Humanoid

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.

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.