Humanoid

Depends on the individual game. Some still can't use more than two cores, but the proportion of those which can is increasing so anyone planning to keep their machine for 5+ years should be looking at a quad-core.

The DVDs by themselves are not relevant, as the ISOs are freely downloadable (or at least they were, MS make you jump through some hoops now to get them). The important thing is whether they came with separate licence keys. It seems unlikely to me, as there's no reason for anyone to give them to you. More likely what happened is that Win8 Pro came with downgrade rights, because a lot of businesses still required Win7. Therefore MS made it possible to install Win7 with the Win8 Pro key.

I haven't done much research lately, really this is from when I was building a PC for my sister at the start of the year. Ended up going for a G550M. I usually use JonnyGuru for PSU reviews but they haven't reviewed the CoolerMaster or the directly competing Corsair CX450M, however both are well-regarded on their forums. There's a Seasonic G450 for 20EUR more if going for the premium option, but at the basic level I can't really go past the above two options. Doing a search now and the CM is quieter while the Corsair might have theoretically better caps. I'm of the opinion that it'd take some extremely bad luck to have either fail, whereas quietness is something that affects the day-to-day user experience, so I'd plump for the CM. P.S. The SII and MII from Seasonic are from last decade and while they're still serviceable, it's probably time to put those designs out to pasture. EDIT: Both the CM and the Corsair are made by Channelwell, so it's a bit of a muchness anyway, there is no wrong decision between the two.

You want this thing to last, you get a proper quad-core. The age of the dual-core gaming machine is over. Other than that, hard to say without knowing where you're buying from. I priced a 1500EUR machine for fellow Finn Lord Socks a few pages ago using German stores, so if that's an option for you, here's a sample build (no idea what delivery will be). In terms of the decision-making process, I've changed to the cheapest Skylake quad-core, picked an appropriate motherboard (I think H110 is too bare-bones, and also like having 4 RAM slots for future upgrades), added an SSD, and gone to 16GB RAM. The rest is simply picking the cheapest option offered. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Core i5-6400 2.7GHz Quad-Core Processor (€179.92 @ Mindfactory) Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-B150M-DS3H Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (€73.10 @ Amazon Deutschland) Memory: Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory (€57.37 @ Amazon Deutschland) Storage: Sandisk X400 256GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive (€79.99 @ Amazon Deutschland) Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€52.77 @ Amazon Deutschland) Video Card: Sapphire Radeon RX 470 4GB Video Card (€215.84 @ Mindfactory) Case: Fractal Design Core 1300 MicroATX Mini Tower Case (€48.49 @ Amazon Deutschland) Power Supply: Cooler Master GM 450W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply (€59.89 @ Amazon Deutschland) Optical Drive: LG GH24NSC0 DVD/CD Writer (€14.59 @ Amazon Deutschland) Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit (€101.52 @ Mindfactory) Total: €883.48 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-08-24 13:59 CEST+0200 Some notes: - It may be possible to get a cheaper Haswell platform, if you choose to go that way you'd go something like i5-4460 + B85 board + DDR3. On the other hand upgrading to a 6500 is a decent idea too because it's got a sizable clock speed advantage. - The B150 chipset is theoretically aimed at business workstations. In reality though, the only advantage the costlier H170 gives you is more PCI-E lanes, which is only relevant for Crossfire. - Some games like fast RAM, but unfortunately Intel has locked all platforms except Z170 to the basic 2133MHz stuff. You can still get slightly faster RAM by looking for lower latency (CL13 instead of the CL15 on the cheapest stuff) if desired. - You can save a few bucks on a non-M.2 SSD, but the X400 is one of the better TLC SSDs, and M.2 is neat (it's a thumb-sized SSD that plugs straight into the motherboard, instead of having to mess with mounting a 2.5" drive and messing with SATA cables). - Only really picked the CoolerMaster G450M over other options because it's the most affordable PSU that has modular cables while still being a good PSU in general. Can you tell I hate messing with cable routing? - You could try your luck for the OS on the microsoftsoftwareswap subreddit. Legally it's a grey place, I suspect most of the keys being sold are TechNet keys which are generated by subscribers. The generation itself is legitimate, but they're meant to be for personal use of whoever holds the subscription, not for reselling. But for $20 a copy, I know plenty of people are happy to take the plunge, and if MS deactivates the key a couple of years down the track, then eh, spend another $20 and you're still ahead.

