Humanoid

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.

Yeah, but the criteria for being "ready" is rarely judged by the developer these days.

I didn't feel much about Civ4 on release either - the bulk of my hours on it were logged in the 3rd and 4th year of owning it. If this turns out the same I won't be unhappy.

If I was a publisher, I'd be delighted if people sent all their problems to anyone but me.

To clarify, he 6990 will be the dual-GPU version - which is slightly confusing in terms of naming. (I prefer the old 4870x2 idiot-proof naming convention), although it's not obvious what kind of compromises it makes in relation to the single 6970. 68xx Crossfire scaling has been amazing (you get ~90% improvement from the second card this gen vs 60-70% last time around) so there's high hopes that the 6990 may turn out to be better relative to its little brothers than the 5970 was. The 6950 and 6970 are late-ish November, the 6990 won't be until mid-late December. Nvidia planning to retaliate with a GTX580 but rumours are that it'll be nothing but two high-binned GTX460 chips on one board.

Steam usually saturates my line because my ISP mirrors most of the stuff they have. Also means it doesn't count against my download limit. One rare thing I can't complain about. Not sure how universal it is but a fair few ISPs still provide free backup dialup access so I'd be able to get that going pretty quickly if my connection fell over.

Yeah, no fan of Steam either but looking at the bigger picture, it's for the best that a relatively small company with a narrow scope runs it, instead of bigger evils like say, Google, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, etc. The biggest irritation is not being able to readily specify the installation location for each game. I'd love to install New Vegas on my SSD but it's not going to work if all my Steam games live there. I did accidentally install Steam on multiple disks on my old PC though, and each copy just saw the installed games in its local directory - thinking that might be the way to go.

You could call Ultima Underworld a direct precursor to System Shock too - both in concept and technologically.

Not only split screen but I wish consoles would support multi-screen output too. Probably need to dial down the graphics a bit since contemporary consoles are starting to choke a little on current games, but still. Hotseat multiplayer on PC too please! Also split/multi-screen multiplayer on PC too thanks.

I am finally playing Alpha Protocol, years behind everyone else. So far I haven't encountered a single bug, except for being unable to tab back in. Imported EU version so no patchy for me. Updated avatar, decades behind everyone else. Image compression of the logo doesn't look so flash here.

Was pretty curious about it myself. Looks like I missed the boat. But not for long!

Makes sense - that was the main failing of the H50 which SPCR did review. But I'd imagine they'd instantly fail it anyway since the noise seems no different. At any rate, all my builds are absolutely slanted towards quiet computing so I admit I really haven't looked at all into what Corsair are trying to do. Breaks my heart that I can't source one of those Gelid Icy Vision VGA coolers in Australia. If AMD's new 6850 can be passively cooled, I'd jump on it even with it being a slight downgrade to what I have. I doubt such a beast is possible though.

Few minor updates bolded. Intel i5-750 @ 3.33GHz Prolimatech Megahalems + 2x Nexus Real Silent 120mm fans Gigabyte P55A-UD4P 8GB PC10666 G.Skill Eco DDR3 1.35V 7-7-7-21 808.8GB WD Green 128GB G.Skill Falcon II SSD Gigabyte HD5850 Asus Xonar Essence ST Sound card Pioneer DVR-216 DVD-RW Sony 3.5" FDD Win7 Pro 64-bit OEM Seasonic X-650 Antec P182 Scythe Slipstream 800-1200rpm case fans 2x Dell U2711 27" IPS monitors Audioengine A5 2.0 powered speakers Audio Technica ATH-AD700 headphones Next upgrade will probably be a new flight stick and a new SSD once the next gen comes out - will move the old one to my notebook once that comes about. Also thinking about building a silent HTPC.