Humanoid

Heh, incidentally my decrepit old notebook falls into that category. But since it's used for nothing but Internet surfing, I went for an SSD, the much lauded Samsung 830. It's an old Core2Duo but ironically it's now snappier than my much newer i5 desktop, which has a relatively sluggish first-gen Indilinx SSD. Feels like a new machine, except when I load up a game on it, it immediately falls flat on its face in a forest of 3D artefacts (the video chip has completely failed for any sort of 3D load). If I wasn't so lazy I'd swap the drives around, especially as the Samsung is twice the capacity of my desktop OS drive.

Wish I had done this a lot earlier. I play Age of Empires 2 irregularly with my sister, but strategically have been always on the back foot playing against the AI because of her refusal to kill animals for food. Well then, armed with a few hints from Google, but nothing explicit since I doubt anyone's bothered making such a silly change, I delved into the map generator script (gamedata.drs and gamedata_x1.drs) and right at the beginning the solution presented itself. #const FORAGE 59 #const FOREST_TREE 411 #const GOLD 66 #const HAWK 96 #const MACAW 816 #const MOUNTAIN1 310 #const MOUNTAIN2 311 #const OAKTREE 349 #const PALMTREE 351 #const PINETREE 350 #const SNOWPINETREE 413 #const SHEEP 594 etc. Welp, that was easy, replace 594 with 59 and now all the sheep are berry bushes instead. Now we can tackle the AI on even footing. :D

I respect the decision to hold off on getting SSDs, but just pointing again that it's more accurate to think of it as not-a-storage-device. It's not an either-or proposition between an SSD and a spindle drive (unless you're on a notebook with no provision for a second drive or mSATA), but rather, something extra you have in addition to your traditional storage. Effectively then, an SSD is a plug-in device used to speed up your PC, in the similar way a video card does. Start with a baseline of integrated graphics and sound and a spindle drive. Want better graphics? Buy a video card. Want better sound? Buy a sound card. Want better I/O responsiveness? Buy an SSD. Yes, capacity is convenience, but one that can be stepped around in a practical way. If you can live with a fixed limit on the number of games you can install on the SSD, great. If not, you can do some trickery with junction points to make use of the limited space: install all your games to your spindle drive, then copy the folders of the games you're currently playing to the SSD. Don't remove the folders from the spindle drive, just rename them, and create a junction point on the spindle drive pointing to the new folder on the SSD. When done with that game, you can just delete the folder on the SSD, delete the junction, and restore the name of the original folder.

Pretty standard for the Civilization designers to leave after their game is completed. Bruce Shelley after Civ1 left and did Age of Empires. Brian Reynolds after Civ2 and Alpha Centauri to do Rise of Nations. Soren Johnson left to help with Spore.

Yes, it's a plain old Steam key generally. Amazon only do a check against the billing address by the way, so if you put in a fake one you can buy it yourself. Though "legally" yeah, safer to get someone in the US to buy from you - and yeah, it's trivial to send cash to other people through PayPal.

He was leading up some Kickstarter project relatively recently: At the Gates

Up to Sony whether they have another Betamax on their hands, with the technological advantage here probably not dissimilar to the one they had back then. What Sony really need is another Trinitron.

You're not playing by your own rules! Anyway, I don't really have a definitive list, just nominated the ten below while looking at my library and picking stuff out of it in the moment (hence the excess, but hey, if you undershoot by five, I'll make up for it). All very much stuff you'd find in mainstream best-albums lists. Abbey Road - The Beatles - Because I need to have a Beatles album here. Truthfully, it's sort of an arbitrary pick between it, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and the White Album. After the Gold Rush - Neil Young - I don't always listen to folk music, but when I do, it's this. Horses - Patti Smith - The greatest debut album of all time. Side A in particular may be the best sound ever committed to vinyl. Let England Shake - PJ Harvey Low - David Bowie - The first and best of the Berlin trilogy, a delicately beautiful collection of song fragments to charm someone who had no prior appreciation of instrumental music in the mainstream. More Songs About Buildings and Food - Talking Heads - The best of Talking Heads as a four-piece, nothing can brighten a dark mood like this can. Parallel Lines - Blondie Remain in Light - Talking Heads - And the best of Talking Head in expanded form (I know it technically was just after this). Nothing makes me want to move more than this. Scary Monsters - David Bowie So - Peter Gabriel Bonus 5 from the 80s, my favourite decade: Actually - Pet Shop Boys Faith - George Michael Rhythm Nation 1814 - Janet Jackson Rio - Duran Duran Songs from the Big Chair - Tears for Fears

