Humanoid

Well Microsoft are killing the "Live" branding from all their products shortly. Won't make the resulting product any better but it'll no longer be Live Messenger.

Only because it had no extensive swamp-trudging.

No significant changes to my core system two years on, just added a 256GB second SSD as my games drive. Really should put the OS on it since it's the faster drive compared to my first-gen Indilinx one, but it's fast enough to not be worth the bother. Intel i5-750 @ 3.33GHz Prolimatech Megahalems + 2x Nexus Real Silent 120mm fans Gigabyte P55A-UD4P 8GB PC10666 G.Skill Eco DDR3 1.35V 7-7-7-21 808.8GB WD Green 128GB G.Skill Falcon II SSD Gigabyte HD5850 Asus Xonar Essence ST Sound card Pioneer DVR-216 DVD-RW Sony 3.5" FDD Win7 Pro 64-bit OEM Seasonic X-650 Antec P182 Scythe Slipstream 800-1200rpm case fans 2x Dell U2711 27" IPS monitors Audioengine A5 2.0 powered speakers Logitech MX1100 mouse + G15 (2nd gen) Keyboard In: Crucial m4 256GB SSD CH Products F-16 Fighterstick USB Alessandro MS-1 headphones Out: Audio Technica ATH-AD700 headphones It really is time to upgrade the graphics card because the 1GB on the 5850 would choke on any modern graphically intensive game. The issue though is that the only modern graphically intensive game I own is The Witcher 2, which I have already completed once and would therefore feel silly blowing $400 on a worthwhile upgrade (GTX670 or HD7950) on half a game. *sigh* Actually my biggest upgrade recently is not one that gets listed on system specs but is pretty notable in terms of overall usability. A new desk. Out goes my 15 year old IKEA chipboard desk that flexed alarmingly under the weight of my screens, and in is a fancy new L shaped workstation with hutch (and, get this, actual drawers ) - only MDF but at least it's solid. Also got a new chair, IKEA high-back Markus. Also built a HTPC a year ago: Intel i5 2300 (stock cooler) Intel onboard HD2000 graphics Asus P8H67-M microATX motherboard (first gen, complete with the potentially faulty SATA ports, too lazy to RMA) 4GB Kingston Value RAM 128GB Crucial m4 SSD 1x 2TB WD Green HDD 1x 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP HDD LG BD-RW 2x 2TB 5900rpm Seagate external HDDs 2x 3TB 7200rpm Seagate external HDDs Win7 Home Premium Corsair CX-400 PSU Antec Fusion Black case Logitech Harmony 650 remote control Onkyo SR-578 HT Receiver Monitor Audio Bronze BR-2 bookshelf speakers TV is still my old Samsung 46" B650 LCD which is really holding me back. Waiting around for the end of this year to see if I can get a good deal on the current get 65" plasmas.

690 is based on far smaller, more power-efficient chips than the 590, as the previous-gen Fermi chips were possibly the most power hungry GPUs ever. If you can run a 590, you can run a 690 with plenty of headroom to spare. I have to say those power numbers in general don't look right - even considering nVidia's tendency to ah, bend the truth when it comes to TDP, the GK104 sips power compared to Tahiti (the 79x0) so something is definitely off when both the 690 and the 680SLI setups are consuming more than the 7970CF. Personally I would be comfortable (in the hypothetical situation in which I was gifted one of these cards) to run it on my 650W PSU, and indeed would be on a 550W model assuming the CPU wasn't overclocked something silly. The thing I'm not comfortable with is spending $1000+ on a card which will probably hit the VRAM ceiling far sooner than it runs out of actual grunt - possibly in the case of a 25x16 screen, and most definitely on any triple-screen setup worth its salt. 4GB 680s are meant to be available about now, the 690 could really use that extra memory.

Bah! Desktop PCs don't need a case, just a large enough flat surface to place all the components on.

The only milestone that really should matter is the final one, because any earlier ones attempt to tie the contract to some sort of nebulous definition of "completion level." If a dev overpromises on delivery time then it's unfortunate but it's their problem. Anything earlier has a whiff of publisher meddling and is vulnerable to "having its numbers rearranged" to have it look like what the publisher wants it to look. Unfortunately I have no idea what, besides Kickstarter, would give the average developer enough bargaining power to negotiate a balanced contract. Also if the project was really that far behind schedule, one wonders if it may have had something to do with the non-payment. Working for six months without pay tends to have a detrimental effect on morale....

Personally I'm hoping it's that Victorian era one that came last in the vote as I'd like something with a non-supernatural vibe to it. ...yeah the horse I back comes last as usual.

Opposite for me, been really winding down on TOR after my smuggler's plot hit a brick wall at the end of Chapter 1 (where it's essentially - Okay, your personal plot is over, here's a generic "help the Republic" storyline). For a game I wasn't particularly enjoying the gameplay of, that's the end of the line really. I'll give one other class a go for the remainder of my free month but 100% sure I'm not subscribing now. With WoW also now dead for me, it means I'll be MMO-less for the first time in years - though to be fair I'd been winding down my commitments gradually over the last couple of years anyway. Not sure what I'll do in the short term. Might install ME3 I guess, it's been sitting on my desk since it arrived a couple of weeks ago.

Well if the last time he played was on launch, the previous patch also made the prologue significantly easier, which may be another factor. I certainly couldn't beat the gate fight in the prologue on normal in 1.0.

I wonder how much of the previous engine they'd be reusing, would be a shame to discard it so soon.

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.