Humanoid

Civ5 compares well to vanilla Civ4. Given it's got 4 years and 2 expansions to make up for, I think Civ5 is in a good enough spot for the future. There are plenty of good arguments for an Civ veteran to let Civ5 mature, but the question as it relates to new players favours it more by providing a more natural learning curve and the chance to learn in-step with the game and the large Civ community. That said, neither SoD or Religion were particularly good implementations of depth. SoD covers for the lack of any tactical nous by the AI and the notion of stacking an axeman and a spearman is certainly no more an involved tactical decision than unit positioning is in Civ5. Religion while not in itself a bad thing is simply too dominant a modifier and renders most other diplomatic factors irrelevant, and furthermore, the implementation of founding religions made it such that it was neither advisable (or for most, possible) to do so. Ultimately none of the items in the list are real causes of the game being derided as "dumbed down," I'd suggest it's entirely down to the AI being less able to hide its constraints behind favourable mechanics - the requirement therefore being simply a smarter AI, or at least one that believably cheats more. Maybe this is all just because they just used the Sitting Bull AI module from Civ4 instead of the Shaka one.

I booted up Fallout 3 for the first time in ages as well, but had to quit and lie down after 30-60min. First case of motion sickness (I assume it was that) I've had in years, odd.

Unfortunately EA holds the rights to it, and Brian Reynolds is busy working on ....Farmville. So that's three things that need to come together for it to happen. Most of the flavour of SMAC came from Reynolds' real interest in philosophy, so I imagine it'd be harder to just straight out switch designers. Some might have dismissed it as pretentious rubbish but hey, it worked.

Start with II and then move up. That would involve playing III! 1-2-SMAC-4-5 would be a better progression. Maybe slip in MoM before II. I can't exactly put my finger on it but I found Call to Power excruciating. This after the local games rag tricked me by saying it was superior to SMAC in the battle to be Civ2's successor. Its only redeeming feature was the African music track (I forget its name), which wouldn't be matched until Civ4's Baba Yetu.

Heh, I'm doing some googling of my own since I didn't know much about it than vague news here and there. But looking at a gameplay trailer - yep, it looks like Crusader with local co-op multiplayer. No networked multiplayer is odd, whole game exudes old-fashionedness to an extent does. I've never played any Tomb Raider games, but this would have tempted me if I actually had anyone to play with.

I had the impression Tomb Raider was restyled (successfully I hear) into an isometric Crusader-style action game, so it doesn't sound like it.

The degree of annoyance over a given inventory system can be ameliorated or amplified by the role and rarity of currency in the game. Just taking Bioware's games alone - you have Mass Effect where midway through the game you probably end up at the cap, and DA:O where there's literally not enough to get all that you want. This meant that after the early game I could sort of ignore the majority of random junk in ME (sucks that there wasn't an omni-gel all button) while in DA:O I'd lug around all sorts of worthless stuff because every little cent counted. And it isn't just the inventory management, it's being able to skip pixel-scanning for lootable barrels, being able to avoid tedious minigames, etc. To that end I lean towards designs where currency is marginalised, being used sparingly as a game mechanic. Don't correlate currency with the power of the player - no buying magic weapons, stat boosts, skills, etc. Limiting it to plot-related usages works well - chapter 2 of BG2 for example if you removed the silly magic items merchants. Or Flashback (ok, not an RPG but since I recently played it) where you earn credits doing odd jobs to pay the entry fee to Death Tower. Or even Ultima 8 where I could just about get enough cash by robbing one house (of a bad guy, so it's virtuous!) would be just about enough to last to the end - that and nothing other than gems were sellable anyway. Actually, I'd like to see that in general - junk like scavenged food and rusty swords shouldn't be sellable at all. I guess this is just a long way of saying the best way of eliminating the pack rat tendency is to remove the rewards of that behaviour. Some might do it anyway, but give the player no in-character motivation to ferry crap to the local tat bazaar.

Or Alpha Centauri! But yeah, start where you plan to finish - so most probably V. Learning IV with expansions would be a pretty exhausting job given the extra complexity over the base game - and I imagine trying to learn the base game first before adding expansions would be a bit over the top. With V I guess you could say you can learn it in step with the rest of the Civ community. The only caveats I guess would be assuming a system that runs it well, and not wanting to say, play multiplayer with a friend who absolutely refuses so move forward or something like that. Or a religious aversion to Steam.

Old platform games are great for killing an odd hour or two. Flashback: The Quest for Identity - remembered for its fluid rotoscoped animations, but it's more than just Prince of Persia with guns.

I've never used FRAPS but I suspect it's for legacy reasons. FAT32 file systems have a 4GB file size limit for instance, and many video editing programs might still be designed around that. Better video editing programs may allow you to join them a bit more cleanly but no idea about any alternatives/workarounds/updates to FRAPS itself. Then again, videos on YouTube tend not to be measured in the gigabytes, nor are they in 1080p format. Bear in mind that 1080p has well over double the number of pixel over 720p for example so the size blows out very fast.

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.