Humanoid

Yeah, few months ago I played a bit on my laptop, with the mobile Haswell IGP. Not only did it experience FPS drops at minimum settings, it also had a tendency to crash to desktop in open areas (but not, for instance, at the fleet).

Clearly he's just impersonating an Oblivion NPC.

The most important strategy to learn in XCOM is the overwatch crawl. It's a bit boring, unfortunately, but is pretty much the key to success at higher difficulties. In essence, the idea is that only the first soldier to move every turn is allowed to reveal any fog-of-war, and may only do so on their blue move. If there's no contact, then move up the rest of your soldiers in a conga line, right behind the first soldier, no cover required, and put everyone on overwatch. If there is contact, then your point man can use their orange move to find good cover *behind* where they are, ideally breaking line-of-sight altogether. The rest of the squad can then move up and attack (if the point-man is exposed to fire) or stay back and lay an overwatch trap. Breaking LoS completely is usually a good idea in general because the AI has a tendency to become a drooling imbecile anytime none of their active units can see any of their units, and they will often take up suicidal positions while they search for you. Another thing that you can use in your favour is the fact that the enemy count is soft-capped in both Easy and Normal difficulties. No matter how many aliens are active, only five of them will engage you at any given time, the extras will just run away out of sight until some of the ones engaging you die. It's also worth looking up the rest of the specifics of each difficulty level here, particularly the section showing how many aliens to expect on each given map type. For Exalt missions, ideally you will have an Assault as the operative. They're so much better at the job than everyone else that they should have the job exclusively. Run and Gun works for activating the relays, so you can often chain together multiple turns where Exalt cannot fire at you, excluding explosives. Exalt Heavies have the rocket launchers and Exalt Operatives have grenades so prioritise killing them in that order. For the Extraction missions, the enemy reinforcements are triggered when you stand next to a relay with your operative. Use this to your advantage by *not* activating the relay immediately: assuming you're not in immediate danger of being shot, just stand there and overwatch, then activate the relay after the reinforcements arrive. For Data Recovery missions, you have a lot more relays and often the most effective strategy is to stand a couple of Close Combat Specialist assaults in the capture zone and watch as the enemy idiotically bum-rushes you, because the AI has a fetish for occupying that zone if none of their units are in it, and will prioritise doing so above all else.

I think Skyrim worked for me because all it did was dump the player character into the world, no strings attached: no silly backstory, no contrived motive, no one-note voice acting. You were free to play whatever character you liked. Fallout 4 completely failed because it effectively had a fixed protagonist. i couldn't shake the feeling the whole time I was playing it (for a total of 10-15 hours) that I was playing Bethesda's character, not mine. Fallout 4 might have been a good game if it abandoned all that pretense, and had simply gone "you're a visitor to Boston, have at it".

I suspect your problem is something else entirely. Those articles refer to a release from back in November where the fan speed was incorrectly capped, and yes, that would cause a thermal shutdown under load. This would not present a problem at idle, where the fan speeds would dip far below the incorrect cap (and indeed shut off entirely for some models) and the GPU would be generating very little heat by running at about 10-20W instead of 200-250W. Furthermore, there have been several driver releases since that problematic one, and I'm not aware of any systematic issues with them outside of rendering bugs in specific games. What you are describing is something completely different and it'd probably worthwhile looking for more information because it may be symptomatic of a different underlying problem, like a system-specific incompatibility, or worse, signs of hardware failure.

It does have a neat new feature:

BG2 to me is more important for what it did to my gaming habits rather than what it was as a game in itself. It might sound like I'm damning it with faint praise, but it's not my intention. It got me out of my comfort zone, where without it my RPG experience may have started and ended with Ultima. Even then they almost screwed it up, the skull on the box of the BG games kinda put me off, because I mean, what does that tell the prospective buyer? Scary undead monsters ahead? Yes, I was a big wuss back then, and still am today, but it could have been the difference between my being here today and being someone probably stuck playing strategy games forever. So yes, while there are better games around, and though I have no interest in ever replaying it, BG2 is important to me because without it, I would likely never have played, or even contemplated playing those better games.

I used a neat little random word generator and it gave me the words pale, crop, impact. I would stylise this as Pale Crop: Impact. It's a guaranteed megahit. EDIT: Feel free to generate your own commercial goldmine with it. I tried again and got Passion: Crew Mistake. I probably can't sell that one, as it'd essentially be a Mass Effect knock-off.