Well yeah, four party members with 120% XP each is fine. But the gameplay of a party of four would be far closer to that of playing a full party of six than a party of two, or one. The XP bonus probably needs to be exponential to the number of missing party members, rather than the linear bonus being applied now.

10% more XP for each "missing" party member I believe. So instead of 6 people getting 1000XP each, you have one person getting 1500XP. Appreciate the thought, but under my brief experience with trying it, it was decidedly Not Viable.

XCOM 2 has released all the DLC that is part of their "season pass", but that's not really saying much, it's not a lot of content. I mean I own it, but can't be bothered to start a new game just to play it because the fundamental gameplay experience would be unchanged. Across the 3 DLCs you get a grand total of two new scripted missions. *Two*. The rest of the content consists of the addition of mechs, the introduction of some special boss aliens, the obligatory new guns and stuff, and a bunch of purely cosmetic options for soldier customisation. Besides that, there's been no announcement as of yet for any further content, whether DLC or fully-fledged expansion, though you'd imagine the latter is quite likely to happen at some point.

Just looked it up briefly and it looks no different to HR? A game which also featured a revolver that could shoot high-explosive bullets, and both laser and plasma rifles.

Still, at least they won't have to imagine what a devastated New Orleans would look like. It would be genuinely interesting in a couple of ways. Fallout up to this point has been mostly dry wasteland, so it's an opportunity to mix it up a bit and have a setting where water is the predominate feature. The other would be the music. Actually on second thought, scrap Fallout and make a game inspired by Down by Law.

And this is why I embrace the lack of friendly fire. I've no interest in managing party members at all, and so by extension I don't want to care about where they are. Given the option I'd prefer the game be additionally balanced for genuine solo play, but based on my experience with PoE that seems to fall in the too-hard basket. I'm only in it for the eeeeeevil dialogue choices, the rest of the game is incidental. Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike applying proper tactics in videogames, which should be obvious enough given my love of XCOM. But I prefer my RPGs and my tactical squad games to be completely separate, I haven't tended to enjoy the hybrid approach at all.

It's a bit of a false economy, outside of a few brief periods between GPU generations, mid-range multi-GPU setups have almost never been worthwhile. For now it's best to just consider it an option for the high-end, in order to get performance higher than is possible with any single product. Something to keep in mind too is that the GTX 1060 doesn't even support SLI, to give an idea of how important nVidia considers it. As for individual games, support does come, but unless it's a sponsored game, it may take some time after release for it to be available, and some more time yet for it to be mature. That said, with DirectX 12, there is the possibility of pairing up GPUs without either SLI or Crossfire being employed, using something Microsoft call "Explicit Multiadapter". It's something that still needs to be implemented on a per-game basis, but it removes the hardware requirement from the equation. This is somewhat older data, but check out this preview from last year, where the fastest solution wasn't dual nVidia cards, nor dual AMD cards, it was achieved by running one of each in the same machine.

Talking about laptops with GTX 960M/1060M graphics, not standalone cards.

Witcher 3 GOTY comes out on the 30th anyway.

That doesn't look like a Pachinko machine to me.

The most important by far is No More Rolling Down Stairs. The only other mod I ran was Disable Storybook Videos. If I played again I'd probably try Auto Apply Oils as in my first playthrough I reckon I could count the number of times I used consumables (other than health potions) with my fingers. Another one that unfortunately came too late to be of use to me is toggle walking speed while playing on the gamepad. By default the game has a walk toggle mapped to the keyboard, but as soon as you start using a gamepad the setting is ignored and you have to tediously tilt the left stick halfway in order to walk. As someone who likes to walk everywhere for immersion reasons, this was incredibly frustrating. As I said though, I haven't tested this mod, though according to the comments there it seems to work well enough.