It's true, but I feel it misses the point - it's a gaming abstraction and I do feel they could have dressed it up better, but ultimately I don't see the behaviour as cheating. "Realistically", the player has just flown over the aliens in a giant noisy aircraft and is assaulting them. It's reasonable to expect the aliens to be prepared for the player, taking the necessary cover and being ready to fire. Yet the animation implies they've been caught totally unaware and they scramble into cover when you see them. Sure, it looks a bit awkward, but in the end it's a purely cosmetic quibble. Indeed, realistically, all the aliens ought to be on overwatch to begin with and be able to kill you before you're even aware of them. This is how the original XCOM handled it, but this is not a viable proposition with the reduced squad of 4-6 troopers, as opposed to the two-dozen, mostly expendable guys you could get in the original. In the end, I can see the point of view of most criticisms of the game, and agree that many mechanics feel very "gamey" - but yet as a whole, I can see the gameplay justification for all those design decisions, and mostly agree with them being made for the sake of being a more enjoyable, balanced game to play. I stand by my call of it being the 2012 game of the year by some distance. A notable thing that may help with understanding why we have the product working as it does currently: during development, the various traditional squad-game mechanics from the earlier games, as well as other titles like JA2 were not only on the table, but indeed were all implemented and playtested as game mechanics. Time-units/action points were in and fully working, so was free-aiming, in-battle inventory management, and various ways encounters could begin. They then culled the mechanics that didn't work, or unbalanced the game.

Everyone in the game has 360 degree line-of-sight, so there's no real concept of "sneaking up" behind anyone. You can a free attack on unactivated aliens by, as stated in a previous post, the special ability Battle Scanner, or using the stealth-suit Ghost Armor, but that's not really relevant until the late-game by which stage it may not really matter anymore. During the free move they are vulnerable to your "overwatch" reaction shots however, so it's fully possible to wipe out a pack of aliens the moment they show up, although this is rare.

Neither are accurate, but it's easy to see why it can be perceived that way. Unsighted enemies are never aware of you, this is true, but they do patrol. What happens is that alien packs patrol various waypoints. On their turn, unsighted enemies movement path is calculated from A to B, and line-of-sight is tested for each tile between those two points. If they can't see your squad from any of those tiles, the group is moved to the new waypoint. (They don't bother animating the move since they're supposedly out of your LoS, but there was a notorious bug where this was calculated incorrectly, and therefore caused enemies to teleport into LoS) If there is LoS established at any point in their move, then on the first tile that contact can happen, the aliens move there, then get a single *move-only* turn which they must use to find cover for themselves, they cannot in any circumstance dash (i.e. double move) or attack. This is then immediately followed by your turn, so it's never possible for aliens to establish contact then attack you without your having a turn in between to react. Now this behaviour does annoy some people, but is an absolutely necessary one for game balance purposes - if this did not happen, it would be trivial to wipe them out in a single turn. The excellent Toolboks mod can disable this behaviour if you wish to see it played like that. Accusations that this is the AI 'cheating' is absurd because the player gets to not only do the same, but actually shoot when this happens - so if anything it's a handicap on the AI. The altenative coding, functionally the same, would be for the patrol calculation to always end the alien turn in cover, but it'd just draw a different complaint that "cheating AI always spawns in cover". The game rolling all the shots in advance is only vaguely true. Like the Civ games, the game saves the random number seed in your savegame file. Therefore effectively what you have is a fixed series of numbers for a given game, but used as required, so not only for shooting, but morale checks, environmental destruction, etc. If you take the exact same action after loading a savegame, then the same random number is used, creating the same result. If you change up the order in which you take shots, then the outcomes will be different. The actual random number generator itself has been tested independently by multiple different people and has been shown to be a fair and robust one. There is actually something to the common accusation that the RNG is skewed towards the AI, but not in the way most expect: on Easy and Normal difficulties, the *player* gets a hidden +hit modifier after each consecutive time they miss. So if they miss, say, a 25% shot, the next 25% shot they make will actually have a 35% chance to hit, even if the display continues to show 25%. The player, having gotten used to this behaviour, then feels less 'lucky' when they play on Classic or Impossible difficulties, where the rules are completely 'fair'. On easy there are even more hidden cheats in favour of the player: every time they lose a soldier for example, the rest of the squad gets a big flat bonus to their dodge chance. Now if you lose all but one of your guys, you can literally stand in the open and Rambo the whole map without a care, because all alien hit chances are 0% by that point. Another sort-of-cheat in Easy and Normal is that no matter how many aliens can see you, only five at a time will actively take action against you, the rest will just stay back and wait for some of their buddies to die before actually attacking.

Looks like what's happened is that Obsidian donated all the colour that was leeched from New Vegas' palette to that game. Then proceeded to use it utilising the "throw buckets of paint at a canvas" technique.

The most ridiculous bra ever until the one three screenshots down, yes.

Here in Australia, home of manly men, we hunt rabbits using bioweapons. I believe that's sporting.

Ultimately I guess the divide is over this issue of gameplay abstraction. I'm fine to assume for example that a guy standing out in the open, out of cover, isn't just standing there but rather is doing their best to not get shot while running across an empty field or whatever - a turn may represent, what, five seconds of real time? Aside, a technicality that won't change anyone's overarching view, but you can ambush untriggered aliens, using either the Sniper's Battle Scanner ability, or Ghost Armor. My position I guess for people undecided would be to watch a few of videos to get an idea of the tactical depth (or lack thereof, depending on perspective) present in the game. They're edited ~10min videos of single missions, with an entertaining blend of tactical advice and comedy.

