Humanoid

I recently fired up Railroad Tycoon again, a game I remember being amused by despite having no idea how to play it properly as a ten-year old. I'm still as hopelessly bad at it on anything more than the easy no-collisions mode. Thinking about doing a final game of Civ4 before moving on, pondering Emperor difficulty which I haven't beaten yet. I played Dragon Age for the first time in several months and tried to resume the latest restarted game I had - only lasted a quarter-hour or so out of boredom in the Wilds. I wonder if there's a mod that removes all the bits between the origins and Lothering.... EDIT: Google to the rescue! http://social.bioware.com/project/3407/

I buy the vast majority of my games, and stuff for any other of my hobbies, from the UK, and sometimes from other EU nations. The net saving is generally between 50% and 75%. Customs here will not impose any GST/VAT or import duty on any purchases up to the value of $1000AUD (including shipping, but shipping is usually free). I've bought Civ5 for $40AUD flat compared to $100AUD RRP. Similar story for books and cycling gear. (Could even buy a fully assembled bike shipped free and tax-free if I needed to) I don't own any consoles but this works for almost all console titles too as the EU copies will be the same PAL versions sold locally, as opposed to US imports which will often run into compatibility issues. Aside, http://www.steamprices.com/au/topripoffs is fairly enlightening as to showing the degree to which we get milked. That tracks Steam prices only obviously but the same markups apply to retail in general. I do stick with boxed copies for any non-trivial purchases (which I'll define arbitrarily for now as those worth more than five bucks), so I can wax nostalgic about them twenty years from now. (I'm waxing nostalgic about my 20-year old copy of Wing Commander now, happy anniversary) The in-vogue thing to do is to buy overseas CD-keys to save even more and play same-day (retailer e-mails you the key, tosses the media, nothing is shipped), but I haven't tried it personally. If the trend towards zero physical documentation continues however I might switch over in time. Oh how I miss the big fat manuals in the big fat boxes of decades past. Income tax (including Medicare levy) is 31.5% for the block of income from $35,000 to $80,000. Any portion of income below is taxed at a lesser rate and above at a higher rate, but this covers most of the populace.

I'm pleased at the decision to have a fixed character background. DA:O's shoehorning of distinctly different backgrounds into one rigid storyline was neither convincing nor compelling. And a fixed last name is scarcely any worse than having a player-defined one if the only place you ever see the latter is on the character info screen. At any rate, I've ranted enough in the past about the game making decisions for you which completely ignore the character's motivation, my hope is that a more settled pre-game character background will make the unavoidable railroading feel more graceful and less non-sequiturish than DA:O.

The original Syndicate expansion dealt with the American Revolt (that being the name of it), which is sort of the same. Didn't manage to win a single mission in it.

Check out the videos on Gametrailers.com. If they don't get you excited then gaming may not be your thing. By all means though, pan, denigrate and generally mock ROCKSTAR. Its kind of like boycotting The Dark Knight because you heard Nolan/Bale are jerks. The only thing you are doing is cheating yourself out of a good thing. http://www.gametrailers.com/game/red-dead-redemption/11275 Well I did skip both the Batman movie and game, neither being of any interest to me. Nonetheless, here is my non-sponsored review: This game, whatsitsname appears to be the worst game in the history of mankind. The packaging is made out of toxic waste, the manual is made out of second hand post-it notes bound together with used chewing gum, and the game disc has edges so sharp you'd probably lose your fingers trying to handle it. The game itself is excreable, the gameplay is reminiscent of E.T. but with worse graphics. The manual contains the standard warning about taking a break every hour but it is quite likely that anyone playing this will have epileptic seizures withing 30 seconds - that is, if the game manages to run that long without crashing and causing permanent damage to your hardware (and most probably your retinas). I appeal to the content ratings board to add a warning to the game box that playing this game may cause depression and other forms of mental illness, and anyone who has ever so much as seen the game box should be put on suicide watch for their own safety. Fun fact: All world religions have agreed that the release of this game has heralded the coming of the apocalypse. Summary: Humanity's darkest hour. Graphics: 0/10 Sound: 0/10 Gameplay: 0/10 Overall: -10000000/10

Despite having never heard of the game, I will now gladly pan, denigrate and generally mock it free of charge. I would also call it the worst PC port ever, but since it's a Rockstar game, that part is actually true.

