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I beat Horizon Zero Dawn yesterday and I'm about 1/4 through the Frozen Wilds DLC. Without getting into too much detail I gotta say this game was really good. Everything is explained.. Literally just about everything (robots, humanity, culture, technology, etc.) and the plot is amazing. With this plot, it could be made into a movie. I focused way too much on the side quests initially. I did so many side quests that once I started playing the main mission again I kind of steamrolled the enemies because I was so leveled up. The only real negatives to the game is the lack of direction. Without spoiling anything, what the game should have done was force you to play the initial hunting grounds instead of skipping them. The game doesn't say it but all the hunting grounds are basically tutorials for how to destroy the different robots. It would have been extremely useful knowledge if I didn't skip them entirely, get frustrated on some enemies, watched a few youtube videos on how to kill them, when I could have jumped into the hunting grounds and actually learned in the game. The same applies to cauldrons and bandit camps, aside from the initial two, you don't have to do anymore and the game doesn't direct you to any. You stumble across them on the map and the map is so huge and filled with icons I didn't realize thats what the icons stood for until I got to a point in the game where I had to fast travel everywhere because quests make you travel hundreds of miles all over the place. This game alone made my wish I upgraded my PS4 to a SSD hard drive. Halfway through the game I found myself fast traveling all over the place to save time traveling, but that meant loading screens constantly. Ropecaster is the the best weapon in the game. I wish the game would have emphasized this. Every enemy in this game will leap 40 feet directly into your face destroying half your life bar. Not too difficult when its just one or two small robots, but you get some big ass ones in there and you try to run away, draw your bow, get slapped to the ground and then the next one hits you right after and then a third enemy spews fire at you.. it becomes straight up infuriating. But then you bust out the ropecaster that does no damage.. shoot 3-5 binding ropes at an enemy and they get anchored to the ground... and they'll stay anchored to the ground for like a solid minute unless they take a good chunk of damage. And theres no limitation to how many enemies can be ropecasted.. Got 3 enemies? Ropecaster them in different spots then run up to one and focus your attacks on it. As long as you have enough wire in your inventory to keep making ammo for it, you can keep almost every enemy in the game locked down. And the ropecaster is one of the very first weapons you can buy in the game. You just have to buy stronger versions of it as the game progresses. Also, there is an unlimited fast travel pack you can buy for incredibly cheap, like an animal skin and a few shards. No more having to make fast travel packs. But the game doesn't emphasize that its a thing, its simply sold by merchants near a specific city at the bottom of the same generic list of stuff every merchant in the game sells. Mounts are fun, but it can be annoying as they give away your location to enemies, but they are also great for not caring about that and just running past everything to open up more of the map. Theres alot of skills that seem pointless to unlock, but the best ones are shooting additional arrows, tinker, initial mount skills, hoarder and increased slow down time while aiming weapons. Modifications are amazing and the game doesn't even have a tutorial for them. Equip mods. Don't worry about using them you will be swimming in them by the end of the game. Except for purples. Got a bow, and the damage feels weak.. equip a mod that does +38% damage. Thats significant and the game doesn't even emphasize it. wtf. By the end game all my weapons had 3 mod slots each and all had things like like "+48 damage" +42 damage +15% fire damage" "+41 damage +15 tear".. It makes the weapons significantly stronger. Anyway, its a great game. A bit too many side quests, but props for the developer for having every character fully voiced considering the large amount of characters in every side quest introduced. The DLC is interesting so far, but god damn these enemies are ridiculous. Its like every other enemy is as strong as a major boss fight from the initial game. wtf. Overall I've had a fun time but I was eventually getting bored with the sidequests. Like I said before I focused too much on doing those, my OCD kicked in whenever I saw them on the map. lol. I forgot to say, the sidequests are basically for leveling up. You could technically run through the entire main quest line, but as the main quest line continues it'll show the recommended level to continue. Basically thats where the sidequests come into play. You're only level 15 and the next main quest is recommended 20, do some side quests. I think theres as many side quests as there are but to give the game more diversity and fill in the map. The map is huge and its really interesting to explore. I had a great time and the plot was amazing. I'm looking forward to a sequel.

I now have the urge to buy Goat Simulator for Xbox 360.

