Humanoid

Sometimes user reviews can go spectacularly right - Denon directional ethernet cable

I know about Messi's HGH treatment, but other than that...? Putting aside the manager's token punishment for his positive during his playing days for a moment, this, to be fair dates back a few years. First of all I should probably stress that if anyone insists on evidence that would stand up to the standards of criminal law, no, it isn't presently available and is not something I'd argue about. Now, my background is cycling. Yeah, that sport that's a whipping boy for doping everywhere. You may have heard of Operacion Puerto, a Spanish police investigation into the actions of Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, a gynaecologist who was consulting a suspicious number of male athletes. When police investigated him, there were hundreds of bags of blood with codenames, and a lodger linking those codenames to some of Spain's (and Europe's) top athletes. Fuentes himself did not publically name names but stated that his clients came from all sports, including cycling, tennis, and yes, football. Now over the next months, all manner of names started leaking, some officially some not. Some of the biggest names in cycling were the first to go - you might have heard of Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and Alejandro Valverde. Predictably, the latter of the trio, the only native, was provided the thickest fog of obfuscation and protection. The investigators seemed to pick and choose which names they would confirm from the unofficial leaks. Lots of lawyers and appeals flew around. Then some other names came up via the unofficial leaks. Team doctors for a number of Spanish football clubs, including the big ones - Real and Barca. Then another, arguably even bigger - Rafael Nadal. Very quickly, the investigation was declared closed in the courts, amidst rumours of political pressure. The investigators were unhappy but powerless - the whole affair had been swept under the rug. Fuentes understandably kept quiet publically - he was receiving an increasing number of death threats as details about the affair were exposed. Anyway, it's just a summary off the top of my head and there's a lot of detail that I'd have missed. There are still some aftershocks felt four years on - last year saw another police operation, Operacion Galgo, pick up some of the dropped pieces of the original investigation. The issue remains the absence of any political will within Spain to clean up. Just last month we saw Prime Minister Zapatero unequivically claim there was no way disgraced Tour de France champion Alberto Contador would have doped, in spite of any evidence or lack thereof. Spain is in the middle of a sporting golden era and woe betide any politician willing to prick that swelling bubble of national pride. EDIT: Any old google search should bring up a healthy amount of information, even more for those who can read Spanish and/or French. First hit for Fuentes Barcelona Puerto for example: http://www.ergogenics.org/484.html

WPA2 is the current (i.e. must-have) standard in security and 300Mbit is the maximum speed standard currently available. Not a lot more I can say as networking isn't my thing.

I'm a Spurs supporter through and through and thought it was a ridiculous decision, so yeah. That said, zero shots on goal (not just zero on target) for them shows it was not an unfair result in the end. As awesome as Barcelona are though, I find I can't respect them at all. They're probably the most chemically enhanced team ever seen in professional football.

this is very helpful, but (and I'm probably wrong here) wasn't the 8800gt a high end card when it was released? or was it a midrange? I thought the midrange cards were the 8500 and the 8600? right now a high end is like the gtx580 and a midrange is a gtx 560? I guess my definition is more gamer-midrange as opposed to market-midrange. The difference is probably the $200-$250 mark vs the $100-$150 mark at the moment. Initial G80 series consisted of the 8800 Ultra, 8800GTX, 8800GTS-640 and 8800GTS-320. Then came the revised G92, consisting of the 8800GT which nominally replaced the 8800GTS-320 and the 8800GTS-512 which replaced the 8800GTS-640. The GT was faster than even the 640 as it turns out though, which made it sort of like a mid-range card encroaching on the top-end. Need to remember though that during this era, ATi were struggling so nVidia could price high, at all price points video cards were about 50% dearer than they are now. And yeah, gamer mid-range now I guess would be the 560/460-1GB and R68xx (with the R6950 rapidly dropping into the same category). Midrange in the broader market sense would still be the older tech 450/R5770.

The problem is that even 1080p is starting to push the capacity of the human eye at reasonable TV sizes. I doubt I'll ever be able to fit a TV of the size required to take full advantage of that kind of resolution. Ah, but with OLED all you have to do is roll your TV onto the wall like wallpaper!

