Humanoid

While not nearly as close in hindsight, it made me think of

I exhausted my supply of Slowie is old jokes in 2003.

And that there is such a thing as anti-aliasing. Just occured to me that 3D accelerators are 15 years old now. Scary.

Here I thought manly men preferred their steaks burnt to a crisp over an open bonfire. That said, given that there's a The Sims Medieval in development, I don't see why a The Sims Post-Apocalypse wouldn't work. I'd play it.

Speaking as someone who has the base game and is rather indifferent about the quality of it (and paid full local RRP for it ), the idea of buying the complete edition for about 1/3rd of the price of a local new release isn't looking unattractive. In that sense, it may well be DLC creating an illusion of extra value even if it's just that - an illusion. Psychologically seeing a price of the base game at $100, and Awakenings at $50, seeing the Complete edition to $30 and the immediate thought is "Bargain!" But thinking more rationally I start to think - eh, all I get is just Awakenings at a marginal $20 off and some DLC which probably took some random intern an hour or two to make. I don't know where I'm going with this post, I've just confused myself.

Burned my whole day on U8, finally finished it for the first time at 5:00AM. Must have been about 15-20 hours sunk into it across just two days. Reinforced my liking for the you-can't-be-a-hero motif and the reality of not being to save anyone but oneself. Also I'm a sucker for the music - my first copy of it was bundled with my Sound Blaster 16 and at the time it was the best I'd heard a PC sound, ever. Anyhow, moved on to the Football Manager 2011 demo to see what's changed over the years - I haven't played any iterations since prior to WoW so it's been a long time.

Got to admit I metagamed a little and when I played ME2 without having ever played ME1, I used someone's maxed out import file so I could skip a fair bit of the planet scanning. I'd have no problem just cheating here if it could be done easily. In the end I'll call both planet-scanning and mako-driving both mostly skippable and therefore approximately equal in awfulness. I'll give ME2 a marginal win over ME1 (PCs) hacking/lockpick/whatever minigames mainly because of the ubiquity of the latter - it pops up everywhere and is probably done ten times for every time you have to do one in ME2. On the other hand it's offset of course by the trivial availability lock-melting acid so maybe it's not all that clear cut... Now I know I've made my ambivalence about combat in RPGs often enough, but despite that, I do prefer the sequel when it comes to combat. When I played the original some time later it felt like a substandard generic third person shooter (not helped by the no jumping thing) - and when taken as the third-person shooter it feels like, the design is about twenty years behind the likes of Max Payne or other 'honest' shooters. Now don't get me wrong, I didn't enjoy ME2's combat much either, but it was easier to be lazy with. I do agree that the various cooldowns were a bit underwhelming on a short timer - didn't feel a huge point to them when they mostly feel like an anemic Zidane headbutt. On DLC - I somewhat selfishly hope that they're all crap so I don't feel like I'm missing out. I do realise this is an irrational position though since it would deny other more financially liberal individuals the chance to have something nice - it's tough balancing a dislike for the business model versus the commonsense idea that release of good content is never a bad thing.

Does Lord British finding a Lady British count as video game news nowadays? Richard Garriott engaged to be married. With Russian Lunar buggy also found early this year, and planning to take on Farmville with his new venture I suppose it's been a good year for him. The wonderfully named Laetitia Pichot de Cayeux:

I was waiting for Steam to download some stuff that would take half an hour or so, so I fired up DosBox to fill some time. Started up a new game of Ultima 8 for the first time in god-knows how many years. Admission: I've never finished it before, or even half-finished it before, despite the Avatar avatar and all that. But here I am playing it straight - good guyjust trying to survive and escape Pagan, no stealing or exploiting, etc - and feeling it deserves more credit than I've given it previously. Anyhow, four-five hours later, Steam totally forgotten about, and about to enter the Catacombs. Really creeped me out as a kid so hopefully I have a bit more intestinal fortitude this time.

Running around randomly would be less boring if Bioware finally discovered a way to implement jumping. But in all seriousness, I do hope that the player in that video was just messing around and that the gameplay for bosses doesn't involve meleeing a little, running away to heal/regen and repeating. I got irritated by the first ogre battle in Origins for more or less that. Aside, the joystick this was mainly me recently playing F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 - a game which does involve large periods of doing nothing while still being oddly compelling. Perhaps that's Bioware's holy grail...

Running in circles qualifies as gameplay unless it's caused by an improperly calibrated joystick. - move stick to the upper left position and press button 1 - - move stick to the lower right position and press button 2 -

The 12% is to be phased in, we only learnt about it in this year's budget. No impact on me though - I'm already getting 15% doing government work. The figure was not taken into account when discussing pay - i.e. the super entitlement is on top of regular pay negotiated. No idea how it works in other industries though. I guess it's something I take for granted - I don't even bother reading the statements they sent me. Probably had a minor loss with the GFC and all but the account's worth about 1/3rd my annual pay now - and I've only been working full time for less than four years.

