Humanoid

Yeah, nowadays all PSUs I encounter are the switching voltage type, no need to manually flick that switch at the back (which often led to disaster when kids got curious). And yeah, take out the expansion cards, probably the spindle drives, and maybe take off the CPU heatsink (though then you'd need some thermal paste when reassembling).

People who benchmark all day instead of playing games.

My understanding is that they're usually legitimate Russian keys which can be sourced cheaply because of regional pricing policies. Not familiar with that particular vendor though.

I'm in both their "new subscriptions" and "lost subscriptions" columns this month, signed up but immediately cancelled the recurring sub. Interesting enough to play a month while I wait to buy a new video card to play Twitcher 2, but 95% sure I won't renew in either the short or medium term.

One is having poor fallbacks if that always-online model fails - one being having to go online to get into offline mode, and further, not having a contingency should the connection fail in other ways. The other things that do bother me I've already outlined - non-existent version management (it recently for me decided on its own to redownload the entire 6GB of King's Bounty Crossworlds for a tiny update, and for those people who were silly enough to buy The Witcher 2 on it, it did something similar on the release of the first patch) and again, the forced incompatibility with other distribution systems when it comes to expansion packs. That's a win-win for them, if you buy the base game on Steam, you're locked in to their price for all future content. If you buy it elsewhere, you have to rebuy it on Steam should you want to move over to their system. And yeah, that's before the complicity in the regional pricing scam - I can just barely let that slide because the options for them legally are to comply with the publisher's demands or not sell a particular product at all, but that in itself is perpetuating that ongoing scam. Yes, they chose the latter path because business is business, but it's definitely something that has a tangible negative impact on the average joe. And for whatever reason they feel like they should police that policy in the manner they are now - actively seeking out people using VPNs to bypass the anti-competitive behaviour, and locking out entire accounts for it. Somewhat tangentially, I would like to compare this approach with the one adopted by independent film distributor Eureka (and their Masters of Cinema arthouse brand) who are similarly bound by contracts to enforce DVD/Blu-ray region restrictions. While this is of no impact to me personally since I use a HTPC which ignores region coding, I'm heartened to see them having convinced a few film studios to change their minds, and for the ones who persist, the splash message when you attempt to play the disc on a "wrong" region player explains their position and urges people to get in touch with the out-of-touch studios to voice their concerns. On the other hand, Criterion who roughly filfil the same market segment in the US market blindly region-lock every single one of their releases whether required by their contract or not. Suffice to say I always buy from the former if the same title is available from both. At any rate, my preferred channel for new games remains the direct import model from the UK for reasons of both cost and principle, but I can see how some people may not be as patient as I am when it comes to new releases.

Maybe I was a particularly poor (and easily frightened) gamer as a kid, but I tend to not feel that playing older games has gotten any more difficult to me. I never got past the Death Tower segment in Flashback on my first encounter with it, over a decade and a half ago, but on picking it up again just a couple years ago, breezed through that part. (Escaping the disintegration field on the alien base, and fighting the aliens on their homeworld on the other hand....) Heck, I don't think I managed to clear Super Mario Bros and SMB3 until I was into my twenties. On the other hand, it is true that I'm less willing to delve deeply into their mechanics - if I played an IE game now for example I'd not even think about doing anything remotely close to min-maxing as I once way. Sure, I'd be better at it then back then I suspect, I just don't want to dedicate the effort in the foreknowledge it isn't required to achieve the same result. So yeah, it is a manifestation of losing ability to concentrate, just not a literal one. Difference is "just because" is not a sufficient motivator for me now where it might have sufficed in the past.

If it leaves people unable to cast a critical eye on the very real warts, of course. There are some people who go out and proclaim they won't even consider using another digital distribution service - not just currently worse ones like Origin, but all - and that's not a good way to go forward in terms of competition and innovation. I see it as not being a million miles away from how Google is perceived. It's currently the best at what it does as its primary function, but there's also some creepy, questionable stuff going on behind that.

Not sure how it could adopt ideas from a platform that's almost its diametric opposite, at least in terms of the concept of game "ownership". Any move away from the current lock-in model would defeat the entire purpose of the Steam client and would presumably make it non-viable from a business perspective for new games. Does Steam even have the capability to tag a game bought on the platform - presuming the company controlling it desires to - as independent of the client? i.e. for that particular release, Steam would just act as a download manager for a bunch of files. Personally I'm the type who logs into Steam only for necessary updates, and logs back out as soon as the job's done. This is parallel to the concerns I still have about other limitations, deliberate or otherwise, about the client. No direct control over installation locations, the flaky way it patches (redownloading massive files, ignoring the never-update flag, inability to roll back), incompatibility with expansions bought via alternative channels (I think this is particularly insidious). But I'm veering off-topic so I'll shut up.

