Humanoid

486 desktops used to cost well in excess of $5000. I don't know for sure, but my dad's DX2/66 monochrome laptop might have cost a similar amount.... But yeah, the enemy of gaming laptops is physics, and short of external GPUs (an idea that's been floated a few times), it's not going to get any better for some time yet.

Dammit, Google's taken over my intarwebs even more than I imagined possible. Also it's 2am and I've been half-sick all day. Otherwise I'd have played a whole lot more of the game instead of idly surfing the web while in bed.

Couple minor bugs, disappearing mouse cursor until I zone transitioned and an odd one where the main menu text didn't slide into their boxes (which were still clickable) and instead just sort of just stayed off the left edge of the page save the last few letters. Just played the intro and pretty happy so far. Either there's some reasonable choice in some of the options, or they've at least managed to disguise the lack of them (like Walking Dead kind did). Only a replay or reading spoilers will tell for sure, but the results of the given choices I made were reasonable enough that I didn't feel violently railroaded. Aside, I foolishly put no points in body or dodge and being hit once by a given enemy always took my hp down to about a quarter, oops. Got away with it long enough to rectify the problem so I didn't need to restart, luckily. Based on the original campaign's (non-)use of non-combat skills I had pretty much put all my points into combat related stuff, but it looks like I might want to start diversifying pretty soon. Mechanically there's obviously nothing new. I wish they'd clean up the level design a bit in terms of what's cover and what's not, at times there are things that look blatantly like they were intended to be cover, but aren't actually enabled as such. Party members not having overwatch by default is kinda annoying too, not sure why something so basic needs a skill level prerequisite, a carryover complaint for me. P.S. Stupid Google gives results for Daggerfall when you search for Daggerfall. Gee, thanks.

Could be power related, although that's a hard one to test. The most basic check would be to take a multimeter and use the back of the ATX or molex connectors to check the voltages are in order.

I put the US version in my Amazon shopping cart and it's perfectly happy to send it over to Australia, so I assume there's nothing stopping you from doing the same in the UK. Unlike here, expect to pay some customs charges however (which will be VAT plus a fixed processing fee).

You probably also want the Really Useful Dragons mod.

I don't get it, their idea of porn is pictures of peeled garlic?

Not as such, but troubleshooting aside (I don't really have much to go on besides running Memtest and monitoring temperatures in the OS), but if you are set on a workstation build, and were planning to do it later when Haswell-E is released, then maybe a stopgap partial rebuild with cheap and cheerful mainstream parts would be a more effective and cost-efficient short-term solution. It's not common advice to skimp on parts, but it's one thing when you're spending nearly $2000 on the latest and the best, another to spend nearly $2000 on the questionable soon-to-be obsolete IB-E. So if you can't solve the crashing, then a $300 investment on a basic Z87+i5 combo, which you can later reuse or sell for a decent amount, might be best here.

LGA2011 mounting is different to LGA115x, yeah. Depending on the specific cooler, they can come with alternate mounting hardware, but it's not a sure thing. The other thing is that the current LGA2011 platform is pretty old. Intel in their typically irritating way, have a third generation of LGA2011 to be released, LGA2011-3. These sockets are NOT cross-compatible. If you look at the spec sheet for current models you'll see that a lot of functionality is still offloaded to third-party chips because the aging X79 platform does not support them, USB 3.0 support in particular is handled by an ASMedia controller here, which won't perform as well as native support. So yeah, I'm not a fan of IB-E at all save for very niche purposes, it's a legacy product sold at a premium price. I understand that some people have requirements that might preclude the use of the mainstream-targetted products (i.e. Haswell), but now more than ever does the mainstream product carry a technical advantage over the lagging workstation solution, which is at a more or less literal dead end: IB-E is the final product in which both the socket and DDR3 will be relevant for the workstation.

Holland. And likely because bikes, not pot. Description text is more than 50% wrong, eh. You’re incredibly smart and sensible, and as a result you’re totally self-reliant. You’re ambitious, but you’re also modest and never show off what you have.

Those screenshots.... the 2D game may have been very brown for its time, but that shows it's got nothin' on how brown games are now.

Feels like one of those mechanics that tend to get copied across from PnP without sufficient consideration of how they'd work in a static one-off CRPG campaign, yeah.

I don't think there's a way to get the 1.2 beta patch outside of Steam?

Nowadays you won't really ever find a GPU that's outright incompatible with any game. It'll run the game slowly, yes, but whether acceptably so is up to you. I mean, people run games like Battlefield on integrated graphics, which might chug along at ~10-20fps. I'd call that too annoying to properly play, but people do play it like that.

Blah, just missed the edit window. Anyway, the Dragonfall download from HB is just a bunch of loose files in a zip, heh. It's downloadable now but says it needs version 1.2 of the base game, which I assume will only be available at time of release. The base game is also redeemable for Steam again like most Humble games, which I guess could be abused to pointlessly get yet another copy of the game, but this doesn't apply for the expansion. It's only 300MB though, so not like preloading it would save meaningful time for most. EDIT: Tried installing it anyway, the campaign is selectable from the main menu and character creation proceeds as normal (happy to see some new portraits by the way), but the game will just hang on the loading screen for the first area.

Got Humble keys for both now, happy days.

And render your ice-cream maker forever unusable for anything other than garlic ice cream ever again.

The HB delay is due to HB, but GOG keys are in hand so it's just a matter of processing the new requests for them. Ninjaed comment from the last update:

Bit of a "told you so" situation I know, but Saints' Row 4 is the old game, now with bonus platforming! Screw platforming, it screws up everything. You now jump too high and run too fast to make using the abilities in combat more counterproductive than anything, and marginalises the KB+mouse control scheme more than ever (but it's still essentially required for aiming). Bleh. Needs a superhero mode toggle.

Why ban things when you can just ruin them commercially with an NC17 rating?

Sent my request for HB keys on Saturday but still waiting. Hopefully processed before the release because I'm loathe to have to install the Steam version then redownload the whole thing later.

I prefer loafers myself.

And now they play a bloody video on the main page when you load it up. Someone needs to shake some sense into these rogue web developers. >.<

The Ultima 7 one was genuinely useful, both for general use and for ....copy protection. But the same can't be said of those games lacking open world exploration. U8's was completely useless. The Baldur's Gate 2 one, in addition to being useless, had dodgy paint that came off onto the CD case when I stored them together, ruining both. I heard there was some controversy when Bethesda initially promised cloth maps with some Skyrim editions, only to change it late on. Now that's a game where a nice durable map would have been handy. At least useless cloth maps still have some reasonable value as collectibles. Useless paper maps - and I mean cheap crappy paper - like that which came with IWD2, are just plain baffling.

Don't they use P2P for the actual downloading these days? Guess authentication or whatever might still be down.