Humanoid

I'm not familiar with much FR stuff myself, but I know that the first release was the "grey box" edition, and so a quick googling of what's purportedly the map that came with that edition reveals it's been there since that first commercial release - http://www.mimbral.c.../9279/frmap.jpg As to when Greenwood introduced it into his campaign ....well. EDIT: Ninjaed.

Is it possible that all the (minor) issues are just smoke and mirrors and that the problem was that they had judged your wife from day one due to her background as a showgirl (amongst other things)? Followed then by ten years of actively trying to find faults because of that pre-judgement? I say this because of your comment about bible verses and such - while not necessarily an indicator of their conservatism or even prudishness, it may be that the deck was loaded from the start.

After the first month or two of "oh shiny new stuff", Alien Crossfire is something I always put away for the occasional novelty game. Finally getting to play Righteous Fire again on the other hand without my CD is great. Sale's been slim pickings this time around though due to essentially having all that I genuinely want - heck, I was even thinking about picking up outright rubbish like MM9 due to there being nothing else that drew my eye. Might pick up the Daedalic pack which is today's special due to the various posts praising Deponia above, but no idea what the other stuff in the pack is about.

I never had a 3dfx card, my first 3D accelerator was actually an nVidia, heh - their first serious effort, the Riva128, which replaced my S3 VirgeDX. It was faster than a Voodoo1, but made some terrible tradeoffs in terms of image quality, most noticeable in the primitive dithering of greys, which looked mostly like white with black pepper applied to it. Fortunately they managed to turn it around, and with the TNT/2, overtook 3dfx by virtue of doing 32-bit colour just about as fast as the Voodoo3 could do 16-bit colour. Also on topic, and by a sort of coincidence, I see the Antec ISK300/310 case that I want is also out of stock in most reputable stores. Am in no rush to build my miniITX system since I have other ongoing projects (such as building two road bikes) but I did want to try to get the parts while I'm on holidays in Melbourne.

One factor in the loyalty of a non-trivial subset of customers is likely whether they were affected by nVidia's "bumpgate" - an systematic engineering flaw to do with thermal cycling that took a good while to be fixed (or even admitted to) that caused a large range of their chips to degrade and fail unusually fast. I had a 7900GT fail in this manner, and a similar-generation notebook GPU that would have almost certainly suffered the same fate (based on reports from owners of the same chip) if that notebook wasn't stolen. This problem also spawned the vaguely comedic, but effective notion that you could bake your video cards in the oven to fix them. It did sort of work as a stopgap, restoring function for a few months at a time perhaps, if you were comfortable with the idea of having toxic chemicals at high temperatures sitting in your oven. Fortunately there's been no problems of that magnitude for either vendor since then, a good 4-5 years ago now, so fairly comfortable going either way. Personally I weigh price:performance but the price side of the equation is inclusive of third party cooling since I'm yet to find factory cooling I would remotely label as satisfactory in terms of noise in any recent product.

Christmas means my semi-annual trip back to Melbourne to see family. Not so much for the occasion itself, but because unlike me, they don't tend to have flexible holidays that we can sync up any other time of the year. Typically a shopping trip on the 27th to get belated (and frequently silly) Christmas presents - we're all the type to avoid crowds - and besides that, not much due to the typical 35-45C degree days around this time of year. Some classic movies, multiplayer console games, that kind of thing mostly. No specific foods we associate with Christmas - except maybe some stollen - I'm guessing it'll be probably something like a regular BBQ for dinner on Christmas day. Oh, parents will probably go to the church service in the morning while I sleep in - they're mildly devout Christians, I'm not religious, and my siblings are somewhere in between. It's never something that gets in the way in any situation, fortunately.

Haha, well my definition of opening is rather broad, but I'd say up until it's established *why* you have to go to Mars - at which point the game has established these points: - Earth is the most important place in the galaxy! Go tell the other races their home worlds are expendable and that they should help us - this is by far my biggest beef with the set up of the game. - A kid died! You're now emotionally traumatised! - We're totally going to mount a resistance movement against the reapers, using infantry! - The MacGuffin was something we had access to all along ....on Mars! (But no one's bothered reading it until our blue space-babe buddy decides to go through the volumes of material alone) - Cerberus is the strongest military force in the Galaxy! (okay, I admit this point doesn't quite get fully established during the Mars mission, but it builds up improbably until they somehow take over the Citadel) Maybe that's nitpicking, but I don't feel it is. Nitpicking would be complaining about the stuff like the silly "We fight or we die!" speech, the Reaper opting to blow up the oven-mitt cars instead of the Normandy, the cable car rail mine - but that's stuff that the prior instalments did no better at. EDIT: Expanding a bit on the primary gripe, I'll draw a comparison between the setup of ME3 and that of DA:O. DA:O's opening is something I've criticised repeatedly for undermining player agency. Yes, I object to my character being conscripted into being a Warden, but at the same time I recognise that at least fighting off baby-eating abominations is still a rather sensible course of action, so that I can give it a pass, although just barely. Shepard's initial goal in ME3 is none of those things - it's not sensible, practical or in any way justifiable in the gameworld logic that Earth should be the sole staging point that the whole galaxy should rally around. Indeed the game's depiction of the relative situations in the various homeworlds tend to show that Earth, which is putting up far worse of a fight than the other locations you visit, should be the first domino to be allowed to fall. Even if you were playing Shepard as a super space-racist who believes that goal is the correct one, there's no way you should be able to get the other races to fall in line with that viewpoint.