Aren't the next gen TVs supposed to have 4000+ vertical lines or somesuch? Maybe the next gen will coincide with that (except for Nintendo who will probably release their 1080p console at that time, and top the sales chart with it). At the same time, I wouldn't be too surprised if they went back to x86 and consumer graphics chips. Even now they're pushing 5760x1080 gaming with single chips, and x86 is like COBOL, it just won't die.

I know nostalgia colours that sort of thing, but HoMM3 holds up fairly well given the 1024x768 resolution (hey, some people still use that today) and some lovely art. The older ones with 640x480 VGA I could understand a bit more.

The right card for any given generation is the midrange card released by each of the dominant vendors within the last 6-12 months. And with the respective companies rather random approach to product naming, what it'll be called is anyone's guess. Hopefully the 28nm process will be well and truly mature by then however (with 22nm coming in), unlike the fiasco that was the introduction to 40nm. Aside, 8800GTX wouldn't have been the right card at the time, the 8800GT (which using convoluted vendor logic came after the GTX) would have been the poster child of that generation. So good was it that the subsequent 8800GTS-512, 9800GT, 9800GTX, 9800GTX+ and 250GTS are basically the same product. A roll-call of the 'right' card, with the benefit of hindsight, over the past several years would read something like: GF4 Ti4200, R9700, 8800GT, R5850. Your call on whether the alternating dominance is a pattern or coincidence, but no one would make any serious bets on the next winner. I will say though that the current mid-range is more crowded than ever and it's hard to go very wrong.

I played HoMM2 before the original so it's hard to have an opinion on that comparison. But a moot point anyway as HoMM3 is the best - the perfect sequel in a way, adding a lot of meat but basically losing nothing good from its predecessor. I regret now not buying the (at the time) maligned Heroes Chronicles spinoffs (they were essentially standalone campaigns using the HoMM3 engine), they're nigh-impossible to find now. HoMM4 was if nothing else a bold attempt at branching out, since it would have had trouble improving upon perfection. Just a shame about 3DO being broke and all that resulting in a half-baked, unbalanced product (*stabs Trip Hawkins*) Nonetheless, it was fun enough to play as a single-character romp through the campaign with the overpowered heroes. Frankly in that capacity it was more an RPG than what passes as one now. Have yet to give HoMM5 a proper shake of the sauce bottle.

Dammit, for a moment there I thought they'd used Australia as an RPG setting.

Credit for achieving the impossible I guess. I've had an Xbox for a couple months now and don't have any games on it at all (I use it for pay TV streaming). I guess if the gameplay works well with it it's something to consider once things settle down. Better than wearing out my mouse buttons at any rate. On the PC I'd probably struggle to see it as what it is and instead see it as what I want it to be and come out disappointed. On the other hand, I quite liked Final Fight 3 on the SNES, and if I adjust my expectations accordingly.... (not as much a stretch as one might first thing, FF3 had a branching storyline and simple gear upgrades) So yeah, I'll be tracking the platform wars here, feed me!

Origin was bought first but Bullfrog was probably killed first - in the early years Origin retained quite a lot of independence (and their somewhat haphazard development cycle). Both were walking dead before Westwood were even acquired though, with Chris Roberts and Peter Molyneux having both left by the time of the Westwood purchase. The initial acquisition had been on the cards for a while and for a time, Origin resisted. The cube, sphere and tetrahedron evil generators were not in Ultima 7 by coincidence. By the time of Ultima 8 the inevitable had happened and the EA shapes reappeared as a magic artifact in Mythran's house. All it did was that the Avatar kneeled before it when it was interacted with - heavy symbolism there.

Not sure how it's organised but there's 700MB in the vo directory under packages, and a further 1.8GB under modules. Wild guess that the player character voice acting might add 50%, it would inflate DA1's install to 21.3GB (EDIT: working off proper install size, 16.5GB) or so, so it's not a major component really. Taking a proportional amount off from DA2 would result in a 6.5GB estimate if Hawke was mute. Of course, odds are this is completely irrelevant.

Also free first episode when it's released if you register - http://www.telltalegames.com/bttfoffer

Or Dragon Ball.

I've been playing a new character on a new account when they had that $5 deal a few weeks back - my old characters have too much baggage so I've put them on ice. It's probably safe to say it's probably the closest an MMO will ever get to a decent single player CRPG experience - and better than most single player action-RPGs in that sense. Will I continue on to play Cataclysm proper? I don't know yet, still quite burnt out by WoTLK raiding.

