Humanoid

The pink shirt is gone. No deal.

The difference is that it's the one promised during the KS campaign, indeed as a stretch goal, so they're bound to do it for all copies of the game. So the technical ability is there, leading to the assumption that the restriction of future, paid DLC is a commercial one.\\EDIT: beaten!

Cowon made the best portable music players bar none, it's a shame that it looks like they've left that part of their business behind. I waited too long and missed out on the now-discontinued J3. Sure, it's a niche market to care for such trivialities as audio quality, but I find the trend towards folding all portable devices into smartphones, with all the compromises that entails, to be a very unfortunate one.

Apparently yes, in a manner so complex as to lead to the creation of walkthroughs specifically for it. Didn't read it so it may be mostly self-evident, but still, that's a lot of images.

There's a good deal of damage done regardless of the resolution, because what they've done is paint themselves as lawyers, staying within the letter of the law but all to happy to trample over the spirit of it. Fully within their rights to do so, but no one likes lawyers. The feeling I get is similar to, say, misuse of donations by a charity who, while still pursuing the goal of helping their particular cause, give the cushy contract to a buddy of the suits running it to carry out the work. I stress it's not an analogy, but just the gut feeling I get from the move. I, and I suspect a good many others, would have thrown in a bit extra as a pushback against the notion that Steam be the end-all ultimate utopia of video game platforms, but instead we've ended up achieving the opposite. Steam is certainly a tool of convenience, and I'm totally fine with that, hence my assertion that having mods require manual installation is fine, but when actual capabilities are different then something starts to smell, especially as it's clear it's not a technical limitation but a business-imposed one. While I'm certainly not going to do anything drastic like some of the reactions have threatened (e.g. chargebacks), it does mean I'll stay at the lower tiers for any of their future offerings.

Got to say I'm more than a little surprised about the open admission that the online requirement was DRM for the sake of wanting DRM as opposed to the usual drivel. I mean he's basically saying that the RMAH is just a facade for the draconian DRM despite it hurting the game. I half expected the article to say he was a former employee, but looks like that's not the case. Contrast the statement: "Without the auction houses the always-on requirement would stop making sense, and then players would ask for it to be removed, and no one from the business side of things would likely be willing to give that up. So it remains, but at the cost of the game itself," with EA's recent defense: ”Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period.”

The precedent was set when the second release of the PS3 removed PS2 compatibility from hardware - up until then there was basically a PS2 inside every PS3, which was laudable but in financial terms a ridiculous extravagance. The requirement that Sony put a Cell inside every PS4 to achieve backwards compatibility with the PS3 meant the chances were nil from the very beginning. It's only slightly more rational in engineering terms than duct-taping a full-blown PS3 to every new PS4. Support for PS2 games would depend on whether a modern mid-range PC nowadays could run a PS2 native game acceptably - I have no idea whether that's the case or not, but it's basically what the PS4 would have to do. But one suspects that given the option of either implementing that, or getting customers to pay again for the same game (albeit at whatever the new price will be), Sony will choose the latter. EDIT: Ironically perhaps, it may well be the least engineering effort for Sony to reverse-port the PC port of their PS3 games to get them running on the PS4.

Batman: Origins would have been a good title for a game based on the 60s Batman show.

$1000. Personally I wouldn't want my ugly mug in the game even if I did pledge that much though.

Hopeful that they'll reverse that decision looking at the outcry in the comments. Even if they don't though, it's not quite clear if the direct download version is meaningfully hobbled or not - installing mods manually isn't a bother, so if it just means there's no in-game mod browser, then eh. It's just the last sentence which is the sticking point, at least for people who buy DLC. Since I'm not one, technically the decision doesn't really personally impact me, but I am somewhat disappointed out of principle. Y'know, if they were a bit smarter about it, they'd talk about the direct download version first, then afterwards talk about how the Steam version has some extra convenience by virtue of the platform's features. Would turn it into a PR win instead of a loss, though there's still the DLC issue.

The place where the loss of the paper manual is felt most keenly. I never really got around to playing the game, but Falcon 4.0's hardcover binder manual is something I cherish.

Didn't Sony just refresh with the new cheap-looking pop-top PS3s?

More likely the source of confusing is that F2P "casual" game Ultima Forever, which is being developed by EA/Bioware/Debbie Mythic (whatever the hell they're calling themselves today) currently. They currently possess whatever's left of Origin's (the company, not the platform) assets after the closure. LB had a sly dig at it when talking about his wife in the SotA final stream - the real "Lady British."

I have a Nokia 6300 dumbphone which is the only mobile phone I've ever purchased. For about a year prior to that I used another Nokia dumbphone, model unknown, that was a hand-me-down from a family member, until it started dropping calls. That was in 2007, so I was very much a latecomer to this whole mobile gadgets stuff. I wouldn't get very far with a smartphone as I pre-pay just the $30 every 6 months for my access and have no data allowance whatsoever. If you count the now old-fashioned MP3 player as a mobile device then I also have a Sansa Clip Zip player.

