Humanoid

If you sold it by the litre the list price would go down.

A case where the TES policy of keeping entertaining bugs in (like Giant physics in Skyrim) might not be for the best. Frankly I'm amazed they launched with something as fundamental as the random disappearing horses bug unresolved. And stand-in voice actors for last minute plot overhauls? Wow. But yeah, manual account bans are probably the way to go. It's not like it's a competitive multiplayer game where ensuring 100% is critical. Account bans will probably be somewhat less effective once the game goes F2P though.

I think it's a bit optimistic in two regards - one that game devs will actually put in the effort to use the virtual cores, which considering how long it took them to support even four cores is questionable, and that the game needs to load the cores in such a way that there's capacity to spare so that they can hand off to the virtual cores in the first place. The way things have developed in the past, the limit in the number of cores a game can utilise appears to often be hard-coded to whatever the average hardware at the time can boast, few seem to have the ability or even desire to support a dynamic number of cores. And make no mistake, quad-core is still Intel's game for the next couple generations at least - I'm still wholly satisfied by my five-year-old, 2009-vintage i5, after all, so I have no confidence in Intel trying to push the envelope in the next five years. I'm not fully up to date with the current state of play, but I imagine some benchmarks comparing a 4770 to a 4670K at say 4.4GHz might be instructive. Simplistically, it's probably going to be a matter of choosing between the moderate but everpresent boost, versus the situational but potentially larger one. In the end, it's a gamble, but a pretty low-stakes one. The 1230 conveniently rules out the 4770 non-K, so it's a straight up duel with the cheaper 4670K. If I call the probability of HT being useful as even odds (though in reality I'm a bit more pessimistic about the competence of game devs), I'd go with the price advantage. But it's not really a bet you can really lose out on (especially given you claw a little of the money back from the cheaper H series board). One thing to note is that not all motherboards support the Xeon, so check the compatibility lists closely.

I have never heard of an egg battle and am disappointed to find that it's not a game of people pelting eggs at each other. Haven't done anything special for easter myself probably since the days of primary school, probably the egg painting and maybe hunting (can't really remember doing it, but I assume it did happen). In the middle years it was more a case of easter meaning extra work, a busy time for the family business. Nowadays I don't live near any family so I don't really do anything but catch up on housework over the long weekend - vacuuming the carpets, weed the garden, clean the bathrooms, etc. Exciting stuff, I know.

I was obviously a bit sceptical too, but the producer of the graph has owned up to doing so deliberately on Twitter, even if the defense is rather weak. (A personal preference to draw charts that way? Really?)

If you consider overclocking as not a big deal, then hyperthreading would be a fraction of not-a-big-deal. Sure as demonstrated in those charts, it's not such a big gain in GPU-bound games, but in other games you do get the full benefit. In contrast, just about nothing will show tangible improvement from HT. Either you care about CPU performance or you don't, and therefore you get a 4670K if you do, or a 4440 if you don't. I'd only consider the 1230 if it's meaningfully cheaper than the 4670K (over here it's about $30 more, at price at which I don't think would warrant consideration).

Loved Dishonored architecturally, bored by it narratively. They should farm out the world to a dev with better writers like Obsidian and something great might come out of it.

Sniper is the only circumstance in which I would play New Vegas without VATS. Any other gun and it results in me flailing the camera about as if I were swinging my gun as a club.

This has been doing the rounds. Reuters getting creative with statistics.

Not missing anything. I think I played the demo of the first game back in the day of magazine demo discs. Let's just say Lara Croft is terrible at washing cars, and I haven't taken a second look at the series since. To be fair though, all 3D shooter-platformers of that era were terrible.

I spam buy old games with no intention of ever playing them, which is probably worse. Probably have played about 30-40 games GOG games total, about half of which would be games I own on disk/CD already and purchased for convenience purpose. That'd a decent chunk of games, but the current count of GOG games owned is 203.

Fine, fine. Although at $1.50 difference, it hardly matters whether a game wins or loses in a given round...

I genuinely enjoyed Surgeon Simulator 2013 and am disappointed that there's been no news of Surgeon Simulator 2014. Back in the 90s, Maxis tried to (somewhat pretentiously perhaps) market their products as 'software toys' instead of games. I reckon Surgeon Simulator would fit the label pretty well. It's shallow in terms of what you can accomplish, yes, but the fun element of it I would compare to playing with a Transformer toy - there's just some wonderfully childlike delight in just manipulating simple tools.

A perfect demonstration of Australian Rules football.

