Robert C

I just hope they don't disable the trick you could use to beat Hillary in The Driver. Parking a fast car down the street from the race start before beginning made that one very manageable. I remember there being a mission in Vice City Stories where I desperately wanted the ability to do that.

I used not to mind Buck when McCarver was around, because I figured if Buck was talking then McCarver wasn't. Then McCarver retired. I had a clear view of Buck from above him where I was sitting during the World Series game I went to in 2019. 17 year old me could've probably hit him with a throw from where I was sitting. 48 year old noodle armed me was sorely tempted to give it a shot.

At this point, I want em to set up a system like European football. The big 12 can be the equivalent whatever is below League Two now in England

I can't hate on San Andreas. KJAH alone puts it above GTA4. My personal GTA rankings, best to worst. Never played GTA1 or GTA2. Rankings 3-5 would probably change based on the phase of the moon. 1 GTA5 Online 2 Vice City 3 San Andreas 4 GTA3 5 GTA5 Single Player 6 Vice City Stories 7 Liberty City Stories 8 everything else in the universe 9 GTA4

Melraz and I have been hanging out in crew only rooms. No dots. Just doing the new tuner stuff, which can be done outside of public rooms, promoting clubs and stealing Sentinels, Sandkings and Dubsta 2's. It's like that weird time after the CEO org stuff came out when we just did that for six months, except there's no horrible missions to get the cars off. Doesn't pay as well, but sill make a bunch of cash. It's oddly chill.

I'm not looking forward to those awful ambulance missions in 3 and Vice City. Hope they change those. Meanwhile I'm playing the heck out of 5 again, and haven't shot a dot in weeks. Spending all my time stealing cars and making money. Weird.

Now I can buy GTA3 for the fourth time, I guess. Just do GTA6 already, damnit.

This is where we whine about how slimy insurance companies are, right? So, my wife tried to refill her Synthroid (thyroid med) prescription last week, only to find that Blue Cross won't cover it any longer. They insist on the generic instead. One problem here. Generic thyroid meds are known to have significantly greater variance in the actual dosage than Synthroid. That variance is large enough to make it unsafe for thyroid cancer patients, who need a very tightly controlled dose to prevent recurrence of the cancer, so she cannot use the generic. She's spent half a day of work time fighting with the insurance company, whose response eventually boils down to just saying we just don't give a damn. You'll take the generic and like it. The difference in cost isn't even that significant. We'll probably end up just buying the meds ourselves So, my takeaways from this (none of which are new, this is just reinforcement of known stuff) : - insurance is truly in the slimiest of all industries. They're the only folks I can think of whose success is predicated on not providing the service you've paid for - Our employer loses the time she spent working on all that nonsense when she would've normally been doing something productive (and the time I've spent moaning about it on a wrestling message board). She gets paid significantly more for four hours work than this med costs for a year. I'm sure there's a VP somewhere who's about to make senior VP because he saved money on insurance costs for the company. Meanwhile, there's a bunch of employees spending their time dealing with this garbage instead of working, probably costing the company much more than they saved).

I dunno about best, but destroy will always be my ending. I've done all four endings at various times. The fourth one is obviously the worst, though I'll freely admit it was satisfying to shoot the catalyst in the face. Synthesis just feels gross. I don't mind control, I guess, but I just wasn't feeling it. I still feel like destroy sets up for ME4 really well. The galaxy is a mess. The Reapers are gone, but they left massive destruction in their wake. Earth is likely some sort of devastated, wasteland based on that teaser video and on its proximity to the crucible when the shit went down. The Citadel is obviously gone. The relays are gone, which makes for some actual interesting scenarios. I'm assuming the next game will be set a few hundred years in the future. What's been going on out there in all these cut off areas? Is some remnant of Cerberus still out there? What's left of the council races, and the smaller ones as well? How powerful are the Krogan? What's Leviathan up to? How about the Yahg? I know the catalyst said all synthetic life is gonna die, but he's kinda a fuckup on a colossal scale, so maybe he's wrong, and there's still Geth on Rannoch? I'm sorta guessing that Liara somehow has some of her network still active locally wherever she wound up when the Normandy crashed and managed to build a mass relay, like the Protheans did on Ilos. She heads to Earth and maybe finds Shepard. Then she and others start to get a few more built/working to reconnect the galaxy. Re-resurrected Shepard, or whoever replaces him/her heads out to see what's been up in the meantime, finds a colossal mess, and maybe finds some new threat in the process. Control and synthesis seem like they work too well to set up for ME4, especially control. Assuming those two choices don't go to hell in a handbasket due to the catalyst's fuckup, they'd almost have to introduce some bigger, badder than the Reapers threat to have anything worth fighting.