Yeah, despite the name, "Crew Skills" are really your skills, except you delegate their execution, you've got just the three. As for the rewards of crafting, I found that while levelling how much utility you get out of the skills is, naturally for an MMO, dependent on how much you want to grind it out. You learn to make basic "green" equipment which is equivalent to basic solo quest reward stuff. If you "reverse engineer", i.e. destroy the stuff you created for a partial component refund, you have a chance of learning an advanced "blue" version of that item which is superior to what you'd otherwise be wearing when solo questing. (And for a second tier, repeat the above replacing green with blue and blue with purple, but that's not worth the time and material investment at lower levels). Personally I just used the materials I had on hand without buying any extras from trade, and the result is that every so often I'd luck out into getting something decent - but as I levelled it became a rarer occurrence since I steadily fell behind the tradeskill levelling curve (i.e. I'd be making decent level 25 gear at level 30). So unless things have changed, if you want your profession to remain useful for the entire levelling curve, expect to have to supplement your crafting materials from the trade network on a regular basis. No idea how useful crafting is once you hit max level, but at a guess based on traditional MMO patterns is that you get to make stuff better than any flashpoint gear but inferior to any operations gear.

Clearly the solution is to use Volourn style quotes.

I grew up in a Nintendo household so my purity has not been corrupted by such filth. But I do feel like playing a beat-em-up now.

Obama himself is not-uncommonly called good looking in the media too, is he not?

I read that sentence as "SSDs are great for constant disk writing". Anyway, saw that Amazon UK have the *960GB* M500 for under $600, though it's on backorder (in the sidebar, ignoring the 3rd party sellers). Good god that's tempting, especially considering I paid $400 for my old 120GB one.

How about the dwarf's pecs? Racism!

Courtesy bump for two hours remaining, it ought to hit the $2m mark okay with under 60k left to get (accounting for in excess of $100k of non-KS site pledges). Didn't think it would initially. Believe they've decided against adding any late incentive/addon type stuff and will just do an online store thing later instead. Functionally it's the same result since it doesn't really matter when exactly the money comes in.

Hmm, tried to log in to catch up on recent months' patching. Unfortunately it looks like a new login system is in place, and it's a bit of a hassle. I have to use my "display name" instead of my email address as my ID, which happens to be a string of mostly random junk (as all my user credentials are made-up junk, being intended to be for a throwaway weekend trial account); then there's the two-factor verification change that means I have to get a one-time pass sent by email when logging on. Took three attempts for one email to even arrive. Is their email server running on the same hardware as the SimCity servers?

I've been sick and housebound since Wednesday, but sadly haven't had any desire to play a game of any sort despite the downtime. Neither did I play anything during the easter long weekend, so the lack of motivation can hardly be attributed to illness At least today, thanks to the GOG sale, I got around to firing up NWN2 and launching the MoTB campaign. As soon as I hit character creation, I realised I'd forgotten just about everything I knew about D&D character creation - there were classes I didn't recognise, and I had only perfunctory recollection of what the actual effects of the various stats, feats, and skills had. I think I'm going to go with a severely combat-unoptimised pure rogue to roleplay fairly strictly with, and hope I don't die too much at normal difficulty. If I do I'll just tune it down to easy I guess. And gah, getting 18 levels of experienced dumped on your head in one go sounds rewarding, but having to take them one at a time and allocate my skills manually was a chore. Quit the game after I was done with that, will see how much desire I have to go on with it tomorrow. The first and only real time I attempted MoTB, I only got out of the starter dungeon and maybe half-an-hour to an hour beyond that. The second, and until now, last time I tried, I didn't even get that far - my character was so ineffectual at combat that I got sick of dying to every single pack and quit. Aside from that, just saw the post about TOR2.0, will investigate to see if there's anything at all in that update for single-player campaigners. The AoE2 talk has also got me sort of interested in the subject, but I think my CDs are about 700km away from me at the moment. I think when I can be bothered going out, I'd rather pick up a $10 budget rerelease of the game rather than this new HD edition. Also patched XCOM (I'm usually in offline mode, so much so that I'd call online mode "patching mode") with the view to playing a new Second Wave Classic campaign in the short-to-mid term future. Looks like I'll have to wait for the Toolboks mod to be fully updated for the current patch before I can play though. No-delay overwatch command is essential for gameplay!

Could have picked up the MM1-6 pack instead for the same price and been able to try MM6 which has nigh-identical graphics to MM8, and be able to play World of Xeen (MM4+5) to boot!

Yeah, I was vaguely interested in the idea of it when it was announced, but it doesn't really pass muster if you look at what you get. I suppose it might be a good option for people who rely on Steam for multiplayer support (note that the new version is *not* compatible in any way with the original release for multiplayer), since that's apparently the biggest change. Other than that there's fairly standard updates for modern machines, but fairly minimal ones that have already been accomplished by the mod community. Check out the feature list of the UserPatch for the original release - there's a *lot* of overlap between it and the "official" HD version. Indeed you could say it's better - such as the aforementioned UI stretching, plus smart unit build queue splitting. I'm disappointed at the missed opportunity to do a real update to the game. AoE2 is, to this day, the last RTS game I've played for any meaningful length of time, and indeed is, alongside Total Annihilation, one of the two games of that genre I can say I genuinely like and have good memories of. Given I could probably fairly say that RTS is my least favourite genre of game (FPSes running a close second), I'd consider that fairly high praise. It was the multiplayer game of choice (besides, er, Mario Kart) in my household growing up, so I would note also that there's no offline LAN support in the new release - I'd have to buy three copies of it just to replicate those experiences, as opposed to just firing up the game on multiple machines with the one CD. (Tangential rant: what happened to those old fashioned "multiplayer spawn" installations of yesteryear? Moneygrubbing bastards.) At any rate, I had a quick look at the Steam forum for AoE2HD and it doesn't seem pretty. Sure, overreactions are standard for this type of thing, but there seem to be some legitimately serious issues such as frame rate drops and multiplayer connectivity drops/lag. Plus they changed the food icon from a steak to an ear of corn. THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!