Humanoid

Try the Humble key resender maybe. I forgot to up my pledge during the last stages of their Kickstarter way back when, so I only got the first game. Was disappointed at the time, but now I probably count myself lucky. It looks like they've also reversed their policy on DRM and the new game is Steam-exclusive (the Humble store provides a Steam key and nothing else), so screw that.

Is the strict alternate-turn combat silliness still in? Dealbreaker for me.

Why is it worse to ISIS as an enemy than any other real world faction? Granted it is a lot less likely than China, Russia, or even North Korea, but those all get plenty of play as the bad guys in games. On first glance I assumed it had you playing *as* ISIS and thought "oh those rascals, courting controversy again". Now that I properly ready the post, I don't get how it's controversial at all, yeah. That said, it sounds boring either way. Now maybe if it was an ISIS Afterlife Simulator it might be interesting, assuming the recruitment promises were true. (Though knowing the state of the games industry right now, each of the 72 virgins would be a separate piece of DLC)

Not really, it's good. If you are looking at some other models though, I consider JonnyGuru to be the authoritative source for PSU reviews, and though they don't have a review of the G750, they love the G650.

Gimme Shelter is the best Stones track, but I thought the album itself was the weakest in that golden run. In the same way then, the Baldur's series is Bioware's Let It Bleed, one shining light in a sea of much lesser games and expansions. Sadly, Bioware have been unable to produce a Beggar's Banquet or Sticky Fingers, let alone an Exile on Main St. P.S. Mass Effect is Goat's Head Soup, moments of brilliance surrounded by mediocrity. Dragon Age is It's Only Rock and Roll, one overrated track and boring filler all around.

And that a PCI-E SSD saturating the bandwidth would probably soon overheat and start throttling anyway. At any rate, for both graphics and storage, both aspects are something that'd only likely ever show in edge-case benchmarks and are of no concern to the typical end-user. So for storage at least, there's a reason I'd always recommend bigger over faster.

I haven't really run into any issues but I dunno if it's just luck, patches, mods or the right combo of all three Don't know if anything's changed since I played, but it worked like this (and I played quite a few months after the release, so it's not like it was an early launch problem that was quickly fixed): Seduction attempts had no consequences for failure, and no cooldown on repeat attempts. The seducer, if rejected, would simply try again. Acceptance or rejection is completely random, I think it might even be a simple coin toss. Consequentially, all seducers would eventually succeed through sheer persistence, and that "eventually" wasn't a very long time at all due to nothing preventing them making an immediate repeat attempt. Spying on a target randomly grants an event offering the chance to kidnap or assassinate the target. The chances of success for each event are flat and not affected by any attributes. Whether the AI chooses to attempt the kidnap/murder or to refuse the event in the first place is random, doesn't matter if their opinion of the target is -100 or 100, it has no weight in deciding whether to do it. Failure has no consequence other than the token amount of gold charged for it. Successful no consequence either except for the free ransom money. After being ransomed out, the target has no memory of their kidnapper and can do nothing about it - apparently it's not treason to randomly kidnap and imprison your king. Point is, both Seduction and Espionage are reasonable additions to the game in concept. Their execution is absolutely idiotic. And for the most part, I think that trend extends to Paradox as a company as a whole.

Doesn't count unless it's printed on your business card.

I liked the concept of it, but I had to turn it off after a couple of games because of the STI epidemic and and random barons imprisoning emperors for absolutely no reason. Typical Paradox really, sounds like someone came up with a neat concept ....then they gave the intern one day to implement it. I say this because those mechanics have no interaction whatsoever with the established systems the game has, they are for all intents and purposes standalone.

Sometime around 15 years ago when I started getting Youth Allowance (student welfare), I spent a significant chunk of it just buying old games on eBay for the trinkets and maps. I think I have four or five copies of Ultima 5 and two or three or some of the others, duplicates because either a copy was incomplete, or because it was sold in a lot with some other games. Sadly was never able to get the currency coins, but have the ankh (U4), virtue coin (U5), orb (U6), Fellowship coin (U7), pentagram (U8), virtue cards and another ankh (U9) and a UO pendant. I have a sealed copy of Ultima Underworld somewhere, but I don't know if it's an edition that had any trinkets (Runestones) with it.

Gaming mode is usually just about reducing the TVs internal processing effects to minimise input lag. With blacks being crushed it's more of a calibration issue, though perhaps a less common one as the usual out-of-the-box TV will have an image that's both too bright and too cool at default settings.

I was mildly curious about it. Then I saw a video showing a fight that involved three characters taking about 30-50 dagger swings collectively to down one target. Yeaaaaaaah, no.

Wow, when someone mentioned the outlines earlier, I didn't imagine it'd look that weird. Actually, the look reminds me of Crusader (and yes, consequently Ultima 8/Online) for some reason.

