Humanoid

The Sims is a series I would love if only the sims themselves were fully autonomous and didn't require handholding, along the lines of the other Sim-games. Unfortunately, even at the highest 'free will' setting, while they'll do the basic things like eating and going to work, they'll ignore that broken sink while it sprays water all over the house (except for complaining about it every few minutes before merrily ignoring it again). On UK game pricing, yeah it's awesome, but unfortunately Amazon won't ship games to Australia. There are a number of alternatives, but none are perfect: Zavvi/The Hut offer free shipping and frequent discount codes, but don't remove the VAT component of the prices. DVD.co.uk remove the VAT, but charge shipping (1.39GBP) for every single item with no discounts for bulk orders. 365games (via their localised site) offer pricing in Australian dollars, but are usually a bit dearer than the other two. None have any choice over shipping carrier, all use Royal Mail, which is fine for me, but unlike Amazon it means you can't have expedited and/or tracked delivery.

Yeah, curse those mouse drivers eating up all my conventional memory. If someone passed you a floppy disk with a generic mouse driver that took up one less kilobyte than the one you were using, that was worth its weight in gold! Still, at least it wasn't as hungry as MSCDEX.EXE. :D Ahem. Personally I uninstalled all my Logitech software once I stopped needing the remap facility for MMOs and just let Windows handlle it as a generic mouse.

There's the G400 and G500 which are both current models and the same basic shape as the MX518, yeah. I don't really pay attention to things like mouse 'performance' because I don't play anything where it matters: I prefer the utility of the revolution scrollwheels in the non-gaming mice (using an MX1100 at the moment), I'm addicted to that wheel. It's disappointing that they still haven't added that wheel to their trackball products: I use trackballs on both my laptop and my HTPC and it's hard to adapt to life without it. That said, I've heard that some people have had issues with how the G500's sensor works and prefer the simpler G400. I have a couple of the latter if only because they were dirt cheap, one I use at work and the other has been left unopened on my shelf for the past year - I only bought the second one to get my order past a free shipping threshold....

Ahh, shopping, the one thing I'm really jealous with Americans about. Put together an example build using Newegg: Antec P280 Black Super Mid Tower Computer Case $109.99 SeaSonic X750 Gold 750W ATX12V V2.3/EPS 12V V2.91 SLI Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Full Modular Active PFC Power Supply $99.99 Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4000 BX80637I53570K $219.99 + Newegg Promotional Gift Card - $20.00 ASUS P8Z77-V LE LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard ($20.00 Mail-in Rebate Card) $134.99 GeIL EVO Leggara Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) Desktop Memory Model GEL38GB1866C9DC $42.99 SAMSUNG 830 Series MZ-7PC256B/WW 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) $199.99 Western Digital Red WD20EFRX 2TB IntelliPower SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive $129.99 SAPPHIRE 100352-2L Radeon HD 7950 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card ($20.00 Mail-in Rebate Card) $299.99 + AMD Gift - 4-in-1 Game Coupon (free Far Cry 3, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, discount on MoH:Warfighter) Comes to $1,237.92 so I overshot the budget a little, but that's before $40 worth of mail-in rebates and $20 free gift voucher. No OS specified, if you need to cut back on the budget I suggest downgrading either of the storage solution. Also no optical drive since that's trivial to scavenge from your old box.

$1200 buys a lot nowadays if all you need is the box. Keeping track of drivers isn't really an issue as modern OSes work well enough with the drivers they ship with to at least allow you to download the latest versions - bearing in mind a lot of it is unnecessary bloatware anyway - if you can get around to building it, you can end up with a much more balanced system complete with goodies such as a big SSD and high-end graphics (nothing linked in this thread so far boasts acceptable graphics for the budget).

Saw it reported that the non-US basic Wii U bundles bafflingly don't include a sensor bar. All other bundles, including the basic one inthe US, come with it. The huh? On the other hand, only Europe gets the ZombiU bundle. Weird stuff.

Mostly it's just retuned the difficulty curve, the early game fights are significantly easier now while there's not much difference later in the game. No idea about alchemy however.

At the price I got it, even one playthrough is me robbing them blind Though I also buy games purely based on artistic merit, when I decide that their visual approach etc stands out. Not a GoG game, but if you haven't tried it, you may want to try the Steam demo of 'Trine' Very much a GOG game now, it's right there in the sale.

