Humanoid

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.

Good to hear, dunno how my 5970 will handle it, technically it should eat the game for breakfast but as usual I'm reading reports of crossfire being unavailable...I'm going back to Nvidia on my next upgrade. I think SLI having issues as well, so it's a lose-lose proposition. I only have a 5850 and am a bit worried about the 1GB frame buffer struggling at 25x14 res. EDIT: Looks like compatibility issue is killing performance when nVidia 3D drivers installed.

Decided what the hell - bought the GoG version to go alongside my CE which is in transit from the other side of the world. Feeling generous toward the developers who are being awesome. Between the free DLC, non-DRM, fair pricing and quick workaround to distributor hijinks and government intervention, I'm happy to throw them a bit extra. I guess there's a subtle message there - I've spent more on a single game (~$135AUD total) with free DLC than I have on any other game excluding MMOs. Unlike that other RPG released this year which got none of my cash.

Combining two bad things makes a worse thing, not a better thing.

I guess some of the more illustrious didn't make it because they couldn't free enough conventional memory to get it to run. I mean, where are you going to find a mouse driver that takes less than 10kB these days?

Bought a 360 earlier this year purely to get Eurosport (minimum monthly fee accessing it via 360 being literally half the normal price for a cable package). Still haven't used it for any games, so yeah.

You people are making me semi-seriously consider placing the GoG order alongside my CE. Evil! This after I blow a couple hundred bucks on Amazon UK too, free shipping is a seductive temptress.

There was some controversy in that there was no DOS category pre-1995 (which would have ruled out WC). However I now see a whole bunch of late 80s/early 90s DOS games on that list so unless they all snuck in somehow through being multiplatform, colour me confused. EDIT: Remembered the reference - http://www.wcnews.com/news/update/10666

Tip relevant for Australians and other regionally ripped-off customers who still want to buy through GoG without having to pay the local premium at the behest of the scummy local distributor. GoG recently made a change that they'd stop geolocation tracking from your IP. All you need to do is set your location to USA (or somewhere else similarly unencumbered) and you will get the base US price, and when the time comes, presumably the uncensored download (not that that wasn't going to be a zero-day bypass anyway). EDIT: Yes I was beaten to it in the general news thread I see.

I wish I had a setup with something better than the Sound Blaster FM synth back in the glory days of DOS gaming. By the time I managed to get an AWE64, Win95 already had a foothold and made it all rather pointless. But at least I didn't have a Pro Audio Spectrum. Still, DOSBox lets me relive the old games with General MIDI support at least - though an element of nostalgia is admittedly lost when my games don't sound the way they did 20 years ago.

Clearly Shep is actually a Reaper and they are justifiably hunting him/her down.

I think those things overclocked to 3GHz+ easily (setting FSB to 333MHz will get to 3GHz on the dot). That's assuming it's an original 2006 model with stock at 2.4GHz, not the 2010 ones which came at 3.06GHz.

On the other hand, US hardware prices are cheap so you'll get maybe 50% more machine for the same money. Even better if Bulldozer which will be out by then is a hit and provides a viable all-round alternative to Intel. Might even see the 28nm graphics chips launching by then.

I love junk - the various cheap tatty T-shirts, VHS tapes, jewelery and useless lumps of plastic and metal. The bigger and tackier, the better. Even devices with no discernable use aside from annoying the user when they want to play - codewheels, schematics and obscure background texts. I even keep registration cards.

Well, procrastinating has ended up making my decision for me - with the inflated download price I went for the physical CE instead from the UK. After spending $200-odd on GoG over Christmas there's really nothing much store credit will do for me. Should come to a 'lil bit over $90AUD when it's dispatched, though admittedly the dollar is a bit unstable. 59.85GBP from TheHut with free shipping (after 5GBP code - MAY5). If you're after the standard edition, code MAY2 discount comes to 21.85 pounds (or try dvd.co.uk 22.18GBP if that code expires).

Maybe in 2022, but trying it in 2012 would lock out most of the world. One of the few things I'm prepared to praise Sony about is the ease of installing third-party hard drives in the PS3, unlike the proprietary-only approach of Microsoft. Hopefully we'll see something similar at least assuming the base storage rumour has any truth to it - SSD awareness would be a big plus (though SSDs cost about the same as a console at the moment - I just bought $800 worth of SSD goodness)

Pondering whether to go ahead with the pre-order (~$42 as above), or import a physical copy from the UK for ~$34. Was prepared to pay a little extra for launch day access and no DRM, but I get irritated at the principle of getting 'less' (sure I won't even notice the cut, but still).

Well there is one reason, if you happen to want a lifesize Geralt head.

At increasing price points I feel the best options for the time being are: GTX460 1GB (not the SE model), HD6850/70, HD6950 (2GB useful for resolutions over 1080p).

I think it was the first game's quicksave feature that didn't distinguish between quicksaves and regular saves and used a new slot every time? Swamped my SSD full of hundreds of saved games.

I guess there's less value in it because unlike the later games, the first two Monkey Island games were not voiced. I see a lot less to be gained by remaking the later fully voiced games, and indeed redoing their quirky and charming art styles might be a net negative. I suppose this applies to the CD releases of Loom and Indy4 as well, although in those cases there's a bit more room for movement on the graphics front. Slightly less popular suggestion, but I'd like to play the Heroes Chronicles series one day - on release it was viewed as cheap opportunistic tripe I know, but the more HoMM3-engined campaigns I can play, the better.

How good or bad combat mechanics are is far less relevant than how fast you can blow past it to get to the real game goodness underneath. Obviously some games have nothing underneath and can be safely discarded, but from my admittedly foggy recollection of Arcanum, combat went by in the blink of an eye so I enjoyed it no matter how unbalanced and unengaging the mechanics technically were. Not that I finished the game - I rarely do any game - but felt I got my money's worth.

I think all WMP does in that capacity is write the playlist file (which is a plain old file, .m3u most common I think) to the device. With Apple devices again being an exception, you can view the internal storage of just about any player as it was a regular drive, so it's trivial to select the music files that have already been copied to the player to create a playlist which is then saved manually onto the player (probably in the base music directory). Failing all other options, the agricultural one would be to just stick the music files on the player into regular folders and play by folder which most players can do easily enough. This would mean duplicating some tracks if you want them in more than one playlist however so it not a preferred option. I haven't used any of the proprietary software that ships with any player to manage my music so I can't say much about them, bulk copy+paste is all I need.