Well if someone tried to play every single RTS that was released in that 90s boom, they'd probably still be playing now. Can't really offer any useful feedback as it's my least favourite genre, other than perhaps making the claim that the level of complexity in the genre was saturated very early on it its lifecycle. In most other genres you can add more detail, more complexity, more interaction in general, and add to the experience that way, but requiring even more of that in a typical RTS would likely end up in an unplayable mess, I suspect.

So it turns out that XCOM 2 has a Romance system. It's only minimally implemented now, but the game tracks when a soldier heals another, carries one when injured/unconscious, or just saves them from a flanking enemy. The effect is minimal as implemented now - anecdotally they'll chat together more often in base, will be seen visiting the medbay, etc, but a lot of it was cut as per the reference in that bit of code about there being cutscenes and all that.

Depending on national laws, it's often the retailer you should be dealing with rather than the manufacturer. I've never had to deal with a PC parts manufacturer directly, ever, but Australian consumer law is like that. But it's also true that their coolers aren't as good as Sapphire or Gigabyte's, for instance. One other thing worth mentioning is that the 290/390 series downclocks very well. Set the power target to something like -40% and lose only 10-15% performance, which is a good solution for those sensitive to heat/noise issues. P.S. Also worth looking into the second-hand market perhaps.

It's not a good time to buy, but then it's not a good time to be unable to play games either, so it's a tricky decision. If you're going to a card to keep for a while, I reckon the AMD option will age better over the coming few years. The trend seems to be that their stuff is supported for longer and so gains effective performance over its nVidia counterpart over time. For example, the R9 290 used to compete against the GTX 780 and comprehensively lost to the 780Ti. Now both of those nVidia cards are decidedly slower, and the R9 has gone to competing with the GTX 970 over the past year or two, and in newer games is beating it. With the advent of Win10/DX12, I expect it to pull ahead more clearly. I note that Computersalg seem to have some stock of the R9 290X 8GB edition, a card that's not very common but for all intents and purposes is the same as the R9 390X, but 500DKK cheaper. I'm not a huge fan of XFX, but I'd take it for the price. At that price it also undercuts the slower regular 390 and GTX 970, so it's probably the best value in the "performance" card stakes. At 2000DKK I think the 380X is too close to that price to be palatable. Below that maybe this 380 non-X (avoid the 2GB models) though I don't think they're fantastic being rehashes of the disappointing R9 285, and below that I think the lowest viable gaming card is the GTX 950.

Because not everyone is black and white with regards to Steam. Someone like myself for instance will generally be more willing to take a punt on a game I'm not sure I'd like, provided it's DRM-free. But it it's a game I know I want, then I'll relent and accept whatever platform it comes on. Delaying any announcement buys them more time to try to sell the game for people in that grey area, and comes with no downside to them whatsoever since the most strident anti-Steam people are lost sales either way.

They could announce it now and lose those "potential" customers immediately, or announce it later and try to sell them on the game with marketing/previews/general hype in the intervening time. There is absolutely no incentive from a business perspective to announce that decision even if it's 100% set in stone. Sure, it could save some people some time, but that's hardly of any benefit to Paradox: if you're not going to buy their games anyway then they've got zero incentive to not waste your time.

What, you don't appreciate being able to customise the length of each segment of each finger?

I tried playing BG1 around the early 00s. Having already played the sequel and also IWD2 beforehand, I'd have to agree that it was, by that point, a bad game. Unplayable, it just hurt my brain. Now obviously that can be considered an unfair assessment due to its age even then, but the point I suppose is that it doesn't seem a game ever worth going back to. Bear in mind that at that point I quite liked the Infinity Engine and would have welcomed a new game along similar lines. Nowadays my opinion now that it and its derivatives suck, so my opinion of BG1 wouldn't have gotten any kinder in the decade or so since. I don't want to replay BG2 because I fear I might hate it. At the time I thought it was a great game, and while time has dulled that feeling somewhat, I don't want to ruin it. Nothing personal against Beamdog, but as a result, I wouldn't even consider buying SoD, even if it were free.

So we're playing the bad guys this time? Is this the new trend of 2016?

Philips are replacing that 40" 4k model with a 43" one soon, so it may be worth it to hold on for a bit as the street price should end up fairly similar. The new model is also IPS, where the old one was a VA panel (which admittedly some may prefer for the deeper blacks).

It becomes a bit harder to argue that they're "not conducting business in Australia" when they have regional pricing specific to Australia. :D

Eh, for the use case described I'd be totally fine with an Atom, an i3 preferred of course, but I don't even see a reason to aim any higher. Maybe check the Dell Outlet for the "as new" stuff (most often cancelled corporate orders), otherwise really the best machines at the price point will be superseded models (Haswells most likely) that brick and mortar retailers may be trying to clear.