Every time she's asked she rules out ever going back into gaming though. Though if Williams and Jim Walls (Police Quest) return, that'd complete the suite of Sierra adventure alumni... What I fear most is that Derek Smart will try to get in on the Kickstarter action. OhgodIwishIhadn'thadsaidthat.

Not just Katy Perry DLC but a whole Katy Perry-edition full-blown expansion!

Haven't really used GOG to acquire indie games previously, so none of the eligible titles are in my library. Figured I'd do my part and pick 5 of them based purely on the info page for each title. Ended up with Resonance, Blackwell, Machinarium, Botanicula and Symphony to take my library to 160.

I've been putting off sleep for a couple hours to make sure I don't wake up to a failed project drive. With $5k and 7 hours left it's now assured but still, sort of want to stay up until it's 100%. The things Kickstarter drives me to..... at least Eternity's drive had the decency to end at about noon my time.

Helps that the minimum pledge tiers were a bit higher than pretty much any previous Kickstarter too, and that even those were limited in number. In the end I didn't bump up my $125 pledge as I had planned because I'm feeling Hero-U might need the cash reserved instead, but will look to possibly increase it in the future.

So Hallford in the wake of his somewhat ill-reasoned Krondor-followup petition drive ends up here instead? Backing the wrong horse surely.

He's not going to pay you millions or even tens of thousands of caps because that would break the game economy. It's about game design and balance, not House being an a-hole (still not a four letter word, Obsidian naughty language filter.) That's why they dramatically reduced casino payouts with one of the updates. I used to roll into the strip with 9-10 luck and walk out with about 200,000 caps because you could get upwards of 50,000 caps per casino. All you needed was a jackpot on the slots with a maximum bet to get around 40k caps. For a typical wasteland nobody 1000 (or 1250) is a lot of caps, and unless you've been really busy with faction jobs, you're generally walking in as a nobody in the eyes of all the factions of the Mojave. Except Mr. House, who sees your potential and your value. Besides, it's necessary to continue the main quest, which is more pressing than what the reward is. I'm well aware of the metagame reasoning behind it, just pointing out the amusing (in my own mind) result that in the end he died over a couple hundred caps because of his overreaction.

I was just going to praise them for having that option to immediately kill him, until I saw that thing about DA2 bringing him back. I've taken that option twice out of the two times I've attempted a playthrough long enough to reach that point (though both playthroughs were terminated soon thereafter). I've also left Sten to rot in his cage every single playthrough. Despite the characters I was playing being vastly different every time, I feel none but a chaotic stupid character would have a good reason to take either of them. DAO is a game I still openly dislike, but is one that still does illustrate the design about-turn that has happened since, where "because we don't want you to miss the cool stuff we made" is a good enough reason to invalidate your choices.

It's only within the last year or two that the GPU industry has reached the point of maturity in its development, a point the CPU business reached almost a decade ago, where the principal vendors have essentially formed a truce to end the power consumption wars. For CPUs this was the ~125W range 'achieved' by the Pentium 4. For GPUs it appears the final number has ended up about double that (nVidia's Fermi), with a little leeway given to dual-GPU cards. It's not that they can't engineer products beyond these limits - with some aggressive overclocking, a Bulldozer CPU can pull ~400W, more than most complete systems - but such stretching is left to the end user. If and when we move away from the ubiquitous and somewhat outdated ATX design (not holding my breath) then maybe the figures will see revision, but eh. I don't expect the numbers will go down - neither GPU vendor would willingly go that route if it meant sacrificing the marketing benefit of having the one fastest product - but I'd be happy enough to see it at least stay where it is for the foreseeable future. On a personal note, I paid ~25% again the price of my video card to get a cooler with a noise level that would allow me to retain my sanity. For an overclocked 7950 this means it's still well within reason to engineer an air cooler that can dissipate that ~250W adequately and quietly. I suppose the issue then is engineering an equivalent solution economical enough to use as stock cooling. Aside, GTX780 isn't a next gen product anyway, it's more or less a refresh like the 580 was to the 480, so that performance gain quoted is entirely reasonable. It means that the 'full' Kepler (GK110) will never be released as a gaming card and remain solely in the domain of HPC/workstation oriented products. Sure, it would have been interesting to see how it performed with gaming loads, but if this decision is final, then it's reasonable to assume that it was either not possible or at least uneconomic to pursue it. I wouldn't necessarily call it a loss because being so compute-oriented, it may not have been much of an impressive gaming card anyway even if fully realised.