Games like most other media types have their consumers trained to value the product as its medium instead of it's content and therefore don't see any problem at all with every single release having almost the same release price. It'd be more favourable interaction with the DLC paradigm if costs and content would actually factor into the final price, more like how Lindt chocolate costs twice as much as any other supermarket-stocked brand, yet I don't think twice about paying for it. You'd then either get sort of complete full package games for a higher price upfront or the more skeletal games with lots of planned DLC for a smaller initial price. The culmination of such a system would be where the engine/game system is released for free but all the content released essentially as expansions. And no, it'll never happen - movies still get released with the same SRP on release whether it's Avatar or Norbit.

"Learn by doing" mechanics result in the activity depicted in the graphic to the left. <- Anyway, it's all the same thing - whether your character becomes stronger through the acquisition of a singular experience point figure, discrete skill points, a sword of strongpower + 1 or a Super Mushroom (or any combination thereof) is immaterial and only of flavour value. Rrrrawr Bob become stronger, kill tougher bosses!

Maybe the standalone storyline sort of dampened interest in general? Got the same vibe for expansions/semi-expansions like Colonization for Civ4, Total Annihilation: Battle Tactics or HoMM3: Shadow of Death, just sort of ....disconnected. Or maybe the public just have no interest in playing a Frenchie. Incidentally are there new PC voice sets to reflect the new background or does the Orlesian warden sound still sound like a British coalminer?

So after 4 aborted runs I'm not sure whether to try for another or just skip the original campaign and try the expansion as a standalone game. Does purchasing the expansion add any functionality/gameplay to the old campaign or are all its additions completely contained in the new story? My biggest whinge is still having to repeat the whole Ostagar+Tower schtick every time which is discouraging me from restarting. I see there's a skip the Fade mod but nothing else so far. That said I might use the skip Fade mod anyway just because the powergamer in me would get massively irritated if I missed a single one of the stat buffs.

I was hoping for another tie-in with a new David Bowie album, but alas.

Problem with that is my current grey warden would prefer to raze Denerim personally.

Intel are charging extortionate prices in Australia so we either import them or go for cheaper Indilinx drives really. The nature of SSDs is that unlike HDDs the larger the drive the more operations can be performed simultaneously. 160GB SSD will perform significantly better than 80GB and so forth which is especially noticeable on writes. There's no real dropoff where gaining capacity does not give a performance boost. That said, even 64GB SSDs crush spindle drives on reads by so much hardly anyone would be quibbling about it - though I'd be a bit dubious about the general utility of 32-40GB models (typically marketed as boot drives now). Aside, best value SSD over in Australia for the time being will be the G.Skill Falcon II at about $250AUD for 64GB or ~$440AUD for 128GB. P.S. I've heard Raptors are actually very quiet drives in themselves, just that the 3.5" bolt-on chassis causes all manner of vibrations and associated problems. Used as a 2.5" and suitably mounted (ideally suspended) it'd probably beat out some 7200rpm drives for quietness.

SSDs are awesome but WinXP does a terrible job of supporting them - general use degrades SSD performance until it does some self-rearranging - typically for modern drives this is implemented using TRIM which is Win7 only I believe. For Indilinx-based SSDs there's also a utility called wiper.exe when using them under older versions of Windows which is roughly equivalent to an SSD "defragger," but being a manual process it becomes a bit of a chore. (Incidentally, don't use standard HDD defrag on SSD, it's just causing wear without gaining anything.

GTX285? It's pretty poor value at the moment though I understand some people are avoiding AMD GPUs. It's been reported that nVidia are holding a press release about GF100 this coming week so you might want to listen to what they've got to announce. To drop a little personal op-ed here though, I'd say nVidia's recent business practices are as dubious if not moreso then Intel's (handling of mobile bump-gate, PhysX lockout, Batman AA, constant rebadging). Also given the tiny difference between the 965 and 955 (200MHz and nothing else) and how trivial they are to overclock I'd go with the 955BE - since after all the only real reason to go for a BE is for overclocking. RAM for AMD is dual-channel only so 4GB. Motherboard you're probably looking at a 790X unless you plan to do crazy things like run 3 video cards.

Anandtech's Buyer's Guide also recently updated. Key decisions are probably how many cores you want (2, 3 or 4) and whether you have any interest in overclocking (and hence the BE edition CPUs) or even core unlocking. If on a very strict budget then an AM2+ board (instead of AM3) would allow you to reuse DDR2. My knowledge on specific models is pretty much nil but of the current AMD chipset offerings I believe the FX is the premium series, X is mainstream and G/GX is mainstream with integrated graphics. For video ATi currently win at all price points until nVidia gets around to launching their perpetually delayed new series - so any decision here comes down to a) buy whatever ATi card fits your budget, or b) wait and reuse your existing card for now.

