Humanoid

Everything heavily controlled and centrallised ...like Steam?

FFVIII was one of the worst ports from consol to ever disgrace the PC. The idiots forgot to add a Quit option and you had to kill the game through the task manager every time you wanted to exit. FFVII was a LOT better. FF7 is the worst PC port I've personally played, so that's some achievement to top it. Fortunately I played it on desktop, but the initial release had all its critical inputs mapped to the numpad, rendering it unplayable on any machine - like most laptops - without a numpad. The keys were remappable of course, but you needed the numpad to access the menu to do so....

Not sure what you have, but assuming it's not worth replacing the cooler - though reassembling it with new thermal paste is a possibility. State of the graphics card market, in gaming terms, is pretty simple at the moment: The minimum I'd recommend = 7850 Best value = 7950 A little bit more = 670 or 7970 There have been no announcements of any meaningful upcoming products so these recommendations will hold for a while yet.

I never even knew "commander" was being used as a formal rank - always just assumed, at the very least in terms of ME, that it was used more in a literal sense, like calling your office manager "boss". I was used to being called "commander" in Strike Commander, where the latter case held true - it was just a substitution for the player name, which isn't defined canonically by the game. I also always salute left-handed - only as a casual conversational gesture obviously - probably purely because I'm a leftie. But yeah, Wing Commander also mashes up ranks a bit, but in game context it's fairly logical in that navy ranks are used for capital ship commands, and air force ranks for fighter pilots. And it's relatively consistent as well in that Halcyon in WC1, Angel in WC2, and Blair in WC3/4 were all 'air' force colonels - vaguely recall Prophecy broke from this though - but I don't really recall much of Prophecy at all. Likewise in the parallel track you had admirals (Tolwyn), captains (Eisen) and commodores (Blair). (EDIT: ah, here)

Live action actors are obsolete? I haven't noticed that yet, either in terms of film or stage. The industry for both has changed of course, but obsolete? Nah. I'm always sympathetic towards the continuing push to eliminate requiring humans from various jobs...as I think in the long run it leads to a lack of variety, option, number, and "tiers" of employment opportunities. Largely obsolete in the games industry. If the same happened to voice actors they'd likewise still have work outside of games. The obvious follow-up question is why I'm singling out games as opposed to TV series, ads and whatnot. I feel the flexibility offered by being able to do away with the logistical issues is worth the tradeoff of a little aural fidelity - in the same using polygons instead of live action allows developers to overcome similar issues with the same tradeoff made. That kind of flexibility is nowhere near as critical in the other fields that voice actors work in.

Voice synthesis is probably about as far away from mimicking a natural human voice as current graphics are from mimicking a real human appearance, if not closer. Yet we forgive the latter attempt much more readily. I don't really have a point here, but just found it an interesting phenomenon. That, and I miss the halcyon days of the reign of FMVs. As for the voice actors, I have about as much sympathy for them as I did for those live action actors who got obsoleted years ago. As in, there is some, but considering the tradeoff of game developers being no longer beholden to the logistics of recording, it's a trade I'd instantly make every time. It's hard enough to add or fix stuff stuff in expansions, DLC, and even patches when the actors *are* available and willing to come back. Consider even huge, massively funded blockbusters like ME2. Their DLC squad members were essentially non-interactive because of the piecemeal nature of recording additional voicework. Multiply the difficulty for your average, more modest projects. The current system is a huge drag on developers' ability to build on immersive worlds.

Given how much the original Wing Commander demanded of a 286, have to say I'm amazed it could run Privateer at all.

The laptop I'm typing this on hasn't been able to render any 3D graphics without breaking into random grey artifacts for about two year now, but no problems whatsoever in 2D. Last card I had fail put green pixels all over the place in 2D even fresh after a cold boot. In the former case it's almost assuredly the GPU core, but the latter I think is likely symptomatic of failing graphics memory. I recall that you water-cool your system, so perhaps it's possible the failures are due to inadequate VRAM cooling (assuming your waterblock covers the GPU only)? Individual RAMsinks without direct airflow over them?

Managed to hurt my back sleeping funny, so spent the afternoon with a couple movies, one catching up to something I never got around to, and the other catching up on something the filmmakers never got around to. Repo Man, Alex Cox's sort-of-sci-fi, sort-of-dystopic, sort-of-punk-comedy. To be honest, I can't say I "got" it, or that I "got" the supposed political overtones in it (something about Reagan-mumble-mumble), but that wasn't necessary to the enjoyment of just sitting back and watching the leads, Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez, shake, nay, blow the dust off the bleak urban setting. Soul Power, the documentary-slash-concert-film of the famous soul festival in Kinshasa, Zaire - featuring the likes of B.B. King, Bill Withers, the Pointer Sisters, and of course, James Brown - that preceded the legendary Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle". filmed in 1974 but not released until 2008 due to various lawyery stuffs. I'm not a fan of soul music but love my concert films, so not sure how I would take this. Significantly more talky bits than I had expected, but perhaps for that reason I liked it more than I expected. Ali gets a fair bit of face time, naturally.

