Humanoid

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.

Just to show how much the low end has progressed in PC graphics, the GT630 cited there is a rebadged GT440 and is slower than a 8800GT, released in *2007*. The PS4 dev kit that's been released is based on the Trinity APU. I'd definitely consider a Trinity-based system if building a bare basic gaming PC, it's by no means speedy: the CPU is weak, and the GPU is only marginally faster than the GT630/440. It's slower than the GT640 and is about on par with the HD5570. Impressive? No. It's taken five years for integrated graphics to match the mainstream discrete solutions. But it's good enough for playable framerates, and I daresay superior ones to consoles, in a variety of modern titles like Skyrim and whatever ho-hum modern shooter you care to play on moderate settings. Price? Example build: AMD A10-5800K - $130 AsRock FM2 board - $65 4GB of some basic memory - $20 64GB SSD - $60 (yes I'm including an SSD in a basic system build, shh) Basic case with included PSU - $60 (can go cheaper but I have *some* standards) Input peripherals - $15 I'm going to cheat and say you migrate your old OS licence over from an older box. What, you haven't owned a PC since WinXP was released? Also going to assume your games will mostly be digital downloads from Steam or GMG or whatever at about a half to a third of the price of console titles. So a wee bit more, or a fair chunk more if you need a gaming OS. And some big omissions of course, disk space for one means you won't have too many games installed at once, but you can sub in a 500GB spindle drive for pretty much the same price. There's also no optical drive nor Wi-Fi, each of those would add about $20 each. Maybe I'll call it a 'luxury pack': add Wi-Fi, DVD and a spindle drive for $100 extra.

I was going to pick up Descent to Undermountain out of morbid curiosity before realising that it rightly isn't there. My Interplay library on GOG is pretty small, still 24 titles on the current sale I don't own, but probably will only pick up the Descent games and maaaaybe FO:T for the hell of it. Plus all the 80% off Telltale packs, of course. Already have most of them on Steam but would like to decouple the games from that.

Since Deus Ex was mentioned, one such 'huh' moment for me was HR's silly VTOL craft which did everything from travel two city blocks to flying non-stop across the bloody Pacific Ocean. In itself it was a bit silly, but in the context of the original reverting back to conventional helicopters.... well. On the other hand, the other complaint I often hear, that Jensen's augments are more advanced than some seen in the later-setting game I don't really mind. And yeah, Silent Storm, urgh. I think Alpha Centauri got the balance more or less right. I know some aspects of it were considered to be a bit pretentious, but eh, didn't bother me.

Tricky question. If the question was what we would like to see *not* in the game the answer would be easier. A: Casey Hudson.

I think the early mockup of the topdown game view probably confused and put people off a bit, looking like a solo-coded flash game for the most part. Yes it was stated to be far from final, but as evidenced in this thread at earlier points, that part didn't seem to come across. I'd also would have liked to get some addon physical goodies, but the separate $30 shipping on top of the $15 for the physical tier shipping in the first place kind of kills that deal for me. I'll probably end up sticking to the $35 tier and adding a second copy and the proposed sequel for a net $71 spend. Better value than the honestly rather unappealing $50 and $65 tiers. I don't have statistics or anything to back me up, but it feels like the backer count for those mid-tiers are lower than usual for projects of this scale.

I am sorely disappointed by the omission. I rate Faith as the best pop album of the 80s, ahead of such other massive works like Thriller, Purple Rain and Rio. I even broke my self-imposed Sony Music boycott to pick up the recent super-special-edition re-release.

Unfortunately Unicomp want $50 extra to ship a 'new' Model M over the Pacific. Anyway, while I'm not unhappy with my brown switches, in hindsight I'm thinking I probably would have preferred the higher actuation force of blue switches. As for the GPU cooler, I've successfully installed it now after probably the fiddliest time I've had of installing any PC hardware. There should be a minimum dexterity score requirement listed on the specs. That said, performance is great, looping Heaven for a while and my load temperatures are down 15-20°C and there's no real noticable ramp up in fan noise as the fan speed increases.

Took apart my video card cooler so I could install a new, quieter and better performing one. Unfortunately I didn't read the instructions before starting. "Thermal adhesive requires five hours curing time." Nooooo! Scuppered my plans for an entire night of XCOM.

As many other turn-based game systems work, there is a sort of simultaneous turn mechanic. Any other visual issues would simply be occasional ambiguous resolution of the result by the graphics engine. Specifically though, overwatch does trigger simultaneously with multiple combatants, such that shots tend to be wasted on the first alien to walk by. However this is logically sound in terms of the game universe so I don't really have a problem with it. It feels that there may be a pseudo-real time element I guess, when resolving which unit is credited with the initial hit, but that'd also be function of range - assuming projectile speed is the same, the closest unit's shot is resolved first. There does seem to be an exception in that sniper's overwatch shots will fire last. Similarly, the animation when spotted aliens scurry away is just , although the justification for it, besides being necessary for game balance, is somewhat questionable. Unrelated, but I do believe there's some dodgy LoS issues reported when dealing with overwatch fire on the aliens initial move. But again, while it feels like real time, any overwatch fire resolution on any of the units are still resolved deterministically, with the variables being, assuming the units move at equal speed, their movement and proximity. The triple move I can't say I've really noticed previously, not saying it doesn't happen but I suspect it's just a case of them being spotted on the final action of your own turn, therefore allowing them to go immediately into their regular double-action after the initial contact.