Politics When he got elected I figured he'd only be a 1 term deal because the Dems would come up with a credible candidate. But as Sledge pointed out, Trump will win reelection. The media will continue to lose more credibility as they put up a bunch of polls leading up to election day showing he'll lose. Not only do they give him free air time, they continually discredit themselves as they can't come to terms that the internet is a bigger source of information than they are. They give him more fuel to self promote each time they mess up. On top of that, watching the news is just as utterly pointless as a newspaper subscription. These channels, ALL of them, are only about ratings. Remember when that Malaysia flight went down? CNN covered it for a month and even threw around a theory that it got sucked into a time space continuum for a second. But anything you see on the news, you've already read hours prior to it being talked about unless its a California car chase or terrorist attack. Anyways, on the surface the economy is doing way better. For the average person there are more jobs to choose from rather than taking anything available. I've noticed this trend on a personal level as now its become increasingly hard to find qualified people to hire at my work. the applicant pool is smaller and poor, as in years pass it was easy to find someone, and they were probably overqualified trying to make ends meet. I've also seen a lot more people switch jobs/find a new job while previously everyone was holding on to their miserable job, and the only way they were leaving is if they got fired or laid off. When it comes down to it, a lot of people have more money in their pocket today than they did a few years ago. When this happens they give less of a fuck about anyone else but themselves. They don't care if you can't get married or go use a different public restroom. It doesn't concern them, they're doing great. That's how Trump wins. Fired up base, unenthusiastic opposing base, and complacent independents that are good with their current situation in life. The deficit will never be fixed until the whole thing collapses. Republicans stopped being fiscally conservative long ago, and democrats will only cut spending where it hurts the people that work hard for a living, the military, or some other type of budget that leads to innovation. They say "wErE gOnNa TaX tHe tOp 1%" but they don't tell you, they're gonna lump you in with them because the top 1% alone can't pay for all the spending they want to do". You get told you gotta take one for the team and face your new reality, sorta like Obama said all them jobs weren't coming back unless Trump had a magic wand to bring them back. Well... I guess he had a magic wand. No, he didn't but here is the reality of it: entitlement spending needs to be cut and neither side is willing to do it. Dems will cut out everything but entitlements, and Repubs will come back in and restore them all, without cutting entitlements to balance it out. Instead of taking the issue serious its political football of one side saying the other hate poor people, and one side saying the other is just trying to pay for votes with the government purse while we give out money we don't have, and haven't had for a decade now. Also we need better review of all these federal departments that waste money because they had excess and just spent it all on dumb shit so the budget committee doesn't see that they had excess and feel like they can trim the fat from them. Why are we just looking at numbers like this? End of year reviews should be made, purchases restricted and excess should go into somewhere else or be saved for the next year and docked. Budgets should never keep increase automatically like it some type of cost of living raise... Either way, politics have been changed forever. Maybe for the better, maybe for the worse. After Trump, I can see more people that aren't government lifers getting nominated. Congress is where the real rot is. Most these fuckers have been in there for 40+ years, and anything they say you can go back 20 years and find where they said the exact opposite. Plus they waste even more money by stuffing a bunch of unrelated shit into critical bills that have to be passed. If both sides could come together on a grassroots/state level and call an Article V to impose term limits on congress it would do us a lot of good. Lets face it, they'll never vote term limits for themselves. But not enough people have the drive or care because at the end of the day, politics currently doesn't effect the common person on a daily basis. Politics is shit, and being a keyboard warrior about it does nothing but get you a few likes from your friends that agree, while changing no one else's mind. People can swap bias articles with cherry picked data all day, but I've noticed the fatigue on that is starting to settle in... right up until the election cycle fires up in full force. Enjoy the calm while it lasts. Whew rant over.... on to other predictions. Gaming PS5 vs. XBSX will be a closer one this gen. PS4 completely dominated this last generation because MS miscalculated how powerful the Sony launch console would be and ended up with a weaker console filled with forced features no one wanted. The whole thing was a debacle. PS4 not only had the more powerful system, they had the better first party titles and none of the silly features getting in the way of playing games. The poor UI and lesser online service was a minor inconvenience lost in it all. This go around it looks like XBSX will have more processing power by more than 3 teraflops. MS will still struggle with their 1st party exclusives. They bought up a bunch of financially marred 3rd party studios and I feel like all they'll do is release sequels to old series that use to be cross-platform. While Sony will continues to launch beloved series sequels and create new IPs. The One X is more powerful than the Pro and it hasn't done anything to play catch up this gen. so power is a thing that continues to diminish in relevance as long as it doesn't impact 3rd party title availability. In the end, I don't think anyone really wins this gen now that Sony has caved into cross play. I expect full cross play for all 3rd party multiplayer titles. People can buy the console with the 1st parties they want and play with their friends either way. So in reality the gamers win the console wars... aside from having to sign up a new account for every developer to enable cross play, and have 30 new passwords to remember, data breaches to worry about, and an inbox full of even more spam. Internet YouTube will be different by the end of 2020. It seems like they're cracking down on all the hatebate videos. Commentators will be thinned out as corporations are probably pouring money YTs way to get rid of the negative press they get from big YT talking heads like Jim Sterling. This will hurt YT in the end, as just as much good comes from YT as bad for some of these companies. Hypemen for stagnate franchises like COD and new titles like Apex will have a harder time making money without some type of official endorsement form the company of the game they cover. This in turn will cost them credibility with their viewers as a shill. Expect a few new social media/stream platforms to come to light this coming year if YT does indeed head down this path. Internet in the US will be just a shit as it has been the past decade. Marginal increases in some places. Fiber internet will still not be in enough places at affordable rates. Entertainment At least 10 new streaming services will debut this coming year. Netflix's financial woes will start to really affect the product as their content gets stretched even more thin along with everyone else's. Disney fired the first shots for a stream bundle with Hulu and ESPN. They own all of that, but expect to start seeing others "team up" for bundles. We're headed towards cable packages 2.0 just like I felt we were earlier this year. Hollywood will continue to struggle with more pointless and horrible movies from shitty actors that are really just wannabe activists trying to make your escape from every day life about every day life. Marvel Phase whatever we're in will start to struggle at the box office as well because they don't hold the weight of interest as the Avenger's group. We'll all get called racists and sexist for not wanting to watch it. They'll have to rely on D+ shows as well but I don't think they'll be as popular as where they could go with Star Wars.