An on-topic post! Burn it! Couldn't say anything about the last few days of posts because Star Wars is not something I know - I've still yet to watch any of the movies in full - so therefore something I can't whinge about. ME on the other hand.... well if I had to pick "what has annoyed me the most" it'd be the ME3 opening, *not* the ending, because from a personal perspective, that's where any interest remaining in the property finally keeled over and sank into the icy depths.

Only ever played it once (not meant to be a slight on it), so it'd be assured that it's been a decade or more since I last played it. Heck, I completely forgot about the existence of that crystal room with the genie shown just then. >.>

One thing I noticed is the UI elements were all stretched and weird. Only two years between them, but it's interesting to see how ME has aged, technologically at least, so much better than JE. I've only played the tutorial, several months ago, and haven't really had the urge to pick it back up since then.

I quit early this year and haven't had even the slightest urge to come back, and as I recall I've been playing slightly longer than you have. That Annual Pass thing was a clever ploy, fortunately as someone with no interest in D3 I could avoid being tied up. Hypothetically, if I were to even try to come back, I think the attempt would burn out pretty quickly - my old guild, co-founded in 2007, no longer has the critical mass to even regularly do ten-person content: at its peak in 2008-2010, it was a fully fledged 25-person raiding guild. I have neither any inclination to attempt to rebuild (having quit any leadership roles at the end of LK) nor any drive to find a new home - which, aside, would involve paying the extortionate server transfer fee multiple times over as the old guild was the sole Australian/SEA guild on that US-Pacific time server. $250 to transfer them all? Good god.

They're closer to the goal than Hero-U was at the same stage of the project I think? In terms of percentage and not in absolute dollars however. Pretty sure they'll make it, though none of the cash is mine, yet.

No personal experience, but obviously sounds like you want the e-ink versions instead of the hybrid reader/tablet versions like the Kindle Fire or Nook HD which use regular LCD screens. The former being easier on the eye, being made for purpose (that is, extended viewing of text only), while forsaking other types of media. While various e-book vendors have differing file formats, you can use the free Calibre software to convert them, making it a non-issue. (But yes, Amazon does the mobi/azw format as opposed to the open epub format, though they provide a conversion tool)

Watched Ingmar Bergman's 1955 Smiles of a Summer Night. First Bergman I've seen in years, so it felt odd to come back to what is essentially a rom-com, but hey. Though I can't see why it made Time's 100 movies list, it was fun, particularly Eva Dahlbeck's performance. In the meantime, picked up a five film box set of Bergman's earlier work which I will work my way through. Aside, I'm still waiting on a Barnes and Noble order of twenty Criterion Collection movies from their early November sale to come through, they've always been slow but this time even moreso. Not that I'm short on stuff to watch, but still, there's a few titles in that bunch I'd like to prioritise.

If anything, Game Company Executive should be the top level node of the Criminal career path. :D

See, not having grouped in any serious way, I already had too much trouble keeping up with them, so yeah, just illustrates the problem further. And at the risk of droning on too much about WoW (a game I haven't played in some time now), a simple mod like the popular NeedToKnow surely couldn't be seen to be damaging gameplay in any reasonable way. All something like this does is change the display of various statuses from a tiny square with a hard-to-see radial grey overlay to a simple horizontal bar that you can place where it's most comfortable to view. In an attempt to stamp out the more extreme edge cases (like the infamous AVR, which allowed you to draw simple geometric objects directly onto the gameworld and broadcast it to your group) that the WoW API allowed for (or at least used to), they've wiped out the simple quality-of-life mods like the former. Good point on the prevalence of group quests too - fortunately they're strictly optional (the nature of repeatable quests, of which they all are), although the point is not communicated to the player all that well. The story development in them tends to be tangential to whatever you're currently doing, and is usually pretty trivial, so you don't miss out on much in that regard, but a side-effect tends to be that skipping them will end up in you doing the "bonus" lines later on to catch up.

