Humanoid

It's kinda scary to think that they're probably going to drop to half their peak number, in that that number would still be, in terms of revenue, orders of magnitude larger than any other game out there. But yeah, Cataclysm is the common marker for the start of the descent, and that holds personally true for me as well, I vastly scaled back my responsibilities at that point, entering a semi-retired state for my final year of playing.

Put in a few hours tonight, but have wrapped out for now. It's a good game, probably a very good game, but not quite a "grab you by the lapels and pull you in" level of good - or at least not yet. I use my patented "how late am I playing this game on the day of acquisition" scale, and it rates a 1am. (On invitation I was also happy enough to take a break about an hour in to get some multiplayer Monaco in) If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it isn't meant to be - it's something I'd recommend to anyone (and have given away my extra copies coupled with that recommendation), and overall I'd say it hit my window of expectation, given the source material and the resourcing, smack bang in the middle. Haven't played enough to put in a big picture review, but a running commentary of sorts: put in in a spoiler tag because of the nature of running commentaries, but nothing explicitly spoilerish (and also because of the secondary reason of it being rather long-winded). Played the DRM-free version for what it's worth.

I don't know the slightest thing about the ruleset, but I'm diving in anyway with a custom/null class. Hopefully I won't flop too badly....

I'd have named him Iron Bull.

Here it's 3am, basically maximising the amount of time I have to wait before playing it: too late to play it before sleep, so it'll have to wait for basically an entire workday cycle.

I went for rechargeable AAs from the get-go, but I don't use it for much (my XBox generally isn't for gaming, and until last week, the only PC game I preferred a gamepad for was Sleeping Dogs), so it's hard to get a gauge on longevity. Plus I got the glittery Eneloop batteries, they're so pretty (and bloody good).

MS make both wired and wireless versions. Naturally the latter can pair easily with the XB360, but requires an receiver to work with a PC (though they sell them bundled with the gamepad in the "for PC" branded packs). Further, there is an option to either use 2xAA batteries or a rechargeable proprietary battery pack with it.

Couple hours of two-player Monaco. All the gameplay videos I've watched prior have been the full four players, so I wasn't sure how well it'd play with fewer, but it worked pretty well. Didn't want to be reliant on the Lookout, so tried a few different pairs, resulting in some pretty chaotic gameplay whenever neither of us played Lookout, or to a lesser extent, Gentleman. Still, some classes do feel like a luxury that's far less viable without a full party.

Yep, that's the recommended setup. It works pretty naturally, I use freelook pretty liberally while driving, and while it's, as stated, just about essential at intersections, it becomes pretty natural in a more general sence in time and you end up looking left while turning left, etc. There are additional camera modes, such as the usual chase cam and overhead cams, which makes parking significantly easier - but I choose to use the first-person camera exclusively. You can look directly behind with freelook only outside the driver side window (as if you're really just sticking your head out the window), otherwise you'll only be looking around the cabin - no looking out the passenger-side.

I'll add a note that setting up a decent control scheme is pretty critical to enjoying the game. It's hard to get a feel for anything with the keyboard, obviously, and I'd suggest a gamepad with analogue sticks as a minimum. Ideally you'd split the steering axis from the brake/accelerate axis: pushing a stick/D-pad in the upper-right position for hours on end doesn't play well. My personal setup for now is an XBox360 gamepad (I have a wheel, but it's a gameport model from the 90s which won't work under Win7). I use the left stick for steering, the right stick for free-look (critical when trying to pull out of a driveway), shoulder buttons for up/down shifting (I play in "real automatic" mode, so it's just reverse/neutral/drive), and the analogue shoulder triggers for brake/accelerate. Various other buttons for left/right indicators, wipers, headlights, and horn. There's a cruise control feature but I choose not to use it for now. The god-king controller for the game would naturally be the Logitech G27, which is specifically supported, and is required for the ultra-hardcore true H-shifter manual driving.

Haven't seen the option, no. But the time compression being directly proportional to the world compression, that's really not surprising. But once you have your own truck, you can go out and drive in your own free time without a delivery to make (and without a trailer if you like), which more or less fulfils that function: drive from Glasgow to Prague in one session if you like - it'll take a number of hours in-game - just remember to refuel and take the occasional nap.

What's there to say? You drive a truck around Europe. The game has RPG elements in that you can level up both your driver and gear up your truck. Initially you're just a driver for hire, with no cash and no truck. You take jobs to deliver goods from city A to city B and get paid for it (and gain experience). You're docked cash for damaging the truck and/or cargo, and can be fined for various traffic violations, such as speeding, failure to use headlights at night, etc. When you level up, you can assign points in various categories such as long-distance driving, or valuable/hazardous goods shipping. Not long into the game, with the help of a bank loan, you can purchase your own truck, an entry level model of course, which you can upgrade for cash, or replace. A bit later on you can hire other drivers to drive your other trucks, and before you know it, you're the boss of Europe's biggest freight company. As for realism: Graphically it's quite nice. There's not really all that much to show, granted, since the main view will be of endless expanses of tarmac, but I can't complain. Weather effects are well done, particularly like the rain (which will really make you turn on your wipers, which, yes, is an active feature). The trucks are realistically modelled inside and out, and officially licenced from all the major brands, except Mercedes Benz (who are rebranded as Majestic). The cars you encounter on the road, while not explicitly named, are recognisably real models such as the Mazda 3 and Ford Focus. You won't be able to explore the cities in any real way though, at best it feels like you're entering the outskirts of the major ones, and while you can see some famous landmarks, it's nothing like how cities are modelled in games like GTA - they're mostly represented as towns of maybe a dozen roads. The world is, of course, significantly compressed, somewhere up to 10x time compression outside town, significantly less once you arrive. This feels about right: it places most drives, at least initially, at about the 30-60 minute mark (for say, London to Birmingham and London to Liverpool respectively). Once you progress to longer drives, other elements like sleep (stay awake too long and you'll black out and likely wake up in a ditch and/or with a tree in your windscreen) and refuelling. Road rules as far as I can tell are correct, though I've never driven in Europe (or anywhere really, never driven a car in my life) - in Britain you drive on the left side, as opposed to the rest of continental Europe, road signs show locally-correct symbols and units. There's even a feature where you can tune in to real-life Internet radio for whatever region you're driving in, which adds a nice sense of immersion even if you don't understand a word the DJs say.