6950 Crossfire might be turn out to be the best value high end solution - costs about 20% more than a single GTX580 but 50-70% faster. That'd be the upper bound of the 6990 I imagine, depending on how much they end up having to cut it down to fit in the 300W envelope.

I probably played SimFarm a fair bit more than any of the core SimCity games. Not sure how well it was actually rated back then though. Also enjoyed "light-sim" Strike Commander for bringing together Space Opera with conventional military sim. And of course there's Ultima 8.

So, pretty much the entire catalogue is on sale now (except Activision which will start within 3 days) - could probably rack up a couple hundred dollars worth with a 5 minute perusal of the list. Not sure if it means anything but will very soon have more games on GoG than on Steam.

A fair proportion of the old game boxes were those two piece ones that can't be flattened. A lot sturdier though so I don't mind. Alas, 90% of my games are back in my parents' place, stuffed in boxes in the garage, hundreds of kilometres from me. I put all the CDs, manuals and yes, registration cards back into them before packing them though, so it's hardly a case of just storing boxes.

Not directly comparable of course, but my personal feeling was that yes, ME2 was a poor RPG mixed with a competent shooter, which translated to a better experience than the original's poor RPG - poor shooter mix. Storytelling redresses part of the balance of course, but I personally don't weigh it enough to alter the overall comparison. * I should also note that I'm not an FPS player, at all, and end up flailing wildly at the air when I attempt to play from that perspective. Played ~95% of New Vegas in 3rd person view. Probably something to do with the diminished situational awareness triggering some sort of panic reflex.

The reverse for me - playing FO3 I somehow ended up with the idea that dear old daddy might have been the bad guy and played it accordingly - player character all suspicious and careful instead of rushing after him. I might have shot myself in the foot with that theory.... New Vegas was simple but strong motivation - no one shoots me in the head and gets away with it and so needed no encouragement to progress the main plot. Well, that is until my revenge was served at which point the experience more or less plateaued.

I don't think that's retrograde. Technology does not always get smaller as it progresses. My current monitor is about an inch thick. Ten years ago, my cat could curl up on it when she wanted a warm place to sleep. Fifteen years before that, my mother owned a Mac that could have fit inside that monitor. Before I was born, she worked at a technology company where the computer filled a small room. Home fridges are almost a century old. Give graphics cards that much time, and they'll probably be smaller. Tangent: Fridges are also an odd example as they come in a wide range of sizes. They're meant to store stuff and their size is based on how much stuff you expect to store. Birth control probably had a bigger impact on the size of the average fridge than cooling technology did. I accept that advancement will always prioritise one aspect of the technology over others particularly in the early stages, but the personal irritation here is more about the chosen tradeoff. VESA Local Bus video cards were huge, but silent, but that did not generally impact usability. Nowadays some rigs are so loud that headphones become a necessity when gaming. Maybe the market is proving me wrong, but it's showing some signs of settling down so I hold out some hope. Some years ago Intel crashed headlong into the barrier of what the market would take in terms of CPU speed vs power dissipation. The engineering farce that was the P4 Prescott showed all consumer CPU vendors the line in the sand, and today we're seeing impressive developments in CPU speed despite that technological constraint. My hope is that with the 300W Fermi monster (GTX480), nVidia might have hit the same wall and that it's the beginning of a more mature, balanced approach to GPU development. I guess the most contentious issue is the question of how good is good enough - and I expect my standards are on the lower end of the spectrum. ME2 is the best looking game I've ever played and from what I know it's considered quite a distance behind the bleeding edge. I'll make the personal call that it's good enough for the mainstream and that if the upcoming integrated graphics options are enough to power that, I would be very happy indeed to see developers standardise PC graphics to be playable on said platforms. Not saying there should be an upper bound to graphical quality, but I think it's win-win for both developers and gamers if a common hardware baseline is established. It may be Sandy Bridge/Fusion, or it might be the generation that follows, but I look forward for when the time comes.

Men would be less depressed about losing their hair if plugs were better quality, easy to get and had no social stigma. ....at least I think that was the intended point.