Humanoid

So I didn't know there was a Clevo reseller in the UK. Apparently there is: http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ I don't know the company so it's not an endorsement, but Clevo are sort of a 'generic' notebook assembler who make very customisable machines, and at a good price compared to the 'brand names'. I reckon the W230ST could be easily upspecced to beat any of the options you've presented prior. Heck, it comes with an IPS panel by default which is fantastic, and a video card with plenty of juice to drive it. Upgrade the RAM to 4GB or even 8GB, and optionally even the CPU to a quad-core, add a 240GB SSD, and it's a genuine gaming machine - not a machine that does gaming on the side, but an out and out gaming notebook - that crushes anything else under 1000GBP, at a price the configuration tool gives me of 832GBP. Specced at exactly 2kg too. Obviously the usual caveats apply for a device of this type - support isn't going to be as easy as if you go with an established vendor. And while the parts inside are top notch, I'd expect the chassis to have cut some corners and so feel somewhat cheap and flexy with plenty of plastic. And I imagine it'd be pretty hard to find one to inspect in person before buying it. EDIT: Token review. Ignore the Avadirect branding, it's just the US reseller who add their own branding - just like the UK seller calling it the Optimus V for no real rhyme or reason. The Clevo model number is the one you'd research. EDIT2: If you were looking for a brand, I think the closest would be the Gigabyte P34G, but that's over 1k. Very light for a 14" gaming machine though. I'd have said the Lenovo Y410 and upcoming successor Y40 would be comparable, but it looks like the former model is not sold in the UK, so I doubt the followup would be.

On the linked Asus - well, screen size is not correlated to price at all. 11" panels all the way up to 17" probably cost the manufacturer the same amount given approximately equal quality. What matters is the type of panel and the resolution, and that Asus has a rather nice 1920x1080 IPS panel, as opposed to the nasty 1366x768 TN that infest cheaper products. It also features an upgraded CPU (4500U as compared to the common 4200U, though personally I don't feel the upgrade is worth the cash). The rest of the difference is in general materials (Gorilla glass, aluminium/magnesium instead of plastic) and build quality. Not saying it isn't overpriced, but it's a premium product and is built as such.

It's hard to compare since the Novatech seems to be some sort of UK-only OEMish product. It has a generously large SSD for the price point, the rest of the specs are pretty vague. If the Alienware screen needs to be upgraded I'd say it's a safe bet the Novatech has an equally poor screen - not that it'd be powerful enough to game at full HD I guess, but I just feel 1366x768 screens are unacceptable in this day and age. Also be aware it has a previous-gen low-voltage CPU, which is to say, similar power to the current gen but significantly worse battery life.

Fortunately then it reads that the future acts are intended to be full-blown sequels to a full-scale game. Which considering the price they're asking for them (an extra ~$100 for act 2, and an extra ~$250 on top of that for act 3 *holy cow*), had better be the case.

Sitting on minimum pledge for now (stupid Aussie dollar is sinking fast), but I'd totally triple it if I can play a female thief. Don't care the slightest bit about the other classes, but yeah, thief!

Had no idea it was imminent either. Was planning on ignoring it, but $18.75 on GreenManGaming, hmm. I've managed to steer clear of Uplay all this time, but not as opposed to it as I might have been in the past. (With regional pricing firmly in play, Steam is asking $35 and Ubisoft are asking $40. Yeah, no.) EDIT: Mildly amused by Gamefly's region restriction:

SHIVs can rescue games that otherwise are headed down the toilet. Alloy SHIVs in particular (normal SHIVs come at the point in the game where taking lower ranked troops isn't as big a liability) are cheap, fast (they move further than standard troops), tough (hp similar to Titan but unlocked by researching Carapace), do more damage than equivalent-tech assault weapons, and thus can shepherd your newbies while they learn to shoot. And with upgrades they can suppress and self-repair, plus they benefit from a number of passive boosts you get from the MEC technologies - so they're more powerful than ever in Enemy Within. Their aim is a bit rubbish but can be compensated for by getting in close - you obviously won't need to worry about being flanked or otherwise exposed. And they're viable right to the end, even when the toughest aliens are out in force: which is to say, with enough SHIVs, no game should become unwinnable due to attrition.

As a fan of the more streamlined female form, does it not mean that I can now accuse the developers of objectifying women *more* with this move? /philosoraptor

It turned out that pay TV content was about as boring as free-to-air TV content, just more expensive. Never had pay TV prior, or since. A $300 lesson, but ah well.

Sitting on the sofa with nothing to do led to turning on the Xbox for no apparent reason for the first time in months, which led to a lot of patching, but ended up with Rock Band 3. It's the only thing on the console I've played more than once, and while still a monumental waste of money in hindsight, it's the one thing that keeps it from being a total loss. (The console was purchased as a short-lived experiment of pay-TV streaming, games being an absolute afterthought)

If viewed in the context of being a sort of multiplayer framework, then it's not so surprising perhaps - like a beta for an MMO, say, it doesn't seem the type of game to have a defined content target.

