Humanoid

It's more fun in the beginning in almost all ways. Would love some UFO missions not located in "sparsely populated areas" as generic man repeats over and over. I understand glossing over UFOs being shot down over the sea (until they do a TFTD expansion of course), but an urban UFO crash would be interesting tactically. But for best immediate improvement of game variety, what probably should happen is that a new mission type is implemented for the late game to replace the abduction missions, and occur on the same map set as abductions - even if they're just "kill all alien" objectives under a different name. Have tried base Classic mode a little. The +10% hit and crit bonus aliens get is, I suspect, affecting the AI decisions and not in an interesting way. They factor in the extra hit chance when deciding on their move and will take the relatively improbable shots instead of manoeuvring into position and I feel that's less interesting. Just a hunch of course, can't say for sure that's how they're programmed, but at any rate, I'd probably go with removing that bonus for a better experience, and generally moving classic a bit away from impossible.

No specifics but the main thing would be whether you'd be going USB or analogue. Convenience vs quality, but then again you didn't mention singing. I guess budget will drive that and any other main decisions - are we talking tens or hundreds (or thousands) of dollars?

After a blank last week, picked up Syndicate (as everyone should) plus U9 and LoL1+2 for the hell of it. I now have all but four of the games in the EA GoG catalogue... 144.

Small updates: As we wind into summer, I'm feeling the 'stock' cooling of my 7950 no longer being adequate for its purpose - it ramps up to ~60% fan speed under load, and even 50% is already audible in an unpleasant way. To that end, I've got an Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 7970 on its way to replace the Twin Frozr III cooler - it was better than a reference cooler, sure, but in the same way that being hit by a car is better than being hit by a bus. Also picked up a new keyboard, Das Keyboard with Cherry Brown switches. It's the new revision with media keys - I like the idea of having media keys, but am not fond of the implementation with an extra modifier key between the LCtrl and LAlt keys. Finally, I am preparing to build a new mini-ITX PC before the year is out, though not for any particular purpose. Provisional specs are an AMD Trinity A10-5800K APU, ASRock FM2A75M-ITX motherboard, some DDR3-1866 RAM (APUs can really use the extra bandwidth generally), 256GB Samsung 830 SSD, Antec ISK-310 case. Undecided on whether to bother with an optical drive. Rest of the parts like a USB wi-fi stick, input peripherals and display I can salvage from older boxes. Not sure on O/S, in itself I probably would go Linux, but my dad has spare licences on a Win7 Family Pack from a couple years ago. CPU: Intel i5-750 @ 3.33GHz with Prolimatech Megahalems cooler and 2x Nexus Real Silent 120mm fans M/B: Gigabyte P55A-UD4P RAM: 8GB PC10666 G.Skill Eco DDR3 1.35V 7-7-7-21 HDD: 808.8GB WD Green SSD1: 128GB G.Skill Falcon II SSD SSD2: 256GB Crucial m4 Video: MSI Radeon HD7950 Twin Frozr III with Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 7970 cooler Sound: Asus Xonar Essence ST ODD: Pioneer DVR-216 DVD-RW FDD: Sony 3.5" Case: Antec P182B with Scythe Slipstream 800-1200rpm case fans PSU: Seasonic X-650 O/S: Win7 Pro 64-bit OEM Mouse: Logitech MX1100 Keyboard: Das Keyboard Professional Silent (Cherry Brown) with Media Keys Display: 2x Dell U2711 27" IPS Speakers: Audioengine A5 2.0 Headphones: Alessandro MS-1i Gaming Peripherals: - CH Products F-16 Fighterstick USB - Thrustmaster HOTAS Cougar - Logitech Dual Action gamepad - XBox360 Wireless controller for PC HTPC: CPU: Intel i5 2300 with stock cooler Video: Intel onboard HD2000 graphics M/B: Asus P8H67-M microATX motherboard (first gen, complete with the potentially faulty SATA ports, too lazy to RMA) I/O: Astrotec 4-port USB 3.0 expansion card RAM: 4GB Kingston ValueRAM SSD: 128GB Crucial m4 SSD ODD: LG BD-RW Storage: - 2TB WD Green HDD - internal - 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP HDD - internal - 2x 3TB 7200rpm Seagate GoFlex Desk external - Vantec HX4 quad-bay 3.5" HDD enclosure, housing 2x 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP O/S: Win7 Home Premium PSU: Corsair CX-400 PSU Case: Antec Fusion Black Mouse: Logitech M570 Wireless Trackball Keyboard: Logitech K520 wireless I/R:Logitech Harmony 650 remote control Sound: Onkyo SR-578 HT Receiver Speakers: Monitor Audio Bronze BR-2 Display: 46" Samsung B650 CCFL LCD TV

Oh, and bug report for that playthrough: besides the obvious camera/movement issues and the date sort bug: - One occasion where the UI became unresponsive during my turn: I could select an action but not execute any, and could not switch soldier or force end turn (Backspace). Had to force terminate for this one. - One occasion where after firing a rocket in a UFO, the game seemed stuck calculating its effect, effectively hanging. - Only one occurrence of the oft-reported random enemy spawning in LOS: a Sectopod spawning behind my squad, effectively right next to the Skyranger. while I was scouting ahead. - One occasion, again on a UFO, where a soldier landing after using Archangel armour ended up inside the level geometry and was unable to move (including flight) for the remainder of the mission.