The problem for me is the messed up progression curve that makes late-game stuff fairly routine. This applies both in terms of difficulty, in which your first month or two are the hardest regardless of what level you play at, and in terms of variety, in which once you've secured your position strategically (i.e. carpeted the world in satellites), the majority of maps are cordoned off and you're left with a small pool of repetitive UFO maps left for months of game-time. In short, the best way to experience new stuff in the game is to keep restarting it and playing the opening over and over. To contrast, the lategame of Civilization 4 for example, kept me interested because it opened up instead of clamming up - even if inefficient, I liked engaging in global combined arms warfare with a range of options such as establishing air dominance and multi-pronged amphibious assaults that would not have been available in the early game. Late game XCOM is the reverse, it gets *less* complex as the majority of late-game enemies are mechanically simpler than what came before: most no longer bother with the cover mechanic (everything but Muton Elites really), ignore the hit calculations (psionics) and in general simply test how much firepower you can muster per turn. ...and yes, I've taken your slight tangent and sailed it into the Bermuda Triangle.

I accidentally insulted House on my playthrough (asked for more cash or somesuch), causing all the robots to go hostile. Being pretty durable but lacking the firepower to kill him, I ran around his pad for a while (since I think the exit is disabled) until I stumbled upon him and killed him. Ah well, that's what being a cheapskate over a few hundred caps while being a millionaire gets you.

The fourth and fifth titles were Clouds of Xeen and Darkside of Xeen respectively, representing two sides of XEEN - which like all the early MM worlds, was actually a spaceship of some sort. World of Xeen is what you could get if you owned both aforementioned games, you could merge them into one installation to create one giant game.

Heroes of Might and Magic initially shared nothing except the name with its "parent" title, the original settings for each were apparently intended to be fully independent of each other - Might and Magic was a fantasy/sci-fi hybrid from the beginning, and HoMM was straight high fantasy. It wasn't until MM6, after a long break from the series, changed its setting to match that of HoMM2 that the series were unified, and even then that was done kind of sloppily - so much so that rather than tidy it up, they decided to blow up the world and start afresh. They had planned to introduce the sci-fi element into the Heroes series in the first HoMM3 expansion (Armageddon's Blade) with a new "Forge" faction, but faced a fan backlash so massive that they backed down and substituted a last minute ho-hum alternative instead. There are also other spinoffs such as Crusaders of, Legends of, and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, but I've never played any of them.

Whenever I see the name Cullen my mental image is always of the ponytailed antagonist in Kindergarten Cop....

7" or 10"? Pfft, I'm changing my opinion, bigger is indeed better, so this Viewsonic 22" Android "tablet" is my new pick. :D

Included case fans are almost always substandard anyway and are the first thing to be removed when I get a new case. And yeah, my current case is also a P182(B) - but I'm quite happy to stick with it, and indeed might keep using it for my next build (whether that's Haswell or the following gen remains to be seen). Actually I bought the 182 many months before actually building a system around it because the 183 had been announced and I didn't like the look of it - was worried the 182 would be too hard to find. Mix of Nexus (for clamping onto coolers where more pressure is required) and Scythe fans (intake and exhaust) for me and I'm reasonably happy with the acoustics, but room for improvement. Alternative for me would be a Silverstone Fortress I guess, but it's a ways off before I make any decisions - going to grab a Haswell notebook for certain next year (probably the Lenovo X240) and a Trinity-based mini-ITX system: was going to settle for a basic Antec case for that but saw that CK101 case too. Tempting for sure, although I've never been a fan of aluminium for casing.

More or less my position, except that I would remove the word 'really' from before 'enjoyed Skyrim' and insert it before 'dislike Oblivion'. Oblivion has the distinction of being the worst game I've purchased specifically (the ones ranked below it would be mostly random inclusions in bundles either with other games that I actually did want or with hardware). Not even the mighty ME3 could topple it. Morrowind on the other hand, were I to rank all such things in order, would be more or less smack bang in the middle.