Monday, April 29, 2013

skyrimconfessionss: “The moment I became the Arch-Mage I...





skyrimconfessionss:



The moment I became the Arch-Mage I regretted it. I just didn’t think that my level 28 Breton was powerful enough to be worthy of the title.”


http://skyrimconfessions.com/



Yeah, I have issues with how easy it is to become a faction leader in general, but especially the Mages Guild. In most cases, while it’s certainly possible many game days have passed, you more than likely spent like, a week tops at any one of the guilds, and they see fit to make you their leader? While some other characters there have been with the faction for years? At least with the Thieves Guild you can draw it out by doing side quests for Vex and Delvin before really diving into the main quest so that you’ve at least contributed to the guild in a meaningful way beforehand, the same is true though to a somewhat lesser extent with the Dark Brotherhood (to be fair, I have not finished their quest yet) and Companions. But with the College of Winterhold the most you could have done is fetched some books and soul gems, or let a couple of the other students use you as a guinea pig for some shoddy magic, and the main quest progresses so fast it’s almost over before you know it, you can finish it using almost no magic at all, and BAM, Archmage.




I’m not even sure why Bethesda feels it’s necessary for you to end up leader of every faction aside from the Bards College, anyway. I would be fine with just being a member as long as the quests they gave were still entertaining. Or at least make climbing to the top REALLY difficult and long. It would be far less jarring that way when you did end up in charge.






Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/49240729419

kiev4am: X-Factor is coming to an end in September, issue #262.

kiev4am: X-Factor is coming to an end in September, issue #262.:

kiev4am:



foreverrhapsody:



xcyclopswasrightx:



Peter David Readies The End of X-FACTOR


image


Cover to X-Factor 259 by David Yardin



I saw it coming from a mile away, but…


awwwww



AUGH I was just coming on here to wail about this news.


Yes, one might say the writing was on the wall on and…



What?? Noooooo…….! :(






Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/49170877041

Saturday, April 27, 2013

skyrimconfessionss: “I use a cheat mod for lockpicking because...





skyrimconfessionss:



“I use a cheat mod for lockpicking because in my opinion Skyrim lockpicking is bullshit.”


http://skyrimconfessions.com



I never got why people found lockpicking in Skyrim (or Fallout, it’s the same system) difficult… I never bother putting perks into lockpicking, even on my thief character, because give me a handful of lockpicks and I can get into a Master lock at level 1, though yeah it’s a bit tricky. And have you played Oblivion? now that was a frustrating lockpicking system. I would happily download a mod for Oblivion that replaced it’s lockpicking system with the one from Skyrim.






Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/49064811233

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

we-are-star-stuff: applepiesfromscratch: Cost of the Mars...





we-are-star-stuff:



applepiesfromscratch:



Cost of the Mars Curiosity Rover - $800 million


Cost of a team to operate the Mars Rover - $1 billion


Total Cost of the Mars Science Laboratory mission - $2.5 billion


Accidentally drawing a penis on the surface of another planet - Priceless









Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/48809386410

Friday, April 19, 2013

skyrimconfessionss: “I wish Skyrim didn’t feel so small to me....





skyrimconfessionss:



I wish Skyrim didn’t feel so small to me. I see all of these concept art photos, with massive mountains and huge expanses, but when I get in game it’s all scaled down. I understand why they have to do that, but hopefully things will be bigger in next-gen consoles.”


http://skyrimconfessions.com/



To be fair, this isn’t unique to Skyrim (or Bethesda’s games in general) it happens in all games that cover a fairly large area. I also don’t think it’s a console restriction, but a conscious design choice. When you are dealing with an area as large as a country, even a small one, which contains multiple cities and towns that you can visit, it’s just impractical for the devs to create all of it, it would take far too long, and it would run the risk of becoming more and more generic if they tried to do it. I’ve seen some games that block off areas in various ways to make it clear you are only visiting a small portion of a larger city, but that often feels a bit frustrating that you don’t have the freedom to go where you want. But on the other hand, I think it would also get frustrating if the cities were of a more realistic scale in terms of number of buildings, streets and people, and it DIDN’T have areas blocked off, because it would take so long to find your way around, that you’d never get anything done, and you’d constantly be getting lost in the warren of unfamiliar streets. It would make the quest markers an absolute necessity for finding specific NPC’s if there were thousands of them wandering around, too. I think we just have to accept that the world has been compressed, and that each person we see actually kinda represents 10 or even a hundred people…






Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/48415414528

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

skyrimconfessionss: “I think I spend more time taking...





skyrimconfessionss:



“I think I spend more time taking screenshots of my characters than I do playing Skyrim. I’m vain.”


http://skyrimconfessions.com


Image provided by submitter



yep. I hear that.




http://elderstats.com/character/3219/#!/photos


http://elderstats.com/character/3012/#!/photos






Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/48209675191

Realized i had another backlog of Skyrim screenshots. I like the...









































Realized i had another backlog of Skyrim screenshots. I like the dragon breathing fire one, it’s just unfortunate the snow went all wonky when i turned on the free camera. :-/ Guess i’ll just have to find another cliff to try and recreate the scene with no snow ;) You may notice most of these were taken at night, and that will likely continue because Aleddor is a vampire now. He CAN go out in sunlight, but he’s way more effective at night, so…. the darkness shall be a continuing theme from now on, though hopefully some nice auroras will turn up. It’s also boosted my sneaking to the point where I’m just slitting throats all through dungeons, so there will probably be fewer fight screenshots going in.






Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/48187094354

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Sampler for the new album of one of my all time favorite bands,...





