Humanoid

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.

It's fortunate that my "paper" currency is plastic and therefore washable. On the other hand, I would not even attempt to wash a cat.

Four months after buying it, and after a couple of days Origin-wrangling, finally started ME3. Taking my time through it due to limited time and no great enthusiasm - everything about it plotwise has been spoiled for me a long time ago - but the kindest thing about it I can say is that it's not worse than ME2.

source: http://www.swtor.com/free/features While I agree F2P is the right move, I think some of these restrictions are nonsensical and will hurt both paying and non-paying customers significantly, along with the bottom line - it's as if they're trying to placate people with currently paid-up subscription blocks with exclusivity to certain features while actually hurting them by doing so. Breaking it down - - Limited character creation: As long as all classes and subclasses are available I guess it's not a big deal, but it seems a petty thing to restrict - essentially making some aesthetic choices exclusive. But then I never cease to be surprised at what some people will pay for pure vanity functionality (WoW's infamous sparkle-pony comes to mind) so eh. - Capped warzone/flashpoint participation per week. This is kind of a big deal. I guess the idea is "if you want to play more, cough up," but I expect the net result is that the paid subscribers end up running out of people to play with when first their "freeloader" friends, then the server community at large (remembering the group-finder tool is server-restricted) hit their weekly quotas, leaving this content a wasteland in the day or three before the timer resets. - Capped space mission participation per week: Okay, this one will probably go totally unnoticed. - No operations: I have a hard time seeing a large enough paid population persisting to maintain and develop operations from now on in - wouldn't be surprised if the move completely kills off this style of gameplay. - Restrictions on fast travel: No details that I can see, but this sounds basically like nagware - try to annoy the users enough with tedium until they either relent and pay up, or quit altogether. - Trade network: I basically didn't use this at all during my month of TOR so not sure what the real impact is. Low limit on selling? No selling at all and purchases only? Could be anything. In the end, I think trying to have it both ways like what's proposed there will result in no winners at all. Hopefully some common sense prevails before this muddled up segregation goes live.

I'd be all over a PST "EE" that removed all non-player instigated combat. But I guess the balancing challenge there is finding a way to make the physical stats be worth taking. But regardless, I don't believe in all the stuff said about "tarnishing" a game when debating whether a proposed sequel, whether spiritual or otherwise. I'll always back the side making the attempt, because even the tiniest chance of getting something good out of it is better than zero chance.

Noting that my previous post has little value as general buying advice, I'll add that here instead, separated by what I think are the common circumstances for someone looking at getting a highish-end card. Assumptions are that pricing is roughly in line with the US pricing I had ($320-330 for the 7950; $400 for the GTX670; $420-430 for the HD7970; and $500 for the GTX680) and that the advice in general is applicable when comparing reference vs reference and custom vs custom. Medium resolution, no overclocking The cards broadly perform to their place on the price curve, with the 670 slightly overperforming, making it the best buy in this category especially when added to it running cooler and more efficient. As previously mentioned though, avoid the reference design like the plague, which is easy enough to do given Gigabyte sell their excellent custom design for the same price as other vendor's reference cards. Medium resolution, overclocked Here the respective AMD cards catch up to their nominal tier matches in terms of performance, though at a cost of a fair bit of heat and power (and consequently noise). A ~$70 saving on the purchase price goes a fair way towards closing the gap however. Ultimately your power supply and case cooling may have a good say in which way you go here. High resolution, no overclocking The main difference here compared to the medium resolution case is that the 670 loses its edge over the 7970, both in absolute performance and price-weighted performance. AMD edges this segment unless plans are made to add a second card later. High resolution, overclocked AMD clear win, matching or beating the equivalent nV cards even with a mild overclock let alone a maxed one. Again multi-GPU muddies the issue a little, but given the gap in price and in performance, it's tempting to go CF anyway in this segment.

