Humanoid

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.

I can't armwrestle very well either with 30fps+, the mechanic feels laggy regardless. Either it's like that for everyone or it's just my poor dexterity. I probably won't do it ever again anyway so moot point. Anyway, found that normal was much too hard for me, nearing the end of the prologue I got stuck for about 20 minutes on a certain populous melee (minor complaint: hulking guys in full plate run as fast as unarmoured people including Geralt) and turned it down. Doubt I'll bother going back up. Only real complaint so far is that the stealth gameplay feels clunky. Hard to get the stun option to come up, and the general movement against obstacles is iffy. Just as well it's optional.

Well Bulldozer is next month. This game is making me itchy for a 2GB graphics card but with the HD7xxx series tentatively dated for Q3 I don't want to make the jump yet. Gotta say it's the first game that's really shown the shortcomings of 1GB frame buffer on 2560x1440, but admittedly before this the most graphically intensive games I've played were NV, ME2, DA and er, WoW - so nothing remotely high-end.

you need more screwdrivers than with a desktop PC, but yes it should be possible. Depends on the specific model of notebook, but it may well be soldered in. More likely than not I'd imagine. Bit of a guess but the percentage of notebooks out there with upgradable graphics is probably sub-5%. It would need to be not soldered in obviously, have a pin-compatible replacement, and have sufficient cooling as to not melt your system if you do make the upgrade.

Preliminary performance report from cutscenes and just moving around a bit without combat yet as I don't have time to play tonight. It's borderline playable but with a fair bit of slowing down on high settings. I'll probably bump down to medium then slowly add detail while trying to keep a flowing framerate. i5-750 at 3.33GHz, 1GB HD5850, 8GB RAM. Bugger all loading time on my shiny new second SSD, no idea how a spindle drive would do.

Apparently the performance hit from each setting is mostly incremental and can be toggled on and off for relatively small performance changes. Except Depth of Field and Ubersampling - each alone is capable of halving your frame rate.

Upgrading GPU in a laptop would be quite the feat.