Humanoid

Heh, just replaced a mouse too, but in my case it's because I got sick of trying to manoeuvre a mouse around a coffee table, so I picked up a Logitech M570 wireless trackball. It's a known quantity for me since I already have the corded version that I use for my notebook, but still, it's a market that I wished had more options. I'm also a big fan of Logitech's free spinning Revolution scroll wheels, so I hope that someday that gets implemented in a trackball. Also bought a 4-drive HDD enclosure for my HTPC which was running out of space (12GB filed to the brim), but can't bring myself to buy enough drives at current prices to fill it up, so at the moment I only have one 2TB disk in it which I had spare (from back when they were <$70 a piece *sigh*). It's a Vantec NexStar HX4, and while the chassis is fine, the stock fan it uses is a horrible grindy thing - not sure if it's faulty or just crap. Luckily it seems to be a simple two-pin 80mm case fan, so it should be fairly simple to replace - except all the spare fans I have are 120mm. Blergh. Guess I'll try oiling the hub for now. Oh, had to add a USB 3.0 expansion card to the HTPC as well to run the thing properly since in my spectacular lack of foresight a couple years back I thought that saving $20 on the motherboard in exchange for USB 2.0 only ports was a good deal. 4-port "Astrotek" (looks generic to me), seems to be working fine. Doesn't require an extra molex plug which is nice.

Oh absolutely, did a quick count and of my ~120 titles owned on GoG (counting bundles as one item), I own about 70 of them in hardcopy somewhere - most of which are still in my parents' garage. And yeah, NOLF2 is still the most recent FPS I've played, unless DXHR counts as one.

Not necessarily after good games, but there's stuff I'm interested in as a sort of historical curiosity, e.g. - The more obscure Sim-games, like SimIsle, SimFarm, SimAnt and er, SimHealth. - Ultima 8: The Lost Vale expansion, which was completed but then cancelled with no known copies surviving. Then there's the more obvious stuff like a fair chunk of LucasArts' adventures, late 80s to mid 90s flight sims, some ignored Microprose titles like Covert Action, Grand Prix 2, Transport Tycoon. Privateer 2. On a more mundane level, GoG ought to work on finishing up the various titles they have that are still missing their expansions.

You're not the last, I'm going through NV veeeery slowly, about 2-4 hours a week, and I haven't started any of the DLC, none of which I had on my first playthrough. About level 12 now I think, supposedly too low to start them, but I hear the recommended levels for the new stuff is very conservative - so I'm not sure whether to go on with the post-reaching Vegas drudgery (a bit of an exaggeration, but the weaker half of the game for mine) or take the plunge. Not playing anything else either, knocking off one or two movies a week from my couple-hundred title long backlog. Did pledge a hundred to the Broken Sword Kickstarter though, and I imagine the QFG one will be up soonish.

Not that I'm not delighted, but I was under the impression that the game was just about done already given the hints we got last year and earlier this year. Given that, I'm somewhat surprised to see they've had to go to Kickstarter to get it finished. Hope it doesn't mean they ran into trouble. It was also "known" that Revolution was working on another (new IP allegedly) adventure at the same time, but that it wasn't Beneath a Steel Sky.

EDIT: Just for fun, since I've got my game designer wannabe cap on, an example of how the original scenario could play out if you shift the scale to be external to the character, i.e. reputation-based. For the sake of this scenario, I will call the system the nasty/nice system. Some outcomes are straightforward, and not all necessarily modify your reputation. Now the way the above is constructed is deliberately constructed to remain a single-step depth decision tree modified by a single variable. Given the resources, some options can lead down interesting and perhaps unexpected paths. Restating:

I'm not thinking pie-in-the-sky options that aren't there and would need to be implemented, I'm talking options that already exist in the codebase but are hidden from view because of the value in the internal variable. So out of that hypothetical dozen or so choices, the system is selecting a handful it deems most in-character for a given savegame and presents those only. I can understand the information overload angle, and while I'm personally fine with leaving all the options visible, I'm happy to accept that some may view it as confusing. I also admit I haven't really fully taken in the full text of the first few posts -it's generally a case of me sitting up in bed at 8 in the morning to start my day and check out the new posts, as the timezones thing mean the vast majority of posts on this forum are made while I'm asleep. So really the main thing I've been trying to address are the big multiple choice examples in the first post. From an imaginary me-as-a-game-designer perspective, I don't see the value of designing and coding a system which is designed to expose X out of Y number possible options when presenting all Y is, at the worst case scenario, adding a bunch of text that the player can just skim over. I realise I probably have latched onto one particular aspect of this whole proposal without looking at the bigger picture in depth, which I don't really have much to add to. Happy to leave it at that for now.

