It’s a safety feature to keep you from using the ‘autopilot’.

I found combat extremely tedious when underleveled. The bosses aren’t a problem because they’re scaled, and the random mobs aren’t really dangerous unless you really misconfigure your party (I haven’t died once to them), but they take forever to whittle down.

Generally you can just switch off to your lowest level characters between cities and you don’t need to do any extra grinding. Just pick the next chapter that has the lowest level and by the time you get there and do it you’ll be at the right level for the next next chapter.

Yeah, the stories are just guideposts to get you fighting the right level monsters at the right time. They break it up slightly so it’s not entirely fite fite fite and they give you some sense of real progress.

Watch yourself in the multiplayer, this guy is a notorious griefer

Not really. Okay, obvious, yes, they’re allowed.

This is more like finding out Dick Cheney really does burn puppies to death for fun. A step up in known attrocities, but hardly surprising or a turn.

All right - but I’m gonna pirate it. If it’s great I will actually buy it.

That was my takeaway from this article - ‘That is some damn nice water’.

You hit it at the end - they reacted uncharacteristically fast to this because this hits them right in the moneymaking nads. Nobody f#@$s with TF2 trading in Valveville!

Radiowho?  (That’s unhip old man stuff now too. We’re old).

Learn to read? Your comment was ‘Speeding, for the person with poor time management that thinks they’re more important than everyone else.’

Speeding, for when the speed limit posted is laughably low for current road conditions.

My Camry may be boring, but it does have little trays that are effectively ashtrays but plastic. About six inches deep, 3 inches wide, 2 inches tall (just guessing here) - one to the left of the wheel, one to the right. And you’re right, they’re great for stashing miscellaneous treasures.

It’s nothing to get mad about since nobody’s expected anything of Metallica since the late 90s. But it’s very amusing that the most amazing genre busting band of the late 80s has turned into the Gen X version of those tired old Boomer nostalgia rock bands we used to make fun of, endlessly playing their greatest hits…

I was at the Live Shit: Binge and Purge recording concert in San Diego in ‘92. That was a fucking amazing concert, one of the best in my life. Did another one late 90s and that was still pretty good.

Makes sense - these guys have just been tired old dudes with no metal since the black album. They’re just raking in the money from nostalgia - which okay, they earned, but I just can’t imagine going to a Metallica concert any more it’s such a marketing driven thing and they’re just chasing hot genres. For some…

Favorite things of Japanese boys (besides video games):

I put 80s hours in the original with no regrets.

They do talk to each other with very plot-specific dialogues... but it’s really easy to miss. A little ‘Hit + to see a Scene’ shows up in the upper right corner of the screen. It starts showing up at Chapter 2 for each of the characters, when they can be pretty sure you’ve got all 8.