Humanoid

I wonder if the sales figures include Civ:CTP and it's technically non-Civ sequel. The games mag I was subscribed to at the time had a "shootout" between SMAC and CTP1 and called it for the latter. Ugh, that was a terrible, terrible call. And yeah, I have it installed without Alien Crossfire, and have done so for years, despite spending entirely too much on a copy of the Planetary Pack on eBay to get the expansion. On the roleplaying though - I tend to roleplay in my strategy games regardless of how much it's supported. Usually as a vindictive bastard of a leader. The loss of personality in Civ compared to SMAC isn't entirely down to the setting either, since Civ2 had oodles of it. The wonderful wonder videos, the er, charming advisors, the construction of your throne room (I always upgrade my rock to a chair first)... those all were relatively unobtrusive additions that added to the charm - I find the complete removal of those aspects with no attempt at replacement rather baffling.

There's also some brouhaha about subscribers having to spend their cartel coins to unlock the catpeople race. The first non-gear game feature (expansions aside) that subscribers need to 'pay' for? Not sure I like the implications of that.

Can't say I'm unhappy about the development personally - shove that mediocre IP to mediocre developers and let the developers I like work on more interesting properties. I'm not saying SW fans don't deserve good games, but the idea of Obsidian doing another Star Wars title as mooted was one of my least favoured outcomes. Yes, selfish I know given the potential windfall, but hey, everyone wants to ensure their idea of a good game gets up.

Fat. TOR has four body types for each gender (identical for each race), being: normal, fat, space marine, weedy. The differences are less pronounced for women though, it's more like normal, marginally overweight, tall, and skinny.

Y'know, all this talk about BL2 combined with some record boredom (I would say I've played fewer hours as a percentage of time this year than any year in the past two decades) means I might bite on it for $10 (Gamersgate daily deal). Would be the first pure FPS I've bought in over a decade I think.

Odd that about 90% of the EA catalogue is on sale but a few stragglers. Unfortunately the only one I particularly want, Strike Commander, isn't included. Only a half dozen sale titles aren't already in my library.

Slight nitpick, but the highest level graphics "Iris Pro" is codenamed GT3e and will not be available in Ultrabooks. Further, for desktop, it'll only be available in the BGA-form 'R' series CPUs - so yes, that soldered CPU thing has begun. You actually have to make sacrifices in CPU performance too: 'R' series CPUs are clocked lower than the regular and 'K' offerings which have more modest graphics performance. It's likely the primary target for Iris Pro on desktop then is the all-in-one market, particularly the iMac. Wikipedia, I know, I know. Check out the table at the top of this thread - all those CPUs, the baseline series and the gamer-targetted 'K' series all only come with GT2 HD4600 graphics. In typical dodgy Intel naming fashion, 'plain' GT3 can either be 'Iris 5100' or 'HD 5000', depending on TDP. These will the the ones you see in 'U' series Ultrabook CPUs, sensibly the thirstier GT3e Iris Pro will only be available in high-end 'regular' quad-core mobile CPUs. (Looking at the charts provided by Intel, it's running up to 55W, so almost desktop-level consumption)

They haven't implemented the romance with the IA's sexbot, so no.

Doesn't sound like the PSU thing is a big deal, there's just new power-saving functionality which will require a compatible PSU to operate, otherwise it'll function like the previous gen in this regard. The USB3.0 issue is a real one though, and while significantly less bad than the Cougar Point chipset issue when Sandy launched, it's irritating that defective hardware is being launched at all. For what it's worth I actually do still run one of those faulty Cougar Point H67 motherboards, was too lazy to send it back interstate.

I tend to think it's more the early 90s, most of the late 90s seemed to be a blur of mostly identical-looking C&C RTS clones and generic Quake-engine shooters.

One of the reasons I never became particularly good at Civ was that I tended to do that kind of thing out of spite rather than through strategic thinking. But still satisfying nonetheless. If I didn't have the world under my thumb I'd be charged with war crimes. ALL the war crimes.

