tbarrie

This was my favourite part. The fans willing the face to get back up is a wrestling cliche, but seeing them actually tangibly contribute to his getting back up was neat.

It's a silly concept. You were better off not knowing the term.

So has anybody noticed that the LIST missions to survey a specific planet are broken? As far as I can tell, the actual requirements to complete one are: Land on the specific planet you were asked to survey Survey a planet in the same solar system as the planet you were asked to survey Not necessarily in that order. When I surveyed a gas giant in the same system as my target, I got the money right then and there, then got the experience points when I landed on the right planet.

No. It was clearly awesome.

Well no, but if the copyright owners cared enough about wrestling to notice and complain presumably they would have.

Couldn't agree more. Certainly neither AEW's booking nor Tony Khan's other business decisions have been flawless, but I believe the biggest problem AEW has businesswise is that WWE (reportedly) stopped sucking once Vince was forced out. WWE still has a massive advantage in terms of general recognition; it's got to be extremely hard to gain market share as long as the juggernaut is putting out a decent product.

Luchasaurus is a dinosaur who knows lucha libre. Of course his piledriver is a death move.

Well, yes, which could be a problem in the early game when picks are scarce. But by the time you're thinking about taking Security 4, odds are you're swimming in them. And realistically, how often are you going to need to undo anyway?

Or, I mean... there's an undo button.

Has it really? That surprises me too. Granted it's a little on the easy side, but you do it often enough that if it were harder it could easily become frustrating. I think they got pretty close to the sweet spot. Yeah, I was thinking stagger protection sounded pretty good. But worth four skill points? I'm not sure.

So now that we're a few weeks in, let's talk about some of the game mechanics, from a perspective of what's changed from Fallout 4. There's a new lockpicking mini game. Not much to say here. The old one was fine, but the new one is better. They also now use the same skill and mini game for computer hacking, which makes sense in a world where all the locks are electronic. Turning persuade checks into a mini game is, in my opinion, a massive upgrade over both the Fallout 4 method and the New Vegas method, both of which were unsatisfyingly simple. Now you can choose your approach either tactically or based on what fits your character, or whatever mix best fits your playstyle. I might quibble with the fact that you always know up front how much a given line will help if it works and how likely it is to work, though. Seems like you should have to put some points into social skills before you get that information. Diverging slightly into how the mechanics are used, I'll also note with pleasure that the persuade checks seem to consistently DO something. That alone is an improvement over Fallout 4, where it felt like most of the speech checks affected nothing. The new skill system also strikes me as a big upgrade in principle. In Fallout 4 higher ranks of a skill (perk) were gated behind level requirements. I didn't like it, because it took away the choice to specialize or not. It didn't matter if you saw your character as a full-fledged scientist or a dabbler, if you were taking Science at all you'd be taking rank 2 around the same time. The Starfield approach of requiring you to use the skill in certain ways a certain number of times avoids that problem entirely. However, the implementation of that system sometimes leaves something to be desired. For example, to level up Stealth you need to hit sneak attacks. So if your game plan is to sneak PAST enemies, you're not going to get good at sneaking. Similarly, the Deceive skill both improves your chance of evading contraband scans and your chance of getting strong ships to hand over their cargo without a fight - but only the latter counts toward improving the skill. This was a problem for my first character, who wanted to be a smuggler but wasn't interested in actual piracy. Hmm, what else? The already light penalties for carrying too much stuff have been dropped even further, with the effect that there pretty much IS no limit on carrying capacity. Not a fan of that. If nothing else, it makes the Weightlifting skill useless (unless you really want its rank 4 effect, which protects you against being staggered by enemy attacks). Might add more later if I think of it.

I must have done the Mantis quest too late the one time I did it, because I found the rewards severely underwhelming. Was never tempted to use any of them.

Was the Bret/Bigelow finish wacky? I'll confess I mostly remember it for setting up the finish to Bret/Owen at Wrestlemania X; I don't recall what led to the victory roll in the earlier match.

Wait, there are normal posters here?

Huh. Jobbing Copeland in his debut match seems like an odd decision.

Yeah, I should have thought of that one. Although I'm more interested in cases where the larger team was composed of "name" wrestlers, even if they're clearly lower in the pecking order than the smaller side. But I did some Googling, and it seems AEW has had like a dozen handicap matches, and that Darby Allin one may be the only time the lone wrestler has lost. Disappointing. I was all prepared to praise AEW for its disciplined booking in this respect, but not so much I guess. (And to be fair the lion's share of those matches were "monster versus multiple jobbers" matches, where of course the monster is going to win. But apparently Big Swole has beaten Britt Baker, Penelope Ford, and Rebel; Kris Statlander has beaten Jamie Hayter and Rebel; and Swerve Strickland has beaten Mark Sterling and Tony Nese. I have no recollection of any of those matches.)

So other than Paul Wight vs jobbers, has the smaller side ever won a handicap match in AEW? I can't think of any examples, but then the only AEW handicap match I can think of at all right this moment is Darby Allin vs The Men of the Year back in early days.

I'm now doing a mission called "No Sudden Moves", and I have thoughts.

Assuming we're talking about the requests you get from the various shipyards, I don't think they need to be dialled back. Those missions are, IMO, clearly only there to reward players for building industrial outposts. And it's not like you're expected to deliver the full amount in one trip. (Incidentally, 2000 is the "medium" amount. In my experience, they ask for 500, 2000, or 5000.)

You may already know this - but the starmap is 3-D. So how close the two dots are on your screen doesn't tell you much about the actual distance between the stars. Full point to Bethesda for realism on that point, but not so much on clear interface design.

So question for those who finished the Mantis quest:

Is there any way to get Sam Coe hatless? My character wants to go on a nice date to the Whetstone, and she ain't taking him in his cowboy getup.

Ran my first session of Icons: Assembled Edition yesterday, and I think I like the rules a lot more than the rulebook. The book is extremely poorly organized and confusing. But the rules, once I finally figured out what the fuck they were, seem solid and conducive to fun play.

Ship Parts cost more than a thousand creds each, though. You'll want them so you can, you know, survive, but for healing between fights paying the fee at the shipyard is a better deal.

Even if you don't have Security, you only need three, and there's way more than three lying around the area. I gave it back to him. Just seemed like the right thing to do. I mean, my current character did. My first character totally fenced it.