I did leave off a reminder that I run a comparatively high resolution of 2560x1440. But even ignoring that, the real comparison is as mentioned: willingness to overclock. Given the tight restrictions (no voltage tweaking) on doing so on Kepler, it means that the 7970 at 1100MHz+ is now on average the fastest single GPU, and the 7950 (admittedly at clocks I personally won't run) given the right treatment does the same to the 670 (again, at about 1100MHz). At high resolutions AMD has had the advantage since the start, and now it's a big one. A lot of current perception may say otherwise, but that's based on outdated launch reviews and benches: it's both damning and encouraging, but driver revisions have closed the gap completely since then (recall AMD had massive issues with Battlefield 3 initially). In general, the 79xx series scales better than Kepler with clocks (almost linearly at parts of the curve), which is a complete reversal of the previous 69xx series which barely responded to clock boosts. And the overclocking headroom is massive, the 7950 stock core is at 800MHz, and easily reaches 1000MHz (a 25% boost) without touching the voltage, and at ~1.2V should generally hit about 1150-1200MHz, that's up to a massive 50% increase. The 7970 for what it's worth reaches around the same clocks from a 925MHz base (1050 for the GE editions being rolled out now - but don't bother buying the GE really). Being out here on the other side of the world gives me little knowledge of worldwide pricing, but given the US pricing I've seen - placing the 7970 at barely over 670 pricing, means that for the majority of cases the 7970 is the superior investment. Graphs and numbers below the line representative of my resolution (though not of the games I play), feel free to skip this part as it's admittedly boring. Some graphs to back me up on both the scaling point and the overall performance - first up is the ubiquitous BF3, an nV stronghold until fairly recently. The blue bar is the 7950 at factory settings, the green bar is at 1025MHz. I do believe the AA advantages AMD here, but I always run AA. Going up to 2560x1600 - blue is 925MHz, green is 1050MHz, with the 7950 there at its stock 800MHz: Skyrim, another strong nV title, until recently: ARMA2 Also have a fairly recent comparison between the top custom designs for both the 7970 and the 680 here: http://www.xbitlabs....n-hd7970_6.html Plus some raw numbers: http://www.xbitlabs..../zfulltable.png P.S. For multi-GPU purposes though, yes, I would go with Kepler for the time being. (But personally I don't think I'll ever bother with either vendor's multi-GPU solutions) I like to think I'm pretty vendor neutral, GPU history is HD7950 - HD5850 - 8800GT - X1950XT - 7900GT - 9800Pro - 4200Ti - 500Ti. Heh, that's perfectly symmetrical.

Took a risk buying a HD7950 from Amazon US - if I need to return it I'll be out of pocket, but for a ~$100 saving ($330USD vs $400AUD+ locally, and shipping essentially the same) I figured it was worth it. Just installed it and all seems well. It's an MSI Twin Frozr model, with stock clocks of 880/5000MHz. I'll probably try to see if it can reach 1000/6000MHz on stock voltages, though generally these cards are capable of another 10-20% more over that with sufficient voltage. I definitely want to keep noise under control, especially given in the last 6 or so months, my slowly dying 5850 fan has damaged my ears. Now I know I've said that the GTX670 is the clear winner this generation a couple months ago - but the landscape has shifted a bit given that AMD have lopped off over a hundred dollars off the launch price, and nVidia have not moved a single dollar. So the revised advice currently is this: go AMD unless you're absolutely set against ever overclocking the GPU, in which case it's a wash. This is based on street prices of $320-330 for the 7950; $400 for the GTX670; $420-430 for the HD7970; and $500 for the GTX680. Additionally, I would say given current premiums for custom designed cards as opposed to reference, to always go for the custom unless you'll be going the waterblock route. This advice applies particularly strongly to the GTX670, which has a spectacularly cheap plasticky reference cooler and questionably contructed reference PCB.

Zowie Bowie! Less grim more glam! I don't really have any valid comment, as horror movies aside, superhero movies are the movie genre I avoid the most. I don't think I even watched the Kilmer Batman movie, let alone anything after.