It's still having the computer guess at the character's personality traits - "He'll enjoy dialogue that conforms to his style of play" - you'd have the game stop you from sneering, from being condescending, from being infuriatingly obtuse? Is your character choosing those "insane" dialogue options because he is insane, or because he's feigning it? My position is that evaluating a choice should be made in the context of whether it fits in the scope of the game world, rather than what the alignment system guesses your character to be. You can't make neon pink elvish armour in Fallout because you can't make any armour at all. In a game allowed you to craft and dye any armour you wanted, and one in which elves exist, then I'm not seeing a reason not to allow that choice, even if you've been roleplaying a Johnny Cash doppelganger.

Presenting my view simplistically: alignment system bad; reputation system good. I feel what an alignment system tries to do is frame a character's mindset, and restrict your options based on some preconceived notion of what a 'good' or 'evil' act is - and we've seen some pretty counterintuitive examples of each in a lot of games. Personally I feel that the player-character's state of mind really has no business being quantified: let it stay in the player's mind. There's no point in the game trying to guess whether your character is feeling vindictive, mischievous, elated, angry, or depressed - the player can take the input, being whatever the character has recently been faced with, and come up with an in-character response. I don't see the value of filtering those possible responses based on some internal metric - it's a lot of effort designing such a system with little-to-no payoff. The player has a brain, they can filter better than any computerised tally can. Reputation on the other hand affects how the game world reacts to the player and can be much more interesting. If you've spent the game channeling Charles Bronson blowing everyone away, that bad guy you've been trying to catch would sensibly be more likely to fight to the death when cornered, whereas if you have previously shown a merciful streak, they may attempt to surrender and submit to your interrogation. The key difference I see here as compared to the alignment system is that the player can still take any action the character is physically able to which is far less of a straitjacket, but still provide payoff for the manner in which you've been behaving. A simple example would go like this. Under an alignment system, if you've been behaving "evilly," your character doesn't get an option to save a kitten from a tree. That's it, can't even try. There's no conceivable reason in the world your character would ever do such an action ....really, who's playing the character? You, or the writer? (It really isn't hard to justify - after all, evil masterminds tend to have a genuine liking of cats :D) Under a reputation system, there's nothing stopping you from rescuing the kitty. Except, oh, you've been known in the neighbourhood for being a mean bastard with a history of cruelty to animals. You try to rescue the kitten for whatever motivation you have (game doesn't need to know), but the little girl who owns the critter screams at you to get away and leave them alone. Just like that, instead of narrowing your RP options, you now have an interesting new situation to handle.

Don't care about the game, but sad that JvC has been reduced to this.

Will be interesting to see whether you actually start out as a member of the clergy/chantry thing from the beginning or whether you get railroaded into it like DAO railroaded you into the wardens. That one thing was the single most offensive thing in the game for me, so any improvement there would be a small glimmer of hope. Having you be, say, raised from childhood as a member of a fanatical church then having the option to go on a righteous quest to purge the infidels or to go rogue would be far more interesting than being a warrior/thief/mage that's for whatever reason forced to fight for the church because the plot demands it. Unfortunately that thing that looks like a press blurb sounds like the latter scenario is the likely one. Ah well.

The comments about Wilson sound so like the comments about Casey Hudson that I could easily mistake myself for being in the ME3 thread.

AMD to bundle Sleeping Dogs with HD78xx series cards, and I assume there's a good chance of it applying to the 79xx cards too. Presumably a response to nVidia just announcing they're bundling Borderlands 2 with their current generation cards. While personally I'd prefer lower prices instead of bundling games I have no interest in, at least both GPU vendors are now moving towards more current games with broader appeal (as opposed to say, the previous headline bundled title, DiRT). Hopefully not just a once-off. This leads to an interesting hardware recommendation for those with a video card budget of ~$250-300USD. Which card to buy depends on which bundled title you prefer. As for DA3. I'm too lazy to even make the Inquisition joke no one expected.

Doesn't sound good. Can you still hear it spin up normally and such? It *probably* isn't a head crash which means the data is technically still 100% recoverable if it's critical stuff - my guess is that the electronics failed - but will likely cost you hundreds of pounds to pay a data recovery specialist to get it out. In the past it was (relatively) easier to swap out the PCB in the event of a failure like this, but I don't believe this is a practical end-user solution with more recent drives - no personal experience with it though. Not saying that you can't buy a replacement PCB for your specific drive, but it'd be a lot more complicated than just ordering it in and plugging it in. Do physically inspect it though, often you can see when one of the chips or whatever has blown. In terms of things you can try, there aren't many: you could try swapping the cables/ports that it connects to in case it's a problem with either of those, or try it in another PC, but I'd not be terribly optimistic. P.S. Looking for replacement PCBs on Google brings up stuff like this - http://www.onepcbsolution.com/index.html

I have no personal experience either really, I buy my movies on disc (generally from the UK and US) and rip them myself. At 30-50GB a pop for a typical blu-ray, it's pretty space intensive, filled up about 12TB thus far.