Since it's free to play and all and you don't have to worry about matching payment details and such, wouldn't it therefore be no issue at all to just create a new battlenet account for this game alone with all fake details?

Sure, but it's more an example of technological "advancement" leading to less gameplay, not more. It was the same as the dawn of the 3D era where in terms of actual results, the games both looked worse and played worse than their direct predecessors. Rebel Assault's gameplay after all was a looping video overlaid with a targetting cursor. Arcade games in the preceding decade were magnitudes more involved. Star Fox was apparently released earlier that same year. But yeah, the TOR thing is more a case of "whatever, as long as I can ignore it" - people find their own niche in terms of fun in MMOs so I don't mind that it's there. I certainly didn't feel like I was missing out in WoW, not engaging in any PvP whatsoever in my last 4 years of it.

My general experience with Blizzard is that in their dictionary, "usable stealth" is synonymous with "exploitable loophole" and is something that must be stamped out as quickly as possible.

Rebel Assault is possibly the driving reason for my intense dislike of Star Wars in general, since it was my first real exposure to the setting. No, I haven't watched the movies in full to this day. Anyway, like so many other people, I got it with my Sound Blaster 16 + CD-ROM drive bundle, and it certainly was a disappointing introduction to the brave new world of "multimedia" gaming. It was over three years after Wing Commander for goodness. Fortunately the bundle contained some better stuff like Strike Commander, Ultima 8, Syndicate and Civilization.

If it gets less awkward at higher levels then that's good news - certainly wasn't reliable on my level 12 hunter. But yeah, I'm kind of splitting attention at the moment because none of my three current classes really hit the spot. But since I doubt I'll ever play long term, the prize will probably go to the most compelling storyline. And that description of healing does sound nasty - and this is coming from someone who has healed extensively in WoW with all four healing classes. After years of never needing to look at my hotbars during combat, it's certainly a jolt back to the past. I'm definitely not after something like classic WoW's "decursive" mod, which with a single keypress, scanned all 40 people in a raid, then cast the appropriate cleansing spell on the first valid target. But what I wouldn't be able to live without at a high level of play is a "clique" type mod - essentially context-sensitive mouse clicks to activate certain abilities. And I've just had my first taste of space combat and am now having unpleasant flashbacks to the awful Rebel Assault.

The less you can do with the classes today, the more extra classes they can sell you later.

Yeah, the movable UI elements that I didn't have during my first trial are an improvement in an absolute sense, but my problem is less button placement (since I'm fairly used to managing MMO keybinds) but the lack of feedback. How much longer is the cooldown on ability X? Has ability Y triggered? Is debuff Z currently applied to the target? In SWTOR the solution to all three of those issues, and more, is to keep goggling at your main hotbar and/or the tiny buff icons above the player and target unit frames. In that other big MMO, this information is available to the API and can be shown any way I like. A specific example: - The bounty hunter has a "Rail Shot" ability that does high instant damage, but can only be used if the target has a damage-over-time effect on them. Problem is, my source of damage-over-time is applied completely randomly so I have no predictable way of knowing whether Rail Shot can be used currently without focusing all my attention on my buttons. I have no intention of doing that, so presently I just disregard the ability altogether - fine so far for levelling but I expect such an approach is not viable at max level. An ability of this nature is straight out of WoW - however in that game I would typically solve the information issue with any combination of a) having a big horizontal timer bar showing time remaining on my DoT effects; b) having a large 2D graphic overlaid on the middle of the screen pop up; and c) a customisable audio cue every time the ability became available. Other similar examples: - Sith Warrior's Retaliation ability, that only is available after a successful defense (I assume this means after dodging or deflecting a blow). It's nigh-impossible to notice when that actually happens. - Smuggler's Vital Shot. A straightforward enough ability, a DoT with a fixed timer. But even this is more effort than it's worth to use, because to see the duration of the DoT currently, and therefore when I need to reapply it, I have to stare at the tiny icon above the enemy portrait. Suffice it to say, I don't bother using this ability either.