I only got a few hours out of Fallout 3, as opposed to the triple digits of New Vegas. I had no particular motivation to do what the game wanted me to do (to be fair, NV had the same problem post-Benny), but perhaps the part that broke me was the game's insistence that, despite the world being a wide-open wasteland, I should have to navigate tunnels to get anywhere important. No thanks.

The main inconvenience with the DirectX thing is that you have to be in online mode to do it - if I forget to launch a game at least once right after I download it, then it won't work in offline mode. Anyway, loots: Surgeon Simulator 2013 Season of Mystery: The Cherry Blossom Murders Mark of the Ninja Bastion Euro Truck Simulator 2 Dishonored - The Knife Of Dunwall DLC Deus Ex Human Revolution: The Missing Link DLC Also bought Monaco 4-pack from the official site after they price-matched Steam.

I always founds the game to actually be decidedly niche. I remember playing it waaaaaaaay back in the day. I also picked it up off GoG not too long ago, and realized that perhaps I didn't finish it because it simply wasn't my cup of tea. Same, as a kid it was just too fast for me, I couldn't deal with the actiony gameplay it sort of devolved into after the first few levels. And the trains, god, the trains - I might have ragequit the game for good after the umpteenth time being run over by the trains. I still dislike the RTS genre in general these days so the preference has never really gone away. Happy to back this of course, but it's something I'll then ignore until it's released.

It's on a different landmass, and has one new faction, a Saracen doppelganger, added. Biggest gameplay change is probably that it lets you rebel and start your own faction. It also has a combat-only multiplayer mode.

Some random pickups while waiting for Shadowrun Returns, working my way up to my own truck in Euro Truck Simulator, going back to pick up some of the challenge achievements in Surgeon Simulator, finished Season of Mystery: The Cherry Blossom Murders in a couple sittings, a bit of Theme Hospital nostalgia, and one mission in Dishonored before getting tired of it again (started in October, am now five missions in).

Heh, Xeon W3520? I remember a lot of people picking them up for home use, either due to shortages in supply of the i7 920, or because they hoped the Xeons would be better binned compared to the consumer line - there also might have been pricing anomalies making the Xeon cheaper. They were in all technical respects exactly the same chip.

Heh, I probably should have clarified. Multiboxing is controlling more than one character simultaneously, that much is obvious, and can be done for whatever reason desired. In my case, it was taking advantage of a bonus where if you 'recruited' a new account, and the recruiter and the recruit were in the same party, experience gain was tripled. Now I did this way back when the level cap was 70, so probably sometime in 2007, and the triple experience only worked until level 60, i.e. the base game level cap. The base game by itself was something like $5, with a free month included, so I figured why not, level up a couple of 60s real quick because I wanted a shaman (which was not an option for the Alliance faction in the base game). The mechanics are easy enough: launch multiple instances of the game executable (fully supported with WoW, not the case with TOR apparently), and use AutoHotKey to send commands to the 'background' window(s). My form of multiboxing was very basic, one command to make the background character follow the foreground character, one to perform the basic attack spell, and one to heal the foreground character. Functionally not very different from a TOR companion in that regard. Commands can be overloaded, which is to say, I had one of my attack keys perform an attack with both characters (which is basically what you were seeing, just on a smaller scale), others, such as the heal one, did nothing on the foreground character. Anyway, the implication of this is yes - in WoW you will see parties of up to five identically set up characters, usually with names like 'Bobone', 'Bobtwo', 'Bobthree', etc, (since there's no need to hide it) all performing the same action at the same time, most commonly in PvP matches. And as long as the player behind them is paying Blizzard their 5x$15 per month, then it's totally fine by them. At any rate, while I'm sure some players bend the rules, I made sure none of what I did was against the terms of service. Using the refer-a-friend system to recruit yourself is fine. Being logged into simultaneous accounts is fine. And the use of AutoHotKey is fine - with the proviso that there is no time-based automation: i.e. you hit a button and the commands sent by AHK need to be singular and immediate. From what I gather, this all makes most of these techniques against TOR's ToS in more than one way, so your report is correct in that regard.

More like $100k. The general conversion rule-of-thumb being +50% these days.

Huh, I didn't know they disallowed multi-boxing (not saying that guy you recorded was me ). I did do it in WoW once upon a time as a leveling measure, admittedly - it's something they're okay with though.

I dunno, number of hours as opposed to quality seems to be Bethesda's modus operandi. :D But in all seriousness, well done that man.

At the risk of piling on, Oblivion is still one of the trinity of games I can say are the worst I've ever had the misfortune to purchase. The other two parts of the trinity are Civilization: Call to Power and Mass Effect 3.

Can't have a good sale when there's nothing good to put on sale.

I thought it was meant to be the old woman at the back in purple in Malcador's post. Yeah, out of this entire thread I pick out that woman ...something's obviously wrong with me.