Humanoid

I thought, like it's gameplay, HR's art direction veered wildly from segment to segment - the whole game is like a multiple-personality disorder turned into code. Brooding man in black and femme fatales in Elizabethan collars. Generic and sterile office environments and grey abandoned warehouses against a vast floating cityscape. Heavily armoured paramilitary forces and naked muscle-man. Intercontinental hover-copter (!) as your primary means of transport amidst conventional 20th century transport options everywhere else.

It's a world away now, but the time limit was the reason I never played Fallout 1 until after I did Fallout 2. This was before the time I was smart enough to look up stuff for myself, so really all information was sourced from print magazine reviews, so in the main all I saw was the time limit mechanic as described in the review and thinking to myself "that doesn't sound fun" and more of less ignored the title. A regrettable incident in hindsight of course, and one that I imagine lessened my perception of the game when I finally got around to it years later. But that's a digression that adds nothing to the discussion really. I'm still not particularly in favour of time limits, though it's not a firm position. Hard, binary, "you fail" type limits I don't feel are particularly compelling, especially in longer time scales. Even on the shorter scale, like "run away from the time bomb" or "get in and out quick before the radiation kills you" I can take or leave. It becomes either a case of save-scumming in examples like the former, or a maintenance chore in the case of the latter. It's not an interesting decision point, it's just either a case of doing it and being allowed to move on, or not doing it and having to replay that section. On the other hand, I'm very much in favour of time as a variable in terms of choice and consequence - a third axis if you will - in which time elapsed contributes to the outcome, not in terms of success or failure, but in terms of story divergence. The most basic implementation of such a system would be some linear scaling, where your task would get incrementally more difficult if past certain thresholds; the next would be as outlined by chamr, where certain options would be closed without completely denying you success. But the concept could be taken even further, with things like a completely different narrative branch possibly resulting - neither positive nor negative - leading to potentially different ending scenarios. This leads to the tangential issue of, in the case of "failure" to meet a time limit (I don't like the use of the term "limit" in this context), the handling of failure in general. In a perfect RPG world, there would be no concept of failure in the metagame sense, just the in-universe consequences of the player character failing. Or before I muddle myself up even more in the phrasing, "being allowed to fail." This was discussed here in the forums earlier this year I think - my favoured example is as always, Wing Commander's losing path. Wing Commander 3 in particular had a very long, detailed, and fleshed out (and mostly unrecoverable) losing path where the tide of the war would sweep you up into a final, doomed, last defence of Earth. In the context of the game, this path was just as significant and compelling as the winning path.

Yeah, COTD regularly pull stunts like this to draw traffic - the amount of stock they have is probably something in the low three digits, and apparently the deal has notched something like 20000 Facebook 'likes' so you can calculate your odds from there, if you can even get onto the site the minute it goes up. This practice just barely skirts by consumer laws about having a reasonable number available when advertising a sale. Still, if you want to chance your arm, create an account there now, and within the sale period, stay logged in and spam refresh on the hour, every hour (since they change the item every hour "randomly") and have your card details and such ready to paste in. It's almost a perverse sport or such - thousands of people will be doing that exact same thing and you probably have less than a 30 second window to complete the transaction to actually buy one. I have to admit even I'd be tempted by a $20 D3 deal, speaking as someone who personally despises the genre, but I won't personally deal with COTD so no competition from me.

I can definitely see the benefits of the Steam cloud but am very much glad it's optional - I'm not so cynical as to automatically assume it's there for nefarious intentions, but I can also see how it could potentially be abused by some ne'er-do-well (whether inhouse or external) potentially causing some sort of data privacy issue. After all, there's no guarantee over how much info could potentially be stored in what's nominally a saved game file when we're possibly talking about any arbitrary number of Steam games.

Not really a lot of specifics I can give, but if you do go for the pre-built route, the traps are usually two: one is the typically anaemic video card likely to be shipped with it (advertised with misleading specs like "Amazing 2GB graphics!") and the other is a possibly proprietary spec and/or underpowered power supply that could prevent any reasonable upgrading in future. That and the usually cheap and noisy plasticky styling, but that's more an issue of taste.