Cuts area loading times in the likes of DA by 10x, and apps like Firefox load instantly. Never tried Win7 with a spindle drive however so it's not exactly a straight comparison.

New toy built over the holidays: Intel i5-750 Prolimatech Megahalems + 2x Nexus Real Silent 120mm fans Gigabyte P55A-UD4P 4GB PC10666 G.Skill Eco DDR3 1.35V 7-7-7-21 808.8GB WD Green 128GB G.Skill Falcon II SSD Gigabyte HD5850 Pioneer DVR-216 Sony 3.5" FDD (yeah...) Win7 Pro 64-bit OEM Seasonic X-650 Antec P182 Mix of Scythe Slipstream 800-1200rpm case fans Audioengine A5 2.0 powered speakers Pending are a viable 3rd party cooler for the video card and an ASUS Essence ST sound card. Perhaps a Dell U2711 when cashflow permits.

Given absolute freedom of choices, my human noble would have slit Duncan's throat as he slept on the trip to Ostagar - but it's a clearly impractical one as it would sort of necessitate writing an entire new game to branch off from that point. What I'd have perhaps liked to see instead is the origin stories relegated to the game's second act as a sort of flashback instead. This would convert the flimsy illusion of choice into one of circumstance, which on the whole I would find more palatable plotwise. e.g. You are a Bhaalspawn/Jedi/Guy covered in scars who wakes up in a mortuary instead of you (are forced to) 'choose' to become a Jedi/Grey Warden/general saviour of all humanity. Choice denied feels crueller than unarguable circumstance. Perhaps open the game by throwing the character thick in the battle for Ostagar - and at the point your character gets knocked out, the pace can be slowed right down to explore your character and how they might have gotte into the current situation. I realise that's begging for a dozen ancient tropes, it would allow me to feel more control over the player character as a personality rather than a storyteller's construct. My last attempted character concept was a genocidal elven supremacist city elf who would have loved to erase the entire human civilisation of Ferelden, along with the poxy human religion. Needless to say it didn't get very far (though open mockery of the chantry / monarchy / humans was somewhat amusing) and I'm waiting on the expansion to start my next game.

If only the movie was banned too it would have saved people a lot of money.

It reads to me that it would be improved if the method of delivery were to be similarly improved - and by improved I mean "made cheaper." If you have an automated VO software that could provide a usable variety of relatively convincing outputs (ideally client-side) in response to an arbitrary bit of writing (hello General MIDI), you'd have much greater scope in what you'd be able to write. Of course, this would probably mean another actor's strike, but so be it.

I'm quite happy with VO as part of the cinematic experience - but talking head sequences don't really fulfil that so I'm not too concerned either way whether the mundane conversations are voiced or not. The Wing Commander speechpacks were fairly pointless, one of the few things in the history of gaming that are a bigger ripoff than DLC, but on the other hand I'm quite fond of the FMV excesses of the sequels.

The fan on current model single-fan power supplies is an intake fan, the bottom PSU placement is designed to isolate the PSU completely from the heat dynamics of the rest of the system since traditional top-placement meant the PSU was taking air from increasingly hot CPUs and ramping up their own fan as they overheated. Likewise, modern 'blower' video cards take air from inside the case and exhaust it outside to the back panel of the case. The problem with multi-card solutions in terms of heating tends to be the upper video card is starved of cool air since there's very little room between it and the card below, and the heat from the card below heats up the whatever intake the top card gets. This effect would be further amplified the worse the front intake airflow is (around the HDD cage area).

Not impossible - indeed it could have been that the 5870 was glitching because of power issues? Don't see much to do besides test those cards one at a time to try to confirm the problem.

A DLC I'd buy is one that provided an alternate storyline progression between the end of each origin story and the point where the world map opens up - i.e. a parallel exclusive path to the Ostagar-Wilds-Ishal line. As it stands that part of the game rapidly becomes an irritating bottleneck on every playthrough after the first, whereas decent options (or at least passable illusions thereof) exist prior and following on from that arc. Possible hooks include perhaps having an alternate ending to each origin where you get captured, or another one where, say, you manage to escape your conscription while journeying to Ostagar - anything of the sort really, because Ostagar is starting to feel like Irenicus' Dungeon.