Humanoid

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.

Huh, never knew Hickman was a guy. [Your geek cred has dropped by -10]

Maybe the alternative was Catwoman in, er, Catwoman. :D

Having the backstory with the cereal killer and vase urination stuff wouldn't really improve the situation I think....

So time to keep an eye out for a new Ron Gilbert Kickstarter drive I assume. Works for me.

They're primarily a component manufacturer, one of the bigger ones - I owned an MSI motherboard way back in the Pentium 3 days I think, and currently own an MSI video card. In this sense they're kind of like Gigabyte, and up until recently, Asus, until the latter kind of stepped up their investment in consumer electronics - between them I guess you could say they're the big three of Taiwanese computing firms. Can't say I know anything about their notebook range.

Not that I'm particularly fond of the concept, but the $135 tier is uncapped, so it'll never go to $150.

"EA is an on online company. We're definitely watching what's going on at Blizzard, and we're putting in backstops and checks to try to prevent those kind of things from happening." Guess that didn't pan out so well. It's probably a game that would have been a nailed-on purchase if not for the technical aspects - I own both SC3k and SC4 but have basically played neither - but SC2k easily makes any top-10 games list I've ever compiled. Will Wright Kickstarter time maybe? :D

Technically not qualified for the title for a couple of reasons, that of not really a game as much as a children's interactive e-book, and that of being mostly funded before the CSG campaign anyway, but the first product from Jane Jensen's studio has been released - Lola and Lucy's Big Adventure. I only really mention it because it's the first, and so far only actual product I've received out of the $1k+ I have sunk into various projects.

I've been waiting for the option to upgrade my Shadowrun Returns pledge, from $60 to at the very least up to the $125 tier, but would rather do it via formal process rather than just emailing them. Given it's looking rather good, I might go even higher.... As for Garriott's Kickstarter - well at this point I'm admitting when it comes to LB, I probably toss any sense of rationality out the door: sure he's a mega rich space tourist, but I feel as if I owe a huge chunk of my existence as a gamer to him, so I'm in no matter what. On another level, I also appreciate the effort to bring back the MMO genre back into the direction UO was originally heading in, before EQ and then WoW kind of hijacked it. I've always wanted to be ....a lumberjack!

The 'new' classic TMNT toys released last year were excellent by the way. Sure the originals had nostalgia value, but they were neither quality nor actually accurate to the cartoon anyway.

I'd have to say it's not a fantastic time to be looking to buy, because Intel's new Haswell CPUs are just a few months away. On the other hand, the main advantage it will offer will be in the area of integrated graphics, so if discrete graphics are an absolute must then there's less disadvantage in buying now. On SSDs, I feel they're even more beneficial to notebook PCs as compared to desktops due to the likely extensive usage of standby/sleep - being able to start doing stuff the moment I lift the lid is an immeasurable convenience. For what it's worth, my laptop is a doddery Core 2 Duo from early 2009ish with a failing video card, but the third-party self-installed SSD in it has given it a new lease on life: for desktop applications there's essentially no difference in responsiveness between it and a shiny new top-of-the-range PC. Obviously my machine pre-dates the introduction of mSATA, but honestly, even if that were an option for me, I'd probably have removed the spindle drive anyway: the noise and vibration aren't worth the extra storage space for me when 2TB external USB-powered drives are available for barely more than $100. I personally don't think the new trend of spindle drives supplemented by small 24-64GB SSD 'caches' are really all that either. The user has no control over how it's used so it's really best treated as a slightly faster spindle drive at best and nothing more. On displays: It's very unfortunate, but apparently no one in the world manufactures 14" IPS panels. This sucks because it's my preferred size as well. At 15.6" and 13.3" you have options, but at 14" it's mostly a matter of finding the least-bad TN panel.

It was bad timing for an Aussie - launched while I was asleep and by the time I woke up in the morning, all the good early bird tiers were gone. To be honest, I've largely ignored this thread as it seemed mostly about business aspects that I have little interest in, the side effect being I really know little about the proposal in general. Nonetheless my plan was to give it as much time as possible and decide my level of commitment towards the end of the campaign, all the while keeping tabs on both of inXile's project to help determine that. But then just now one of the $250 slots opened up and my sense of sneaky opportunism kicked in and grabbed it. I feel a little bad about holding onto a tier I might not necessarily *really* want - the source rulebooks feel a bit less of a reward because they'll be something easily purchasable separate from this campaign - but there's not really any "optimal" tier for my intended spend of ~$200.

Personally I wouldn't accept a spindle drive as a primary drive for any notebook today, let alone a relatively high-end one. Fortunately mSATA support is fairly common now, and ought to be a relatively easy addition - however if you choose to add it yourself instead of as a factory option, you will of course need to move the OS manually to it. I also lean towards the Alienware despite my dislike of its tacky chassis, mainly due to the better screen, although even then it's barely satisfactory. Modern laptop screens, with a few exceptions, tend to be woeful TN panels (the first resort of any cost-cutting vendor).

I remember the brouhaha in the late 90s when the Wal-mart version of Heavy Gear came with a shiny decked-out mech for multiplayer purposes while non-Wal-mart purchasing plebians had to level their way up to that equipment level. I suppose if you squint hard, the current method is a 'lil bit more egalitarian than that, not that we'd blink at it for any more than a fraction of a second nowadays.

The good news is that it appears that whatever their using is non-proprietary, so unlike PhysX, this will work on both vendors products, assuming a card of sufficient horsepower. Aside, it appears the hair is the only part of Lara not encrusted in several layers of dirt...

Don't all physical tiers also get a digital copy anyway? A quick scroll through the options reads like that's the case to me.