I vaguely recall that credit/refunds were made available for people who took up the pre-release access as addons. Not sure what the impact on people who just had tiers with that access by default though.

I'm pretty sure I tossed a little money towards it during their KS, but not enough to get into the alpha/beta tiers. I can wait. Unless I'm mixing up my projects, I think they might have opened up alpha access to all KS backers.

Broken Age. Thoroughly charmed. Which is a thing to say about a story about a Lovecraftian elder god.

That is odd, even on the US Steam store it's simply $20 down to $10 on sale. But odd in a good way. I've extended my shunning of Steam to never again buy directly from the Steam storefront: even if it involves a price premium I will go through a third party, be it Amazon, the Humble Store, GreenManGaming, Gamersgate or whoever.

Couple short stints in the Banner Saga and I have to say I don't really get the combat metagame. Fundamentally it's understandable enough, and I very much like the fact that health equals damage. What I don't get is the tactical implications of the hard-coded alternating turns, which if anything seems to hobble the player with more units. As my party gets bigger, I feel significantly weaker because my big damage dealer now gets turns far less often and instead I get to take actions with the worthless little guys who do 1-2 damage. I just don't understand the rationale at work here at all. Why on earth would you design a turn structure like that?

Spam filter ate the email Humble Bundle sent me.

Both Steam and most of its games are on a dedicated SSD for me - drive F - with a few stragglers installed on the spindle drive. Until my most recent install I did it via symlinks and later the Steam Mover third party tool, but that's apparently no longer necessary. That said, I tried copying an XCOM install over to a different PC lately, and after doing the copying and running the Steam install routine, it decided to empty out the XCOM directory instead and attempt to redownload the whole thing from scratch. Even over a local network, 20gb isn't a quick copy, grrrr. Terminating the download, recopying everything, then resuming worked, but it's still an iffy process.

Not Created Equal is interesting at first glance, but in reality all it does is lead the player to cherry-pick the best rookies and bench the rest. I suspect it ends up making the game a bit easier as it's more than likely that you can find six of your starting roster who start with above-average stats. Class selection for EW (yes, the expansion overhauled the system) was only cracked recently, and is somewhat tricky to explain. Luckily someone else has done so - here

There are four, as far as I know: for finishing, for finishing classic, for finishing impossible, and for ironman.

Yeah, one of the chief flaws of the game is that the late game switches tactical focus from mobility and defensive positioning to simple massing of firepower, which is far less interesting. I've stopped playing several playthroughs in which I was well on the way to winning because it just turned into a chore. That said, heavies are a fine choice but I find Assaults to offer greater versatility late-game. Chiefly this is because Heavies are restricted in mobility - you need to not move in order to use any of the class' defining abilities, and that counteracts the desire to get in close to compensate for the poor aim. Assaults retain full firepower after moving - indeed after dashing - and that is invaluable in situations where somethings absolutely needs to die. Snipers continue to be fantastic throughout the game too, to the extent that I restrict myself to one per mission in order to encourage more mobile and more interesting gameplay. Sure the removal of the ability for Squad Sight shots to crit have weakened the all-seeing Archangel Sniper tactic somewhat (it being the god-king strategy of the base game), but Double Tap remains a "this thing dies now" ability, and there are some fun combo strategies to be had with alternative Sniper builds, such as In The Zone synergies. An underappreciated feature of Snipers which is not readily evident when starting out is that it's often the only 'safe' way to kill awkwardly positioned enemies. By that I don't necessarily mean those hiding in hard-to-reach areas, but rather those where taking conventional shots can often mean activating additional alien packs. This is crucial because on Classic and Impossible difficulties, the hard cap of five active alien combatants at any one time is removed: every alien you activate is out for your blood - not to mention that there's more of them on each map, making contact more likely. To clarify, on Normal/Easy, no matter how many aliens you've activated, only up to five will actually engage you, the rest will run away and wait for some of their buddies to die before joining the fight. If I was powergaming.... I'd go with a heavy duty squad of something like two or three each of colonel-sniper-turned-mechs and Assaults, and a Sniper or two. But that's boring. Perhaps counterintuitively though, I reckon I'd have a lot of fun with a 6x Assault team. More conventionally though, my typical loadout looked like 2xAssault, Heavy, Sniper, SniperMech, plus one whatever - generally some newbie to level up. Probably another Mech if not training. Dropping supports entirely is somewhat controversial, but hardly unprecedented. P.S. That said, I've only ever gotten access to Blaster Launchers once, on my first playthrough at normal/non-ironman difficulty. Never got to assault a Battleship for the requisite fusion core item required to research the launchers in my subsequent games. I'm probably far too far into my current game to make any changes, but what does the original base class of a character do for MECs? For instance, what would a sniper-turned-MEC bring to the table that a heavy-turned-MEC wouldn't? Two things - the soldier's aim score and one special ability depending on class alone. Assault - damage from enemies within 4 tiles is reduced by a third Heavy - 20 aim penalty for the nearest enemy, who also cannot crit Support - 10 bonus defense for your squad within a moderate radius Sniper - Shooting before moving gives a +10 aim and +10 crit bonus The Assault's ability doesn't tend to come up very often, as a "tankish" ability, it's far overshadowed by the Heavy. That, and Assaults are too awesome with their regular skillset to give up. The Heavy is unique in that they're the only class with aim progression *worse* than MECs. This means it's the only class where it's advantageous to convert them early - in min-maxing terms, you want to do the conversion at or before Lieutenant rank in order to extract the maximum possible aim (for all other classes, converting at Colonel is optimal). The Support's ability is interesting but somewhat fiddly to use. +10 defense is great, but pointless in situations where your MEC is exposed, because it means the enemies will shoot at the MEC (which is the usual thing, they target the easiest thing to hit). So to take advantage of the bonus, you need to ensure your MEC is out of line-of-sight. Now while that's not a bad idea in general, it tends to limit your options when moving your MEC more than usual. The Sniper's ability tends to be a late-game thing, and even then is fairly unimportant. The real reason to take a sniper is the massive aim advantage colonel snipers have over anyone else. A maxed out Sniper-MEC has 105 aim. Assaults 89, Supports 90, Heavies 78. TL;DR - conventional wisdom has it that your first MEC is a Heavy, and that further ones are Snipers. But necessity and random factors can and will override that.

