Humanoid

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)?

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.