quality art. Not sure if it’ll be a regular or not, will depend on how it develops.Gabriel Dropout
Gabriel is an Angel who graduates top of her class from Angel school and is basically perfect at everything. However once arriving in the human world, she gets addicted to MMOs and goes completely rotten. This is what WoW does to you. Solid art, really good cast with some great comedy potential. Getting some Umaru-chan vibes from it. Assuming it develops okay, could be pretty entertaining. Definitely going to watch more.Fuuka
Main character is your Generic Wet Noodle Protagonist, who always has his phone in hand and appears to be a Twitter addict (I can relate). He moves from the country to live with his sisters in Tokyo while his parents live overseas. Just after arriving he encounters a random girl who falls over and gives him a bit of an eyeful, then smashes his phone assuming he was taking photos of her in a compromising position. RomCom ensues. Animation-wise this is pretty good, but it seems a bit generic to me. I’m assuming we’re in for a standard love triangle (main dude was also childhood friends with some random chick that is now a massively popular idol or some shit). It seems pretty good but it’s too vanilla for me. I might come back to it depending on the rest of the season though.Hand Shakers
I didn’t finish the episode, because the animation actually made me feel slightly ill. I get what GoHands were trying to do here, but the show itself looks to be utterly horrible and adding weird experimental animation over the top makes it worse. They’re doing this weird shit with random jump-cuts and camera angles and fisheye effects and stuff, while also really badly mixing 3D and 2D effects. There’s 3D chains everywhere and they keep moving and… urk. Avoid this. It’s just bad.Little Witch Academia
the best show this season. So anyway, Little Witch Academia is the latest TV anime from Studio Trigger. You might have already seen the two OVAs they made in this setting. This is basically a superset of that, starting with Akko’s arrival at Witch School. For those that are unfamiliar, LWA could be described as a mashup of Harry Potter and a Magical Girl anime. Atsuko (‘Akko’) was inspired as a little girl after seeing a magical display put on by her idol, Shiny Chariot. She decides to enroll at Luna Nova, a school for witches, despite having little or no actual magical aptitude. The series is directed by veteran animator Yoh Yoshinari, who has a legendary hyperactive animation style – FLCL, Gurren Lagann, Panty & Stocking and Kill la Kill are some of his distinctive works. So basically this is a super good show. Go watch the OVAs (the Kickstarted one, Enchanted Parade, is even better than the original) and get excited for it in a year or so. 🙁 First episode is fucking great by the way.Masamune-kun’s Revenge
When he was younger, Masamune confessed to a girl he liked, only to be completely rejected because he was fat. The girl then proceeded to nickname him ‘Pig’s Foot’. He swore revenge, and began by working out so hard that he became ripped and super hot. Now in high school, he encounters the same girl again, who terrorizes anyone that confesses to her with a combination of public humiliation and mean nicknames. He concocts a dastardly revenge plan: make her actually fall for him, then reject her. So basically it’s a variation on The Taming of The Shrew, by way of several Hot-People-That-Hate-Each-Other-But-Fall-For-Each-Other-Anyway RomCom anime. Doesn’t seem as skeezy as some of those can get though. I enjoyed the first episode a lot. High quality animation, solid cast, interesting enough of a hook. Probably a regular watch.Seiren
Going to admit it now: I didn’t watch much of this. I got a little way in, then got a horrible suspicion about it and looked it up and I was right. Way back when, there were a couple of Visual Novels turned Anime, Kimikiss and Amakano. Very high quality productions with great art and fantastic character designs, but painfully generic vanilla romance plots. Generally a few pairs of characters that sort of overlap with each other. No hook, no real conflict, no real plot. Everything basically set up ahead of time and plays out exactly as you’d expect. I found both of those shows to be utterly boring. I wanted to like them and couldn’t. And this is the same artist and writer doing basically a repeat. Not my scene at all. Looks to be pretty polished though so if you’re into generic sappy romance plots it might really appeal to you.Urara Meirochou
A bunch of cute girls, lead by one that seems to have been raised by wolves or something (her method for apologizing is to reveal her belly and make puppy-dog eyes, yes really) travel to Fantasy Kyoto (the Labyrinth Town, Meirochou) to study to become Urara, basically fortune tellers. Didn’t have much substance but it’s got solid character art and it’s pretty cute, though basically fluff. I end up watching these sorts of shows though so this probably is a regular. It definitely appealed enough to give it some more episodes.Youjo Senki
This was one that a lot of people I know were excited for going in, and I don’t understand why. Set in a sort of alternate-history WW1 except there’s magic. The main character, Tanya, is a little girl who is also an incredible mage. And apparently a horrible monster. So basically an anti-hero protagonist. The setup sounded okay and Aoi Yuki is incredibly good in the part (as you’d expect from her) but the execution is beyond crap. The character designs are ugly as fuck, and the direction was a mess. Episode 1 felt like I was watching a clip show for an 80s series, pulled around by the nose. Really, really didn’t like this. Unappealing. Dropping it unless I hear amazing things about it.EDIT: Auto-moderation? Why? 🙁
So I ran a normal Rift last night on T12, everything was going perfectly fine, rift guardian spawns: it’s Perdition. Never seen him before, so I just treated him like any other RG – hung back, keep him slowed him with wall of death, hit him with a pirrahnado and let my pets wail on him. Quickly got him down to half health, then- *blink-splat* I get instagibbed as he appears on top of me. Huh. Okay, respawn, run to a safe distance, summon pets, and atta- *blink-splat*. Hmm. I’ll wait for the cooldown on my pets to finish, and try again. 20-30 seconds later: *summon* *blink-splat*. Right. Maybe if I approach him from the area entrance? *respawn in town* *wait for cooldown* *summon* *re-enter* Right, where is that basta- *blink-splat*. Dammit. Got him eventually, letting my pets deal damage as I maniacally ran in circles as an angry chicken to avoid his other attacks, but holy crap do I need better defence in my build. Just need that spirit harvester to drop…
Woo. The new PC, it lives \o/
Well done Frankenstein
Haha. Good one Tigs 😛
http://i.4cdn.org/v/1484286831986.jpg
Oh crap. Great need!
