Humanoid

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.

I've heard second hand that it's still online-only, with some guff about the "integral social element" or whatnot.

Obviously women in power armour would be stronger as there'd be more room to fit extra machinery in the same sized suit.

I'd be interested ...if I could then replace SteamOS with a more reputable Linux distro. Would be pretty dirty if there were some shenanigans like games that play fine on SteamOS being artificially locked out of the regular Steam client for Linux. Assuming that doesn't happen, then saving the $100 on the OS when building a backup gaming machine would be pretty nice. Might build a Linux gaming box when Kaveri is released.

I was going to complain about the missing Righteous Fire expansion missing from Privateer, but double checked and there it was. No idea how long ago it was added, but for a while now I've only been playing the original campaign since my CD version is several hundred km away. Well, I know what I'll be playing this weekend.

And a bonus one.

Found one. Slightly earlier timeline than I thought, though if you look at the other tab in the browser (Netscape had tabbed browsing? I don't even remember that), BIS was still sort of open (I think they locked most of the forums but OT or something was still accessible for a bit). Alongside that I also found some old video clips of TessCalliSarah giving a guided tour of her new house, heh.

Tessie made a one-off post in the tarna thread recently. Haven't seen the former three in forever.

Humble Bundles have frequently overlapping titles, so I imagine that's the most common source. Technically, according to their terms, you're not meant to split up the bundle, but that's obviously difficult to enforce. Sometimes multiple titles are attached to a single key however, for example the recent Paradox bundle had one key that redeemed both Crusader Kings 2 and Magicka, so those couldn't be split (and I already had CK2, so the copy would vanish into dust if I redeemed the key to get Magicka). The other reason I guess would be getting multi-packs of games, which is often done for multiplayer-oriented games, and which are typically priced at four for the price of three. So any reasonable person wanting to buy three copies would get a spare one. Less reasonable people like myself might also buy the multipack for the sake of the bargain, as irrational as it may be.

Yeah, at times it does that irritating wave mechanic where there's a counter of say, 20 guys you need to beat up, and they'll just keep spawning until you get that counter down. About as excusable as it was in DA2. Certainly would have preferred fewer but more varied (and tougher when necessary) mooks rather than the endless clones they send at you. Unsurprisingly it led to my disregarding the optional missions from a very early point. I mean they dress it up, but Drug Bust missions are beat up some guys then hack a camera. Fight club missions are beat up some guys, then beat up some guys. The core storyline has enough of that already, it'd have been nice if the side content was significantly different, at least to the extent that say, SR3 managed to make it.

The Interplay forums were only around for about a year I think. I know I registered on BIS in mid-2002, and this place was opened February 2004 (since I assume my registered date was within a day of the launch, which also appears to be the date this thread was created), so that'd place the forced migration from BIS to IPLY in late 2002 to early 2003? (God the colour scheme for that forum was ugly) I might have better info on my other PC, got a screenshot of a couple incidents (such as the whole Lord Jim thing) which would have timestamps on them.

Looking at a list of GFWL games, I only have two, and one of them, Fallout 3, I don't even remember it being there (maybe it wasn't in my copy?). The other, Street Fighter 4, I dismissed ignored whatever it wanted me to do and just played normally. I played very little of both games, admittedly.

It was IWD2 for me. And like other long-timers, stayed for the off-topic: heck after IWD2 I think I stayed more or less clear of any of the specific game forums. And I may be misremembering things, but I don't think I'd ever signed up to any forum before BIS, and was very timid initially.

Based on the clues, it's obviously Looney Tunes. You may scoff, but did you expect South Park too?

Sameish, but sometimes I wouldn't bother going back to the gamepad (especially if it had turned auto-off) unless there was a tricky bit. Actually biggest improvement the gamepad makes is just for driving, fighting with the keyboard full time is perfectly servicable. Incidentally, I checked out my total playtime on Steam: 13.9 hours for SD, 13.8 hours for SR3, heh. I guess I have a pretty specific threshold for when I get bored of this type of game.

I went with KB+M exclusively for the first few hours, it was mostly okay, except it was hard to tell which key to hit during QTEs (arrgh), especially when fighting the generic grappler dudes. Switched to gamepad after that, but after failing a number of missions involving aiming, I ended up having to go back to the mouse now and then (fortunately not *too* often).

I had to keep switching control schemes between mouse and gamepad depending on what a given mission wanted you to do. It was a little jarring for an open-world game in that there were clear distinctions for when the game wanted you to punch stuff and when it wanted you to shoot stuff. But yeah, I found it servicable, and generally more fun than SR3, not least because the enemies were at least finite. (Maybe I was doing it wrong, but whenever I fought in SR3, it was just endless spawning waves of enemies arriving in endless waves of cars) I got thoroughly sick of the "grab enemy by the leg and elbow them in the knee" counter animation though. EDIT: Still playing FONV, but my violent nutter run came to a pretty rapid end, decided to call it a day on that character after finishing the hunt for Benny (the best part of the game anyway) when I turned the Tops into a fiery inferno, burning everyone in that place (including the restaurant and courtyard, which until now I had no idea existed). As much as I liked the idea of properly RPing such a character, the main reason for playing was to play all four DLC (all totally new to me). And high level DLC means quests which means a reasonable character, so I started over as a pretty boring neutral guy, for what I expect will be a fairly normal completionist run.

I guess the league format might affect compatibility, but a quick search did indicate that the versions are multi-player compatible in that you can play against the expansion teams, just not as them.

Tangentially relevant, the upcoming Humble Bundle appears to include this at the $1 level.