Humanoid

I thought it was a nice gesture, but then I found out EA Access is a paywall. Classic EA. That said, 10 hours is plenty to get an idea of how good or bad the game will be, so that when considered in isolation is more than fair and I hope other games follow suit. I ragequit on ME3 in less than half that time, and played DA3 even less (through apathy rather than anger in its case). Demos would have saved me from both. ....maybe I shouldn't tell them that.

Enemy Within was good but after having completed the vanilla game I only needed to complete it once to get my fill since it was the same campaign, just with added mechs. (I completed normal vanilla, then C/I vanilla then C/I EW) Screw the "DLC" that came with it though, it's unreasonable to survive Portent without memorising the Thinman drops. I never got the Slingshot DLC but it suffers a similar issue with the pre-activated "Gankplank". Whenever I see someone complain about an unreasonable difficulty spike in XCOM it's almost always due to the DLC. Ultimately though, EW is important because it's required to play the final version of Long War. My gametime went from around 120 hours post EW, to 450+ hours by the time I completed a single Long War campaign.

Today I heard about Overcooked for the first time and immediately bought it for some four-player co-op insanity while I'm still on holiday. It's a blast with the full complement of players, pretty good with two players, and while I didn't try it solo, probably would suck single player. Shame it's local co-op only so it's not something I can play when I get home next week. Best co-op game since Monaco, which I absolutely adore.

Those are the exact traits I look for in a laptop. It's a business machine not concerned with being "sexy" but rather having things like the best keyboard available on a laptop, good connectivity options, being tough as nails, etc.

Impulse-bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T460s to replace my T440s. The new machine is a base model i5 compared to the older one which was a i7 (still dual-core) Haswell, so the final performance would probably end up fairly similar. Other specs are the same - the usual 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, 1080p IPS screen, which is all that matters. I dropped the touchscreen which turned out to be more hindrance than help, and the backlit keyboard which I used maybe once a year. So really there was no reason for me to do this changeover, but the price was irresistable: $1000AUD for the new machine when I paid well over double that for the older one originally. The new one is about 20% lighter at ~1.35kg (3 pounds) which is nice but just icing on the cake. Old machine goes to my parents who were using my old Core 2 Duo Dell with an almost completely dead battery as a spare machine.

You're probably not comparing apples to apples if there's that much price differential. You can get a 4-port wireless-N router for under 20EUR these days, though it'd be a cheaper Chinese brand with a less polished UI. Something like this would absolutely do the job, and I run TP-Link gear no problem, cheap and cheerful but not as idiot-proof as the established brands in terms of setup. The primary price driver besides brand would be wireless capability. These days devices will come either with just the older wireless-N support, or with the newer wireless-AC standard. In the latter case they'll still have wireless-N as a fallback, it just means the device won't be operating at its maximum throughput. But that's not all, because there's a numerical rating attached to the standard, whether it be N or AC, e.g. N300 or AC1200. These numbers are a measure of their speed, but is not a direct representation of it. Now for the N standard it's pretty simple. The number just means the theoretical maximum throughput, i.e. N300 is 300Mbps. You will never hit that theoretical value of course, but it's easy enough to compare various products with that figure. The wireless-AC products though are misleadingly labelled because the number is the sum of two separate wireless bands that will be operating. When you operate an AC1350 router, you're not getting 1350Mbit, you're getting (theoretically of course) a 450Mbit wireless-N network operating concurrently with a 867Mbit wireless-AC network (and 1317 is rounded up to 1350 because reasons). This is why they are marketed as "dual-band". Modern devices will have the option to connect to the AC network and only get the 867Mbps or to the slower N network, you cannot connect the same device to both simultaneously. Older or cheaper devices such as game consoles would just connect to the wireless-N network and act as if the AC network wasn't there. EDIT: The USB ports on routers are not designed for you to connect a PC to them, rather they are intended for things like printers or an external hard drive to share between the other devices connected to it.

