Humanoid

Female smuggler was my only character, really, none of the others I tried (granted I only had the free trial month) made it past 15-ish. And I flat out disliked the smuggler gameplay. But the story kept me in it, at least until the end of act one. After that, well, I'll just say I never made it to 50.

Going to have to give the opposite advice to this. Gunslinger + Squad Sight is by far the preferred perk combo. Gunslinger is essentially like-for-like with Snap Shot, a little less damage perhaps, but without the aim penalty. But what the combination means is you get Squad Sight, which is amazing, compared to the mediocre and highly situational Damn Good Ground (which apparently does *not* work while flying). And while researching armour first provides a safety net for beginners, it's a liability for higher difficulty levels. At classic you can still go either way (though even then I'd still heavily favour lasers), at impossible it's essentially mandatory: plinking away with conventional weapons at 6hp Thinmen and Floaters will ensure a rapid death, no matter how good your armour.

Never less than 2 snipers. Providentially, my blonde-haired female Russian sniper was randomly assigned the nickname "Wolf." Those aliens can throw grenades, you know. The line is just something you do to move around between engagements, the idea being that every encounter initiated by the player means the point guy still has a move to get back into cover (and since it's probably an Assault trooper, to hit run and gun), and everyone else can get into cover and fire. When the contact is enemy-initiated, then you likely get to fire all six overwatches simultaneously, then start your turn fresh.

I'd say the mid-to-late 2D RPGs have held up better than the late-90s 3D titles listed there, visually.

Looked up the specs on an off-the-shelf SFX form factor PSU, Silverstone gives it as 125x100x63.5 mm. This would fit in the given specs. As would a low-profile cooler - Noctua's NH-L9 gives a height on 37mm above the motherboard, fan installed, which would also fit assuming ventilation holes are drilled above the cooler. And the video card with a blower exhaust would easily fit within the height requirement. A 2.5" HDD and slimline optical drive should fit over the areas of the board not taken by the CPU cooler. (EDIT: Wait, does the Steambox even come with an optical drive?) Now to deal with the other dimensions, it's crude MS Paint drawing time! I used figures from a Gigabyte mini ITX board, and the Titan (which has a standard nVidia cooler, since they don't allow custom coolers anyway). Figures are in mm, taking the longest total on each side gives 270x282 ~ 10.6 x 11.1in. Obviously there's going to be a fair bit more space between the components required so that they're not hard up against each other, but still, that's within the 12 x 12.4in spec given. I'm not saying that this is how it'll happen, obviously, but that it *could* happen, with the only specialised thing being some sort of accommodation for a PCI-E slot (which on mini-ITX boards is hard up against the edge of the board already) to be made parallel to the plane of the motherboard.

Launch a Kickstarter in Zimbabwean dollars. You'd then be able to claim to have raised trillions of quadrillions of dollars for your project, no matter what it is.

I've found Foxit to be too slow for my day-to-day use - almost as slow as I remember Acrobat Reader being - so I've switched to SumatraPDF for general use. It's not perfect though, I had issues printing a barcode for example (printed out a mostly black box instead), and I've heard some complaints about colour fidelity, but it's lightning fast and simple to use. Case in point - I opened up a test PDF with embedded images, and was able to right click it, select "copy image" and paste it into a graphics editor no worries. I opened up Foxit (which took several times longer to even load up the file) to try to do the same thing and couldn't find a way to do it. It was an eBook/Magazine type thingie, so a big file admittedly, but still, I expect a modern PC to not have to stop for several seconds to load it up. So try Sumatra I guess Monte if you get no joy out of Foxit.

For what it's worth, on easy and normal difficulties, civilians killed offscreen by chryssalids do nothing. On classic, they have a 50% chance of zombifying. On impossible, 100%. But yeah, generally speaking melee-based aliens aren't considered a big problem. I mean later on you meet the Muton Berserker, worry for a moment as it charges towards you, then laugh at it as you pick it off. The key here is the earlier advice to only scout with one guy, and move all the others behind him such that none of them explore any more of the map. Doing this means you'll likely have all six guns pointed at any alien trying to charge at you. I do admit that that kind of methodical play can get pretty boring at times - the winning strategy for higher difficulties is basically forming a conga line (literally, all six adjacent to each other in a line) out of your guys who creep around the map, out of cover but being near it, therefore being able to immediate mass firepower when contact is made.

