Humanoid

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.

I did have that problem too, and indeed I didn't finish the game after getting bored flying over a horde of titans and just holding down the 'A' button to rain death on them from above. It's more a gameplay discontinuity than a plot one though, since the intro movie kind of foreshadows the sci-fi element to an extent. I never got up to where MM6 introduced its sci-fi elements - how did you feel about those?

Stopped playing Mount and Blade: Warband about a week ago. Founding my own kingdom in that game was really the beginning of the end: the game's interface is blatantly inadequate for managing anything larger than a trivially small kingdom, and in the end my game sort of devolved into a frustrating mess. Maybe in the future I might try again without going in that direction, but eh, got my money's worth. Nothing to replace it yet, will probably look for something shallow as I'm relatively busy with other stuff at the moment.

Yeah, easy to forget that Ultima 2 was set on Earth, and revolved around the notion of time travel (and laser blasters). And that the antagonist of Ultima 3 was a punch-card computer.

It's the other way around really, the series started out with much heavier sci-fi influences that really never left the mainline RPG series. Heck, the gameworlds - VARN, XEEN, etc were basically spaceships. Then Heroes of Might and Magic came along, completely outside the continuity of the RPG. Think of it as Mario Kart alongside the Super Mario Bros series: it took various personalities out of the RPG series, Kastore, Crag Hack, etc, and used them out of context and out of continuity; plopping them down into a generic fantasy world for the sole purpose of facilitating a strategy game. As a pitch it would sound like "let's take our most famous characters and use their likenesses as units in a strategy game!" Of course, what happened was that the mainline series went dormant after MM5, and over five intervening years, the popularity of HoMM overtook that of the RPGs such that when they tried to reintegrate the gameworlds, the louder voice of the strategy game fans unfamiliar with the history behind the property sort of rebelled, and in a way hijacked the Might and Magic name. The clash between the two series, obstensibly of the same IP, is what ultimately led to the ill-fated decision to hit the big red button and institute a brand new gameworld for HoMM4 and MM9. The best example of the issue is when NWC tried to introduce the new "Forge" faction in HoMM3's Armageddon's Blade expansion. This planned (and indeed, I believe, fully completed) sci-fi faction was to be the main theme of the new content, but irate fans believing sci-fi had no place in the series prompted the devs to back down and instead, late in the piece, substitute the exceedingly dull Elemental Conflux faction in its place, with blatantly rehashed versions of existing units and all. EDIT: Another example: Crag Hack, the dwarf barbarian, took off on a spaceship alongside some other recognisable names in pursuit of some ancient space god, who is basically a robot, at the conclusion of MM3. They took his likeness - essentially his iconic portrait - and attached it to one of the random Barbarian heroes in HoMM - except as a human because there are no dwarven heroes. He gains his own separate identity via the HoMM campaigns which follow, notably stopping the necromancer Sandro in HoMM3:The Shadow of Death. Then in MM7, which falls subsequent to SoD, the initial, dwarven Crag Hack, crash lands on the same planet, and indeed continent Antagarich, on which HoMM3 occurs, and becomes a driver for much of that game's plot. Messy, so you can see the reasoning for hitting the reset button.

Not really advice as such, but the motherboard specs indicate that some of your USB ports run off the AMD chipset natively while the USB 3.0 ports have a third-party controller. Does the error occur either way? Bear in mind it implies different drivers for each set as well.

How I feel about the resignation really depends on how much of the recent direction of things such as "every game needs multiplayer" and that of microtransactions is down to him as opposed to the broader management, really. How they function as an employer is, of course, out of scope for the average gamer.

I remember the reasoning/excuse for the apocalypse happening at the end of HoMM3/MM8 was that they needed to create a properly unified world for the various franchises to operate in, because they had kind of lost their handle on the existing one (and I recall an example given that Bracada was a frozen ice land in HoMM3 but a barren desert in MM7). Remember that the mainline series had really only joined up with the Heroes series starting with MM6. Seems a rather thin pretext obviously, but yeah, hindsight.

Y'know, despite HoMM3 being just about an equal contender for my personal favourite game ever, I don't actually mind the direction in which they were *trying* to take HoMM4. Any refinement of the previous formula would be a matter of just trying to improve on HoMM3's already beautiful graphics. Sure, they failed, but getting heroes more involved in combat (especially Might-oriented heroes who were literally just stat sticks) and adding more granularity to positioning in combat for example were progressive moves that I supported. Not excusing the end result, though obviously 3DO being broke had an impact too, but I think the initial premise was mostly sound. It's the same reason that for whatever criticisms I make of Civ5, it's not going to be the aspects in which they were attempting a new game as opposed to a graphical update of the prior instalment.

I don't consider M&M as a general fit to Obsidian's typical M.O., but then again, same applied to Dungeon Siege. Have to admit I'm not a fan of the series in general - way too combat oriented for me - but will give it a chance. It's one series where I wouldn't mind if the gameplay style was rebooted, though obviously the long-time fans of that design will fight me for it. Incidentally, first western RPG series to hit double digits? After 27 years it's finally overtaken Ultima.