I didn't even get to max level, so to say nothing on endgame content, I think the problem is an extension of the "it's like WoW" point. It's like an outdated iteration of WoW. Obviously anything specific I say going to be an assumption since I know nothing of the internal development process, but it retains a good number of design elements lifted from designs that have been used and since discarded in WoW. TOR plays like WoW2010 (Lich King), or even WoW2008 (Burning Crusade), and as someone who played through those years, I don't really want to go back to those times. Prime example is the skill/talent tree/system. TOR's system is essentially a clone of WoW's back in 2004 - full of minor, trivial and generally uninteresting 'choices'. +3% damage to one of your abilities? And making it a 5-point talent so you eventually end up, five levels later, with nothing more interesting than +15% damage to one ability? Yawn. WoW got rid of most of these types of talents back in 2010, and ripped up the system completely this year. A more minor example would be the longer cooldowns on your best abilities. WoW has gotten rid of these as they weren't useful restrictions. If your tank doesn't have his/her prime defensive cooldown available when you're about to attempt the boss again, then most people will just wait it out, making it an inconvenience and not the balancing mechanic it was supposed to be. I all-too-frequently found myself idling in front of some elite enemies just waiting for cooldowns to come up before engaging them. The other major issue is the encounter design versus the deliberate design decision to restrict moddability and general UI feedback. In a way I applaud the decision to do this: maintaining a dozen or more mods just to successfully raid in WoW is a right pain. But what TOR has done is simply rip away the ability to do it without considering its consequences on both gameplay balance and general usability - UI feedback as to your abilities is exceedingly poor. For example, some special abilities require fairly complex conditions and prerequisite actions before being able to use them effectively. Maybe it requires the target to be bleeding, and for you to have built up some 'combo points' by using a different ability beforehand. Well, unfortunately the 'bleeding' indicator on your target is a tiny non-descript icon hidden amongst a dozen other status icons above your target's health bar, and your combo points are likewise displayed as a tiny indicator above your health bar. (WoW's other extreme isn't necessarily the best approach, mind you, as in that, you can pre-program that precise combination to make it pop up a massive translucent image overlaid across the centre of your screen, accompanied by a custom musical cue, telling you whenever the best time to use that specific ability came along.) They're definitely guilty of trying to have in both ways here. And finally, one more issue is that the opening level for a quarter of the classes is a damn swamp level.

Exactly that, there is an official update, a hotfix - the Slingshot DLC introduced a bug which made existing ironman games unable to be loaded if you install the DLC - which updates the game regardless of whether you have the DLC or not (tested by logging in on my laptop). (It's made worse because the GPU on my laptop has essentially failed, so I can't try the game, or any 3D games in general, on my laptop either. But I don't want to get a new laptop until Haswell mid-next-year, blah.)

Random example of Steam getting in my way now - I've been playing a self-modded (using both Resource Hacker and Toolboks) XCOM classic run, and am staying in offline mode to prevent Steam autofixing/patching it (I don't need or want the Slingshot hotfix patch). I want to try the Football Manager 13 demo, but am unable to do so because I need to log-in to "complete installation." Yeah, relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, I can log in once, get everything in line, then go offline again and re-mod XCOM, but still, it's something I wouldn't have to do if they weren't both Steamworks games.

I have a separate CC just for Internet stuff. Somewhat frighteningly, I've spent far more on it than on my main day-to-day card so far this year. Haven't pledged to anything since Hero-U, but I'll do one last round-up of projects before the year is out and pick a few to back.

I was hoping it was for "method to exercise a cat".

The unique thing about the Dark Brotherhood questline in Skyrim is that you can totally short-circuit it and take it in another direction right from the outset. Sure, the alternate path is not nearly as engaging as the 'intended' path, but it's a welcome addition. All the more baffling then, that the same approach isn't taken with the other major non-plot questlines. All it takes is removing the plot armour and a simple trigger to activate the fallback questline when you get all stabby.

Might be just you given how generally reviled the Thieves' Guild part of the game is - probably the most disliked writing of the game in general for a lot of folks. That said, I did enjoy it enough to say it's probably the most enjoyment out of a Bethesda-developed game that I've had, and although I didn't have the desire to finish it in the end, I can comfortably say it was worth the money.

The perfect set-up, but I just, just can't bring myself to do it.

I think in the official timeline the island of Morrowind is destroyed? Doing a post-apocalyptic Morrowind setting might infringe on their other main title.