I finished my first game earlier today, regular normal game, with soft-ironman self-imposed: but did reload a couple times where the wacky multi-level camera and movement issues would have wasted my time. Did very poorly strategically at the start - apparently a fairly common problem due to the economic management aspect being poorly covered in the tutorial - but once stabilised it wasn't really a challenge, yeah. I'm a bit loathe to start a new classic game before the upcoming patch though, and even then I might choose to mod/hack it to swap out some game elements I'm not fond of. Lategame comments: tactically I think the game becomes a fair bit less interesting late on - the aliens, elite mutons aside, cease to behave in a 'realistic' fashion and instead just rely on inherent bonuses, making the game less about clever positioning and more about raw firepower. Cyberdiscs, Drones, Sectopods, Ethereals - none of them really behave tactically, being basically treated as being in permanent cover, and even for the Sectoid Commanders it's mostly just an illusion of it since they're not bound to the normal rolls. It was more interesting early in the game where the aliens mostly played by the same rules you do, with the occasional floater or chryssalid providing occasional but interesting exceptions. Compounding the issue is that increasingly the varied mission settings are replaced by visually and tactically repetitive large UFO levels, where you pretty much start on the boarding ramp. Yes it makes in-world sense that eventually as you gain control of things, abduction missions gradually fall away, but most of different the levels in the game are only played on those missions, so while there is, in absolute terms, a good enough variety of maps, I'd hazard a majority of them are essentially removed from the pool by the second half of the game. Unfortunately it seems that modding the game is a bit more finicky than in Civilization for the moment, with most changes requiring hacking of the game executable. The mods out there I mostly like the sound of, but the issue is that you're essentially stuck picking one pre-defined package of what the particular modder thought was the best balance. Hopefully in the future the tweaks can be done in simple text files so that I can pick and choose what I want. Things that are known to be changeable and which I would like to have direct access to: - Restoring the Arc Thrower to be a secondary weapon and not a miscellaneous item - Removing the arbitrary +10% hit and crit from aliens in Classic/Impossible (happy to just have to deal with the unshackled AI and no limit on active AI combatants, they don't need flat bonuses on top of that) - Toning down the environmental damage effect of plasma weapons - Slowing base research speed thereby making science improvements more meaningful (I did not build a single lab in my initial playthrough) - (Maybe) removing panic friendly fire (though it only occurred once in my game just now) - Increasing trooper downtime after injury (the perk to halve injury time in particular I feel is a bit too strong) - (Maybe) enabling an extra miscellaneous item slot for all troopers I want those changes, but don't care for the couple dozen other tweaks the current mods tend to add. Guess I might do it myself after the patch hits - I don't want to make these changes now then have to redo them a few days later.

The initial design planning for this would have been in the works around the time Ultima Online was in development I imagine. The MMO elements including death seem to mostly match up to that game.

I was totally thinking of the PM thread, yeah. I've never had trouble with URLs, but then I've never had occasion to post particularly many. However I have had some big issues with the way the software handles lists in general - so much so that I don't bother using list tags anymore. If the URLs were in a formalised list, maybe that's the issue?

Yes, the forum software supports it, but it's disabled in the admin settings (for good reason). If the feature were on, when you try to create a PM, the recipients textbox would have multiple lines, and you'd be able to enter one name per line.

Oddball bug, fired the game up and panicked: "oh no, I've lost all my games from the past day!" For some bizarre reason it turns out that the game thinks that November 1 occurs between October 30 and October 31.

LucasArts haven't produced anything I've considered worth playing (or indeed, worth watching) in almost a decade, so I don't see how it could get worse.