Reads to me that the next 'proper' Hitman is still business as usual, just that the pseudo-spinoff (in the manner of CoD) one that was to be up next is no longer.

Both companies future plans are absolutely dependent not on their designs, but on TSMC's (who actually make the chips) ability to deliver increasingly smaller process nodes without screwing up horribly. It's not a case of designing the fastest thing on paper, but on making the fastest thing that your manufacturing partner can actually deliver with the tools they have. It's the reason both companies flagships are so close right now. They're both pushing the limit of what the current 28nm process can viably do, and as such, neither is actually able to make anything more than minor tweaks until TSMC have their 20nm stuff ready to go.

Yeah, one of the chief flaws of the game is that the late game switches tactical focus from mobility and defensive positioning to simple massing of firepower, which is far less interesting. I've stopped playing several playthroughs in which I was well on the way to winning because it just turned into a chore. That said, heavies are a fine choice but I find Assaults to offer greater versatility late-game. Chiefly this is because Heavies are restricted in mobility - you need to not move in order to use any of the class' defining abilities, and that counteracts the desire to get in close to compensate for the poor aim. Assaults retain full firepower after moving - indeed after dashing - and that is invaluable in situations where somethings absolutely needs to die. Snipers continue to be fantastic throughout the game too, to the extent that I restrict myself to one per mission in order to encourage more mobile and more interesting gameplay. Sure the removal of the ability for Squad Sight shots to crit have weakened the all-seeing Archangel Sniper tactic somewhat (it being the god-king strategy of the base game), but Double Tap remains a "this thing dies now" ability, and there are some fun combo strategies to be had with alternative Sniper builds, such as In The Zone synergies. An underappreciated feature of Snipers which is not readily evident when starting out is that it's often the only 'safe' way to kill awkwardly positioned enemies. By that I don't necessarily mean those hiding in hard-to-reach areas, but rather those where taking conventional shots can often mean activating additional alien packs. This is crucial because on Classic and Impossible difficulties, the hard cap of five active alien combatants at any one time is removed: every alien you activate is out for your blood - not to mention that there's more of them on each map, making contact more likely. To clarify, on Normal/Easy, no matter how many aliens you've activated, only up to five will actually engage you, the rest will run away and wait for some of their buddies to die before joining the fight. If I was powergaming.... I'd go with a heavy duty squad of something like two or three each of colonel-sniper-turned-mechs and Assaults, and a Sniper or two. But that's boring. Perhaps counterintuitively though, I reckon I'd have a lot of fun with a 6x Assault team. More conventionally though, my typical loadout looked like 2xAssault, Heavy, Sniper, SniperMech, plus one whatever - generally some newbie to level up. Probably another Mech if not training. Dropping supports entirely is somewhat controversial, but hardly unprecedented. P.S. That said, I've only ever gotten access to Blaster Launchers once, on my first playthrough at normal/non-ironman difficulty. Never got to assault a Battleship for the requisite fusion core item required to research the launchers in my subsequent games.

Delayed because EA are apparently scrambling to fix BF4 properly first (as far as I know nothing related to the Mantle implementation, just BF4's general suckiness).