Dude's Chronicles 5-24-2018: Pre-Memorial Day

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

- George Santayana or Plato

It's a holiday weekend, enjoy appropriately and responsibly.

Entertainment

• Westworld: Season 2, Episode 5 - This episode felt like a big side step. They did things but it didn't feel like anything moved forward. Disappointing to say the least after I enjoyed the previous episode.
• Arrested Development: Season 4 - Finished it and now I'm ready for Season 5 on 5/28.
• Hellboy 2 - This showed back up on Netflix so I watched it. Makes me wish they had gotten to finish out this trilogy.

Games

• XCOM: Enemy Within - Finished the campaign and loved it again. There was just one thing...

• Battletech - Finally got a bit of time into the game and oh boy! Apparently I just hit the point where they show you all of the things that you have maintain and customize. Everything from fixing and customizing your mechs to making sure you have enough people and the money to pay them. This is not something I was prepared for so I'm going to be needing to learn quite a lot to be effective.
• Life is Strange: Before the Storm - Farewell DLC - It was short and sweet but man, that ending started out as a knee to the groin and ended as a twist of a knife. Quite well done but be ready for some heartache.

News

• The Division 2 may release before March 2019 - Ubisoft has already confirmed the game is coming and that it will be at E3. According to an earnings report the game should launch before the end of their fiscal year but this obviously isn't set in stone yet. I'm looking forward to this game and am hoping for the best. They did a lot of work on this game after it released and I hope they continue the improvements with the sequel.
• Second map coming to PUBG on Xbox One - This is great news because I need a new map to play terribly on. On a serious note, just doesn't seem like this should have taken this long. What is making PUBG updates so slow on Xbox One? Maybe my expectations were off since I thought that a large number of issues would have been smoothed out while PUBG was still in Early Access on PC but maybe this shows just how hard they pushed to get it to the console and maybe it wasn't nearly as ready as it could have been.
• Resident Evil on Switch, sorta - It's a 45MB download because it is a streaming client. Not to sure how well this will work but since I don't play these games nor do I live in Japan, nor do I own a Switch I guess I'lll never know. However, I am in support of them working to get games on to the platform regardless of the delivery.
• $100Million for Fortnite Tournaments - EPIC is apparently willing to put its money where its mouth is. Now all I need to get me some of this sweet cash is a team... a sponsor... and skill.
• PS4 in final phase of life cycle - This coming from a Sony exec during an investors meeting is not a major revelation but more of a way to set expectations. It sounds like he was trying to say "hey, this thing has been out for a while and a lot of people already own it. Likely we aren't going to keep selling huge amounts of consoles" without saying "hey, people are already figuring that we're working on a new console and aren't really buying the current one unless their's dies".
• No more Vita games on physical media, outside of Japan - Add this to the fact that Vita and PS3 will no longer get free games under PS Plus in the coming months and you can figure out what is going on. Look for the Vita to keep fading away.

Closing Arguments

While you enjoy your weekend please remember why we have it. Be sure to honor and respect all of the veterans.