Vakri

The problem as I see it for why so much crap gets so popular, is that a lot of people don't actually care about the music itself, they care about irrelevant crap like how "cute"/"hot" the singer is and other nonsense. The actual music itself barely matters. People are also too easily swayed by "popularity" (whether real or perceived). Even if an "artist" is a complete nobody who can't sing or rap or write music worth a crap, all it takes is a slick music video that presents him/her as a cool new hip awesome somebody who all the cool people like, and/or for some already established artist/actor/what-have-you who people think is cool to endorse them, and suddenly no matter how crappy they actually are, they'll make millions and have tons of fans.

I found out a friend of mine with a similar PC decided to buy it and it ran ok, so I took the plunge and it does indeed run smoothly (constant 30+FPS) with view distance down to low and no anti-aliasing.

So it turns out the game runs silky smooth with most settings on high. I threw a tantrum for nothing. Sweet.

Yes, it was a bit of an overreaction; I was in a bad mood yesterday anyway and this just ticked me off further. Still, I have the money, I just don't want to waste it on a game that won't run (well, at least). And minimum/recommended specs, I've found, are rarely accurate. For e.g., my old PC, supposedly met or exceeded every recommended spec for Battlefield Bad Company 2, yet the game ran like crap on even the lowest settings. I've encountered a lot of games like that; unless my PC is either waaay above the recommended specs, or below minimum, I never bother with using specs as an indication of how well the game will run. I rely on demo's, but Gearbox has "graciously" decided not to have one. Re: pirating, I actually suggested it not as a serious option but more as a "it's kind of stupid that you don't have a demo and I have to potentially resort to illegal methods just to make sure that I'm not wasting $60 only to find out that the game doesn't even run on my PC" jab.

Wow, Gearbox is a bunch of a-holes. I've got an aging PC that technically should be able to play the game, but I'm unsure how well. I'd like to try the game out before I buy it, yet there's no demo. So I made a thread on the official forums asking about my options. Is there gonna be a demo eventually? Would Gearbox care if I "pirated" the game just to try it out? Or am I basically just screwed, forced to either not get the game or take a gamble and maybe have it not work well at all? The response was essentially "go watch some youtube videos or play the game at a friends house" (which completely failed to address my post) followed by the thread being locked, then deleted. I've been looking at the forums and it looks like several other people have asked about a demo only to be insulted, then have their threads locked. Screw you, Gearbox.

User Kost at MMORPG.com sums up my feelings on the matter nicely:

Anyone else see this? David Brevik was asked about his thoughts on D3 and gave an honest and rather muted response, and here's how some current Blizzard employee's reacted: Not shown in the pic: Andrew Chamber's comment: "Cant wait to see how he brings all his answers to Marvels diablo clone. Looking forward to him beating us out of the industry with his actions!" I always thought that Jay Wilson was kind of a d-bag...

As someone who's had a lot of bad to say about this game, I do think this is a good step in the right direction. I'll probably reinstall and play again after this.

Personally I think BoP with the ability to trade any items you get with those you were playing with when you found them (for a limited time at least) would be ideal. Of course something like this will never happen, as there's no money to be made with such a system.

I'm looking for a laptop for my grandmother for under $400. No 3d gaming, it just needs to do basic internet stuff (Facebook, blogging, tweeting, etc.) as well as HD videos (Netflix, youtube). Right now I'm looking at: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215345 $379 15.6" screen (don't want any smaller) Pentium B940 (2.00GHz) 4GB DDR3 Memory Intel HD Graphics Is that a good price-to-parts ratio? Is it overkill? Any recommendations would be appreciated.

I didn't even notice your initial post when I made mine. Sorry if it seemed like I just kind of wrote you off. It's kind of hard for me to explain what precisely I'm looking for, though even the stuff that doesn't fit exactly is still nice; your song "Run Away, to Far Away" is great, for instance, and more along those lines would be just fine.

Exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. Thanks Radiowar and if anyone has anything else, I'd be forever thankful. Well, alright, thankful for at least a couple of hours, maybe a day, tops. But still, thankful none the less.

