Humanoid

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.

I thought I may have had an older picture (no stalker, honest!), but the only thing that comes up is this pumpkin, dated 2002, with the filename BIS_sawyerpumpkin.jpg, and another related one.

Thanks for the people making me feel young - my first, as in first paid by me instead of my parents, was as late as an Athlon XP 1600+ with GF3-Ti500 graphics. That was store-assembled. I subsequently built an XP1800+ as the "family" computer (learning to do so by disassembling its predecessor), put the Ti500 in it, and bought a GF4-Ti4200 to plug into my machine. The motherboard PCB was a lovely shade of purple, more manufacturers need to use purple PCBs.... Before that, sort of mine (as in I was the primary user) were a P3-600 + TNT2, a P200MMX and a DX4/100. And before I could safely call dad's PCs were a monochrome DX2/66 laptop, a 12MHz 286, and some IBM compatible in the late 80s I know next to nothing about. That PC I suppose could be taken as a valid answer to this - I remember some of the games on it: Alley Cat, Winter Games, Pole Position, etc; and I know my older cousin installed and played Pool of Radiance on it, but I was too young to understand it back then. The longest lived out of those machines was actually the P200 which survived from 1997, which got repurposed to be my DOS gaming machine from '99 until the maturation of DOSbox in the mid noughties - I know I ran it alongside a Northwood P4 at some point.

I had been playing Might and Magic 7 a fair bit for about two to three weeks, it was more fun than any game with as questionable balance, encounter design (or lack thereof), interface issues and terrible visuals (even compared to its peers from a similar vintage) has any right to be. In the end I had to put it away near the end (as so often happens to RPGs for me) because it kind of devolved into mindless blaster spam against hordes of thousand-hp foes. That said, I three weeks is a far cry from the perhaps 30-60 minutes I put into it back in the 20th century (and about 5-6 hours into MM6). Haven't had the motivation to pick up anything else since then, unfortunately.

Eh, I dont know about that. While I agree that there is much less "community" and you do run into a huge pile of tards in LFG I think LFG/LFR is an adequate tool to prevent people from hitting that wall. I mean, I dont have to be your buddy to down bosses. Although I do wish raid finder didnt stick you in those lower difficulty raids. If SWTOR had this tool from the beginning I would probably still be playing. LFR obviously wasn't around back when I did the experiment I described, but I don't see it doing anything at all socially - it merely advances the effectively solo play experience one more step before encountering the same wall. By that note though I'll have to admit my experience with LFR is minimal - I did it for the first two to three weeks of its release but left it because it was neither fun (partly because of the anonymous nature of LFR and partly because Dragon Soul is a terribly designed raid) nor necessary to fuel normal (and subsequently heroic) raid progression. I did not use the tool at all for my last three or so months of WoW. Admittedly my last month was literally just logging on for a raid twice a week, bang my head against questionably designed hardmode bosses and logging out straight after, and doing absolutely nothing else. Was good to get heroic Spine on literally the last day of my subscription though.

Being spinoffs of a kind from Ultima 6, that's a fair assessment. A new starter should certainly start with U7 then if left wanting more, go back to U6 and only after then explore the chronicles.

It's valid for certain elements - in the sequel for instance I personally couldn't quite follow the first part of the prologue for example with the Nilfgaardian ambassador and what was going on: I had no idea what Nilfgaarde was (not that it was mentioned apart from the equally meaningless term "black ones" used) and had simply assumed the guy was part of the kingdom's clergy or whatnot. No help to be found in the printed documentation: I had the artbook, the game mechanics manual, and a game guide, but nothing of the actual world the game is set in. Origin was a great example of providing supporting material to help understand the game world, and I would prefer that path be taken more by modern games. Wing Commander for example had the famous "Claw Marks" manual that read like an internal ship newsletter and provided background on your future wingmates, foes, and the game in general. Crusader had that cool supplement, which purported to be a WEC dossier on the chief resistance operatives. Strike Commander had the excellent "Sudden Death" merc magazine conceit. These were all relatively small, nothing like the massive Maxis manuals which had a lot of dry reference reading: Simfarm for example had what seemed like an exhaustive history of real world farming techniques. But they were invaluable for getting into the swing of the game world - very apt for the company motto of "We Create Worlds." The nature of the printed word also makes it a vastly superior method to provide backstory than say, DAO's codex system which is more of a distraction when you're busy trying to play the game. This is a relatively rare case I suppose where segregating instead of integrating story from mechanics is the superior design. Maybe it'd even be a good opportunity to include a novel or two.

While I have no personal interest in returning to the game, I think these two moves - the server consolidation and the server-restricted group finder tool - are both very good moves: the latter of course requiring the former to work. Inevitably, the WoW comparison is made: WoW has resisted closing any servers (theorised to be for PR reasons above technical ones) and instead have created the region-wide group finder, and soon will implement shared zones amongst servers. These have been short term solutions that unfortunately have reduced other players into essentially more erratic and volatile NPCs - people that you'll likely never encounter again after the next hour. Which means yes, I'm partly agreeing with the fringe that argue that the group finder has/will destroy the sense of community in MMOs - but only insofar as the WoW implementation of it does. Now, I'm personally happily retired from all forms of online gaming at the moment, but I can only the imagine the case now, that if I was a fresh faced new starter on WoW, I would in all likelihood level solo to the level cap, grind the group finder tool to get a decent set of starter gear, then hit a brick wall because I know essentially nobody on the server. I know this to be true to some degree because I tried an experiment a couple years ago, creating an alt on a a well-populated Oceanic timezone server, and did just that. Social butterflies may find different of course, but I'd bet that a decent sized proportion of current players are having an experience like that, and thus don't have terribly much incentive to stick around. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those who claim the old days were best and that everything new is junk - but I certainly do believe that without the circumstances that were around back then, in terms of the way group finding encouraged to network and build a reputation (I know, that old "MMOs are like jobs" cliche), I would not have played for the 6+ years that I did.