The more satellites you have operational, the greater your monthly income. They also reduce panic levels, which is nice. I built a new power plant after discovering that power was a limiting factor, and I wish I had the resources for a satellite nexus thing, but for now I think I just have to settle for a simple two satellite hub. Damn network congestion Trying to plan a bit ahead too, so my facilities ends up next to each other for the added efficiency. It's almost standard practice to build a 2x2 square consisting of two hubs and two nexuses (nexii?): you probably want the second hub regardless of whether you have access to a nexus because the starter hub + 2 nexus won't be enough while a hub + 3 nexus is overkill and therefore inefficient resourcewise. Probably my biggest complaint about the strategic layer of the game is how engineering oriented stuff works out much more powerful than research: more engineers are always the option to take over more scientists, more workshops are better than more labs, etc. It's mainly because of how comparatively shallow the tech "tree" is and how your science division is idle once you've exhausted the research options (or need to unlock more through non-sciency actions).

Though I'm sure it'll meet the funding goal, a pre-goal stretch target is a bit of an oddity.

Yeah, I don't think Win8 retail is available just yet, though the OEM version is available I think. That said, it looks like there are workarounds available to force an upgrade copy to work on a clean install, but of course it's not officially supported.

The guy who wrote Minecraft and is now rich as a result.

Yesterday I played my first half-hour of XCOM. Today I played the next eight hours of it. I don't have anything particularly insightful to say about it. Had fun, until the first large UFO mission. Now I understand what a lot of the complaining over the past dozen pages has been about. Also makes me glad I didn't go official Ironman for now - though I'm doing a soft-ironman which lasted until that aforementioned mission. Also continually flat broke, I think I'll go read some documentation now before I pass out for the night. Wishlist? Aside from a proper scout/stealth mechanics which is probably outside the scope of any fixes, probably a change to the funding model to a pro-rata per day basis rather than the monthly lump sum. Perhaps a better distinction between the map boundaries and the fog of war.

I'm now imagining Cerberus operating a hospital. It would be run like the Gumby brain surgery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M68GeL8PafE

Renegade interrupt: administer adrenaline shot! - Dammit, I don't have enough paragon points to save his leg! I only have the red option to amputate immediately and yell at him to harden up! - I give the kid a lollipop after a successful operation. Dr. Morgan disapproves (-10). Dang. I'll have to find a jewel-encrusted scalpel gift to make up for it. - Doctor! This patient has no health cover! That's okay, we'll limit him to three pills a week, 10 minutes max on the IV, no sponge baths, and only the fluoro green hospital gown.

Started Dishonored. Oh, looks like the first segment of serious gameplay is a sewer level. Dammit, I think I'll end it there for now. Ahem. Played only about 30-45min thus far - mechanically pretty sound except for the requirement to hold down buttons for certain actions instead of just tapping them which is irritating me. The writing so far... well I don't think they're even trying yet at this stage - not dismissing it, but not a great start: if it's going to keep me playing again today and tomorrow it'll be through the mechanics and not the storytelling that's for sure. I am getting a bit disoriented though but I won't really blame the game for that at this stage - I've not played a game from an exclusive first-person perspective since... well I don't really remember as such, but it's been years.

Good to have confirmation. I'm using Arcsoft Totalmedia Theatre + AnyDVD HD right now for my HTPC and probably will stick to that for years to come, but am thinking of building a second one, sans the terabytes of storage, as secondary device for a bedroom or whatever. An AMD Trinity (A10) based miniITX box will probably be home to Win8 if the pricing is competitive and the media support is there - primarily Blu-ray and FLAC. I am aware that I technically can get away with playing the main feature on discs with the basic support that the likes of MPC-HC and VLC have under Win7, but I like my extras.

Interesting, hadn't heard anything of that. Blu-ray support is a pretty big deal because it costs a fair chunk of cash to get proper support in Win7. Unfortunately Google is being a completely useless bastard when queried about actual support: it just returns page after page of copy-pasted articles from May about the removal of DVD playback, and nothing about the situation *now*. Microsoft's Win8 site is even more useless, offering the key for the Media pack but hardly a word of what it does.

Blu-ray support? I remember that MS state a while back that not only would there be no Blu-ray support, but no native DVD support either in Win8. Something about royalties or somesuch. Hmmm, must investigate further.

But wait! Now that they're part of EA, they have the rights to do followups to SimHealth and Theme Hospital!

I believe Tim mentioned at least in passing that it's a valid option, not sure if it was in one of the updates or in one of the third-party interviews. I will start the game with the intention of soloing, but am not bound to the idea, so I'll see how it develops naturally. The other angle is that that your character does have weaknesses, ones that are compensated by the other abilities in your character's skillset. A situation where the only solution to a given problem is to throw more bodies at it is just as artificial as the scenario of one character being able to do everything as per the other games you cite. That said, it should be very much a valid roleplaying option to hire a bunch of goons from the Adventurers' Hall on a short-term contract, if a soloing character decides that they must absolutely wipe out that pesky group of tough foes. Perhaps my definition of solo is a bit looser than those who might swear off having a second portrait in the interface for even a split second...

Looks like you're really taking this moderator business to heart then.