^ Echoing the demihuman fatigue, and I'll toss in alien species in the same breath - which just makes a Darklands-esque take on fantasy, or indeed a similar approach applied instead to sci-fi, very attractive to me. So in the end, I don't care whether they want to throw classical era fantasy, medieval fantasy, Victorian fantasy, contemporary urban, steampunk, cyberpunk or far-future sci-fi at me - just make it a humans-only affair. After all, humans can be as vile, mysterious, deceptive and downright ugly as any monster or alien. Give me a human adversary instead of some ancient god, orcs, dragons, demons, insectoid aliens or indeed reapers.

My completely selfish position is that the big O avoid any horror IPs - because I don't do that genre, and thus would hate to miss out on the anticipation of, and later the playing of, any such announced game.

I tried the Bounty Hunter too - had more fun with it than the smuggler in terms of combat mechanics, but it's not really doing anything for me plotwise. I mean the plot drivers are: Between this and the Sith Warrior that I tried immediately before, I also feel like there's less decision space for me personally when resolving quests - it's fairly frequently either chaotic stupid or obedient patsy. I suppose the cartoon villainy is the fault of the setting more than the game specifically, but yeah, I think I'll lean towards the Republic instead for better roleplaying freedom. And now for the rant which I've delayed a bit prior until I got a taste of how it applies to the different classes. In the end it made no difference however, it's the same one if I had stuck with just the one class. In the end, I think what will be the killer for me are the UI limitations. Sure, it's unfair to compare seven years worth of user-driven interface ingenuity in WoW (at one point, infamously, going to the extent of being able to draw 3D objects directly onto the gameworld). But the closedness of the design in terms of allowing any experimentation user-side at all is potentially a terminal issue for any MMO. Bioware has been able to get aware by making their single-player games progressively less and less customisable over the past decade, but extending such a policy to SWTOR is a case of self-inflicted foot-severing. Further, I think it's also a case of a disparity between the design of character abilities and the backing of the interface required to effectively use them. My UI for WoW circa 2005 was roughly about as functional as TOR's today. Critically, however, TOR's combat complexity aspires to be about the same as WoW's circa 2012. A sensible goal, to be sure, but the player flat out doesn't have the tools to use the abilities effectively. To wit: In 2005, a typical class would use two, maybe three abilities total over the course of a standard battle. In 2012, it's more like 5-6 in constant use, plus 2-3 more that get used every 30-120 seconds. In the former case, it was fully possible to operate at near maximum effectiveness with the game's terrible standard interface. In the latter, the limitations would be crippling and I would elect not to play at all in preference to using it. That's how I'm starting to feel with TOR's combat, and I'm not yet even level 20. Either combat ability usage needs to be simplified to fit the limitations of the UI, or the UI advanced enough to accommodate the desired level of combat complexity.

Wasn't there some hinting about an expansion announcement this year? Could be bridging content so the shift wouldn't be so jarring.

Is there actually a way to properly preview voices other than the word or two they utter when you select the class/gender combination? Creating all 16 combos (necessarily involving deleting some of them to free up character slots) is tedious - especially if one's silly enough like me to spend way too long customising appearance then deciding to change because of the voice. Thus far: Female Smuggler - like the voice ....shame about the class not being fun Female Jedi Knight - didn't work for me Male Sith Warrior - most recent attempt, but about 5 levels in, starting to grate.

Guess even almighty GoG can't find any copies of The Lost Vale, U8's infamously 100% finished expansion which was destroyed when EA decided to not bother releasing it. Though really its only value is just as some sort of historical curio, it's interesting how thoroughly its existence has been scourged from the planet. One thing that has reemerged though, is the Prince of Persia source code, found in the back of Mechner's closets.

If by "cracking" one means "downloading the unprotected DRM-free files from the Internet," sure.

I fully accept the position that backing a game proposal on Kickstarter is not economically rational. But economically rational behaviour is what led us to the lamentable, creatively bankrupt, blockbuster-oriented current state of the gaming industry. Therefore I will embrace and celebrate the irrational amongst us - I paraphrase, but the saying goes "a reasonable man adapts to the world; an unreasonable man adapts the world to suit him - it is therefore upon unreasonable men that change depends on."

Wouldn't even need to change the character graphics for the gender switch!

Apparently the Enhanced Edition is activated now - but there may be an issue with a corrupted patch pre-download which can be manually rectified with replacing parts 1 and 2 from the following: http://en.thewitcher.com/ee_manual reference: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/the_witcher_2/installer_corrupt/page1