Humanoid

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.

The hope was probably more that they'd consider escape from under 2K's iron boot.

Intel don't typically drop prices of their previous gen, and although retailers might do so of their own initiative, it's probably a bonus rather than something to expect to happen. They just tend to quietly phase them out without fanfare. And the RAM should be fine really - technically Intel has lowered the maximum supported voltage for DDR3 on their platforms (since Sandy I believe) to 1.575V (1.5V standard with 5% tolerance), true, but even the 1.65V requirement commonly seen in 'performance' RAM back in the day ought to easily run at the standard 1.5V, perhaps with frequency/timings set to the default rather than the XMP profile. Low voltage DDR is hardly a new thing, my 3.5 year old Lynnfield system was built with 1.35V DDR3. It's a shame that memory prices have spiked lately, since the start of the year. It also seems that Samsung have stopped production of their 1.25V "magic" RAM, which was not only a bargain, but outperformed just about all of the stupid blinged-up "enthusiast" RAM around these days. (I particularly loathe the trend of massively tall heatspreaders)

Three years ago we already had Core iX CPUs out for a while, so unless you bought a particularly outdated machine back then, I see little reason to upgrade. So the first question is, what do you have? If it's a Nehalem or later, i.e. not a Core2Duo or Core2Quad, then keep it and just buy a video card and/or SSD. The gains in CPU in absolute performance since 2009 are utterly marginal, <50%, let alone gaming performance which would be a fraction of that. I would also check if your current version of Windows is an OEM copy - those are linked to your motherboard once activated, so upgrading your CPU (and therefore motherboard) may require the purchase of a new copy of Windows. EDIT: Just to illustrate how little the CPU matters, Anandtech has recently, somewhat controversially, recommended a cheap AMD APU as the best buy for gaming with a single GPU. Most games are so bottlenecked by graphics such that a $100 budget processor does not meaningfully hinder the experience. Now consider that a Trinity A8 is probably not any faster than what you have, and if you were to get a meaningful upgrade to your CPU, you wouldn't be able to fit a new GPU into the budget.

Given it's the third release, the followup then is XBox 3.1, followed by XBox 3.11 for Workgroups.

Ah, I'm not so unprofessional as to give it a final score based on a beta test. But neither am I going to play it again, so.... I dunno, what's the competition this year? In a few monthsyears we may see some rockin' user made content that'll make it a winner, but safe to say that content won't be made by anyone associated with Cryptic, I suspect.

Up to level 8, and probably nearing the end of my run with this. If I were to damn this game with faint praise I'll say this: It's like TOR without the player characterisation. I tolerated TOR because the character interaction at least allowed me to feel some sense of ownership despite the bland gameplay - in Neverwinter everyone is interchangable, mere cardboard cutouts. It's interesting because right at the start, in the first dialogue of the game, you actually do have some reasonable dialogue choice, but it disappears, literally, after the next NPC line. The other problem is mechanical. As a rogue I'm not even sneaky - it's neither encouraged or even possible to sneak around when stealth is just a 5 second duration "reposition in combat" ability. Sure, the combat may be a bit better, but that doesn't make it *good*, it's the same TOR experience where you do nothing but methodically clear out group after group of 2-4 foes even if all you want to do is to get from point A to point B. (Yes, I know TOR has actual stealth, but it's so impractical as anything but a combat opener due to the unfortunate virtual requirement of dragging a companion around) I mean WoW actually has pretty solid stealth mechanics. I used to be able to skulk around, assassinate key targets, often disabling their escorts, then escape to the shadows with careful planning and judicious use of skills - especially back in the vanilla days. Yet WoW classes are accused of being generic when we have counterexamples like the above two games where stealth is little but a novelty if not a pure combat mechanic. Maybe I was expecting too much, but at the moment NW is failing as a game in the two most important metrics - in terms of the MMOs I've played, the worst of both worlds.