I recall more than a few games coming with both CDs and a DVD in the same box in the late 90s - Tex Murphy Overseer certainly did - but not sure publishers would bother going to the extra expense nowadays unless they had a vested interest in the BD format being adopted. An important difference I suppose is that now, even if a PC game came on several DVDs, it would still only be for installation, whereas in those heady "multimedia gaming" days, disc swapping was more akin to what consoles do today.

So with TOR expired for good, I still can't muster up the willpower to install ME3 - as much because of the side decisions as anything else: wait for story "fix" or no, and whether to try create a usable import or no. Instead I decided to have a short bash with Privateer for the first time since going to Win7, on account of finally having a USB flight stick. Ended up playing about 6 hours straight, with the "one more upgrade" syndrome. Tarsus went to Orion - the first time I've tried the Orion seriously - and hated it, and went on a mad push to buy the Centurion. A familiar problem of course, is having the cash to buy the ship but not having any to actually make it usable. So there I was, flying a Centurion with no engine, no shields, no guns - just an afterburner, a missile launcher and a handful of IR missiles, desperately afterburning around trying not to be hit, knowing that even one pirate Talon could kill me with ease. With the hefty repair bills incurred from playing like that, it took a few trips to even be able to buy a set of basic lasers for 4000 credits, let alone the recommended set of Tachyons for 80000. I think I'm just about ready to leave the Troy system now.... It occurs to me that this game is basically the same itch that MMOing gives. A gateway drug? Maybe.

I'd hazard a guess that given the plan was to move on to an MMO based on the Amalur IP, maybe they overreached early on perhaps an overoptimistic schedule.

It works if you go through alts fairly methodically I suppose, with weeks or even months between repeating the content. Thing is, over the last week - my sub ran out today incidentally - I'd been pretty much sampling every class after abandoning my "main" smuggler. That means repeating content in quick succession, and not having any time to build up rested XP - I find myself borderline underlevelled for a lot of content. Admittedly I also do zero group content, so no heroic quests - I get out of all the public chat channels as soon as I create a character. Doing a full clear of Coruscant and Dromund Kass twice each in the space of a week does colour the perception a bit, sure. And yes, the minor dialogue changes depending on class are a pretty nice touch.

Abstaining second round - if it's a new city either way then it doesn't really matter to me whether it's New York, Phnom Penh, Timbuktu or Atlantis.

I have no problem with an MMO that encourages alts - but TOR doesn't really succeed at it beyond two (one of each faction) because of the linearity of the planet progression beyond the tutorial planet. Now granted, creating independent, parallel levelling paths would multiply the development effort required, but if they're insisting on this "levelling over endgame" design then it's sort of a necessary thing. One thing that happened to WoW after the last expansion was an explosion of all the launch zones and reconfiguring them such that they ended up with three, sometimes even four zones you could choose from at any given level. Now this didn't do much for the veterans who had no reason to go back, but it's great incentive for the newer players to go again on a completely different trip around the gameworld. re: Free weekends - they're mostly obsolete now that any subscriber can send out 25 week-long trials (previously limited to three).

It's being given away with AMD cards now, lost value pretty fast so I'm not convinced anything is forthcoming.

It's a lot in absolute terms, but actually less than the previous generation - both the 6990 (dual 6970) and 590 (dual cut-down 580) were significantly more power hungry cards, and also more power hungry individual GPUs. At 170W, a single 680 is the most "efficient" top-end GPU in a long time. A technical aside is that 300W is the paper limit they stick to because of the PCI-E specification, but there's nothing stopping them from enabling an alternate mode that blows right past that - that previous gen, as mentioned, with some voltage hikes and overclocked cores, would blow past 400W - the 6990 in particular had a BIOS switch that when toggled to the alternate mode would essentially unrestrict everything, allowing it to fly past the nominal 450W that its stock cooler was rated for. On the plus side at least both vendors are finally working on idle consumption as well. AMD in particular has a "long idle" state it can fall back to which sips just a couple watts. It's offset, unfortunately, by their load power being a fair bit higher than nV's this generation, but still.

Australia in general has an odd relationship with cheese - raw (read: unpasteurised) milk and products derived thereof are generally banned from production and sale because of perceived health risks. It is one case where it's hard to argue the overused "nanny state" cries aren't accurate. That said, there is a loophole for milk at least, that permits its sale for external use, e.g. for milk baths - and obviously there's nothing preventing the internal use of said "cosmetics" product.

