Humanoid

Dammit. Oh well, I might have, er, half of a lazy single-layer transfer then.

I made the mistake of loading up on 2TB drives before and am sort of capped on space on my HTPC without disposing of some of the drives - but upgrading them to 3TB drives is too little gain for the effort. Impatiently waiting for either vendor to release 4TB 'slow' spin drives, or indeed 5TB if the price is within reason - they're due near the end of the year last I heard. I've filled barely half of the 800GB on my desktop spindle drive, yet have filled the full 12GB available to my HTPC, with about 50+ Blu-rays in the queue to be ripped as soon as I acquire more space.

Yeah, in my last game I ended up deliberately leaving a gap in my satellite coverage to ensure abduction missions continued to happen. Alternatively, I think a mod can create that behaviour without needing to game the system.

The alpha build of Moebius, from Jane Jensen's Pinkerton Road Kickstarter, has been released to backers. Torn on whether to try it.

Up until the second expansion, I believe WoW officially supported dial-up connections as part of the minimum system requirements. So yeah, not a whole lot to it.

My feeling is that the support is based more on what they're specifically promising for this instalment - the turn based combat, higher degree of roleplaying, the co-op play, the return to an isometric view, etc - rather than what was in the prior games. Not that I speak for everyone, of course.

Did a bit of paid overtime yesterday which neatly covers the $65(+shipping) boxed tier. Done. Shame there's really not much in the way of swag to make the $100 tiers appealing. Ah well, must remember to email the Shadowrun guys this week to up my pledge to them anyway.

As long as they're not 5/5 panicked, it's a stable situation: panic will not go up until you either, a) ignore an abduction occuring on the same continent, or b) fail a terror mission. Remember also that a country at 5/5 does not actually leave until the end of the calendar month, except if a terror failure occurs to take them to 5/5 (in which case they leave immediately), so it's still a recoverable position. Aside, refusing council missions is actually not all that bad - often the first month's council mission is skipped if it's a bomb disposal one. Actually lowering panic is done via launching a satellite, successfully completing an abduction mission in that country only, succeeding at a terror mission on the same continent (actual reduction depends on number of civilians saved), or successfully assaulting the alien base (worldwide reduction), which I guess you could say ends act 1 of the game.

Meh, I just started construction of my second lab directly under the first lab. Why is it couterproductive to build labs adjacent to other labs? Heh, I meant that most experienced players will build no labs at all. There's a relatively shallow tech tree in this game, which I imagine will remain so until an expansion at the very least, and so every single dollar (or simoleon) you have is always better spent on other things. That said, it's on normal difficulty, so it's really not that big of a deal either way. At classic and impossible difficulties, you flat out can't afford to build any without hobbling your game: you can't afford to "waste" a single cent. The strategic base-building aspect is one of the weaker parts of the game, and there really is a definitive "optimal" way to go about it once you're used to the game. Again, not a worry now, but once you've played through once or twice, future new games will play out exactly the same way in terms of initial builds.

The Gollop Chamber can be used by any psi-capable trooper, and indeed it can be desirable to use it with a non-levelled psionic because they get promoted to the max psi-level for free. A common trap is that they have to be wearing Psi Armor to be eligible.

The four cardinal directions, yes, so generally speaking it's optimal to build your facilities in a 2x2 square - particularly your satellite uplinks and workshops. EDIT: To expand a bit, some people go nuts and build a 3x3 grid of workshops, but while optimal in a min-maxing sense, it's probably not the best idea for an early-game foundation. a 2x2 grid consisting of two Satellite Uplinks and two Satellite Nexuses (Nexii?) will be sufficient to cover every country on the map so more than that serves no purpose. If you end up building three Uplinks because Nexii aren't yet available, it just means the fifth facility can be plonked anywhere on the map. Labs are generally built in a 0x0 grid: building them tends to be counterproductive.

Amusingly now, it feels that those two 9/10 scores at the bottom are mediocre ones using the conventional game scoring system. "A nine? How mundane."

Many Might and Magic games track your character's age and apply stat penalties once you hit 50 or so. That generally means playing about 20 times longer than a typical run though. Mount and Blade has stat loss for "age". Thing is, it starts about 700-800 days into a game, so er, potentially it's saying a 20-22 year-old adventurer is already into physical decline. Yeah. The Pirates! games that are its spiritual predecessor also slowed your character's swordfighting speed as you aged, amplified by injury.

While some motherboards have multiple SATA controllers, usually when the native chipset doesn't support SATA3 by itself, the specs of your board indicate this isn't the case. You might have a physically damaged port, but the electronics behind all six of them are the same. Your call on what to do of course, peace of mind vs the hassle of the RMA process. I personally have a first-generation Cougar Point (H67) motherboard in which all but two of the SATA ports are guaranteed to fail after some time. They haven't yet, but it's been a couple years now and if they fail during that system's lifetime then I'll just have to grab a PCI-E SATA card.

Ran aground with Fallout. Playing as an unhelpful jerk and therefore essentially doing no sidequests, I'm finding myself unable to assault either endgame location at level ~8. Don't feel like going back and doing sidequests, nor to run around farming experience from random encounters, so I'm a bit snookered (especially since my only meaningful skills are unarmed and er, repair). Guess I could cheese it with extreme savescumming, but more likely I've failed to finish the game again for the umpteenth time. Will probably give King's Bounty a dip over the long weekend given all the discussion about it going on.