Hardware-wise it's about equivalent to a GTX 940M from what I can see. Absolute entry level.

So you want to play an incest simulator? You sick, sick puppy. if one genuine wants such, they can get it from most any japanese dating game. *shudder* HA! Good Fun! Dating sims have nothing on Crusader Kings 2.

There is a patch for it, but it's big (well, for the time...) and took aeons to apply for me. That said, wasn't there a way to register your Witcher 1 disc key on Gog and get it on their platform for free? GOG provides a GOG copy of either of the first two Witcher games no matter what platform you originally bought them on. https://www.gog.com/witcher/backup There is no distinction between versions, all editions upgrade to the up-to-date Enhanced Edition.

PC3L (or DDR3L) is the 1.35V standard so it implies that your existing sticks are optimally designed to run at that voltage, though it will typically accept 1.5V without issue. The stuff in that Newegg link is also DDR3L so it's correct (and it mentions 1.5V compatibility as a fallback). The timings may not exactly match but that's no big deal: while the sticks will all run at the speed of the slowest one, in practice any difference here will be a fraction of a percent. That said, if you do really want to match them up exactly, you can check the SPD tab in CPU-Z to see what your current sticks are qualified to run at.

Any of multi-class, classless level-based or classless experience-based. The common thread is that these systems go hand in hand with the idea of a dynamic *character* instead of a fixed-function machine, but the rate of power gain can easily be regulated by the "game master" as to eliminate any perverse incentive to grind.

Just go ahead and do that stuff now if you want, it's perfectly fine to do so. In my opinion, a certain dungeon beneath the hangman tree is more challenging early on, well with one clear exception, but I won't spoil anything for you. If it's the temple under the big tree, yeah, went there as one of the first things I did. Found it somewhat challenging (on default difficulty) I quite liked it though, gave me that "IWD Vibe". Off to visit the lordling it is then My first and so far only PoE run ended there, when I tried exploring that place solo. Success eluded me and I lost all momentum and ended up playing something else. This was before story mode was a thing, so I don't know how viable it'd be if I returned to it today.

Guessing the Squeenix holiday surprise box will contain the first episode at least, if you want to try it that way.

I still haven't played perhaps the "big three" titles that perhaps would normally be my top contenders this year, and I doubt there's enough time left in the year to give each of them a fair shake. Those games are Mankind Divided, Civilization 6, and Dishonored 2. In the absence of those games, the title would technically default to Stardew Valley but that probably doesn't reflect my real opinion of it. So uh, yeah, I'll award 2016 GOTY sometime next year I guess. Previous award winners: 2015 - The Witcher 3 2014 - No award, worst year for new games in living memory 2013 - Monaco 2012 - XCOM: Enemy Unknown 2011 - The Witcher 2 2010 - Fallout New Vegas

I logged in and both my existing characters who were level 50-55 last I remember are suddenly level 65. (One had only just started Shadow of Revan and the other had done nothing since finishing the class storyline) Since I'm not a subscriber this is my level cap, so in effect I won't level at all if I decide to play though SoR and the half of KotFE that I'm eligible for. Very confused. A quick scan of the 5.0 patch notes says nothing about being forcibly levelled up to the cap.

Great. Makes sense now that they simplified the companions. I love that I don't have to give them a full set of gear anymore too, and any one of them can heal me. edit: So that probably means if you get your BH to the KOTFE, you get to kill Gault. But only if that particular companion is one of the minority that they've decided to implement in the new content. Guessing here, but for companions that were previously of your current class I imagine the only difference is that you get a few additional lines before killing them, but everyone of every class gets to do the deed.

Yeah I actually read up on a full-spoiler summary of the new expansion since I'm unlikely to play it anytime soon. Apparently you can now kill a number of companions during the course of it, but they will remain usable outside of the story, i.e. they're dead in terms of the story but you can still summon them during normal gameplay.

