Humanoid

The Avatar is an obvious one in every edition of Ultima after U4, excluding U8.

I don't use playlists personally, I sort by album (relying on the embedded metadata in each track) since I'm an album listener - but playlists are generic formats and pretty much any media software can create them. My desktop music player of choice is the wonderfully customisable Foobar, and it certainly does create and handle playlists.

Well, down the checklist for Apple's players: Audio quality: middle of the road at best Supported formats: limited, no FLAC or OGG expandable memory: nope software tie-in: haha, itunes On a tangent, but I've yet to see any device ship with decent earphones yet so my position is buying third-party ones is a must. I use Koss PortaPros myself.

Late I know but basically there are only two portable music players I'd recommend to anyone which between them cover all the bases. Both are selected with audio quality first and foremost, followed by a wide range of supported formats (I use a mix of FLAC and OGG), expandable memory (extra 32GB microSDHC) and no software tie-in. Sansa Clip+ is the first, and one I think everyone should own. Tiny matchbox-sized player with minimalistic interface, infinitely usable, rugged and cheap as chips - perfect outdoors/gym player. Cowon J3 is the other, and is the complete player and the best sound quality, and indeed video quality in the market bar none. The best of the best.

Then what is a Black Box? Only the best CRPG of all time.

I'm still cursing Microsoft for discontinuing gameport support in the latest Windows - every now and then I wax nostalgic about the good times when all you needed was a simple stick with 4 buttons and a hat switch, and the intense rivalry between Thrustmaster's F-4 based precision and CH Products' more genteel sticks. Gaming PCs almost by definition would be attached to a stick of some sort - such as the awesomely versatile and nigh-indestructible Gravis joystick. Mind you, a significant proportion of Wing Commander players were strictly keyboard only and swear by it. For me, it's not necessarily the most effective playstyle that matters, but the most engaging. But I digress - Privateer is indeed awesome and is always in my top 5 when those silly "Best Game Ever" threads come along. Privateer 2's combat kind of sucked, but on the other hand it had an great live action cast (I would argue the best ever assembled for a video game) and some psychedelic design. There have been multiple fan attempts to remake Privateer - the most successful being Gemini Gold - but I don't really know how they play. Launched it for the remade intro (and Privateer does have an awesome intro sequence) but didn't bother playing it. Slightly tangential, but jettisoning the space combat aspect, the relatively recent remake of Pirates! (or indeed the originals) make for many an hour of good explorey tradey goodness.

Vaguely on the topic of sequels, it's interesting to see how the expectations shift from 17 years ago to now. Wing Commander CIC has republished an 1994 article covering the making of Privateer - remembering by this stage Origin was well and truly EA's property. Of note is the final note regarding sales - 50,000 units to that point had already guaranteed that there be a follow-up, either an expansion or likely a sequel. (As it happens, both, sort of) http://www.wcnews.com/articles/art64.shtml

Only restating what's been shown earlier in this thread, but every single NPC in Oblivion (and for the most part, Morrowind). But then the ready availability of a certain kind of mod proves the other competing developers right. Though fairly simple, I like how Ultima handled the Avatar's companions. Of course, they were pretty much facsimiles of Garriott's real life colleagues/friends (also 50:50 gender split). Jaana the druid, Julia the tinker, Katrina the shepherd, and Mariah the mage.

HTPCs cost something in that range generally, and this essentially is a HTPC in a cheap plastic case - though not sure how Atom does with HD video. I'd go Zacate or even full Sandy Bridge once we hit the upper end of that price scale.

It was passable once you realise that you can jog away leisurely from just about any monster with no real trouble. They give up pretty easily. Not that running long distance across bleak murky terrain is much better - ends up being similar to most WoW zones actually.

All I remember of the M&M6 combat was equipping the whole party with bows and firing away while backpedalling. I think I played the in-game card-game in M&M7 more than the game proper.

Yeah, but the Deep Roads also won that award. Witcher swamp vs Deep Roads, go.

An AMD Llano-based one might be interesting on the other hand. But yeah, you can stick a mini-ITX motherboard in just about any retro/oddball chassis for novelty these days.

I bought the Broken Sword "Director's Cut" which had bit of added content towards the start of the game, so yeah, sort of. And apparently it's one of the most successful games on iOS, proving yet again that Mac users are easy to please.

Given that all they need to do to ensure ME3 is a winner is rerelease ME2 without planet scanning, I fail to see how it could possibly go wrong. Oh wait....

Out here, along with many other countries, lottery winnings are not taxed. But at any rate, I'd probably try to evaluate whether the winnings would be enough to live off the interest. Probably not immediately possible out of $1m (though it'd bring my retirement forward a decade or three), but double the prize and I think I could instantly retire and live without ever withdrawing the initial amount. Can't really think of a lot of big-ticket purchases otherwise - I don't plan on buying property in the middle of a bubble (Australia is home to the #1 most overpriced housing market in the world apparently), and I won't buy any sort of flash car, given that I can't drive.

Dropping the DirectX standard may well just result in a de-facto adoption of an even more proprietary standard. See Sound Blaster compatibility back in the DOS days. The Sound Blaster itself was compatible with AdLib. If you had a Gravis Ultrasound on the other hand.... In the current competitive environment it'd probably mean you need, at the very least, two video cards on hand permanently to make sure you can run any given game. If Intel comes back in, probably three. If you have a Matrox, well forget it. Back in the early 3D Decelerator days, you'd come across games that were pretty much Glide vs software renderer. Glide was awesome relative to the hardware capability of the Voodoo chip, but it was hell for the other vendors who tried to push their own APIs - PowerVR, Rendition, S3, etc.

So, nVidia launch the GTX590 to attempt to smoke AMD ....and end up taking it a bit too literally. With some mild overclocking/overvolting within the protection parameters, several review sites, using a mix of samples and retail boards have reported their test cards blowing up - indeed one tester had both his cards independently fail. Thermal imaging of the card in a closed case have shown the PCB heating up in excess of 110

I can rationalise it as the character having better sensory abilities than the player though, what with the augmented eyes and stuff. The perception stat in RPGs in general rarely seem to do anything logical, and admittedly it's hard to scale beyond making aiming more accurate which is a bit of a non-sequitur. I wear my sunglasses at night So I can So I can Watch you weave then breath your story lines And I wear my sunglasses at night So I can So I can Keep track of the visions in my eyes

I missed the conversation, is this about a Daikatana sequel?

Hmm, I didn't get that far before quitting. Maybe I should go look for my old saved games on the old PC.

Have to admit I never played KoTOR2 despite owning it. I dislike Star Wars though, so maybe in its non-Starwarrishness I'll have more motivation to play. I like the setting best when it mostly ignores the mystical and fantastical Force/Jedi/etc stuff, a'la the original Dark Forces where you couldn't wield a lightstick, or the space combat games which were mostly conventional to the genre.

I gave him all Sten's paintings since I left Sten in the cage to rot. My character did not forgive anything, ever.

Telling Ally that Duncan deserved to die was one of the very few moments in Origins that my character could vocalise what she really felt. Shame it was only a 5 second detour before returning to the railroad tracks.