That does look rather fetching
“Your IP or IP range is blocked from accessing 4chan.”
Uh…
The Google machine informs me it is probably this.
I go the same error then next time I tried to access it was fine. And yes that is what it is
This is more for @welbot but advice from other gurus is just as welcome.
Given my CPU “fun” I have vritually enough parts to build a new server. I’m just lacking a motherboard and a cooler.
Long story short, I’m basically upgrading my FreeBSD box so it has newer hardware (it’s main weakness is the DDR2 RAM which is getting harder and more expensive to find now).
But I have been pondering; would it be better to use a liquid cooler (sealed unit of course) instead of a typical fan?
I’m thinking along the lines of keeping the overall machine quieter by using a simple cooler instead of multiple fans.
What do you guys and gals think? Overkill or a good, durable, long term solution?
Either way, thanks in advance for any advice.
Or go for a noctua air cooler, their fans are dead silent & their coolers are awesome. I have their L9i low profile cooler on my NAS, it’s a great little cooler, keeps the i3 6100 rather cool. I’m also running 3 of their NF-F12 fans in my new build 2 in a push pull config on an AIO water cooler and I can’t even hear them lol.
The last time I looked, a liquid cooling loop is actually usually marginally more noisy than a good CPU fan designed to be silent.
I have a Noctua fan (can’t remember the exact model) in my desktop (which also has a good Corsair case to reduce noise as well) and when the machine’s not under load you can’t even tell the thing’s on. I went this route because when I built it, my PC had to live in my bedroom and the noise was keeping me up at night. The only time I can hear the machine nowadays is when I’ve got it under load playing a game, and the bulk of the noise comes from the GPU.
It all depends on the kind you get. What most people don’t seem to realize is, that most sealed water cooling units still have fans to push/pull air over the radiator. Noise wise, they can be equally as noisy as some fan cooling setups. If you want absolute silence, you can get passive heat sink coolers, but how successful it will be, will depend on how cool your room is, and how hard you push the processor.
Why is it that everytime Nintendo brings out something, all the Nintendo haters come out? “I don’t enjoy this thing, so I have to ruin it for you too!”
Seriously, I don’t go around shouting that the playstation or xbone are shit, why do they have to do it?
I’m starting to feel pretty down on the whole thing and questioning whether I even want one any more. Can’t actually tell whether it’s just all the negativity going around the place, or if I’m actually displeased enough with how everything’s unfolding to just cut and run.
I would suggest ignoring what people are saying. Ask yourself if you’ll be more disappointed if you miss out or if you get it and regret it.
I guess it’s more that the negativity cuts through the hype than anything. Although some do bring up good points that stick with me.
The main one that’s bothering me now is the paid online stuff. The monthly game is worthless to me since I’m not going to play it, and the advanced features look to only be available through a smartphone app which I am unable to use. So there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to the subscription at all, I’m just paying to use the games I’ve already paid for. So that has me wondering if I should even bother getting Splatoon 2, or any multiplayer-centric titles at all and just stick with single player, since that’s what I tend to play most of. And I could probably stand to leave out Mario Kart even though I barely played the original. That leaves the lineup looking pretty dry so far. Also I’ll probably play Zelda on Wii U instead, though the screwup where we’re getting Limited instead of Master Edition (and ours has the sword statue instead of the Sheikah Slate case for some reason) has me a bit annoyed too. Oh, and apparently the joycon grip that comes with the console doesn’t allow you to charge the joycons, you need to buy one of the separate ones for that instead! I can’t even remember if there were other things that were bothering me any more, but it’s all feeling like the death of a thousand papercuts.
Have they confirmed it’s paid multiplayer?
It was mentioned in the presentation. I think all the details we have on it so far are here: http://www.nintendo.com/switch/online-service/
For fucks sake. Thanks a lot Microsoft, you started this bullshit.
