Humanoid

And the salary of about 50c a week? But low tension, so it might be worth it for someone looking for a less stressful job. God that was awful, sorry all. I'll get my coat.

It's even more hilarious considering the mad wailing of certain local business identities (such as Gerry Harvey) blaming the non-imposition of the 10% GST onto imports under $1000AUD in value. Yeah, because clearly making punters pay $44 instead of $40 against the local price of $100 is going to save local retailers. On the other hand it might reduce unemployment to zero given the extreme recruiting customs will need to do to process the huge number of parcels. Latest purchase: I've imported a set of Rock Band 3 drums as a Christmas present for a family member. Paid $130USD + $30 shipping. Local price? $288.

If I wasn't able to borrow that tatty old box of a game with laughable cartoony graphics from my local video store 15+ years ago, who knows where I'd be now. That game was Heroes of Might and Magic. Wonder if Steam rentals as a sort of try before you buy mechanism could work. Pay a few dollars for 24 hours access say, then after that have the option of buying outright with the 'rental' fee offset against the full price. Back to wondering again about the relative (negative) economic values of these various channels compared against each other. - Piracy - Second-hand sales - Rentals - Borrowing/swapping between friends - Grey-market imports To illustrate: While I'm not sure how much shelf price has much of an impact on the cut the developers receive, take for example the currently popular route of Australians importing games from the UK. For the industry as a whole (retailer, distributor, publisher, developer), it would be a greater financial loss if an Aussie imports a game from the UK for $40 against a local price of $100, than it is for a Brit to outright pirate a game (that same equivalent of $40 vs zero). The first instance causes up to a $60 net loss spread across the whole chain, the latter would be a $40 net loss given the most optimistic scenario of "1 torrent = 1 lost sale." Now it's ameliorated somewhat due to the majority of the loss being incurred by the widely despised retail end of the chain, but they are a valid part of the electronic gaming industry.

I would be happy with The Witcher 2 was The Witcher 1 without the swamp.

Might be pure coincidence but since upgrading to Catalyst 10.10 (from 10.5 or somesuch) I've had no CTDs in over 20 hours of played time (in a saved game of about 40 hours total thus far). Another thing that's amazed me is how robust alt-tabbing has been compared to FO3 and Oblivion. Sure the music gets stuck in a short loop but I haven't failed to tab back into the game at any point. In FO3, task switching meant about a 95% chance of the game locking up.

Ah, but do oystersogres feel pain?

Going off on a tangent a bit, I'm curious about the relationship between piracy and second hand sales. Now I'm not very familiar with the console scene (hence this post) but reading and listening to people it seems there's a huge second-hand market with some going to maximum lengths to game the system. If this is untrue then obviously the rest of the post is moot, but anyway - I assume the developers/publishers get zero cash from both piracy and second-hand sales. Now, take a pre-owned game for say, 3/4 the price of a new one. Given the buyer was obviously willing to pay that much for a smallish saving, the probability that they would have bought new for full price if that was the only available avenue is very close to 100%. I imagine the probability of a pirate paying no money for a game buying said game if piracy was not an option to be much, much lower. I'm not sure what I'm missing but it seems if each incident of piracy/second-hand sale is expressed as fractions of a lost sale then the latter is surely a much larger hit for the game companies? Example with arbitrary numbers: Second-hand buyer who is 90% likely to buy same game if it was only available new: 0.9 units of lost sales Pirate 20% likely to buy same game if it was not piratable: 0.2 units of a lost sale Using a calculation like that (I think I'm highballing the pirate's buy chance if developing/3rd world countries sales are included), one could say a developer is losing 4.5 times as much money when a game is traded second-hand as compared to when a game is pirated. I guess the final question is whether the gulf between incidences of piracy and incidences of buying pre-owned is so great that the overall estimated lost sales due to each factor overwhelmingly leans towards the former - thus justifying the shunning of the PC as the preferred platform for development?

I'm afraid I don't quite follow - rereading the paragraph a couple of times gives very different interpretations (in the order I pictured them): 1) Localised incident serious enough to cause soldier to desert. Hiding as an outlaw with family doesn't seem particularly clever on the PC's part. 2) Total annihilation Fallout-style. This would be read as a civilian vault-dweller story. Is emerging from caves after two years plausible? Isolation of a cave system would be nowhere near a "real" vault so nature of outside civilisation would be a pretty big factor. Assuming option two is the more likely. Anyhow, personally not a fan of the one-person-to-do-everything style in terms of the mundane work described - I mean a self-sufficient society presumably has more than one able body. Maybe the PC could pick one or two to do as a sort of character creation/tutorial? (i.e. glorified GOAT/Doc Mitchell test) Bit of a nit-pick - but tech from two years prior would probably be viewed by the society as current tech instead of Fallout-esque "pre-war" tech. I mean a person wouldn't forget how a car works after two years of not seeing one. As for the main plot - I guess the question is how to explain the impetus of finally looking into the briefcase affair. It needs to be important enough to chase up instead of focusing on rebuilding the community, but not so earth-shatteringly obvious in importance as to make one question why it was left alone for two years. I assume it'd have to be something outwardly ordinary but which is only explained by some sort of discovery or incident during the recon quest. Won't comment on the mechanics for now, not really something I look at. EDIT: Wait, is this even in the Fallout universe? The above might seem kind of silly if it is.