That's what you *have* to do to play "properly" last I knew - just like ME2's (can't recall the others) system where if you don't go to either extreme, you don't get the optimal rewards. In this case it was that you can't use certain gear unless you've maxed out the alignment bar. It's not a hindrance for someone just playing the 1-50 story I guess, but I imagine for someone planning to do the endgame content, it basically forces them to blindly pick either the top option all the time, or the bottom option all the time. Making each decision on its merits as I did, by level 40 I was basically flip-flopping between the neutral zone and "Dark I" which meant I couldn't use any alignment gear at all.

There's no Netflix or equivalent in Australia, so it's assumed the movie files will be regular non-streaming 1080p video. Even if there was, the general speed of Internet connections here would preclude its use anyway. And for good sound on a (relative) budget, I'd recommend at least a pair of active bookshelf speakers such as these Audioengine A5+, I personally use the regular version (no remote control) as my PC speakers.

Us Americans need something in our favor, what with our distinct lack of top hats and "cheerio." But when I see the words "top hat" the first thing I think of is Abe Lincoln.

As a scoundrel, all I remember was being steamrollered by elites whether at level 1 or at level 40, so I can't say the difficulty changed any. If I changed from my tank companion, elites were flat out unbeatable - and yes, I tried both the burst damage ASAP and the spam heal companion (with zero points in any healing skills) methods. Was neither overlevelled or underlevelled for the most part, though probably undergeared as my WoW mentality told me to ignore wasting time with gear management until the level cap. Went double for companion gear - the only gear they got was when all the rewards for a given quest were restricted to companion use only. I think beating the guy to get my ship back at level 15 took 15+ tries.... EDIT: Only after reading the above discussion on the cinematics do I realise: the guy on the box cover is the guy who dies in the intro? Huh?

I take back all the crap I said about ME3's ending, and bestow it all upon ME3's beginning. I've had a gutful of the emotional sledgehammer, the contrived melodrama, the senseless cheerleading for Earth. The idiotic dream sequence after the first real mission of the game was the straw that broke the camel's back - I'm done with the game, for me my worst game purchase since Oblivion. The marginal improvements in the shooty bits don't compensate for the insulting delivery. Have instead started my second run through New Vegas, and my first with any sort of DLC (disabled all the loot ones though). Hardcore, stealth bomber. Struggling with any sort of difficult combat which doesn't involve me getting the drop on foes with my dynamite however - can't drop my compulsion to raise non-combat skills to make every check I see so aside from explosives I'm pitifully low on any skill that enables murder. Had to skip the Repconn plant quest because of that but no big loss I guess. Also finding that sneak seems much less effective than, for example's sake, Skyrim: it seems that it's balanced around guns range instead of melee range, I've barely been able to get close enough to anyone for a melee/pocket-dynamite sneak attack. I'm talking ~50-60 skill here, not high but I don't expect to have to nearly max out a skill to be able to even start using it. Even with walk toggled, light armor and at most a knife equipped I can't get close enough. As for hardcore mode comments, I imagine I'm mostly echoing previous comments: I like making health recovery more restrictive, i.e. the delayed effects of "potions" and that sleeping is not a panacea; but on the other hand, food and water management is a bit too mechanical for me. Not sure if it'd be better to simplify it or remove it altogether however. No comments on the companion changes or ammo weight since I'm using neither in this run. Finally, with it being discussed here, I'm tossing around the idea of KoTOR2 as my next game in line. I never got past the tutorial first time around, my video card died on me during that attempt and I never returned to it. Vaguely curious, to me at least, is that the dead card was a 7900 series (nVidia), and now I've just bought a 7900 series (AMD), come around full circle, sort of. Anyway I know there's the restoration patch, and am aware of the movie and music patches. I think that's the "complete" installation?

I thought the prevailing opinion was that DA2 would have been better off without its contrived respawning set-piece combat (and the singular tunnel it was set in) anyway. I probably would really play it with combat totally removed actually, the writing couldn't have been any more offensive to me than DAO's was.