I haven't played any of the rebooted KB games despite having copies of all of them on both GoG and Steam. Advice on whether to start with the first one or straight to the sequel and its expansions? I only briefly played the original when it was included in the big box HoMM Gold (1+2) collection back in the late 90s.

Perhaps sort of like that webcomic Axecop. Except for the whole "we need cash" thing obviously.

I keep hoping they do a single player Warcraft RPG. They should totally bring back that cancelled graphic adventure. The genre is back! Other random thoughts on recent posts (since there are so many of them): - Reaction to Heavy Rain is fairly negative sure, but the Walking Dead garnered a fair bit more positivity, so I'm not giving up on that style of gameplay yet. Haven't played either of them though as neither appeals thematically to me. - I did watch someone else play Alan Wake. It was horrible, hours and hours of watching a generic guy gun down hordes of indistinguishable mooks in what appeared to be the same dark forest. If actually playing the game is worse than that, then may the darkness have mercy on our souls. - I've played DuckTales and don't recall anything so memorable about it that it should be the one that gets a remake, weird. Chronicles of Mystara on the other hand, is just about the only D&D game I can convince anyone to play multiplayer with me. Also bonus points for being a 2E game I can play without getting a migrane from staring at XP charts for an hour. - Whatever mix of reactions EA/Bioware may or may not have with regards to CDPR, I would hope that ignoring them isn't one: benign cribbing from each other is how the collective developers will move forward.

Fallout, a game I've never finished. *shock* *horror* Two hours in and it's already sort of gone to the hounds - at Junktown and both Killian and Gizmo are dead: the former by my hand after that jerk tried to imprison me just for not wanting to help him, and the latter through... well, I don't know, telepathic shock or something as he apparently succumbed to an assassination by nobody before I even visited his third of town. Probably the fifth or sixth time through this segment and I learn something new again. I'm going to roll with that result - no reloads barring death - and so the upside, I'm a rich man now ....as soon as I find a vendor to dump the shop inventory to.

I call shenanigans on this. The two games are way too similar for you to have that opinion. You were probably just burned out on the game because you played ME2 too much. I can see how it would happen. I divide ME2 into two roughly equal portions, the mostly self-contained recruitment and loyalty missions, which although often lacking context, were really rather good; and the core Cerberus/Collector stuff, which is a lot more divisive. ME3 to me felt like a game made entirely of that latter part, so it would follow that someone's evaluation of ME3 overall would be poor if their opinion of that half of ME2 mirrored that.

The dungeon will all the slimes on the first level, blarrrrgh. I'd fight the medusae on the second level all day over those slimes. Alongside the teleporter mapping (which I did manually), Bracada was probably the most irritating zone. Though the actual hardest thing for me was probably clearing out the Pit - the lich kings were pretty tame but those queens of the dead wrecked me. On the other hand, mapping the barrow downs was actually pretty memorable, though screw the short respawn timer on the outside zone. Mind you these aren't long term memories, just stuff from last year. I played it mostly straight too.

A bootable Linux stick/disc is something I'd always recommend anyone beyond the most novice of users have handy for troubleshooting purposes.

I get what you mean by that, but EA had already well and truly taken over by the time of Ultima 8, and indeed was foreshadowed by the generators in U7.

I looked up some mods for Warband and it seems the most popular is something called Prophesy of Pendor, but no idea how it compares. Damocles for Warband is a thing too though. But yeah, if I ever come back to it (before the sequel, at any rate), I'll be sure to heavily mod up. Aside, the capitalised typo in that screenshot made me chuckle, heh.

I feel that Bethesda did a servicable job of creating *a* post-apocalyptic world, with some trappings of it being the Fallout post-apocalyptic world. As its own setting, it did a lot of things right. I would hazard that one's perception of it then is just how much that Fallout veneer matters to the game. It just feels as if it was primarily designed by someone with some superficial knowledge of the setting, but which kind of misses the point thematically. Stuff like "Hey, Fallout 1 had this theme of purifying water right? Let's make that the central plot of our game!", amongst other reused elements like the GECK (now a magic genesis device), various factions (BoS, Enclave), of which the names are familiar, but the employment thereoff is just somehow off. The most important thing it misses for me though is thematically. Specifically, the theme of rebuilding. Fallout 1 had you leave the vault and enter a greater world already in the process of rebuilding civilization. Fallout 2 and New Vegas portrayed worlds that have moved on significantly even more than that. I cheat a bit and look at the wiki and note that Fallout 3 begins some *116* years after Fallout 1 does, into a world much more devastated, bleak, and altogether hopeless; where people still scavenge for pre-war food and live in makeshift towns with no plan for the future. If anything, it feels like this should be set a generation or two *before* the events of the original, not very long after the bombs dropped. Sure it can be rationalised as a west coast vs east coast thing, but it still misses that theme: without the player character's (and Liam Neeson's) intervention, human civilization in Fallout 3 looks to be going absolutely nowhere. Discovering nothing, producing nothing, the basin was essentially doomed. Contrast the very first town you encounter in FO1: an active attempt to establish a new agricultural society that appears to be, security aside, fully self-sustaining.