So I'm looking for some techno/electronica/trance of a particular variety, whether a ReMix or otherwise. It's kind of specific and hard for me to describe exactly, but basically what I want is ambient/atmospheric with a darker, sadder, ethereal and/or "peaceful" (but not really "chill") touch. Here are some examples of the general type of "mood(s)" I'm looking for, though note that the examples aren't all of the "electronic" variety: "Fear Not" by Fray, particularly the ending (3:50+) Bal-Sagoth - The Ghosts Of Angkor Wat (ignore the intro; song starts at about 0:15) Urfaust - Outro Sinke Dus - Premonition Jeremy Soule - Luxon Theme http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCw_QS_QRls I know basically nothing about electronic music and have been getting my "fix" of these sorts of soundscapes from artists who make largely non-electronic music. I figure there's probably a lot of electronica/trance/etc. artists out there with music that's at least somewhat along these lines of what I'm looking for that I've never heard of before. I'm not too terribly picky so even if you're not sure if a song matches exactly what I'm looking for, I'd still be interested in at least checking it out. Thanks in advance.

...but that's what these sorts of events are for! Scoring political points and furthering agendas! I mean, ABC is already trying to implicate the Tea Party: "Stephanolpoulos: I'm going to go to Brian Ross. You've been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant. Ross: There's a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado. Stephanolpoulos: Okay, we'll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much." You see, that's what these sorts of incidences are for. The left will use this incident to blame the Tea Party, "violent rhetoric" from the right, and use it fuel their push for stricter gun control, while the right will blame violent movies and video games, the "left-wing hate machine" and whatever other bull-crap Bill O'Reilly and friends can manage to pull out their a-holes, because politicizing the hell out of these sorts of incidents is the American Way.

Dark Tranquillity Ne Obliviscaris Be'lakor Insomnium 4 bands that both write smart, intelligent lyrics, and who's fans/concert goers are largely nice and mature people (as are the band members themselves). Now for something more on topic: I hate Lamb of God worth a passion, but I agree that that hatred is irrelevant to Blythe's guilt. The video in the OP is apparently not the actual incident in question so it's hard to judge, but my gut says it was probably some idiot who deserved to be pushed off stage and that Blythe isn't really at fault.

Eh, as much as I hate Obama and Biden and practically every other politician for that matter, I just don't see that there's enough real evidence here to make this particular conspiracy plausible. I wouldn't be at all shocked or surprised to find out that it's right on the money, though.

I guess there was a post yesterday regarding Zombie Bears. It's not very encouraging, though: "Hey guys! Happy Friday, I have some good news for you. We have decided to make a 1.0.3a patch to fix some critical issues and I have convinced the developers to include the fixes to the two Zombie Bears issues that arose after 1.0.3 launched. Thank you very much for your patience everyone, and for your discussions on these forums, Reddit, fan sites, and other places. It's awesome to see such an active community. This patch does not have a release date yet, but it will be releasing in the near future (as in before 1.0.4) :)" So basically, Zombie Bears is broken as all hell, but Blizzard wasn't even going to address the issue until "Quality Assurance" man Vasadan convinced them to do so. Really instills a lot of confidence in the developers dedication to fixing broken mechanics and WD's specifically... If this were any other MMO/online RPG (aside from WoW), a quick 10 second patch download would fix this issue promptly (Guild Wars would tell you to log off and back on to download a quick update, which would take a total of a few minutes), but because it's Blizzard, we'll have to wait for some unknown Tuesday when the whole game will go down for 6+ hours just to apply a few bug fixes, and chances are, more issues will arise anyway. Color me frustrated...

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5913061953

Sigh... I keep trying to like this game (and Blizzard for that matter), but then things like this happen: My WD, who's current build is based on Zombie Bears, is worthless. Not because of a nerf, but because the last patch completely broke the skill. In typical Blizzard fashion, they haven't even acknowledged the issue, nor is there any kind of ETA on a fix. Reminds me of when Warlocks had flat-out broken Talents and were overall waaay underpowered after WoW's release, but they just left them as-is for who knows how many patches until the community got so mad that Blizzard finally decided that something HAD to be done... so they gave Warlocks a free mount to try and shut the Warlock players up. When that didn't work, they finally started to actually fix the class. Guess some things never change...