I'd take a new Star Wars RPG over nothing, but I'd take almost any new non-Star Wars RPG over that, so eh. In the context of Obsidian at least, I'd rather see them have room to flex their creative muscle rather than don the straitjacket that is the Star Wars licence.

Obviously it is your destiny to remain forevermore with integrated graphics.

Wasn't there some controversy when it got released? Something about only a censored version being available in the US (sort of a "reverse" fallout 2 stunt, where Europeans got the gimped version) Mermaid bra and green blood. Not sure about the specific version in each region - it was apparently trivial to circumvent anyway, but I don't recall what version my Australian bundled copy (with a Sound Blaster Audigy) was.

I'd go with a tower cooler if overclocking the CPU, generally an easy job. For GPUs is a bit more fiddly, but personally I can't stand the blower-style stock coolers. RAM cooling is usually irrelevant, my memory of choice would be the Samsung 1.25V "magic" RAM, which doesn't even have a heatspreader - but regardless, try to avoid the tall heatsinks on memory because they tend to block installation of CPU coolers.

Yeah, even in the "worst" case scenario (in terms of power demands) if FO4 ends up on the next gen consoles instead of the current competitors, it's doubtful there'd be any big leap in requirements. Additional notes: - A high-end motherboard doesn't really give the average gamer anything - make sure you actually need the extra features they provide. Mid-range boards are usually a better bet, what they have over the entry level is usually better power circuitry and SLI support (the cheaper models usually only support Crossfire). - Memory speed is largely irrelevant, latencies especially so - while memory frequency only makes a real impact when using integrated graphics. That said, the price gap up to DDR1866 is usually pretty small as well. - The primary cons of SLI/Crossfire, aside from cost, are initial compatibility issues with new release games and the phenomenon known as microstutter, where some people who are more sensitive may notice fluctuating time between consecutive frames. I'd say avoid it until it becomes necessary due to unsatisfactory current performance.

Generally speaking, trying to futureproof/anticipate future requirements isn't a reliable science, and whenever possible it's best to just wait for the time you actually need the upgrade to do the upgrade - the best value outcome is almost invariably from going down that path. However if you must get something around now, it's simple enough: i5, 8/16GB, and one of 7950/7970/670/680. Given the ubiquity of loading screens in prior Bethesda games, I'd guess an SSD would be very helpful too. As for what's coming, there's been no announcement yet from either of the GPU vendors about timelines for their next product. Intel's next-gen Haswell CPU arrives mid-year and is expected to deliver fairly modest gains in CPU performance, but while of no interest to serious gamers just yet, the biggest leap it makes is likely to be in its integrated graphics.

Not seeing that trend either - always noted larger SSDs are equal or faster at everything, all else being equal. Samsung 840 as an example. And aside, I've just bought a 256GB 830 for my aging notebook, so it better be faster.

Slightly confusing naming scheme but the 840 Pro > 830 > 840. Not a 4TB SSD as such, but a 4TB array of SSDs should only cost about $3000. Mmmmm.....

Well there was the incident, think it was with that Vertex 2, in which they switched to a slower NAND - on a smaller node to save costs - without telling anyone. To add insult to injury, changes to overprovisioning meant it had reduced capacity as well. It was only found out when users found speeds were significantly below those in prior reviews and did some digging to get to the bottom of it. Not so much a technical issue as much as business ethics.

RAM (and PSUs) you can just rebrand, but SSD controllers are in a completely different league, and to an extent it's not unfair to say that OCZ's engineers have been coming up a bit short in that regard. Still, we need to keep the big picture in mind in saying that one is still far more likely to not notice any problems no matter what product you pick - the scale of any issue is still far smaller than say, the notorious IBM Deathstars.

Spider Solitaire could be considered a new release if you count the Win8 version of it.

Damn those humans and their lack of respect for reaper intellectual property!

The links were to a PNY reference-cooler 670 and a Windforce 7950. For what it's worth, looked through all the 670s on NCIX and the cheapest ones with custom coolers are the $330 MSI and the $340 Gigabyte. EDIT: The Windforce 7950 is $280 for comparison, and while there's a $260 XFX one with a custom cooler, I've heard disappointing reports of the XFX custom design. EDIT2: Looking at Newegg, their 670 pricing is rubbish so the candidates appear to be the Gigabyte 7950 from NCIX for $280 (after rebate, no bundle?*), the Sapphire 7950 from Newegg for $290 (after rebate, bundled games) and the Gigabyte 7950 from Newegg for $300 (no rebate, bundled games). * While there's no note on the item listing on NCIX, a googling of "Never settle bundle NCIX" does show that they're part of the scheme, so I'm not sure whether it's active for the particular card or not - might be worth contacting them to see whether that's the case.

No experience with stores on that side of the pond so no idea how that kind of thing works normally - there's no real culture of vendor cashbacks or coupon options over here. Pretty hard to say no to three new release games for $10 of course.

Yeah - not a fan of the stock reference "blower" type coolers from either nV or AMD. That Gigabyte custom cooler is a pretty good one, as far as factory-installed ones go.

Only one real choice at $300, and that's a HD7950 as the competitor product at the same price point is a fair bit behind. If you're inclined towards nVidia then the only realistic option is ponying up another ~$50 for a GTX670, which performs much the same, so less value but can be argued for.