At that kind of budget, pretty much everything is within reach, really. Ultrabooks are something that will really benefit from Haswell's improvements in efficiency and graphics power though, so if there's no hurry then I'd advise waiting. There's a bit of a muchness about most vendor's offerings these days since the qualifications of what makes an ultrabook is dictated by Intel, and other limitations are inherent in the form factor. So you know they're going to come with a crappy shallow keyboard and clickpad, limited inputs, etc. The main differentiator will probably be the screen quality. Don't know much about specific models, but I know Asus are trying to push this market with some nice IPS panels on their Zenbook Prime series, and Samsung are doing similar with their series 9 ultrabooks. You could also have a look at the Lenovo X1 carbon, which while having an inferior screen - a pretty good one for a TN panel but I'd expect more for the price point it's at - it at least has the best keyboard you'll find in this class, and there's some style cachet in having it's unique carbon-fibre construction. EDIT: While not an ultrabook, I'd probably also look at Lenovo's X230 (and presumably upcoming X240) notebook. It doesn't strive for thinness or sex appeal, but at 12.5" it's as portable as any ultrabook, is full-powered as opposed to the ULV CPUs in ultrabooks, and has a great screen and while they've succumbed to the fashion trend and gone for a chiclet keyboard, it's at least the best damn chiclet keyboard in the market.

Obviously it's just information from someone in the future, after Bioware reuse the genophage plot device with their new property.

4am there on the US west coast is pretty much prime gaming time in Australia so yeah. Still haven't really played the game, though I had another bash at the character creation. Struggling to get eyes the way I want them, be it for female or male. God I feel so superficial.

Fair enough. I started as a rogue - indeed a thief, so I'm a bit irritated that the game insists I'm a trickster - as I always do, and don't like the idea of being helpful to the poor saps when I'm really there to rob them. I'll make a fighter of as-yet unknown type tonight, my other character archetype. Character creation should be easy for me since most games I will start twice with these two characters and minimal variation, but that's not the really the case. I'm assuming there's no multiclassing here right? P.S. Are the class prefixes, e.g. Trickster, Guardian, etc, actually official D&D subclasses/kits/whatever, or just descriptors used in this game?

Tried it for an hour last night. And by 'tried' I mean I messed around with character creation for over three-quarters of an hour, and actually played for less than fifteen minutes. Character creation is pretty good. Some unnecessarily fiddly stuff (I mean fingernail length? Really?) but overall pretty robust without being too ridiculous - could get the appearance I had in mind for myself, mostly, though the end result was a bit more babyfaced rather than the angular look I was shooting for. Certainly beats out easily the two other recentish MMOs I've tried in this regard, TOR and GW2, though for the former at least I had the luck to have one preset face be mostly what I look for. So yeah, that took 45 minutes despite coming in with very much a firm idea for both character background and appearance, it's not like I was just staring at the screen being unable to come up with a character concept. The gameplay ....eugh. I've only taken three quests so far, and by the time they presented the "fetch nine arrows" one I decided to call it a night. I'll try again, maybe create the second character, but I can't say there's anything promising about it.

Well even my praise that is tainted by the blatant stupidity of the Rayman Legends delay, demonstrating Ubi's unerring ability to screw up everything that's good. But yes, Rayman Origins is a superb platformer, one of the best ever. Also, it's probably because I can't think of any other currently active Ubi-owned franchises other than the juvenile* Assassin's Creed. * Yes, I know that's slightly ironic when I'm comparing it to a platformer.

Registered with the display name nothumanoid, but haven't even downloaded the client so I don't know if that's useful information or not.

I either already have or am not interested in the various titles, but I want that T-shirt, since I missed out on backing Broken Age beyond the base level game-only tier. Hmmm.... EDIT: Never used Humble Bundle before: it says money can be allocated to Child's Play or the EFF, but I only see one general 'charity' slider. Is it just split evenly between those two? EDIT2: Never mind, missed that little triangle next to the label.

Ubisoft's best franchise is Rayman, and I'm not being facetious.