Personally I'd like to see difficulty changes that aren't just "less/more damage, less/more health," at least with regards to the end-game (Inferno). I think enemies should gain new abilities. Things like shield skeletons gaining a stun-bash that leaves you vulnerable if it hits, giant spiders being able to spit acid pools that do damage over time and/or lower the armor value for those standing in the pool, zombies that can revive themselves and/or explode in a cloud of poison upon death, etc. Basically, things that make difficulty a little less about "do you have enough Resist + Armor + Vitality to survive being hit by high spike damage mobs" and place a little more emphasis on active dodging, situational awareness and proper skill management.

Just a quick comment on one part of your post before I go to bed: "With regards to skill balance, it's unfair to say that Blizzard should release a perfectly balanced game with this level of complexity." I don't expect perfect balance. But some of this isn't your typical imbalance issues that plague every game - it's stuff that's so pathetically easy to see that I just can't believe that any competent play-tester could have possibly not seen it. It's not like Zombie Dogs are slightly worse than some other skill or that WD pet builds are slightly less effective than some other build; they are completely and utterly worthless. Wave of Zombies as well is just so obviously inferior to Zombie Bears it's ridiculous. It takes 3 seconds of using each Rune to realize that Wave of Zombies is the same thing but worse in every conceivable way. How could these things possible get past play-testing?

The item system in this game is just way too simple. There are too many "essential" stats and the extra bonus modifiers are few compared to D2 (as well as other Diablo-esque RPG's such as Titan Quest). They're also incredibly boring and not very useful. Gold/orb pickup range increase? Extra life from orbs? Skill improvements that amount to "5 less mana per cast" or "5% extra damage?" Come on. Sure, they help, in an incredibly boring, uninspired way, but ultimately they help so little that no sane person would actively look for those stats on their gear, at least in the higher difficulties. D3 end-game is all about stacking Primary Stat + Vit + armor/resists and some IAS while doing defense-focused builds. Even if it wasn't, and you could sacrifice, say, some resist for something else, well... there isn't really much else anyway. It makes one of the primary aspects of this kind of game - finding better and better gear - incredibly boring, because a "better" item is just an item with a extra +12 vitality, +16 more primary stat, +15 more to resists, and a bit more armor. I just can't get excited about spending hours and hours farming just to get an item that has 152 vitality instead of 104, and 50 resist all instead of 30. There needs to be more modifiers, and those modifiers need to be more useful. Legendary items, for the most part, suck, and so do Sets, meaning that collecting a whole Set or finding an uber-rare Legendary item just isn't exciting. And there are no Runes or the like to further customize your gear for a variety of unique and interesting effects. There's also the fact that I don't think Blizzard even tested many of the skills/runes. For example, there is simply no way that any even semi-competent play tester could have possibly used any of the Witch Doctor's pets, in particular the Zombie Dogs, in higher difficulties. They are completely useless in Hell and Inferno, and not in some obscure, hard-to-detect way either; they are just flat-out useless wastes of hot-bar space. In Normal and Nightmare they are usable, but still sub-par. Another example: Wave of Zombies. 3 Zombie Chargers that deal 71% weapon damage each, or 3 Zombie Bears that function in basically the exact same way (and cost the same amount of mana), but deal 236% weapon damage, have a larger AoE radius, and can hit targets behind you? Hmm, which should I choose? How could anyone at Blizzard (anyone with at least a couple of functioning brain cells) possibly found these (among other) skills/runes to be at all adequate? It just boggles the mind. I think I might just let this game sit for about a year. Maybe after some patches, content additions, skill balancing, etc., it might be worth it. But right now, I just can't get excited about the game. So many flaws, and for me, too few redeeming factors.

I have a question. How accurate is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3Rrk6lgi24 when it comes to the general "livelihood" of the game world? Because that to me (as well as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9_hqGsnpp8&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUdZn5v5sEU&feature=related) looks really, really terrible and is kind of a huge turnoff.

I got 7 of them already.

America isn't all bad: 5ive Behold... the Arctopus Dream Theatre Dysrhythmia Iced Earth Isis Kamelot Liquid Tension Experiment Manowar Mastodon Morgion Nile Pelican Periphery Scale The Summit Symphony X Wolves in the Throne Room Etc. Of course, for every decent band we've got, there's about 10 in Europe.