They remembered they had him on their roster?

Oh, it's for sale now. However, I'm cheap. And it costs less if you jump through the hoop. I don't even try to race if there's a bunch of high levels. The races where there's two guys above 100, and a couple level 10s are more my speed. If I had to win I wouldn't bother, but I can usually manage a third place in a race with only three people in it.

So this tuners thing has a car you can win. Deal is you have to place in the top three in one of the new tuner races (locked to the new cars) three days in a row. I want the free car, so I'm actually doing a few races again. Ugh. Five plus years of not racing means I've actually got worse at racing than I used to be, and I was crap to begin with. Unfortunately the car I have is also crap, so I'm doing even worse than expected. Like getting schooled by people that have done five total races bad. I figured out real quick that I'm not catching up if somebody has even a decent lead on me. So last night I got pitted twice by the same person on the first lap of the race. I was miles behind after the second one, so I decided to display my annoyance. So, want to pit me for sixth place (out of seven) do you? Spent the rest of the race ramming the poor sap. He had to restart multiple times because I pinned him against things, making it impossible for him to move. When the race ended he was pinned between my car and a telephone pole, facing the wrong way. Somehow he placed after me, though he was closer to the finish than I was. Turned out he was the race host. He put the next race on non contact. Then he left when it started. The guy next to me ran over his character as it exited his car. Then I won the race, somehow beating a guy who had 1600 race wins and only about 200 losses by more than 20 seconds. Then I got to quit racing for the day That's what victory is like in GTA in 2021.

All of that sounds a lot more fun right about now than the current Alabama/Clemson/Ohio State/Oklahoma status quo.

And somebody already found out how to hack it. I'm so proud.

Sadly you're right. It's all indoors. Can't bring weapons or run anybody over. Somebody will figure out how to hack that, and will be my hero.

Probably about the duck.

My finest GTA moment. Dying halfway through round one. Still not as funny as our characters fusing behind a semi trailer. Been a long time since i laughed till I cried.

I'm curious if that means Xbox One and Series X/S can't play together whenever this drops. It's been a nice change from the 360/Xbox One switchover to have the two generations able to play together. I could care less about losing access to car upgrades. I haven't raced in years, and cars in general are pretty much useless with 8902347690243876 different kinds of weaponized/flying vehicles packing auto aim missiles. I do like the idea of tuner meets, though. I love myself a car show in GTA. It's a target rich environment.

Buy 3 times, at least for Xbox, apparently. PS5 gets it for free.

Gotta love when that happens. I'm a logic designer, not an IT person, so I normally don't get too many emergencies. The one fun one I remember was while I was working at Motorola forever ago, and an issue with first silicon came up during a new years party at my house. I wound up doing validation work while distracted and drunk in the middle of the party. Somehow didn't FUBAR it.

They're just so terribly precious about that.

I've always encouraged Stout to buy the original games since he liked Andromeda. Then I replayed Rannoch last night. I'd forgotten how that reaper fight goes. Worst, for me. Have to do 20 Mary Lous in a row to avoid the Reaper, and if you screw even one of em up, you get to start over. I'm picturing him getting positively apoplectic over it.

ME3 decided to get all buggy last night. About halfway through the fight to get to the shroud on Tuchanka, I ran into a couple Rachni, with a few smaller things surrounding them, that I could not target with biotic charge. I ran right up to their faces, and still couldn't hit them. Finally had to get Garrus and Edi to kill em for me. The last rachni took me out, just as my helpers killed it. Apparently it autosaved when that last rachni died, because reloaded right were I'd died. All the enemies were dead, but I couldn't move in any direction. Fortunately, I had a manual save from just before the fight started, so I went back to that and stayed in cover till they were dead. And apparently after I looked it up, it's a bug others have seen, since I see it listed in the second bug here (whoever filed it REALLY needs to learn the difference between "bride" and "bridge"): https://answers.ea.com/t5/Mass-Effect-Legendary-Edition/Two-Quest-Breaking-Bugs/td-p/10382933

So far the most annoying part of ME3 is that Shepard still runs like a Bushwhacker wannabe in casual clothes

I always use the same folks, with one variation, for the suicide mission. Tali does the vents. Garrus leads the second team both times. Mordin takes the crew back. Zaeed and Kasumi with me throughout. Only thing I ever change up is Jack/Samara for the bubble. Really should switch it up sometime.