I'm annoyed that they squandered a chance to use Spamalot as a headline.

They're also doing NWN1+2 for $9 for anyone who missed the GOG sale. ...unlike Tigs who pulled the trigger between sales.

It's sort of a natural continuation of when they initially switched from the traditional PGA-system CPU-with-pins to the LGA socket-with-pins, back in the P4 days. That move was taken as a cynical one to move responsibility for bent/broken pins away from Intel and to the motherboard vendors instead. With soldered on CPUs, they can move the entire burden to the mobo vendors and not have to deal with the end-user themselves.

Ouch, $25 shipping for physical tiers. Seems the costs are creeping higher and higher with each project.

They might need to mod in more camera control in that case. But on the other hand, Ultima 7 which they're claiming as a primary inspiration had nude sprites, or at least Serpent Isle did.

Significant integrated graphics performance boost, though only in a few selected models (four tiers of integrated graphics for this gen, just to add to the confusion), and some good power efficiency gains in the mobile models. Actual CPU performance gains will be modest, in the single digits percentagewise clock-for-clock, and clock speeds will be overall similar to Ivy. It's a "tock" in Intel's schedule and therefore is on the same process as Ivy but with with a largely new design (compared to Ivy being a "tick", a process shrink without much else). Desktop Ivy chips had an annoying design where, breaking from tradition, they no longer soldered the die to the heatspreader, resulting in a big hit to the clock ceiling. Curious whether that'll continue. There would also be some appeal, if the rumours are true, in Haswell possibly being the last Intel platform to support drop-in CPU upgrades, the word being that future CPUs will be soldered onto the motherboard and sold as complete, non-upgradable units that way.

And SimCity remains a rich vein of comedy gold, but that can't really be counted as a positive for EA either. The latest patch reportedly resulted even worse traffic problems, and also had a laxative effect on the populace as sewage systems everywhere were pushed to the brink.

Yeah, the bundle thing was more of a side-query since I was assuming I might be able to keep a crew skill I'd otherwise completely lose with it. But if I technically keep it anyway then it's something I won't worry about at all. Googling for the information has been surprisingly tricky, yielded one lone result that mentions in a roundabout way that it's single character only, but in the context of a rant about the cartel coin system. Assuming it's accurate for now.

Haven't really kept up with the rumours but is that related to the mooted switch to BGA (soldered on CPUs) for desktops or a different rumour altogether? Aside, my "no new desktop CPU" statement is a bit of a lie because technically I'm still interested in building a new mini ITX system as a side-project, it's just that it's probably going to be a Richland-based system.

Still happy enough with how my Lynnfield does, though USB3/SATA3 would be nice, so no desktop upgrades (storage aside) until Broadwell at the earliest for me. Will pretty much jump on a Haswell notebook near launch though, current one is near death, or indeed possibly undead. Intel's naming conventions getting worse with every gen once again, a shame after the relatively straightforward Sandy.

Well the entire software industry sales model is to bamboozle the customer, so yeah.

Still haven't gone back yet, but was just looking at the feature comparison chart again. I know that as a non-subscriber I'll lose one of my crew skills, but I also see I can buy that slot back. But do I get that third skill reset back to zero in the transition or can it be retained if I buy the upgrade (though likely I won't)? I also see the additional crew skill slot is in the "preferred access bundle" they're selling, but I have a strong suspicion that it's for one character only, anyone able to confirm?

Pfft, it's no challenge getting it into a 3.5" floppy. If it was a genuinely floppy 8" or 5.25" on the other hand....

Felt a little spendy in the end, so I did end up buying Sleeping Dogs from the Squeenix store, just the base game mind, and added the $3 Hitman Blood Money to it for the hell of it. Also bought the Tropico pack from GMG, but no to Tomb Raider (thematically not my thing) and Borderlands (genre not my thing, and I have no friends anyway).