Humanoid

Be sure to remember to buy the horse armour DLC before you do that though.

I thought I would be playing Dragon Commander, but it turns out the installer I downloaded from Larian directly is corrupted, and is yet unfixed. Ah well, I'll download via Steam for now, fortunately my Steam downloads are unmetered. More truck driving in the meantime.

I hate the fact that "you can kill anyone!" is the gold standard for reactivity. Yes, I recognize that it's a symptom of having combat as your primary gameplay mechanic. But real reactivity, it seems to me, would involve interactions more sophisticated than just kill/don't any character. Like talking? Going into business with? Sharing an apartment? Playing tic-tac-toe? The problem of course is that a lot of these require specific scripting to be done well, unless you go the Fable/Sims route of fake speech. It's the opposite I think, the claim isn't that it's the gold standard, but that it's the first hurdle. Beyond the base state of existing, which most games treat as an immutable condition, killing an NPC is logically the next step: that is, getting the game to react to the simple binary possibilities of a given NPC being alive or dead. We celebrate the possibility, because like QWOP, barely anyone gets over that first hurdle. If a game can take that step, then as you say, the next frontier is the more 'sophisticated' nuanced stuff.

Lothering is the third intro. Or indeed fourth, if you count the wilds and the tower as separate intros. Yeah, it's a long slog, of which only one part varies.

Heh, I get frustrated with that too ... I mean, I could upload giant uncompressed photos but I'm still old fashioned enough to worry about annoying people with loading them, and most people still don't like clicking links vs. embedding. That "visitor" (cricket?) has an adorable face! ...the robber fly...ick. Makes me think of the Alien using its inner mouth to punch a hole in people's faces. Nice capture, tho. What I used to do, before auto-resizing and before big download allowances, was to upload two images, and use the smaller one as the embed that would link to the larger one when clicked. e.g. [url=http://i554.photobucket.com/albums/jj404/Michael_Ab/robberfly_zps5e4e4b83.jpg][/url]Like so: Probably totally unnecessary these days.

I've felt for a long time that the Origins in, er, Origins, were a nice idea that ultimately harmed the game. Instead of a smooth curve in which the writers could ease you into the game and provide better justification for what followed, they instead let you play a few independent ideas for a while before abruptly grabbing you by the collar and throwing you into the plot, communicating beyond doubt that "yep, you're on the rails now." I've complained a lot about being forced to become a warden in DAO, but ultimately it's not so much the fact itself as opposed to how it was handled - and that itself is down to the hamhanded compromises they had to make in reconciling six different stories into a common one-size-fits-all set of circumstances. So yes, I am in effect arguing for more linearity in the game. Or at least, making an argument that while divergent non-linearity is good, convergent non-linearity is a far more finicky affair.

... the way they handle their DRM-free version annoys me deeply... trying to sell people to the oh-so-hasslefree DRM that is Steam. To avoid swearing: in the olden days, developers were actually able to package bugfixes into small executables, and in most cases these even worked with any previous version of the game. This ability to serve their customers has been lost apparently. To be fair, they're not alone in that Expeditions: Conquistador had the same issue to an extent: their first patch was able to be released as a small executable, but their second required a redownload of the whole game. Applying Occam's Razor, I'd say the stated explanation that Unity makes it hard to patch games is a valid one, as opposed to deliberately wasting bandwidth to push a static number of users towards a different platform. We'll see for sure either way once a few more titles are released.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwpHVBjPr28[/media]

You're never going to make it as a AAA developer with that attitude!

It was hard to tell what station had what kind of content though.

Patch 1.0.2 notes, there's a fair bit of rebalancing going on there alongside the bug fixes. EDIT: DRM-free version is updated on the account website too, have to redownload the whole game though.

It's not even the full series. The only instalment I played, and then only because it was on the driver floppy for my Gravis Gamepad, was Goodbye Galaxy (I think).

RoboCop? Privateer

It's $20, so yes.

Had a couple hours to play some sort of two-player multiplayer game. Thought, why not finally try Company of Heroes? Neither of us had ever touched it, let alone knew the slightest bit about it mechanically, but with limited time, decided to dive right in. 2vs1 against an AI on Easy, should be plenty of opportunity to mess around learning the mechanics as we go, right? Wrong. Ah well, I'll go play the tutorial sometime soon I guess.