Well the fact that the expansions all just funnel all classes into the same path regardless of suitability is kinda testament to that. The game remains profitable but not profitable enough to dedicate more than a skeleton crew to maintain it. No longer having to cater to eight different classes, forty different companions (they've completely written most of them out of the game), no new endgame content, it's basically just doing to minimum amount of work to still qualify as an "actively developed" game. I don't mind SWTOR, systems-wise it's pretty crappy but then so were the KoTOR games in hindsight. The storytelling is somewhat constrained by MMO conventions but I find it only rarely impacts in a genuinely stupid way (infamously so with the one traitorous companion character the game forced you to accept back into your party). The important thing is that it did one thing no other MMO did, allow you to shape your player character's personality beyond being a doormat to be bossed around by questgivers. I've been experimenting with the Secret World since it was in a recent Humble Bundle, but for a supposedly story-driven MMO, the player character may as well be a generic henchmen, they have no personality. I guess the thing is, I never really rated KoTOR all that highly. I don't like Star Wars, but I tolerate it when a decent game is built around it (which can be said of any intellectual property really). At the time I found the mechanics acceptable (I wouldn't for a new release game today) and the characters were okay, but mostly I liked the ability for my characters to express themselves in a way that mattered. Thing is, you can do that kind of thing in what basically amounts as a choose-your-own-adventure book. More than a decade later and I can say I feel the same thing of the likes of Tyranny.

The claim of 40% improvement in IPC would place it somewhere in the Ivy Bridge to Haswell range apparently (I'm just parroting other sources for this). That's where Intel was 2-4 years ago, so while not exactly super impressive, it's probably near best-case scenario for AMD to be there. Given Intel's glacial progress in recent years that's not as bad as it sounds to the layman.

Even early on they boxed themselves in for seemingly no reason: that little segment at the end of the first game for example where you decide on the composition of the next council was completely needless and illogical. The writers simply set themselves up a trap, it was a part of the game that added no value and merely served to sabotage their future continuity. However, I'm more forgiving of that type of retcon than I am of lazy ones like the Rachni queen returning in ME3 no matter your previous decision. To add insult to injury, making the correct decision in hindsight actually punishes you, because ME3 had the philosophy of "paragon = good outcome" in the most boring, predictable way possible. Releasing the Rachni queen, blowing up the Collector base, curing the Genophage, all the types of grey decision that really could have gone either way were turned into simple black-and-white Paragon is Good yay puppies outcomes in the end. In the same way, characters who used to occupy a grey middle-ground between good guy and obvious villain were turned into the latter, because ME3 doesn't do subtlety. The treatment of Udina probably being the best (worst) example of this extreme heavy-handedness.

My disc copy of ME2 turned into an Origin copy automatically, but no idea about the first game as mine is on Steam, but I don't think it or Dragon Age relied on the BSN in the first place (I think they pre-dated the BSN?). I probably could've registered my disc copy of DA1 on Origin but since they gave it away free on Origin anyway I can't test that.

I loathe ME3 and it's nothing to do with the ending because I'd given up in despair long before then. It's a little too convenient for its defenders to readily dismiss complaints with the throwaway "only the ending is bad" argument which attempts to sweep the myriad other issues with the game under the rug. The ending may have been the part that made the most waves, but no, the project had problems all the way to its inception, right back to the cynically parochialism it appealed to (which resulted in the cringeworthy "Take Back Earth" marketing).

I'm successfully multibooting Windows 10 and Windows 7 on a spare PC, but both were clean installs and I installed Win10 first.

You can never trust the Christians to perform a successful Reconquista these days, so I'm helpfully doing it for them as a West African Pagan Empire of Mali.

I don't. Indeed I've never driven a car in my life. And yet I still enjoyed ETS2 for some reason. I didn't bother compiling my own soundtrack for it though, I used the integrated internet radio functionality it has, which more games should copy.