Humanoid

For the longest time, I thought that Arma was shorthand for that America's Army game.

For me, the main attraction of IPS is the colour accuracy moreso than the viewing angle aspect (which tends to be more noticeable on notebooks than desktops). I see it like going to an SSD: once you go IPS, it's very hard to go back. No experience with that specific screen of course, or indeed any 1080p 27" panel. While it's significantly fewer pixels than the more conventional 2560x1440 panels normally seen at this size, I'd say it's hard to go wrong at that price (it's about half the going rate of the Dell/HP 27" models).

I'm under the impression that Bethesda's term for their alphas is "final release".

Makes it sound like the various hijinks with EMM386/QEMM on DOS all over again.

For most users, the appeal was that it was free money, which is the best kind of money. If your electricity was cheap enough, it meant that (environmental concerns aside), you'd be getting free money by letting your PC run some calculations overnight instead of turning it off. However it now sounds like the amount of "work" (and therefore time) to earn any real money is now so high that it really isn't worth it unless your electricity is free.

Hopefully the blueprints help make the interior layouts less headache-inducing than New Vegas. Drawing a very long optimistic bow: blueprints totally mean top-down turn-based tactical-squad game.

Space Cadet Table was the competitive high-score game of choice in my youth. Unfortunately at the frequency Win95/98 required clean installs, records tend to not have much of a verifiable trail.

I own original release boxed copies of both AoW and Shadow Magic but haven't ever played either. No particular reason, just never got around to it. (I also have all the games on GoG for the hell of it) Hopefully this breaks that trend. If I were to play one of the games right now though, is there any reason besides storyline to not jump to the final instalment immediately?

Thinking they should do Wasteland: East Coast instead. Less marketing cachet, sure, but I imagine a lot more creative freedom.

By changing power source, do you mean actually changing the PSU or just trying a different wall socket? Thermal protection was my initial thought too, but the OP seems to indicate all fans were spinning (though check the PSU fan too, it may be non-obvious). At least we have that now, in the original Athlon days, 3 seconds is more time than it took for your CPU to burn in a plume of blue smoke. If you have access to a multimeter, try taking voltage measurements from the back of the ATX power connector to the motherboard. Other random thoughts: - No beeping means it's unlikely it's the RAM (unless there's no PC-speaker present), though if multiple sticks are present, take out all but one and try each individually in the first DIMM slot. - Do you get any video output at all during the two seconds it's on? Thinking if so, it's less likely to be a CPU issue. - Whenever I see a power issue, I tend to think it's 50:50 on either the PSU or the motherboard, though granted most of my failure cases tend to have been totally dead motherboards instead of the odd two-seconds thing.

This is where still having all my old graphics cards all the way back to my S3 Virge DX 3D "decelerator" (Diamond Stealth 2000) from 1997 may have some theoretical utility. :D

All I ask is the chance to be rude back to that first NPC and I'll be satisfied with the dialogue. Between the W2 (like many above, also the first project I officially backed, although I pledged to Double Fine via PayPal) and PE Kickstarters, I will end up with four copies of W2. Maybe in hindsight I should have gone for the T-Shirt instead of the extra boxed copy and poster, hmmm.....

Are you still using a 500mb hd from 1995? Have you tried using a bootdisk? Mostly it was when I had a single 120GB SSD for both OS and games (separate partitions of course). I've since added on another 256GB SSD which has tided me over for now, but even that's about 3/4 full now. I'll probably look at retiring the 120GB drive later this year and doing a fresh OS install - I expect to be able to get a 500+ GB SSD for under $300 by year's end.

A method to conserve precious hard drive space. More than once I've had to tab out of a game just to free up some space to save. It's like my dieting method of not having any food at home.

Makes me all warm and tingly inside. One odd thing though is that the enemy cones of vision are so narrow that you wonder how they managed to get this far in life.

In the 80s, as a little kid, I used to watch my cousin (who is about 10 years older than me) play the Gold Box games, which I guess counts as my first experience with CRPGs. The only real thing I remember was the Stinking Cloud spell, which given its level I guess means it was one of the early games in the series. The mechanics were far too complex for me of course: I would have been maybe 5-6 years old, and it looked a little scary too. Didn't really play any RPGs myself until quite a few years later, when we upgraded from a decrepit old 286 to a (relatively) new DX4/100, including a Sound Blaster 16 with an amazing bundle of some dozen-plus games, including of the best games ever. Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, SimCity2000, F-117A, Wing Commander 2, Syndicate, Strike Commander, Silent Service 2, Return to Zork, Iron Helix and er, Rebel Assault. But the pertinent one for the purposes of this thread was of course Ultima 8: Pagan.

