Humanoid

I haven't made a serious post in this thread yet, and this is borderline, but the only real negative I can say about the aesthetics of Cadegund's outfit is that ridiculous headwear*. The armour, I feel, is somewhat analogous to a modern women's business suit, not overtly sexual, but neither is it unfeminine. * Then again she is a priest, a group of people not known for their sensible hats, no matter what creed.

Assuming it's meant to be a premium release with a clock speed bump, like the old Extreme Edition P4s, it does seem ridiculous, yes. Reports are a bit sketchy at the moment, there's stuff flying around like 220W+ TDPs and $800 price tags, but none of it is official as far as I can see. On the other hand, if it's meant to be a replacement for the 8350 at a similar price point and TDP - analogous perhaps to Richland vs Trinity, then it's a fair enough product, really.

You can put SSDs in PS3's right now ....for no real benefit. Something about how it handled storage meant the speed of SSDs was fully wasted. I use the bosses as a cheap punchline, but ultimately the problem I had with DXHR were the long slogs in the linear missions without letting up. I'm under the impression that this was a result of the removal of potential hub cities in Montreal, and later Singapore, so it'd probably take that for the game to drag me back in. As it goes, I quit after the Picus HQ mission, which was set-up back-to-back with the very lengthy TYM section, it just turned into a painful, unengaging trek through hordes of identical mooks.

To be fair, RAM frequency makes bugger-all difference unless using integrated graphics, which I trust this machine will not be using.

The Witcher 2 was my game of the year, almost in spite of the combat. That's probably exaggerating a bit, but I'm indifferent about it at best. On easy difficulty it didn't annoy me, and that's a pass for an RPG as far as I'm concerned. Then again I'm on record as holding up Ultima 7 combat as what I'd like my ideal CRPG to have. It can be a difficult dilemma to face when combat is in character, but when I as a player can't be bothered engaging in it. A recent example is Expeditions: Conquistador. I've recently started a new game as a confrontational bastard who doesn't compromise or forgive. But when playing the game, I have the option of going into an extended battle, or clicking the dialogue option that skips it and lets me continue doing other stuff. It's really hard to resist hitting that latter option. And just to veer further off-topic, it's partly the reason why I can't definitively say that PE is the game I'm most looking forward to. The IE had some great games made with it, but the mechanics of engagements within the engine were nothing but tiresome to me.

I hadn't actually tried clicking the trailers until just now, heh. I feel sometimes that I'm the only person who doesn't have a YT account, can't watch either. Yeah, I know it's not hard to find an alternative host, but hey, I'm the laziest person I know.

In my head I tried to rank the various RPGs coming in the next couple years by how much I'm anticipating them. I quickly abandoned that endeavour.

GDDR5, technically, which is a variant of DDR3, just a lot more expensive (but has significantly more bandwidth). A source of confusion to many, GDDR4 and 5 are both DDR3 variants, GDDR3 is a DDR2 variant, and GDDR/2 is based on DDR1. Yeah.... That, and regular DDR3 has spiked in price anyway this year, due to one manufacturer (Elpida) shutting down last year. Note that the spike is due to companies who manufacture the actual chips, different to end-user facing companies that stick them onto, er, sticks (such as Patriot, G.skill, Kingston, etc). There are very few companies in the former category and they have historically engaged in cartel behaviour, and are by far the biggest driver of prices. The latter are small-fry and there are many of them. Anyway, prices have now stabilised at a high plateau, and the betting is that they may well stay there for a good while, potentially until DDR4 enters the mainstream.

Yeah, but with so many MMOs free these days (Rift is going free to play, er, today) it's a question of prioritising and time management. For this game, I can't really give a good answer since I never even made it to level 10, but I'd say one strength for those who like their MMOs with a slice of action is that it's got a bit more focus on mobility in combat and relatively few skills, as opposed to rote usage of a dozen different skills. I'm told Tera is probably most similar combatwise, but never played that myself; or GW2 without the automatic cooperation. I didn't really see anything resembling a plot, nor any meaningful agency in terms of RPing.

I can't answer based on the trailers because it's impossible to forget all the other factors, such as track record and development approaches at the click of one's fingers. I'll say that the DA series has given me a total of half of a good game, while the Witcher series has given me one-and-a-half good games. So that's really the overwhelming factor in my expectations of the coming sequels. I'm not an RPG traditionalist by any stretch, so it at least partially explains my position. Standards such as looting, party management, hard numbers and tactics don't particularly interest me in context of the genre.

Wait who is running for election, Assange? You can't be serious? Not just him, but a formal Wikileaks party is running. Assange himself is running as a senate candidate for Victoria, yes. Though obviously there are some legal hurdles in the way given he can't really attend sittings and such at the moment. No one thinks he's any real chance of winning, but senate elections are weird things and very strange candidates have got up before.

"Fondleslabbers"? Wals, sometimmes I think you're too English for me to understand without a translator. I picked up the use from tech news site The Register. Yes, it's English. It's less syllables than "tablet computer".

I think they were allowing transfers to anywhere you liked? Then for any characters not manually transferred via the account management, they get moved to a default server. I don't think I'll bother managing mine, doubt I'll come back to it with the extra latency when it was clunky already on sub-20ms pings.

Well he is running for the senate here in the election in three months' time, if becoming a politician means being a patriot (ha). I admit to being totally superficial in this regard - I back the information dump being released because it's interesting to read about.

Watched Federico Fellini's Amarcord, if only because I was looking through my library alphabetically. Having previously watched his later La citta delle donne, this is as straightforward as Fellini gets - though those looking for a plot thread will be disappointed. It is a collection, or recollection of fragments of his experiences growing up in pre-war Italy; unlike Francois Truffaut's equally autobiographical Le quatre cents coups[/url] (which pops up even earlier in the alphabetical list), Fellini unabashedly embraces the sentimentality and nostalgia of his youth, and though it deals with death and the looming grip of fascism, it never dwells or broods on it.

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)?