I got about 1/3 of the way through Witcher 3 and got bored, put it down and never picked it back up. I found the combat disinteresting for some reason.

A lot of people felt the combat was underwhelming. I always thought it was pretty good but that's on PC at high framerates, so the experience may vary across different platforms and specs.

I've been really addicted to Dragon Quest Builders lately. It's Minecraft but with strong player dorection through storylines and quests, plus Dragon Quest's 30 years of iconic monsters and art style. I played the hell out of the game on Vita when it came out and got it again for Christmas on PS4. I've been making different creations and sharing them between versions, to put them in my custom world.

Picked up my New Game+ save for the Witcher 3 to play on my 1440p monitor. Game is still such a masterpiece!

It resulted from me "hating" the Broncos due to John Elway throwing his weight around not going with the top team drafting that year - seems like a joke now with free agency. I'm over it, have incredible respect for that guy nowadays, he knows football ( even rooted for the Broncos during their recent SB appearances - I'm big on running backs ).

He did a great job bringing in Peyton and giving him the tools to consistently compete deep in the playoffs every year. It's cool seeing Tom Coughlin move into a similar role with the Jaguars and helping them become a top caliber team in the AFC this year.

Philadelphia 24

New England 20

I agreed with EBR on this:

I remember reading THE DARKNESS THAT COMES BEFORE and thinking that it was well-written. But I’m telling you, I went back and looked at the prose in that book, and it is well-written. BUT the writing in THE UNHOLY CONSULT makes THE DARKNESS THAT COMES BEFORE read like it was written by an elementary school student. Bakker has come a long way in his writing skill and technique, and I can’t help but think that this is killing his ability to tell a convincing story. At least it feels that way to me. The writing, as impressive as it is, just keeps getting in the way.

TAE feels like so much of the purpose of the series is being eloquently explained by an omniscient narrator instead of the events happening to the characters. You can look at things like the Cants of Compulsion with Xinemus in the first trilogy and how it gets the message across with such force.

It reminds me of the complaints in the comments for Light, Time, Gravity posts, that the lengthy soliloquies by the author interrupting the story are too long and exhausting, only for Bakker to respond that he had already cut them down considerably in their current form. He remarked before that his blog hurts his commercial appeal by turning away would-be readers but now I wonder if it's also hurt him creatively as well, having an adverse impact on his storytelling and how he writes fantasy.

I probably wouldn't have gotten Forged Battalion if I didn't know and trust the developer. That said, it's still very much an early access game and I think it has a ways to go to be something special.

I recently just got Act of Aggression because it was supposed to be the RTS successor to C&C Generals. It looked the part in screenshots and videos but got terrible reviews. I bought it anyway and after struggling to boot it up through various errors and crashes, found out the reviews were right, it's just not a very fun game.

RTS is in a weird spot where the genre really is too hardcore for most gamers today but in the process of making it simpler or more accessible, they move away from the things that would make veteran players want to buy it.

That said, I do think Dawn of War III was an outstanding release last year, at least on the multiplayer front. It's like the classic Warcraft III gameplay of base building and hero units but with modern day competitive mechanics to make the matches fair and progress naturally.

I'm Roman Catholic. Grew up loving the art, music, and philosophy but it's only the last few years since really I got into the practice. The more I read the Gospel and the meaning behind it, the more I'm blown away. I really think the reason why Christianity has transcended all cultural barriers and epochs is because Jesus Christ really was the Word Incarnate, revealing the logic behind the cipher of the human paradox. I also really believe that if you try to orient yourself towards the kind of life He's describing, you absolutely nurture a closer relationship between yourself and the objective truth/good - God. It's awesome watching your spirituality grow when you take the time to study scripture, do good works, and to meditate and pray.

As far as an afterlife, I trust the Word, so it seems to me we might go to sleep after death, there really is oblivion, but at the end of time, we're reincarnated and some of us will make it to the second Creation while the rest evaporate forever. The sole entry criteria is how you treated people worse off than you. That's not to say it's the only motivation behind my charity and volunteering. The Gospel teaches that many people less spiritually-inclined or who came to religion late will absolutely get in before I do.

As far the free will discussion in this thread, it just seems blatantly axiomatic to me that we have it. We wouldn't be typing about it on an online discussion forum if we didn't. From a naturalistic point of view, it doesn't make sense that the only animal that evolved to have self-expression wouldn't in fact have a self to express. The idea that the soul is blind to itself is completely nonsensical - we can easily apprehend our behavior and our motivations and change ourselves to become better. Prey that's really bad at evading predators can't go to a self-help class to become a better escapist - it just dies off and its genes are discarded from the population. It's important to note that I don't need a religious argument for free will. Catholics don't believe in the theology because it's been dictated to us from the bishops - we believe it because it's true. The notion that we can use logic and reasons to understand the universe is not a secular scientific ideal - it's entirely premised on the Thomistic science and Augustinian philosophy of the Middle Ages.

I just don't see how things like language, abstractions, creativity, and civilization otherwise came to be - these entirely artificial ecosystems we've created according to our sensibilities as much as our environmental necessity. Too much of what defines us is completely unhinged from our survival programming and indeed goes against it. That's why I think the Cross, among other things, is the ultimate refutation of determinism. It's incontrovertible evidence that you can choose to supersede your survival programming, the social pressures of your culture, and even the laws of a legitimate state. That's not to say it's natural or easy for mankind to break our inclinations - the first among the apostles lost his shit when Christ told him he was going to Jerusalem to sacrifice himself.

I suspect the attack on free will is wholly motivated to support the fallacy that science undermines religious meaning. This view is woefully mistaken - marine biology and thermodynamics have no stake in your inherent value or purpose in life. The vast majority of neuroscience is devoted to the altruistic endeavor of recovering mobility and cognition in people suffering from disabilities. It's only these weird public personalities cultivating a commercial brand that misconstrue it to opine on metaphysics, without any training or credentials to back up their agenda. And even then, free will has no inherent bearing on religion or meaning. My wife is Buddhist-Taoist-Confuscist. She believes in all kinds of crazy supernatural and superstitious stuff. She honestly believes her Taoist masters have magical powers to see the future and into the afterlife. But she scoffs and ridicules videos I watch about free will.

The life and teachings of Jesus Christ have permanently and irreversible changed this world for the better. Those who attack the philosophical foundations of our society do so at the peril of us all.