Sidequests are intentionally made worth much less XP than main quests, combined with them being vastly below your level, they're really only there to appreciate as little self-contained vignettes about Witcher life.

Maybe GOG shot themselves in the foot here by announcing GOG Connect before the sale. A quick look and most titles I'd buy are just ones I already own in some form and want a GOG copy of.

Sadly it looks like in the year since I've played, Geralt still hasn't learned how to walk down stairs. And, as far as I can tell, there's still no walk toggle for the gamepad either. It's unfortunate that in a game where I want to take things slowly and RP walk everywhere, actually attempting to do so is awkward and unwieldy. Anyway, up to the bit where I have to fight the title villains, so I should be moving on to the actual new content soon-ish.

One wonders how much more popular the Legion route would have been in New Vegas if they were still warmongering jerks, but equal-opportunity warmongering jerks. I don't know anyone personally who went with a Kaizar playthrough, and I imagine the whole premise of their societal structure put people off from even considering it at all. Just an example of how this kind of thing, even with best intentions, can have a detrimental effect on gameplay - dozens of hours of content that likely will go unseen by the majority of the playerbase.

No shortage of wide-eyed kids thinking "videogames are cool, so making videogames must be cool too" before the industry chews them up and spits them out a scant few years later.

A 70s character in 80s clothing rendered with 90s graphics in a 2010's game then.

Yeah, I've been running my 290X with an effective underclock (or more accurately, at -40% power limit) almost since I bought it. Had to remove the underclock to get a good framerate at my preferred detail level. I might try to optimise a bit more (say, best playable settings at -20%) if I have the time, but time spent messing around with that is less time playing the game. I regret not buying a good third-party cooler now, but it's probably too late in this generation to get one. Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with hardware reviewers' hearing, because their definition of "quiet" is a long, long way away from mine.

New displays arrived and set up. The thinner bezels compared to the gigantic ones on the old model are nice to have, and the anti-glare coating is much more sensible this time. Also pleased to report it happily does 1440p/60Hz through HDMI, a combination I could never get to work previously as all the elements in the display chain - graphics card, cable, monitor - need to support it. I didn't want to use the DisplayPort despite the monitor supporting daisy-chaining, as I'm concerned about potential issues with Freesync and the bandwidth required to push 144Hz. As expected, the new display doesn't quite match up cleanly with my surviving U2711 even after calibration, but fair enough because despite the names, they're fundamentally different displays. The new one is a more consumer-oriented model, whereas the proper successor to the U2711 is the UP2716D, being the model aimed at graphics professionals. I'm experimenting with the P2414H in portrait mode to the left of the two 27" screens. I'm not best pleased with the results right now, mainly because the much larger pixels it has (1080p at 24" vs 1440p at 27") makes it awkward to use as part of the extended desktop, and because the different viewing angle to the centre of the screen (which lines up with the top third of the landscape displays) means it looks a bit off in terms of colour and brightness. No big deal though as it's a temporary arrangement, the question to come afterwards will be whether I can reconfigure my desk to fit triple 27" screens in landscape orientation.

Had no particular reason to connect them, but did it anyway and it went smoothly. Nine titles in the list, but six of them I already owned on GOG anyway, so the three remaining were Trine, Shadowrun Returns and Surgeon Simulator 2013. Incidentally there doesn't seem to be a way to upgrade the GOG copy of the latter game into the Anniversary Edition, despite both editions existing on GOG. Presumably I'd have to spend the 59c to upgrade my Steam version then re-transfer, which seems a little silly.

Downloaded and installed Blood and Wine, dug up my old save game from the system drive of my previous PC, fired up the game and ....dammit, I'm only level 23. It's been pretty much a full year since I've played so I can't even tell what functionality is new, changed, or has always been there. Ended up just spending an hour or so just playing the tutorial from scratch to regain my bearings. Presumably next time I play I'll resume the old save. Probably. Maybe. I don't know.

The absence of the 480X from the announcement has people wondering whether Apple snaffled them all up for the iMac refresh. Shame, would have been interesting to see how close Polaris could get to the 1070 if they released a fully-enabled version at say, $300, but we might be waiting a little longer for it.