I'd observe that that the runaway success of WoW may have compromised, if not killed off, any chance of a Warcraft sequel. While not a perfect comparison in that Warcraft is of a different genre to KoTOR, it does illustrate that generation of content for MMOs can and does have a real impact on the future of the originating property. I recall there was more than a little whinging whenever WoW used and killed off characters from the RTS in the MMO, such as Arthas. One thing in TOR's favour I guess is that at least there's still a little bit of space timewise in the continuity to fit in a game set after KoTOR2 but before the events of TOR.

Eh, most open-world games a la GTA had really strictly predefined protagonists, so it's nothing new. Or at least nothing revolutionary. I planned on buying a pc for this and other games, but then I blew that budget just on bookshelves today Don't tend to classify GTA in the genre, but that may be because I've only played the series for a combined 30 minutes or so. Out of the games I've played I guess Ultima 7 comes closest to the classification.

I have no problem with either open-world or more narrowly focused RPGs, but I can't readily think up a precedent for the former case that uses a predefined protagonist - generally it feels more natural to have such a game have a more directed path. Doesn't mean it can't work of course, just that I have poor imagination. Tangentially, I'm a bit surprised there isn't a bridging expansion between the previous game to this new one - from an ingame perspective to transition to the new areas we'll be visiting, and from a technical perspective, to get more use out of such a graphically impressive engine that's seemingly been used for just the one product.

Cliff racers on the other hand went straight at you, making them the superior to dragons in terms of not wasting your time. Anyway, my contribution to recommended mods are generally convenience-related: 1) One that allows fast travel directly to the Thieves' Guild. 2) One that either makes your horse a passive combatant, or one that makes them invulnerable, as vanilla horses are infected by a raging bloodlust to charge at dragons. 3) Less important, but one that makes wolves less suicidally aggressive. Plus one cosmetic one I will concede, largely for those playing Breton females, to remove the triple frown crease on their foreheads which makes them all look like old women. If you were to mine ore, then the one to make the nodes more obvious is, er, obvious, but I'd recommend not mining because it's a sure way to increase the overall tedium in the game, arguably Skyrim's number one flaw. (Especially the Draugr, oh god not more Draugr) Finally, while I have no personal experience with it, apparently magic using characters in the game suffer at high levels because spell damage does not scale. This isn't a big deal with an average playthrough, but completionists will run into a problem with their spells doing increasingly trivial amounts of damage at high levels. If this describes you, then perhaps look for a mod that scales spell damage at least partially with your level. Don't have any current links unfortunately because it's over half a year since I last played.

Yeah, had the same problem and had to Google it. Anyway, in the absence of anything better to do, I played it anyway despite the regular graphics corruption up to level 4-5, and while it was passable, I don't think there's quite enough there to convince me to buy it just yet. It has, however, made me aware of the upcoming sequel which I would otherwise have ignored. Technical issues aside, I guess what didn't work for me in the game was how much of it boiled down to waiting for things to happen: waiting for bandits to spawn, then waiting for you to catch bandits slooooowly, waiting for the RNG to allow that noble to give you a quest instead of fobbing you off - in the end I felt I spent more time doing nothing than time spent doing something, and that's not a great thing to be happening in a game. Maybe that changes later when you have enough power to do things on your own initiative, like waging war against other nations, but I imagine that's out of scope for the demo. There's a lot of stuff that feels like busywork. I don't see why you have to walk slowly around a primitive interior representation of a castle to talk to the resident ruler, or wandering around a deserted village looking for the one NPC with meaningful interaction (the village elder) instead of just interfacing directly from the town menu. In the end I guess I'll say this: The good part is that it's sort of a mashup of Pirates! and Darklands. The bad part is that it's an inferior to Pirates! and Darklands.

The best adult mod is clearly the swearing mudcrabs one.

In ME1, to avoid the various biotic effects throwing you out of bounds (not that it didn't happen occasionally anyway), any biotic attack on you produced the one single effect - that weird sort of paralysis-writhing-on-the-ground effect for a few seconds.

I assume the actual tutorial function is the same between the demo and the full game - the archery and horseback riding parts went fine, but doing the melee training stuff didn't seem to advance to the next part - all the trainers just offer attacking practice, blocking practice, and sparring, ad infinitum. All the while standing on ground covered without a texture, skybox underneath their feet. Tried just starting a plain new game after since I was stuck there, had in interesting effect in that my character's head, except the hair, was invisible, and additionally the sky had the buffer-not-being-cleared effect going on. Updated from my old 12.8 graphics drivers to the 13.2 beta drivers and no improvement and gave up there. As far as I know though, the demo is the full game except capped at level 7.

Still looking for my first serious game to play this year, with no luck. Tried the Mount and Blade Warband demo, and it's graphical corruption all over the place, and even ignoring that, I don't see a way to progress from the tutorial. I gather it's Pirates! on land which is the only reason I was inclined to try it, but eh, guess it's a bit too rough around the edges for me. EDIT: In desperation I've fired up the SWTOR launcher just so it's there fully patched if I ever summon up the willpower to finish levelling from last year.