Humanoid

You will have to upgrade the motherboard, yes. CPU-wise, Intel's Sandy Bridge launched earlier this year and that's all we'll see from them this year. Ivy Bridge is a refresh to it, not due until next year. AMD's next-gen, Bulldozer, is nominally due out this month but seems all but delayed until September at the least. Unlikely to be worth waiting for, unless you need 8 cores at an affordable price, it's very much expected Intel will hold onto its performance lead. For graphics, nothing has really been announced - the best we can do is rumours and that's that AMD will launch 7xxx sometime this year, probably Q4. Very unlikely nVidia will have anything this year. Graphics are in a bit of an odd spot currently - in terms of price/performance there's probably never been a better time, plenty of viable options all the way from $100 to $300. On the other hand, in terms of real performance gain there's been not a whole lot of improvement on 2009's 58xx series (which were admittedly a big jump). All-in-all it's hard to go wrong at the moment. I5-2500k (the 'k' version is for overclocking which is a huge gain on this platform), Z68 based motherboard, and for graphics AMD 6850/6950 or nVidia 560Ti/570.

Well DN3D was always generous with its shareware version.

Decided to start over with 1.2 and all the free loots you get and try to get through normal difficulty that way. Seems to have worked, although it might partly be because of the mechanics changes as well. Unfortunately have had two crashes to desktop up to the start of Act 1 (both seem to be caused by scripts triggering) - whereas previous game was 100% stable to the end of Act 1. Not sure if it's related to the patch, but hopefully it doesn't continue.

Probably get death threat for including it, and death threats for removing it. Can't really win with religious imagery.

I will now never purchase any EA game from now on. They crossed that bridge a long time ago when UO2 was renamed "Ultima Worlds Online: Origin" and turned it into some sort of 3D steampunk MMO. Which was mercifully canned.

I usually play DOSBox games scaled up 2x (for VGA games). On a 27" monitor I'd guess that'd correspond very roughly to the physical dimensions of an old 14" CRT. Anyway, I'll probably wait for GoG's next sitewide sale before jumping on this new stuff - but once it happens I'll probably grab every single one of them. I still need to buy a USB flight stick though - pretty hard to find the CH sticks locally. EDIT: Mm, just noticed the GoG version of Privateer doesn't include the expansion Righteous Fire. I'd expect it to be added free to the package down the line though.

It's also one of the very few MMOs to host an Oceanic/Australian server that's actually *gasp* in Australia, while the competitors just count their stacks of cash - so kudos for that. It's still probably the most 'open' MMIO out there too, maybe the only one that merits the term MMORPG (instead of stull like WoW which I'd classify only as an MMOG)

My CE took its time arriving, but finally has. Just got home and a mysterious white sack made of the stuff they make tarpaulin out of (name escapes me) was waiting on my doorstep, which gave the impression of some ill-gotten booty waiting for me. Inside, the more conventional large cardboard box, filled with air cells, and the hefty CE box. No damage to report, which is better than a lot of other people's experience with the head and all that. So not speedy, but not bad for free delivery from the other side of the world. I never feel like I own a game until I can touch it, so yeah. Paper manuals, oh how I missed thee.

The EA deal mooted a while back probably. Which is a fate worse than shutting down in some people's eyes. EDIT: Once again, way, way late. That's what I get for reading new posts in reverse order.

Mythic says "Welcome back, Avatar" - but what's the occasion? Have you heard something, Avatar? http://www.wcnews.com/newestshots/full/ultimaforever.png

You're meant to use a Cat potion.

Go back to cartidges! With some speedy flash chips faster than optical or magnetic spindles.

On Easy you walk up to her face and hack away until dead. Yeah. Haven't had the chance to play with patch and Catalyst 11.5b just yet, hopefully can bump up settings a bit.

Cleaning up the folder only does so much, given that clearing the old early games saves is only worth ~2MB each, whereas my saves around the end of chapter one are 13MB each. Being diligent with early saves is therefore of little impact later on where it'll chomp your disk space no matter what. Worse yet, my Documents folder is on my old, small SSD with no obvious way to change it. Might need some file system trickery here. Whatever happened to being able to save games whereever you wanted? Even DOS games supported that....

Tried the Dirt 2 profile?

It doesn't look like a game to me.

EA have said that as far back as Wing Commander Prophecy, which had some abandoned multiplayer code in it.

Well if it comes to the worst and all the contingencies fall over - well there's the 100% DRM free GoG version on the high seas as a final fallback.

Reports here: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/the_witcher_2/grid_shadows/post1 Looks like a limitation inherent in the engine for now, though hopefully it can be modified in future.

Finding looting is an annoyance, so much so that I rarely bother at all. Hopefully it doesn't come back to bite me with some key ingredients required for anything important. I never steal but that's a given regardless, so I don't look in any containers in town. I'm firmly in the ME2 school of loot management (or lack thereof) so it's not surprising of course. Also in chapter 1 I'm noticing some really distracting shadow dithering, particularly on character faces. Didn't really notice in the prologue but that was mostly broad daylight so most everyone was fully lit. Even on maximum quality shadows it's still there so disappointingly it looks like it's there to stay.

Presumably lawyers happened.

Yeah, this came up during the RDR pre-release time - http://forums.obsidian.net/index.php?showtopic=54583 - I imagine little has changed.

Satisfied with performance at this: [Rendering] AllowAntialias=1 AllowBloom=1 AllowBlur=1 AllowCutsceneDOF=0 AllowDOF=0 AllowDecals=1.0 AllowMotionBlur=0 AllowRain=1 AllowSSAO=1 AllowScatterDOF=0 AllowShafts=1 AllowSharpen=1 AllowVignette=1 AtlasTextureDownscale=0 DanglesLimiter=0 DetailTextureDownscale=0 Fullscreen=1 MaxAtlasTextureSize=2048 MaxCubeShadowCount=1 MaxCubeShadowSize=256 MaxSpotShadowCount=3 MaxSpotShadowSize=512 MaxTextureSize=2048 MeshDistanceScale=0.9 ShadowQuality=2 ShadowedLights=2 TextureDownscale=0 TextureMemoryBudget=300 UberSampling=0 VSync=1 [Viewport] Height=1440 Width=2560 Clarksdale 3.3GHz, 5850 as mentioned. Crossfire fix coming - http://twitter.com/#!/catalystcreator

Haven't read anything about it other than this thread, but got me vaguely interested. Hey, it could be the first game I ever play on my Xbox. Would Tex Murphy be a comparable analogue?

The horrible PC ports of past titles they have perpetrated on the unsuspecting PC audience are the greater evil however.