It's not piracy if you have a Letter of Marque!

I view Norway vs Sweden as a-ha vs ABBA. Pick your poison.

Meant to be understood as that no matter how much effort a developer puts into the audio, most gamers won't be able to hear it. Contrast to graphics where even a bog-standard 16x10 TN panel isn't a hindrance at all, neither is a 1080p TV when, as I understand it, current consoles (I don't own one, so I could be wrong) only push out 720 vertical lines.

At least graphics aren't in as poor a state as sound in that it's not presently limited by the output device. Both in PC and console world there's not much developers can do when bound by muddy Logitech speakers (including the ubiquitous top of the line Z-5500) and built-in TV speakers (spend $3-4k on the TV but zero on decent sound). Ironically perhaps the once massively derided quality of onboard sound is now way overkill for the standard speakers people plug into their PCs.

I didn't even know there were any sewers....

My concerns about graphics are primarily about interface scaling if anything - not being able to see any more at 25x16 as compared to 10x7 is more disappointing to me than any perceived shortcomings in the game world itself. I guess we'll see a decent bump when next gen consoles standardise at 1080p. Once we reach that then I imagine it'll be a hard cap of sorts for a good while. That hard cap on display hardware for consoles might be good news for Intel and to a lesser extent AMD with the imminent launch of Sandy Bridge/Fusion - creeping closer to the point that onboard sound hit a decade ago.

Sierra Tools also did the drive format thing on uninstall I believe, which was probably even more widespread in the early noughties. And to stay on topic, I forget how much RPG influence was in The Nomad Soul but I wish I still had a copy.

Was a weird one for me - did the usual up to the point where you're supposed to stake out the tower at night. Since it was the middle of the day I headed over and figured I may as well enter the tower to check it out for later. Oddly enough the guy was in there already and the eavesdropping script ran straight away - I was at the base of the stairs, not even in sneak mode. As soon as the script finished I had the quest info update and left the tower - didn't confront the guy or anything. Went to the monorail and defused it no problem, it left and didn't explode. Didn't even know it was a problematic quest until I went back and read the spoiler thread retrospectively.

Still is 10c on the Top Downloads section and lets me add it to the cart - no idea about getting any farther since I'm too lazy to register.

Is friendly fire implemented? I've been avoiding shooting at all when a companion decides to run up to a random insect instead of shooting it. If I ever played a melee character I guess the reverse concern would apply too. With the aforementioned mods I guess the party members shooting each other up might occur too. As for FO1/2 companions - Ian was just a tribute to Iolo clearly. Name is close enough, the only difference is whether you get shot in the back with a triple crossbow or an SMG.

I for one would be pleased if they leaned back on western animation and bedecked the player character in lycra.

Yeah, over the past year I took both fighter and rogue PCs for a spin, didn't like either experiences - partly due to the stamina mechanic and partly due to the poor selection of ranged-capable NPCs - so I had resolved to go back to a mage if and when I finally got around to it. I told myself I'd start up a new game (importing a cheap complete edition) if New Vegas turned out to be a bust. So now I guess I'll do it if DA2/TW2 turn out to be busts. Oh, and just aside, the ridiculous mage hat graphics look even more ridiculous on an AW wearing non-robes.

I used to be insanely jealous of my friend who had some device to play Sega Master System and/of Mega Drive games off floppy disks (of which he had several boxes), all the while I had to beg my parents to buy single NES games.

Either way if it's something you don't squeeze onto bratwurst it fails the first G in GRPG.

I got Arcane Warrior early too and regretted it - mostly due to my own bad planning though. Turned my balanced 2 melee 2 ranged group into a more fragile 3+1. Couldn't afford to lose my tank (Al) and I had specced thief-girl into full melee as well. Too many point blank aoes tended to devastate my party even on easy/normal difficulty. Now in hindsight I could have reversed the decision with a mod but I didn't know about it. So yeah, impulse decision ruined my game (I abandoned that game a couple of quest hubs after) but it should be fun if pre-planned properly. And I still haven't gotten any further than 2 quest hubs complete on any subsequent character either.... I can't say much about my ME choices - skill cooldowns looked too long to bother with so I just set it on easy and killed everything with pistols.

I bought ME2 under the impression that I couldn't even alter the default PC appearance let alone change gender. I mean the guy's on the box art! So a pleasant surprise when I hit the new game button I guess.