You can save just the *one* civilian and the mission will be deemed a success. Never risk your guys for any civilians. Saving more than one means you get bonus panic reduction, but again, staying alive is the utmost priority (especially since I believe terror missions give your guys extra XP on completion). I've killed more than a few civilians as collateral damage with the rocket launcher and/or grenades. Yes, I'm a horrible person. Chryssalids are much less scary when you realise they can't attack as part of their move action. This means as long as you're more than one move away from them, you're safe, they'll spend their second action point just walking up to your face, at which point you can melt theirs at point blank. How relatively ineffective Chryssalids in this game is actually a point of complaint amongst XCOM fans, heh. That said though, the best advice for dealing with them is probably to research lasers as soon as possible, two laser shots will take care of them easy. Giving your snipers the Gunslinger perk (and giving them your first available laser pistols) is also strongly recommended. Ultimately though, the best advice for XCOM is this: only ever use your first move of each turn to scout, don't reveal any more of the fog of war with subsequent moves. This ensures you only ever encounter the enemy on your terms, with all your APs available. It also means you don't have to use cover when not actively in combat. P.S. It's weird that there haven't been any good sales for BL2 since the Steam sale. Prior to that there were some amazing deals just about every week, best of which was the game AND the season pass for $13 at GMG. That said. GamersGate currently have 50% off the *Mac* version of the game (which makes it a worse deal for the base game than Steam's current sale), and DLC (which isn't on sale at Steam). But I've been told there's no difference between owning the Steam version for Mac or for Windows. Makes sense, if it's on your Steam account, it's on your Steam account, but I can't verify it myself. Maybe someone who's looking to buy the second level cap pack (*hint*) might want to take the bullet for us and try getting the Mac version for $2.50 to test? :D P.P.S. The XCOM collection* is $10 at Amazon right now. Non-US residents will have to enter in a fake US billing address to allow the transaction through, any old address will do. (Predictably, most people I know enter Beverly Hills 90210) * XCOM: Enemy Unknown (w/ Slingshot and Elite Soldier Packs) + Apocalypse + Enforcer + Interceptor + Terror from the Deep + UFO Defense

Given how Adobe's history of vulnerable products, how would we be able to tell? Maybe it will lead to a reduction in exploits, as attempting to read Acrobat's massive bloat will lead to many a hacker suffering an aneurysm.

That height dimension is crazy, some video cards would probably be that thick by themselves. But it is very wide, which leads me to think it may be a side-by-side arrangement: a mini-ITX board is about 7" each side, a large video card is about 10"x4". So lay them both next to each other and you get the approximate dimensions given.

Great, so now Garrett is Kai Leng.

Ah, but according to the article, a backpack is a no-no. Cancels out the +1 score from the umbrella in the first place. (I don't own an umbrella and use a backpack, so -2 for me)

Hey, it's the Guardian's fat brother.

I won't wear anything that can't be machine washed. Am currently 17/40, but I still have a little bit of time to improve my score.

Was puzzled to see a parcel on my doorstep this evening, in a resplendent forest green plastic bag emblazoned with the insignia of Sweden Post. Turned out to be the Numenera sourcebooks, though why they were sent from Sweden is beyond me. Still waiting on the Shadowrun goodies, though they're not officially late yet.

Huh, I didn't know that campaign was still going. Not really of any personal interest since I've never played its predecessors, but I'm in a good mood (go Hawks) so eh, backed. And voted for H. Probably 50:50 with E really, but I think E will get to the runoff vote regardless, so backing the underdog for now. Sorry Keyrock, but I'll throw some cash at your genie game as well to make up for it.