I barely played the original (rounds to zero), and long after the the initial release, so I suppose it's a blessing that I'll come to this instalment with no preconceptions. In the past I may have taken the cynical view to developers revisiting old classics, but these days I fully welcome it - fear of not living up to past results is a crappy reason to not do something. I expect it has better than even odds to be my game of the year, given the only 2012 release games I will be purchasing are this and ME3 (Gods and Kings doesn't count).

If it wasn't because I had gotten SR3 dirt cheap ($8 or so?) on a previous heavy discount sale, I would have felt robbed. Haven't managed to get it to run properly yet because the stupid piece of software zealously insists that my Saitek 52 Pro flight stick and throttle is an xbox game pad and will not let me use mouse and keyboard only as controls. Stupid, stupid stupid!... No, I'm not going to unplug and replug my hardware just for playing one game. Did the same thing, and got the same problem with my CH F-16 Fighterstick - indeed worse because it insists that my stick is being maxed out on the Y-axis while I'm not touching it, so the player character is permanently gazing at the ceiling. Not clever.

Ex-WoW guildie threw me a beta key for this, so while I have no real interest in buying this (or any other MMO for the foreseeable future, really), I was bored enough to give it a try. Character creation feels like the Sims, with more customisation of appearance than any MMO I've tried, and about on par with the likes of Bethesda's single player games. There are also a set of background questions, which while relatively shallow in absolute terms, appear to personalise the main questline to a degree. Think roughly like Mass Effect's sole survivor vs war hero vs ruthless option; at least as far as I can tell to my limited experience - only up to level 8 currently. It's a shame then that the gameplay proper leaves me cold. Combat, at low levels at least, is doing nothing for me as a Thief: it's more or less leaving autoattack of your "free" cost ability on, and using the most damaging ability when the resource bar allows it. The story has been absolutely linear (and for the thief, out of character) so far, and there's some pretty cringeworthy dialogue. I'll probably try one more class before this beta weekend is through, but at the moment I have to say I like it less than I did TOR, and I didn't last even one month with that.

Hardly a new development, but due to region coding blahblah, even 50% off Steam sales on new releases are almost always still substantially more expensive than just importing a boxed UK copy - which tends to limit me to older releases where the price control has lapsed. Even something as comparatively old as Skyrim is still 50-100% more than what I'd pay for a brand new release, let alone something like Max Payne 3 (not that I'm interested in any shooters at this point). And on that note, have just bought my first title of the sale, which is just Simcity 4, which I already own sans expansion pack. Given what else has come up so far, not optimistic of being able to peck at anything else.

Waited until today too, though since I'm sure I'll never end up playing the game it's essentially a donation - I don't do the horror genre. I'm all touchy-feely/irrational like that.

The respective failures are of diametrically opposite nature though - was it the lead gameplay designer as opposed to the lead writer in the DA case? Not something I've followed, and at any rate, I despise the storytelling in DAO more than that of any other of its Bioware stablemates.

It's still on my desk, waiting to be installed, someday. Probably after my holiday and after the Tour de France. Then I'll have a wholly new, fresh batch of dad jokes to relate. But yeah, in all seriousness I probably should get it done before X-COM is out or I might not end up playing it at all this year.

I can see it now.... two bitter foes engaged in a duel to the death, each waiting for the other to pop their head out first from behind the chest high wall. And waiting. And waiting.

Since on both prior import occasions, the default Sheptard actions assumed for all the major plot decisions have been the jerk ones, one can reasonably then assume that the "fourth option" here is the canonical one.

Can't be worse than the original PC port - I remember for some systems it was literally unplayable prior to a patch because all the important default key bindings were bound to the keypad. Which meant a lot of laptop users had to force-terminate the game because it couldn't accept any input. Vaguely remember also that the non-Glide 3D option was impossible to get working properly so I was stuck with the software renderer. In hindsight I'm surprised I stuck it out to the end, really - but I haven't played any of its sequels since then.