I vaguely remember some earthquake doing some nasty stuff to RAM prices. No invasion required.

That's how I play all my CRPGs....

I can't really tell you much more than Wikipedia, but for gaming it's generally considered not worth the effort - data is a few years old but I remember some tech sites doing a test and finding load time gains of 5% or less. Put against the risk of data loss and it doesn't seem a good deal. In RAID 0, failure in any one disk means total data loss - a two-disk RAID 0 array more or less doubles the risk, three disks triple it, etc. Of course, for non-gaming purposes the utility would differ - not sure what else you do so I can't answer that. Gaming summary: Double the cost Double the noise sources Double the chance of failure Up to 5% increase in game loading times SSDs are completely different in that it's the almost instantaneous random reads that make the difference in gaming.SSDs are one of those "once you try it you'll never go back" type things - highly recommended. TV tuners are TVs without the display and are PVRs without a disk. Putting one into a PC therefore turns it into both a TV and PVR with the usual functions - record, pause live, etc. Typically they come with dual tuners so two channels at a time, whether watching both, recording both, or a combination thereof. Some older ones might be one analogue tuner and one digital tuner, which is kind of pointless now so make sure it's dual digital tuners.

My feelings on Bethesda writing: (hopefully hotlinking works)

Hoping that once all the D&D titles they have lined up are out, they'll stick them all in a weekend promo. Recent promos have been a bit underwhelming, particularly with the "50% off only if you buy *all* of the listed games" thing they've been doing. Feel like playing modded Torment but my copy is a few hundred kilometres away.

On numbers alone I wouldn't upgrade for anything less than +50% performance, but for a lot of people it's not the only metric for evaluating an upgrade. There's noise, heat, power consumption, exclusive features (e.g. Eyefinity, 3D, PhysX, audio bitstreaming) or even something like one's favourite game having issues with a particular chip. I upgraded my X1950XT to an 8800GT not for performance but because the fan on the former was starting to wear out and click. Of course, those better financially resourced than myself could probably justify any performance upgrade on that criteria alone. Aside from coolers, card vendors might differentiate on software bundle (free games), included accessories (probably not so common these days), warranty length/tranferability, PCB colour (for people with windowed cases), packaging (there was a card recently that came in a large novelty rifle plastic case) and of course, price. There are also the factory overclocked variants, although this tends to be more obvious a decision than the aforementioned.

Well it was one of the more controversial design decisions and the one that led to the design of city-states. They've said straight out that in Civ4, no one but the player "played to win," inasmuch as the AI was generally oblivious to victory conditions (later on they played for culture wins, which was taken from player-made mods). Instead they played based on various hard coded personality scales. Supposedly in Civ5 the AI is programmed to be aware of each and every victory condition, and are conversely meant to work against the player achieving any. This does mean a loss of some roleplayingish flavour mechanics - no more AIs voting for you in the UN election anymore for example, no matter how lovestruck they are by you. So now AI personalities might affect which condition they try for, but inevitably, playing-to-win tends to lead to some of the sameish behaviour we're seeing - whether Gandhi or Khan, if they notice you're near to winning neither will hesitate to stick a nuke in your face, so they can live to play another turn. City-states were drafted in for the "play-for-flavour" role. I'm not convinced by it either but maybe a gamer with a more wargaming background instead of a roleplaying one would think the opposite. I don't know.

Playing devil's advocate: The shark was well and truly jumped when various RPGs (no idea which was the first) allowed dual-wielding claymores. If anything, dual crossbows are less improbable than that.

From all I'm seeing people do (my copy's still in mail limbo), this does seem a prime candidate for an anti-walkthrough. Been over a year since the Oblivion one.

Hey, it's longer than Rebel Assault at least. Not generally fond of Star Wars myself - haven't watched any of the movies in full (although snippets over the decades might add up to one), but it's a servicable game universe, being fairly open ended and such. Maybe I'm unfairly resenting Star Wars because ownership thereof has effectively killed the LucasArts we knew and loved.

Why Bethesda? They don't do romances & emocrap in their games. But there are about a zillion submissive 'companion' mods for each game. Maybe Wing Commander 3 ruined romance plots for me. I mean ....Ginger Lynn?

Hard to tell, AMD have been known to not-infrequently release fake leaks about their own products - apparently in response to some pretty widespread real leaking of pre-release stuff in the past. I have no idea whether to categorise that as smart or stupid business strategy ....just a confusing one.

Two players using Win98's flaky Internet Connection Sharing using a 33.6k dialup connection playing Tribes online without a hitch - that was the most impressive thing I remember about it.