Size. Size trumps all. So short of a projector (including rear projection), just find the biggest plasma you can afford and lug it away. And plasma means either Panasonic or Samsung - my personal pick for value would be the 60" ST model for a touch under $2k (and therefore $1k cheaper than the 65"). The only meaningful difference between the mid-range ST and the range-topping VT model is that the VT has a blingier frame. And before anyone says "but that's too big!" - here's a nice recommended viewing distance calculator, not based on rules of thumb or anything like that, but on formal motion picture standards: http://myhometheater...calculator.html - a 60" widescreen panel has a THX recommended viewing distance of 2.04m and a maximum of 2.87m. While this might seem very close to what is a big TV, bear in mind the intended use is for movies and not broadcast television. Don't fall for the LED/LCD scaremongering tactic about plasma being susceptible to burn-in and that kind of rubbish. P.S. The size criterion rule also broadly applies to speakers as well if you're planning on building something more complete - and you should, since while everything else about TVs is constantly improving, the quality of built-in TV speakers is almost at an all-time low. Get a basic AV receiver (can save a packet on mid-range receivers importing from Amazon Germany) and a pair of floorstanders to start (budget $1-2k), worry about stuff like the centre speaker, surrounds, and subwoofer later (floorstanders will delay the need to get a woofer, compared to if you started with a pair of bookcase speakers like I did). EDIT: I know you're conscious about stuff like power usage and general efficiency of electronics, but unfortunately the current situation is very much the reverse of the above advice. LED-backlit LCD is the most power efficient current mainstream technology, followed by CCFL(traditional)-backlit LCD, and then plasma. However, LED-backlit panels tend to have moderate-to-serious problems with uniformity, leading to incorrectly bright areas on the screen, and any LCD will fall a fair way behind in terms of colour reproduction and motion as well. For what it's worth, most LCD panels used in televisions are MVA variants, which are less accurate than IPS panels (but moreso than TN panels) for colour but produce deeper blacks than both IPS and TN. However plasma squashes any LCD for deep crisp blacks. Fortunately, the gap is smaller than it's ever been, and another factor is that plasma has variable power usage depending on the image being displayed (i.e. full white screen will suck up maximum juice, a black screen will sip power), whereas both LCD technologies will show more or less constant power usage.

Steam always downloads games to the Steam directory, which is something I can't believe hasn't been "fixed" yet - even supposedly inferior competitors have more flexibility than that. A common approach to the problem, particularly when dealing with SSDs, is to install Steam onto a spindle drive so that by default games don't hog space on the SSD, and then move certain preferred games to the SSD by manual copying and creation of symlinks. An alternative to accomplish the same thing would be to use a third party tool like Steam Mover which just automates the process (never used it myself though). As to your specific problem of Steam not recognising that it's been moved - search finds this : so it should be working, but check where your desktop shortcut is pointing, and also check that the directory on C: has been properly deleted.

The flashpoints currently have daily rewards associated with them, so most players that are interested in that content will run one each day. So currently subscribers have plenty of players to run with. There is a shortage of tanks, and to a lesser degree healers, but not a shortage of players. Personally, as long as they keep their promise and keep adding more content for the endgame on a regular basis, this won't affect me at all. They have one new raid in the pipeline, and as long as they keep that part of the game from getting stale, I'll probably keep playing. Edit: Cantousent, the current trial is only to level 15. The full F2P will not start until later this fall, not sure when. But if you want an invite for the current trial to get a head start, feel free to PM me with your e-mail address and I'll hook you up. I only benefit from it if someone I invite actually signs up for a subscription, so I don't care about that. Just happy to get people in to the game If the incentive is loaded as being optimal at one flashpoint a day, and the weekly flashpoint cap for F2P players is 7+ a week then I guess it's workable. Wasn't aware TOR was still on the daily system since my equivalent experience in WoW encourages doing them in bulk once a week. I reiterate the concern about the development pace of operations/raids though. Once the F2P model kicks in, there seems precious little incentive for the beancounters to keep developing this type of content when it's only accessible by a relative minority of players - and in terms of actual participation, a minority of a minority. Again though, I'm coming from a WoW angle where even as (I believe) the raid participation rate is greater than that of TOR, but still is released at a pace best described as 'glacial.' P.S. Ah yes, healers. By the time I quit WoW, I had all four healer classes (specs) raid-ready, out of the six total characters I had capable of the current-tier raid at any given point. Only one tank though, my guild oddly had an excess of tanks. EDIT: Raithe - my point is exactly that: there is incentive for people to run as many warzones and flashpoints as they can stomach, but as the proportion of paying subscribers drops, forming viable groups to do that will become harder as the F2P players will either have hit their participation limit for the week, or are rationing their quota to optimise the daily rewards from doing them. "Hey dude, wanna go again?" "Can't, only got one run left this week and I need it to do the daily quest tomorrow."

Yes to all three. I didn't participate in any of the three during my time in TOR so it's not essential content for those who only want to play TOR as a pseudo-KoTOR3 experience, but they would be pretty important in terms of maintaining an active player base.