I forget whether I'd mentioned that one of my Dell U2711 displays is dying. I had held out on replacing it for a while since the flaw is only really obvious on relatively bright images. A month or two ago I got an Asus MG279Q to replace it, except that I had to get my sister who lives interstate to buy it from a bricks and mortar shop so I don't actually have it yet. Today I saw a nice deal on the recently superseded U2715H for $560AUD (~$405USD) delivered, so I ordered one (and was sorely tempted to order two), so once everything arrives I'll be running triple 27" displays. The Asus will have to be the centre screen because of the Freesync functionality, even if it probably has marginally inferior display quality. Trying to match up three completely different panels will be tricky, so we'll see how it goes. Just for the hell of it I also added a P2414H to the order, which has an identical panel to the U2414H, but being the "professional" series it has DVI instead of HDMI. I'll probably use it as backup, unless I have issues matching my surviving U2711, which is a wide-gamut display, to the standard sRGB gamut of my two replacements. Unfortunately one big issue created by multi-display setups is speaker placement. Even with my two current displays, my speakers end up being placed too far apart, almost to either side of me, which wrecks any sort of positional sense for games that require it. With three, I will probably have to build a couple of stands to raise the speakers above the monitors, which is risky in itself because they're pretty hefty at 5.3kg each, and I'll have to tilt them down towards me somewhat. Good ol' Blu-tack will help secure them to the stands somewhat, but it's still far from an ideal solution and is probably flirting with disaster. Clearly someone needs to come up with acoustically transparent OLED panels, fast.

I'm watching Galaxy slowly download Blood and Wine, does that count as playing it? (Going to have to be an overnight job, so it'll be almost 20 hours again before I can play it )

Democracy 3, because after all, there's an election campaign already in full swing here. It's okay in what it tries to do, but is fairly self-limiting by essentially boiling down politics to starting you at below 5% approval as a newly elected government (which makes no sense at all), then seeing if you can get to 50%+ approval over the course of your first term to be able to stay in power. It's trivial to win any subsequent elections (if you set the term limit to anything more than two), so the game essentially ends right there whether you win or lose, so it's a very short game indeed. Fire Emblem Fates, only up to chapter 4 which is still in the tutorial part of the game. Too early to make any sort of definitive calls, but on current evidence, it's a regression from the previous game. Character creation is somehow more confusing while having fewer options, and the art direction and story are as subtle as a brick through the window. Your "home" looks like frikkin' Mordor and you're just meant to accept this as normal everyday life...

And then there's Daikatana.

GTX 1070 reviews are out, and consensus seems to be that at stock vs stock, it is indeed a few percent faster than the Titan X/980Ti as promised. However it has far less overclocking headroom, so even with very mild overclocking, it quickly falls behind, and at maximum typical clocks for both, the old cards end up in the region of 10-20% faster. It's not surprising of course, that a cut-down small chip needs pushed to its limits to match a big chip. But with 980Ti prices now as low or lower than the 1070 FE, it's far from clear cut on which is the better buy. Of course, that will change once the custom 1070s come out (assuming they do around the $380 RRP) and also once the stock of the older cards runs dry, but I suppose whether you buy a custom 1070 or a discounted 980Ti, the shake-up is that we should have 980Ti performance for ~$400 shortly. There's still nearly a month before the NDA on Polaris lifts, and by that point we surely will have at least a little news on the GP106 (i.e. GTX 1060/1050), so it'll be that long at least before we get a clear picture on the overall state of the market.

Worse, the stock FE 1080 actually throttles at out of the box settings. After about 20 minutes under load, it hits the thermal limit and drops clocks dramatically. Forget the 2000MHz+ clocks they were demoing at the presentation, it struggles to maintain any sort of boost clock at all. This behaviour would likely escape notice under testing conditions because few reviewers would run their benchmarks for that length of time, and often they run the cards on an open bench rather than in a case. When those factors are accounted for, the 1080's advantage over the 980Ti quickly diminishes, and possibly even disappears completely. With this FE cooler, nV have done an AMD, but arguably even worse. The R9 290 reference cooler was a shocker, but it was cooling a 250W+ card. This 1080 FE cooler is struggling to cool a sub-200W card. $100 extra for a "premium" cooler that can't even handle factory settings? This thing is a shocker. FE? Fool's Edition. TL;DR: The 1080 may be a decent chip, but the FE is anything but a good card. After 20 minutes the fan is at full tilt just maintaining that 82C threshold at diminished clock speeds. And in the next graph we see why: It's about to fall off a cliff... And it actually does tip off the edge for quite a number of games.