I have three problems with dialogue wheel. 1, Needless obfuscation: written "yes", says "sure". 2, When the short written sentence doesn't match what my character says and/or does. 3, When the dialogue wheel is used to hide my lack of choice. Two or more written choices, but they all lead to my character saying/doing the same thing. #2 and #3 really are the worst. It's crazy how often it seems to be done, though. It's particularly infuriating because it's a solved problem. Human Revolution (and presumably Mankind Divided will do a similar thing) has the standard console-adapted dialogue "diamond", but shows you extended text when you highlight any of the options. Even without being the full text, one complete, grammatically correct sentence is often all that's needed to establish the correct meaning. There is no valid reason to not employ this approach. There are invalid reasons of course, not least amongst them the aforementioned intentional deception in order to hide the absence of meaningful choices. In other cases I suspect the dialogue hasn't actually been written yet and the scripters are just working off a flowchart (and couldn't be bothered to backfill the UI).

I thought it was a terrible fight too, not because it was difficult (admittedly I'm a normal difficulty scrub) but because it was boring. Dodge for seemingly forever until he's vulnerable, hit him once, repeat ad infinitum. It's like a Bowser fight, except that in Mario games you only have to do the cycle three times. Here it just goes on and on and on.

Don't own the game, but keep hearing there's just the one definitive fix for performance issues which fixes it for the majority of people, which is here.

I think I got stuck within the first hour and not wanting to look up a walkthrough, ended up never coming back to it.

Well I probably wouldn't play PS:T if all the text was in Comic Sans.

You should get in touch with Prosper. Development dream team right there. :D

It depends on the colour of the dragon right? So the question is, is he a green dragon and therefore evil, or a good copper dragon who's simply developed a patina like the Statue of Liberty?

I prefer the theory that skipping Windows 9 was because of all the potential issues with applications looking for the "Windows 9*" string when trying to figure out what OS they're running on. My reasons for going with Win10 are more pragmatic. DX12 isn't just coming, it's already here, and has tangible advantages over older APIs. I don't discount any of the concerns about what Win10 does with regard to privacy and control of you own machine, but apart from doing my best to mitigate its problems, I can't pretend that my machine isn't made for gaming first and foremost. It's the same rationale for something like Steam for example. Yeah, some people avoid it outright, but even the majority of people who dislike it choose to tolerate it because it's the price of playing the games you want to play. As for the day to day user experience, the differences are so small as to not be a deciding factor at all. It doesn't change how I do things, and that's how it should be.

Completed my ghetto speaker stands. To be honest, it's kinda scary, as if one day they'll collapse and crush me, but at least my positional audio will no longer be stupidly out of whack. Fortunately I remembered my high school maths and the stands are reasonably balanced, and the speakers are secured with Blu-tack for that extra peace of mind.

If your "upgrade" last year was for the full release version of Win10, and the installation was properly activated, then your system is already registered with Microsoft as being licenced for Windows 10. This means you are free to upgrade or clean install Win10 whenever you like on your current machine, the deadline is irrelevant. If you're unsure whether you did it properly last time around, it may be a good idea to go ahead and upgrade now, ensure Win10 is activated, then rollback to Win7 if desired. This applies to anyone still on the fence about it. It's a bit of a hassle sure, but you'll need to do it eventually, even if it's a few years down the track, the two main reasons being discontinuation of support, and DirectX 12. EDIT: To be clear, when you do the upgrade, Microsoft will store the ID of your motherboard on their database. You will therefore be able to freely install Win10 from now until forever on that particular motherboard. The licence is not transferrable, so the only reason to not at least upgrade temporarily is that if you're 100% sure you will no longer be using that particular motherboard by the time Win10 becomes effectively mandatory. (Win7 support is due to cease in 2020)