Even in terms of cold hard cash though, it might not be a clear-cut win. How much more successful would the expansion be in terms of sales if they included more easy-to-develop content like new races in it? (I mean it's not like they even have different voice acting, so it's just a new face model and texturing really) Anecdotally, a lot of people bought the Slingshot DLC for XCOM not because of the crappy new missions, but because it had sweet hats as a character customisation option. But I guess that's an unanswerable question without seeing hard numbers.

It's been a year since I quit WoW, though essentially I had begun quitting quite a bit earlier than that - I had decided that Cataclysm would be my last content cycle before it was even released (in late 2010). I sort of played through Cataclysm as a favour to my guildmates rather than for my own personal enjoyment, which was probably a good sign that my time in the game was up. Don't get me wrong, I still had some good moments playing it, but the overarching motivation was no longer my own. One of those organised transitions I guess: gave up most of my formal responsibilities and stopped being involved in the day-to-day running of the thing I had created all the way back, and became sort of an elder/advisor/consultant at best. I wasn't one to fade out by leaving an active sub that's no longer used though - I played about the same amount right up to the very last day of the sub. Indeed in a fluke of timing, the very last day turned out to be the day I picked up the first heroic Spine of Deathwing we had.

Then again, WoW only did so in one of their four expansions, and it was largely ignored content. Ok, there were also additional starting zones for new races up to level 10-20, but it just bottlenecked the midgame even more. I had initially assumed the catpeople race would be included, and indeed only be available with the expansion. Not sure of the business rationale of not doing that, but eh. Another thing they could have done without overhauling the established levelling path is add more alternate romances. Yes yes, I know the feeling about that here, but you couldn't say it wouldn't be a huge driver for sales. Plus given there's only on average about three romances per class at the moment, that means there's about 7 romances left to implement for each before even having to add new companions. There, that's the next three years worth of TOR expansions planned out.

Just need to convince the idiots that eating their own hair would be 100% as effective. Wouldn't work if they marketed rhino horn as a cure for baldness, however.

Continuing with movies I should have watched a long time ago but didn't (and might not have appreciated as much then). This week, Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law. Wonderfully moody backdrop that has upped my appreciation of cinematography, complemented by the bluesy soundtrack that was the work of two of the principal actors, Tom Waits and John Lurie. It might have been an oppressive movie nonetheless if not for the entrance of Roberto Benigni who proceeds to turn the picture upside down. Definitely bumping Mystery Train ahead on the to-watch queue, and hoping for a Blu release of Stranger than Paradise.

Get off my land you peacekeeping son-of-a.... "I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that, I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five-hundred would be pretty nice." - CEO Nwabudike Morgan, MorganLink 3DVision Interview EDIT: Well I just picked the most humorous quote I could remember from memory, but the more more apt for game development would be: "My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack’s muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" - Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

Alternate suggestion however: The HD38x0 is slightly slower than AMD's current best integrated graphics. You could buy a basic FM2 motherboard and a Trinity (or Richland when it comes one next month) APU for about $200 all up. That'd be a passable (and stable!) all-round upgrade, then when you can, buy a video card down the line and you'd have a competitive system that'd play anything. The more I think of it, the more I like this idea. Recommended APU model is A10-5700, or A10-6700 next month.

While an SSD is technically a storage device, in terms of impact it's actually better to consider it a performance device. For desktops, their capacity is mostly immaterial, since you'll almost always be running a traditional spindle drive alongside - so psychologically it's more "I've bought this thing, and now my OS and applications respond instantly". I maintain it's the single largest performance upgrade anyone can make to their machine. Unless you happen to pick a model that's known to be unreliable (*cough* OCZ), then I believe that statistics actually show SSDs to have both greater reliability and greater average lifespan than a typical spindle drive. As for the rest of system advice, mk's covered it all really. Wals, buy a new video card if you feel the need for a performance boost, though a 470 is still plenty unless gaming at more than 1080p. I'd move the target up to a 670 or 7950 though, not confident that any less is a sufficiently large upgrade. Drowsy, any individual component upgrade you buy you'll only get a fraction of its actual potential out of, due to bottlenecking - however if your video card is truly dying then buying one now and transferring it to a new board+cpu in the future is a plenty viable and forward-looking move: just don't expect much actual immediate improvement until the project is complete (besides the stability of not having overheating parts). Seconding the 7850 suggestion here.

You already listed two things more than necessary.

From the perspective of those who were jonesing for a Meier Kickstarter of course. Personally I have mixed feelings about 2K - I appreciate that they've given Firaxis pretty reasonable creative freedom (XCOM!) compared to many other developers in a similar ownership situation. Their DLC is mostly disgraceful though, particularly in reference to the Civ5 nickel-and-diming.