Yeah, I had an original P180 and currently have a P182. The P180 was a shocker to do work in, though it was excellent once assembled. I didn't even consider using the stock case fans though, replaced them with Scythe/Nexus fans straight away. The top exhaust is mostly pointless so I just got some craft foam and covered up the top grille (and removed the top fan, of course). The initial release had an even bigger problem: the door wasn't initially designed with the same aluminium-plastic-aluminium sandwich as the side panels, and a moderate temperature fluctuation would cause uneven thermal expansion of the materials and some pretty severe warping. To their credit, they offered free replacement panels which didn't suffer the problem) I give Antec some leeway because it was the first product of its kind (it was co-designed by Silent PC Review editor Mike Chin), a highly experimental product which essentially carved out an entire new market now populated by the various cases suggested above. The P182 improves cable routing significantly, mostly by cutting out some well-placed holes in the backplate so most cabling is well out of the way. The P183 is a further improvement, but I don't like the look of it as much, the new ventilation looks a bit tacky - hence the choice of the Define R4 now.

I've never gone for the bling of a window, it's purely there for aesthetic reasons. No difference to airflow, the windowless version would be marginally quieter since the normal side panel (which is padded with noise-reducing bitumen) would provide better sound damping than the window. I guess for case modders, cutting a hole in the window in order to install a fan would be easier than cutting through the padded solid panel. But that's so ten years ago. I have an overclocked 7950 and overclocked CPU, and I only have one 120mm intake and one 120mm exhaust (in my P182B), whereas the R4 has 140mm fans, so it's already superior in that regard.

Back USB ports are just the motherboard, nothing to do with the case. So you have the two blue ports at the rear according to your specs, and a header to connect two front USB 3.0 ports, the only way to get more is via an PCI-E expansion card. Anyway, some of the better cases I reckon: Fractal Design Define R4 (there's also an XL version which is even larger) Antec P280^ or P183 NXZT H2 Nanoxia Deep Silence 1 Bitfenix Ghost * Corsair Carbide 330R * (* Not really heard much about these two, but they target the same segment as the others and are of similar philosophy) If you prefer no front door Silverstone Fortress FT02^ (there was a midlife update to this model that added USB 3.0 support, so make sure you get the new version) Antec Solo II Corsair Obsidian 550D (^ These cases are quite a bit larger than the other options) If you want just the one pick - well, I recently bought myself the Fractal Design so that's obviously where I lean. Without a door, I'd say the Solo II is the pick.

Apparently Grim Fandango has been successfully modded to convert its interface into a standard point-and-click setup. Amazing that something like that is even possible, thus correcting the game's one single flaw.

It also let you change your character in-game without restarting or using console commands. One big annoyance with character creation systems is often the initial creation screen has lighting so awful that once you get out into the game proper, you look a fair bit different to how you looked initially.

PCI-E regardless of version is backwards compatible. You have no worries there no matter what. There might be a completely insignificant speed penalty that might come out if benchmarked, but it's irrelevant in day to day use. No way that power will be an issue either.

Well what brought that comment on was playing a bit of Skyrim lately, and it is exactly a duplicate of the Gregorian calendar, down to the number of days in each month. I'm not familiar with Tolkien or various DnD settings, so if it's not as prominent outside CRPGs, then great. That said, I'm going to say that settings that just round the number of days in a month to 30 and make no other alterations are just as guilty of being derivative as the ones that duplicate the calendar exactly. EDIT: And looking up the FR calendar shows it as the typical 12 months a year, 30 days in a month, with the only difference being 5 spare days inserted. Eh, that's pointless to me. But at least the weeks are different. I'd compare it to how mundane animals are presented in fantasy settings for example. Some choose to create fictional ones that roughly parallel those in real life in terms of role, i.e. a beast of burden, something for milk, something for wool. That's great. But I think most just use the real-world animal directly, horses, cows, sheep, whatever. And that's fine too, both approaches are valid. Having horse, cows and sheep be exactly the same but giving them random fantasy names on the other hand, ehhh, that'd just be dumb.

It does, but as mentioned, if the writers want to do it properly then they should properly be unique, not have the same seven days in a week, twelve months a year just with different names. Some settings already do this of course, and while it's confusing, it at least it shows some thought has gone into it. Just renaming things is not creative or innovative in any way.

Fantasy settings that think it's a good idea to assign obscure names to seasons, months, days and even times of days when in fact they're obviously just a reskinned version of our modern calendar. If you're going to be different, go the whole hog, or just don't bother. My immersion isn't going to be shattered if the ingame clock tells me it's Sunday.

Not as much Monaco as I'd like due to spotty co-op time availability, but loving the design of the new missions, it's obvious that a lot more care has been taken with the level design than with the original launch campaigns. I have not, however, replayed the original ones since they were rebalanced late last year. Anyway, five out of eight missions done and desperately wanting more, not a lot of games do that to me. Really ought to get back to both Dragonfall and Stick of Truth, both shelved about three weeks ago for no good reason. Then there's the flurry of adventure games due this month, triple play with Broken Sword 5.2, Moebius and Tex Murphy.

If you mean the high resolution texture packs, then yeah, 2GB is plenty (1GB might struggle). If you mean all those mods that add extra fancy effects - not sure, I've never tried them. Skyrim vanilla wasn't all that demanding I've found. Played the bulk of my time with it back when I had a 1GB HD5850, and at 2560x1440 with 2xAA it ran perfectly fine on high details (not that I remember what settings it actually offers).