I think I came across more critical than I intended. I think part of it was they just pushed a couple of wrong buttons and peoples reactions to that.
It started with the No region locking (insert huge cheer here) and I was more focused on teh giant * net to it and wanting to know what that means.
They further in the presentation they are talking about releases being ‘in japan’. It might be a silly pedantic point, but lack of clarity on the issues has me thinking it is weasel words. Which annoy me and got off on the wrong foot.
The other thing was the launch line up being non existent seems odd for a launch console. I mean it isn’t the first time it has happened but it does seem very light.
Some of the games looked very cool, the new Mario looks great but I guess my feeling would be to wait until the end of the year to get it if that is your thing. But if you really want to play Zelda and avoid spoilers that would be a reason to grab it. Although as you say there is still the Wii U option for that anyway
@alexwalker: I really like the dark theme for the site (way easier to read with my eye condition), but it seems like after a week or so it resets back to the white theme? I’m assuming it’s being set with a cookie or something, could you ask the web guys if they can extend it so that it lasts for longer please?
I’ll ask on Monday!
http://nintendotoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/zelda-box-art.jpg
Huh. Whodathunk the US box art would be better than the Euro box art for a change.
I quite like both
I like the color of the EU one but the pic of the US one. The US coloring is very Generic AAA Game About a Man With a Sword Who Has His Back To Us While Everything is Dark Blue and Yellow. Normally Nintendo are the ones that rock the boat and have the brightly colored artwork.
A little, but I feel like it carries more of the sense of grit and decay that the rest of the game seems to have about it so far. Though I’m probably also swayed by the full image https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2BrNfPUsAE1I80.jpg:orig
Wouldn’t mind having that on a wall somewhere.
But the actual visuals have a more watercolor look to them, like a Ghibli film.
I need help figuring out what to pull off my backlog. Next major drop everything and play it release for me is Tales of Berseria on the 24th meaning I have a couple of weeks to get stuck into something and finish it. Gravity Rush 2 and Fate/Extelia are out next week but I’m not in a huge rush to play either.
Current backlog:
– Atelier Sophie (PS4, I got about 50% of the way in so probably 20+ hours left)
– Trails of Cold Steel (Vita, I was about 75% done but it’s been a long time & it’s a big time investment still)
– Trails in the Sky Second (Vita or PC, I finished the first one on Vita (PSP) so would have a save to carry over, feel like I’d want to re-play the first one on PC though)
– Gravity Rush (PS4, I never finished it on Vita so this would be starting over – sequel is out next week)
– Fire Emblem Fates (3DS, I never even opened my LE I was so upset at them cutting dual audio and localizing it so badly, but I probably should just play it)
– Bravely Second (3DS, was playing Cold Steel at the time so never got around to starting it)
– Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (PC, was super hyped for this and then it sort of came out in a weird patch for me and I never actually played it)
– Doom (PC, I keep getting a little way in and getting really bored after an hour or two)
– Tokyo Mirage Sessions (WiiU, I have to do some fucking around to softmod my WiiU so I can play the un-fucked version though and the game is apparently enormous)
– Star Ocean 5 (PS4, Just never got to it)
– Gears of War 4 (XB1, Got lost in the shuffle)
– Quantum Break (XB1, Was playing other things at the time)
– Valkyrie Drive (Vita, I dunno I got it on a whim because it’s the Senran Kagura director’s work but everyone says its shit)
– Galgun (Vita/PS4, I shouldn’t admit to owning this probably)
I feel like a lot of my backlog is RPGs that will suck up a solid 40-80 hours each but I’m wanting to fill in the gap between now and the start of Feb or so when I can start Tales and don’t know if I can commit to that, though I guess I could always just start Tales later. Feb and March are going to be packed for me – Persona 5 mid-Feb, Horizon end of Feb, Zelda & Nier start of March, Mass Effect end of March (and somewhere in there Yakuza 0 and Nioh release, but I’ll backlog them) all those will be decently big time investments so the next week or two is basically my last point to take some stuff off the backlog before I get swamped with anticipated new releases. Luckily I think after ME there’s not much in the pipe again.
Reviews of Doom I have seen are that it is more of the same as you get further in so if it hasn’t grabbed you after 5 hours it probably won’t
If you have tales as your next major game I would hold off any of the other big RPG, personally I get RPG fatigue if I try to play 2 straight.
So Deus Ex, Gears or Quantum break are the ones that seem most outside the scope of Tales.
A few other ones there as well like Valkyrie drive but that seems more like a play between session than a sit down and play it through.
If you do want to go an RPG then finish off Atelier Sophie
SUNDAY DELIVERY!
TMNT IS HERE!
Hmmmm so Humble Monthly has xcom 2 next month. That is really tempting, maybe I should just gift myself a month. Or maybe I should just go for 3 months and see who it goes.
But I really don’t need another way to grow my backlog, it is out of control enough as it is