Humanoid

It seems kind of arbitrary what Steam's new not-quite-offline mode can do: it won't grant you cards while playing, but will now save achievements. It won't update games, but will update itself. It won't take screenshots but will show the store homepage. Paranoid perhaps, but it makes me wonder what other data they're slurping while I'm nominally offline. Aside, wacky EA pricing: The Sims 3 by itself: $39.99. The Sims 3 + the Pets expansion pack: $44.99. The Sims 3 + the University Life expansion pack: $19.99. Oookay.

And by brown you mean something like an off-white or ivory. Or bright pink.

I'm awful at texting, it takes me a good few minutes just to compose a short one. But I've communicated to (in person, natch) most people with reason to contact me to not expect responses unless it's something that specifically requires an answer. I'm also limited to 100 messages every six months anyway due to my minimalist prepaid phone account ($30 per six months) - but then I probably only do one or two a month anyway.

If that works, I'm going to go play New Vegas again, for the heat. ...almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.

No one can doubt my surgery skills now!

26°C? People in normal countries set their air conditioner thermostats to cool to 26°C!

I assumed it was meant to be dry British humour, but then I see articles that call that weather hot unironically. http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/hot-weekend-for-london-birming/15188283

Even after the umpteenth time you get captured in a cutscene?

I have an answering machine built into my phone (which I have mostly as an afterthought), I've maybe checked it twice in five years since the landline is really only there for DSL and no one important ever calls me on that number. I haven't changed the stock message so the caller has no way of knowing who they've reached. It was awkward when I found one of the ancient messages was a wrong number from a hospital trying to tell someone that a relative of theirs was terminal. :|

While I don't even slightly doubt it'll come back again before the sale is through, if it doesn't pan out, or if you just want it earlier, I have a couple copies I can lend or trade. Either to a Gamersgate account if you have one, or I can just PM the Steam code, I think. Ironically BL2 is one of those games with regional pricing making it uneconomical for me to buy on Steam directly, heh.

She takes her children corpse-hunting. Now that's a family-bonding activity right there.

The brain transplant is the easiest one by some margin, despite being the last in each category. The game has an XCOM-like inverse difficulty curve, though I suspect the similarities end there. Apparently my next jobs are just doing the same thing over again, but in a moving ambulance instead of an operating theatre, but I'm saving that for another day. At any rate, already got my three bucks worth out of it.

And now Surgeon Simulator 2013. Surprisingly perhaps, the controls aren't *that* unintuitive - only had one failure in the three basic surgeries. It is sort of unbalanced though, the dremel and a scalpel solve all the problems a little too easily... It's just that now, after almost an hour messing around with it, my desktop suddenly feels like it's the one that controls unnaturally.

Trying the demo of Euro Truck Simulator 2 for a couple hours - of which about 30 minutes of which was spent driving, and the balance on parking (or attempting to do so). The experience is passable with a gamepad, but I wouldn't say particularly engaging. I had a wheel about a decade ago, but being a gameport device it's sadly obsoleted, and I'm not about to buy another one, so I'm not sure the game is worth a purchase just yet. Will ponder it until it comes up on the flash sale again I guess. Not sure how much my total absence of driving experience in real life helps or hinders here.... never driven a car in my life.

Oh I'm not saying it would, I'm just saying I'd pay Obsidian for some Skyrim in space Would probably end up with Battlespire in space.

On the other hand, the real pilots might be grateful for the partial suppression of their identities.

Finally, first purchase of the sale: Surgeon Simulator.

So, uh, back to random news: Deus Ex iOS deliberately crippled if run on a jailbroken device. Still happy to take your money though.

What do you mean by "won't work"? I assume your wireless dongle is just a wi-fi thing and not one of those mobile broadband modems, so if Steam is the only thing not working, it might have to do with port forwarding. It's not something I've ever needed to do with Steam, so it's unusual, but they do provide instructions so it's evidently required sometimes. Required ports

Fair enough then. Guess they let an overenthusiastic marketing drone do all the copy:

Not on a machine with it installed at the moment, but just repeating earlier recommendations for a mod that makes animals - both your horses and miscellaneous critters - less suicidal; and one for fast travel to/from the Thieves' Guild (though on second thought, I recommend instead skipping that horrible, horrible questline). A question of my own: the sales blurb for the Legendary Edition claims various extra features besides the DLC, such as mounted combat. Am I to understand that these are exclusive features and that therefore the only way to get them is for previous owners of Skyrim to buy the whole game again? Granted, buying the LE is cheaper than buying all the DLC assuming only owning the base game, but still, the principle kinda stinks there.

I'm only mad at Fargo because of no T-shirt add-on option. The options only came up a week ago and are quite nice (as opposed to the MS Paint mockup), but on the other hand, I want the other mutually exclusive options too (but not so much that I'd pledge $500 or 2x$150....).

Yes, there are, err, some locales on the interwebs where you can, ahem, trade-in your refusenik executables for operational ones. Lucky the drive still works, as it's difficult to download a new DVD drive.

Nope, but I've seen some footage/commentary of it and it's about as far removed from World of Goo as is possible.

My Half Life 2 was the standard double DVD size cardboard box as well. Half Life 2 was 2004 and I know at the very least I was buying the smaller boxes a year earlier with KotOR. I still have all my old large format boxes flattened in the closet, but I'd have to go root through them in order to figure out what the most recent one was. Might have been something like Throne of Bhaal. The newest 'big' box game I can think of is Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, which had a smaller box in it, which had a DVD case in it (I think). Covers all three bases... It was a 2H 2003 release so the timing would match the general phasing out of that wonderful, wonderful cardboard. Sad days. Different regions carried different box sizes though - I bought an imported IWD2 which was a small box, but the local Australian release still came in a big box. Looking at a list of some other 2H 2003 games, Large box titles include Age of Mythology, Max Payne 2, Broken Sword 3, Republic: The Revolution, Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna, and some expansions for The Sims. Looking at a list of 2004 releases, I can't think of any I own that came in a large box.