Humanoid

Finally some decent testing of ULV (or ULT now) Haswell power consumption. The savings are genuinely impressive.

Yeah, it's not the spawning of old, but it's in some ways better. A couple that I remember: Total Annihilation's spawn system was to install a 'light' version of the game, separately from the main installation (both could be installed side-by-side I think). Age of Empires 2 required the CD to start, but allowed you to remove the CD after that to start it on other machines. In both cases I believe it checked the total number of CDs when starting a game - one CD for each three players I think.

I'm not familiar with the game so I don't know what "joining a party" means in context of an RTS. I assume it's just basically just anyone you're playing a game with or against, as opposed to a formal "friend". EDIT:

Watched Shohei Imamura's chaotic Pigs and Battleships. I.... I can't really say what it is - noir, black comedy, surrealist, coming of age neo-realism? Well, it didn't start like that, but I've been told before viewing that it's a film defined by its ending, and that's not wrong at all. The fact can be used as both criticism and praise, but ultimately I'm undecided. I may be in a daze, but I can't say I didn't appreciate it.

You don't need to buy anything at all to play it multiplayer now, so there's that at least. No idea if it's too little too late or no, but it's a nice move in principle.

Hmm, I should have tested that back when I tried Fallout hi-res. Eventually I compromised and picked a middling resolution - 16x12 or something old school like that, and it played acceptably. Anyway, playing at the default resolution (installed fan patch only) didn't fix the issue. But looks like appending the options -doublebuffer -no3d to the shortcut did. Now going to test it with the high-res patch.

Arcanum at 25x14 lags out something fierce graphically. Like Crysis eat-your-heart-out lag. Reinstalling to see if that's the root of the problem and might just go with monitor scaling if so.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/26468/

MCGA is the one that's always confused me. It was so rare, such that I've never seen it in action, but 256 colours (as I saw from the MPS game startup menus - remember having to configure your settings every time you started a game?)! Never knew what it was until the advent of Wikipedia.

Thinking of retrying Arcanum after a decade or so. Got the following mod recommendations from GOG. Any further suggestions (or advice against the below)?

It's notable however that Larry was preceded at the studio by the prozaically named "Softporn Adventure", with Roberta Williams herself famously in the buff on the cover. Terminology aside though, the point is correct that it was a thematic fit. Sierra also famously sold more hint books than actual copies of Larry 1. There's the obvious piracy angle, though I wonder how much of it is from the embarrassment factor (though the difficulty of Sierra games seems to have overcome that...). Two-leaf clovers need some more love in this thread.

While waiting on the E:C patch before starting my next walkthrough, played a few hours of Sleeping Dogs for the first time. It's damning it with faint praise perhaps, but I liked it more than SR3 (a game I suspect might need to be played with a friend to get the most out of). Probably mostly due to the environment design. Verdict - eh, let's say I'm not in any rush to fire it up again, but it's something I'll consider when I'm bored on a weekend afternoon and am scrolling through a list of something to burn a few hours on.

Installed it, but apparently the tutorial function is locked out in the beta. As someone who hasn't played an RTS more recent than one from fourteen years ago, feeling rather lost...

Despite the stick it's copping, Haswell is still the best consumer-level CPU you can get, and it should be within budget, if just barely. Unfortunately DDR3 prices have spiked this year to the highest they've been in a long time.

It makes sense for fighters to be fully covered but also for wizards to always walk around stark naked, except maybe for their reagent pouch.

I don't think your scouts skills come into it, other than the fact that you have scouts at all. As far as I can tell, each point of the scouting skill is one extra movement point per turn, plus a +1 modifier to the scouting skill checks in dialogue.

Well speaking of AMD, Richland was just released today. Odd strategy for them to go head-to-head against the Haswell release, but business savvy is something AMD lost a while ago. The product itself - well, no surprises. Richland is to Trinity as Haswell is to Ivy, with the same ~10% boost. It's not as disappointing because it was a known quantity, a straight refresh on the same node, whereas Haswell is a 'tock' that ended up feeling like a 'tick'. AMD's test in this segment will be Richland's successor Kaveri. Fortunately for AMD, it's the market segment I'm currently interested in, and I expect to be building a A8-6600K-based mini-ITX box later this month. Unfortunately it looks like AMD have followed up the stupidity of not selling the A10-5700 in Australia by not selling its replacement the A10-6700 either. It's inexplicable.

Well the likelihood is that the 25 people you'd think of handing them out to each have 25 codes of their own.

Yeah, the fancy picture viewer makes it hard to find the image URL (if someone has a less roundabout method than quoting the post with the image then toggling BBcode mode, let me know), seems like a triumph of, er, flash over function. Still, it does have another advantage in that it has is that attachments usually can't be seen by guests.

Olaf the Belly Dancer?

I'm more curious whether the nature of Sony's surprise was: a) Awesome, with this we've unlocked the key to harnessing the full power of Cell! We can now cancel the PS4 project immediately; or b) Never ever ever EVER do that again. We must never again speak of this, lest you find a horse's head in your bed in the morning.

Goal reached, and more importantly, a boxed copy is a thing now, yays.

Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face is to Ultravox's Vienna as that flood is to the city of Vienna.

Easy money: sell DLC that does nothing other than removing the boss fights.

I really struggled with a rogue in MoTB, but with SoZ, eh, it's hard to go wrong with four characters of your design unless you go really exotic.