I've gone for the DRM-free options of single player games, generally: I've ignored Conquistador, Larry and Shadowrun for Steam (indeed I didn't bother asking for a complimentary Steam key for the former, which they were offering on request). However I do see the value in some cases - I went for the Steam version of Monaco because I really can't rely on multiplayer partners to figure out setting up the unencumbered version. (The alternative would have required setting up Hamachi for virtual LAN play)

Few more points: - The low voltage standards of 1.35V and 1.25V are officially called DDR3L and DDR3U respectively. This does not affect cross-compatibility, any motherboard that accepts DDR3 will run them. The only real tradeoff here is cost, though the difference is usually not significant. Low voltage DDR3 has the bonus of additional overclocking headroom, as there's no issue with running them up to Intel's maximum recommendation of 1.5V, which should allow for higher frequencies to be stable. - As general advice, it's almost always better to run fewer sticks than filling out all your slots - that is to say, on dual-channel platforms, run two larger capacity sticks instead of four smaller ones. This is mainly done to minimise the potential points of failure. In theory it probably also results in a tiny bit less latency, but essentially that's immeasurable. - A lot of vendors these days try to capitalise on the bling factor, providing stupidly tall and awkwardly shaped heatspreaders on their non-budget products. These are largely cosmetic, memory does not run hot enough for any one solution to meaningfully differentiate itself from the other. If you're planning on running a custom CPU cooler (which I tend to be in favour of), be sure that tall memory coolers don't get in the way. - Don't forget to set the correct profile for your memory in the BIOS once installed. By default they'll usually be set to some conservative setting which all platforms can run. The XMP profile(s), which are embedded in the memory, will set the correct (i.e. the maximum they were tested at) settings for your memory, so usually it's just a matter of turning that on. - DDR3 prices are unfortunately at a long-term high currently. While memory prices have always been very volatile, the driver in this case is more serious than it has been in the past. Until last year, there were only four manufacturers of DDR3 chips (as distinct from the vendors who solder the chips onto circuit boards): Samsung, Hynix, Micron and Elpida. Elpida has gone broke, leaving the pool of suppliers smaller than ever. Further, the manufacturers have been known to engage in cartel behaviour in the past, and while they technically may not be doing so now, it is in none of their interests to increase production and cause a return to the average price. So while prices will undoubtedly fall again as DDR4 looms, most observers expect the new price plateaus to be a fair bit higher than they have been in the past. - That said, Skylake and Haswell-E, the first generation Intel CPUs which will use DDR4, are still a couple years off.

The majority of DDR3 sold today is in pairs, i.e. dual channel kits. All that means though is that they've been tested together. So something marketed as tri-channel is basically the same product, except there happens to be three sticks in the pack that have been tested together, and so forth. There is no such thing as a dual(or whatever)-channel stick of RAM, the terminology only applies to the kits. At the consumer level, tri-channel was mainly used for the first get i7-9xx Nehalems, and quad-channel is in the current high end SB-E and forthcoming IB-E platforms, so there's not much market for them. As far as consumer advice goes, memory frequency really only matters when using integrated graphics, and latency, well, it's really of trivial effect for anything. Still, better rated memory tends to indicate that it's further away from its theoretical limit, and therefore can be said to be potentially more reliable. So to answer the direct question: Will anything called DDR3 do? The answer is a qualified yes. As in, it'll almost certainly work, but some of them will mean running your system out of spec, which may technically invalidate your warranty if anything goes wrong. Neither Intel or Asus will support you using 1.65V memory, whilst on the other hand, Asus will support the higher RAM frequencies marked 'OC', even if Intel do not.

No less specific than describing someone as Danish I expect. The religion you speak of is Judaism, which many Jews happen to practice. I'm sure someone will put this in better terms, as opposed to someone whose knowledge of the subject comes from playing Civilization.

Intel recommend a maximum voltage of 1.5v, and that's probably the only spec I'd stick to, avoid the 1.65V stuff. There's a perception that lower voltage stuff is better quality and has better headroom to be pushed, and I don't disagree: there are two lower voltage standards at 1.35V and 1.25V. Modern PCs don't use the FSB terminology as such, but still, to derive the frequency of the RAM from the rating there, divide by 8 (and round a bit). e.g. PC17000 ~= 2133MHz.

Not using the Doc Wagon?

Unfortunately if you start a custom class, it looks like the game just saddles you with a default loadout of SMG and pistol and no spells, even when I dumped all my points into Willpower+Spellcasting. Was just a test rather than actually a serious attempt at another playthrough for now though.

So basically by the term 'wired' they're saying the enhancement a coffee IV then.

One of those actions potentially benefits me, the other benefits Ubisoft. So....

I always felt sieges ended up being more of a case of exploiting the game mechanics than anything - the garrisons are so large, and gathering allies so mechanically unwieldy that the best approach always ended up being taking putting all my archers at the top of the troop list, telling my entire army to stand their ground and take potshots at the castle until their ammo ran out, then repeating until the garrison size became manageable. I think the whole mechanic signalled the end of my dalliance with the game.