Way back when the Annual Pass thing was first announced I thought to myself, yeah, may as well, not like it'd cost me anything. But I waited a couple of days and on reflection decided it wasn't so great a deal - it'd lock me into a game which in the timeframe may well see no new content but would nevertheless be paying for, in exchange for a game that costs less than 4 months subscription anyway. I think I made the right choice in hindsight - pretty much bang on six-months after, I'm without a WoW sub and without D3, and not feeling like I'm missing anything. It's no doubt been a success for the devs on both teams however - they've managed to stop the "subscriber bleed" KPI for the former game and can claim numbers are absolutely steady, even if a significant subset of that subscriber base have just prepaid for something they no longer actually play.

It's basically a community site run on the side by my ISP, heh - all the ads for example are just for the ISP and no external advertisers. I suppose gives it a decent degree of editorial freedom but also the impression it's just a hobby site run by the gamey techs, not that I mind that.

I'd take the one expanded city over two smaller hubs anyway, because that's what they are - cities. No game has, to my mind, done a satisfactory job of even portraying one average sized modern city so I feel like adding another is biting off way more than any developer can chew. And for a recent example of what attempting that might lead to, we have Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I heard that the original design were for four major city hubs. Impressive sounding to be sure, but what did we get? Two half baked city blocks.

Anandtech is my go-to site for reliable reviews, this is theirs - but the findings are pretty universal. 7% or less performance difference to the GTX680 and equal to the 7970, $100 price difference to the former and $80 to the latter.

Bang - and just like that, there are only two gaming video cards remaining on the market that are worth buying. Forgive the hyperbole but the GTX670 looks to have obsoleted every single card above the $250 HD7850, on both sides. 7870, 7950, 7970, 680 and 690 now aren't even worth consideration in all but the most obscure fringe cases, unless every card listed there receives *at least* a $50 price cut.

Given you can formally in-game set your Sith Lord to be married to your Jedi Master, I don't think the mail thing (which I only found out about a week ago) is too big a leap. Especially true of the story-wise non-affiliated classes - don't think there'd be anything unusual at all about free association between smugglers and bounty hunters for example. Which returns the point for me that I'd personally like to see that non-faction affiliation be a real option in the game, it's a game mechanic with no real value when used as it currently is.

In the end it depends on the reasoning for this GK104 chip being released as the 680 in the first place, as the xx4 codenamed chips are normally reserved for the mid-range chip. The specs bear that out - small die, low power consumption, minimal compute power - and it's known that the GK110, the high-end codenamed chip, exists. Now either nV decided to only release the mid-range as their top-end solution because AMD's counterpart this generation was so underwhelming that they didn't need to release the full version of Kepler (and therefore could make a fortune selling a cheap chip for high-end prices), or GK110 was so complex that yield issues made it commercially non-viable to produce and sell at the consumer level (as opposed to releasing them as Quadro chips at several times the price).

One can only hope that TOR delays DA3 indefinitely then. That, and I've also never bought a Blizzard game without the words "World of Warcraft" on the box - never before, and as far as I can see from their roadmap, will never in the future.

Having played on the Oceanic servers, of which there are only three, I can't complain about population density just yet. Pretty much never am the only person questing in a particular area, and could easily enough find groups to do both normal and heroic quests if I had the desire to (which I don't). But it seems it's a different story on the majority of servers, At least they've got the plans to merge the "dead" servers in motion already - WoW players on equivalent servers have been clamouring for mergers for years but keep meeting the "it's too hard" excuse and instead get milked $25 per character to transfer to a viable server.

One thing that I missed first time through was where all the Blue Stripes were in Flotsam - had no idea they'd taken up residence in some other building so I just assumed if Roche wasn't in the tavern then he was off somewhere and you weren't meant to talk to him. EDIT: Vaguely on topic: Steam just autostarted an update for The Witcher 1, redownloading all 15GB of it. Dammit Steam, fix your version control.

Given today's pricing of SSD vs HDD currently - you're probably looking at $100+ for a terabyte 7200rpm drive - there's little reason to get a spindle drive if you don't need the extra storage space. It's spending less than $50 for the biggest possible speed boost you can get on a PC. Unfortunately if you're avoiding Intel drives then there's no good alternative SSD listed at MSY, though it shouldn't be hard to come across a Crucial m4 at an alternative vendor. Personally I imported mine from the US and may well be doing so with a video card later this year.