Sampler for the new album of one of my all time favorite bands, Amorphis.

Sounds good to me, very excited to hear the whole thing! The thing with Amorphis is that you never quite know what to expect from them… but it’s always good. Though they do seem to have settled into a more consistent sound over the last few albums.






Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/47645144579

Friday, April 5, 2013

thefingerfuckingfemalefury: rayegunn: So, one surprising thing...













thefingerfuckingfemalefury:



rayegunn:



So, one surprising thing and two reassuring things from Stormwatch.


Surprising: “Force” is not a new character at all, it’s Fuji with a different name! :D Saved from Lobdell making him into a low ranking villain lackey in Superboy >.>


Reassuring 1: While disappointed with the alien abduction origin (was hoping for super soldiers again) and the fact that they still have real names (and Apollo now has a LAST name too, Pulaski) they do share an origin, and they did escape from their creators… though not at the same time, so that’s good(ish). Also, Apollo is beautiful and dislikes clothes, as it should be, and he and Midnighter are already together. It was SUCH a relief to see Midnighter in his old costume again. Apollo’s is a bit different, but I am fine with it.


Reassuring 2: Though difficult to show with just a couple panels, Starlin NAILED Angie’s personality, she’s awesome again :D Also she started out with no nanites over her skin, presumably to show that she is not, in fact, a robot or cyborg with very little human left, like Milligan was writing her as. (seriously, she was all metallic in flashbacks to BEFORE the Devolver while IN BED)


That’s not to say there weren’t things I didn’t like, I’m still very unsure of Jenny Soul, and I don’t like that Hellstrike is no longer sentient gas, and am sad to see Hawksmoor go… but… if that’s what I had to trade for rescuing Angie, Apollo and Midnighter, the return of Skywatch (although different from in Wildstorm in many respects, and with some aspects of the Carrier thrown in) and The Bleed, I’ll take it.


Also, it’s good to see Lobo’s being rescued from the butcher job Liefeld did on him in Deathstroke…



I am SO happy to see Apollo, Midnighter and Engineer be more like the versions of the characters that I adored in the original Wildstorm series…one issue in and I’m already thinking that Starlin is the perfect choice to be handling this series, I LOVED the way he wrote these three


SO good to see Apollo and Midnighter being an awesome couple again and seeing the Engineer being her fabulous self instead of being all ‘Skynet’ and wanting to start a robot apocalypse because of…reasons O.O



Yeah. I’ve stuck through this trainwreck of a series since the beginning, every time i thought I was going to drop it, another creative team was announced, and I ended up sticking around, in hopes that maybe THIS time they’d get it right… and Milligan wasn’t bad at the beginning, but it unravelled a whole lot towards the end there… So then Jim Starlin was announced and I ended up sticking it out yet again… I wasn’t really sure what to expect with Starlin. Sci-fi is kinda his specialty, to put it mildly, so I knew that part was a good fit, but… I’ve read stuff by him before, but it was from like the 80’s, I hadn’t read any of his more recent work. I was worried that it may be really dated and he wouldn’t capture the sort of edge they needed… but, though a bit exposition heavy (and guilty of telling rather than showing sometimes) I think he did pretty good, and I suspect the exposition was just to get things rolling the way he wanted as quickly as possible, and won’t be a permanent feature. My 3 favorites are Apollo, Midnighter and Angie, and he did the best with them, so I was thrilled. Angie especially needed fixing SO BADLY (not to mention resurrecting) so it was good that he focused most of the non-exposition bits on her, to show everyone the old Angie was finally back. Apollo and Midnighter only got one page where they interacted with eachother, but it had the right feel to it. Kind of an understated casualness to their relationship, it felt almost like how Warren Ellis wrote them, which is the highest praise I can give.


The art by Yvel Guichet is not spectacular, but I get the sense that there is a good synergy between him and Starlin, it feels like they are very much on the same wavelength here, AND I think he’s an Authority fan. So we won’t have the art actively fighting the story the writer is trying to tell, like I think happened with Miguel Sepulveda, and he understands what the characters are all about, and I will take competent art that serves and compliments the story and characters over super-pretty art that fights it any day.


The real test will be next issue of course, to see how things go now that the info-dump is out of the way, but this issue put me at ease and I’m thinking that maybe we will FINALLY have this series done right.






Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/47205366541

I just realized today I have a TON of screenshots from Skyrim...









































I just realized today I have a TON of screenshots from Skyrim over the past little while, and some are pretty cool. Or maybe just pretty. I ran out of space here so you can see more of the ones featuring my character Aleddor, who is quite fun to play so far, at his Elder Stats page.


I ended up being ported all over Skyrim by quests, first I got shunted up near Windhelm by a Companions quest, then while i was there i got punted down to Markarth by Sanguine’s quest, spent some time there then ended up in a jailbreak and made a run back to Whiterun, there i decided to sit down and finish Sanguine’s quest and join the Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, and (temporarily) the Dawnguard, and FINALLY at, like, level 20, see the Greybeards… so I went to the throat of the World and to Riften to murder an old lady, and then back up to Windhelm when the Dark Brotherhood caught up with me (ironically, just after solving a murder case for the town.) and I woke up near Solitude… I still haven’t finished Sanguine’s quest. But I did do Meridia and Sheogorath’s! I should note that I try to avoid fast travel, so getting shunted all over the damn place is extra annoying. It’s been a rather hectic playthrough, but has provided some nice screenshot opportunities.






Imported from Tumblr: http://rayegunn.tumblr.com/post/47202906369