Or more like Ant Farm Simulator 2014.

I back games that I have no intention of playing, just for the hell of it, so the question doesn't mean much to me. But yes, I'd back an Obsidian title be it a space opera, a city-builder, a side-scrolling platformer or a dating sim.

The thing is, there is no reasonable solution, even if the three players in the market (nVidia, AMD, Intel) played nice with each other: any collaborative effort to replace DX would be similarly hobbled in performance due to the consequent need to be generic enough to work with the full range of products. If we want to extract 'full' performance from our toys, the architecture-specific API is pretty much required. (Unless there was a sudden outbreak of peace and love between the competitiors resulting in magnitudes more cross-licencing and general tech sharing) So I'm not so firm on how I feel about this. It could be the thin end of the wedge leading to the death of competition on one (admittedly extreme) hand. nVidia can try to respond but will be limited by having no presence in consoles, meaning they have the much tougher task of getting developers to specifically support a much much smaller segment of the market (having to code for PCs with nV GPUs alone, as opposed to all three of the next-gen consoles, PCs with current or newer AMD GPUs, and upcoming AMD APUs). But at the moment we're just leaving so much performance on the table (Carmack's term) because of the atrocious overheads imposed by DirectX (and OpenGL is no better). In the manner of which Sound Blaster/AdLib support was required by the early 90s, shared codepaths are nice, but damn, hearing the wavetable MIDI capable cards made the sacrifice seem compelling. If DirectX were to be the new "Sound Blaster-compatible" and Mantle the MT-32, I'm not sure I could say no to that. Glide faded from memory not because it was proprietary, but because the Voodoo3+Glide package was matched then beaten by the TNT2+DirectX package. I wonder what an alternate universe where 3dfx had trounced nVidia would look like. EDIT: On Mantle itself, Carmack hasn't said much on Twitter, save that MS and Sony may be somewhat hostile to the move as it erodes the main speed advantage their consoles enjoyed, a result that would play into the hands of Valve. Aside, I don't think the work, partly inspired by Valve, that both GPU vendors will no doubt be ploughing into Linux right now is of any real relevance to this move. At best it'd bring the situation into parity with DX on Windows, as opposed to something to improve on.

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he, given that both consoles are powered by their competitor's tech. Though it's a fair enough statement really. (Both links pointing to the same article by the way) Actually the elephant in the room now is AMD's announcement today of 'Mantle', a semi-proprietary API intended as a faster alternative to DirectX (by virtue of being very device-specific). Normally one would think this would have a snowball's chance in hell of being successful, but if it's tightly integrated as part of the console dev kits, it would mean the tech would be present by default in cross-platform games. (And it will be present in Battlefield 4 and all subsequent Frostbite engine games at the very least) In terms of competition, it's a strike against both nVidia and Microsoft: the former not having an option to migrate from the slower DirectX since they don't have any presence in consoles to leverage a competing solution; the latter in its loosened grip on PC gaming with the DirectX-Windows co-dependence. Then again, this is AMD, who are somewhat prone to tripping over their own feet from a winning position. Me, I don't anticipate a huge impact for now, other than some headline games having a faster "Mantle mode" graphics option, but in the medium term, it ought to also contribute towards the increasing viability of Linux gaming. At the very least, hopefully it needles Microsoft enough to work harder on improving the atrocious performance overhead of DX. TL;DR version: PC games can be programmed to extract similar performance from hardware as consoles are able to now, and this can be done with comparatively little effort for the upcoming generation of games.

A regular poster on the Anandtech forums admitted to having faked that leak. http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2343871&page=14 Obviously he could be lying, or double-bluffing. :D

Naturally. From the reports I've seen though, the Villa players didn't even half-heartedly appeal for a penalty. Too weirded out to think clearly perhaps.

Valve are a developer? Could have fooled me. (Being facetious of course, but it's also true I've never played any of their games)

Would have been a great moment had the shot gone in (heck, great composure just to shoot), and I say that as a Spurs fan.