Humanoid

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.

Yeah, no point upgrading from Haswell really. Fortunately LGA1150 boards are still easy enough to source. Even if you feel you want to upgrade everything later, a budget board like a B85 will at least get you up and running now. H81/B85/H97/Z97 will all work with your CPU.

Fate of Atlantis is the only good Indiana Jones. There are no good Star Wars or Tomb Raiders.

Party of one or three for me. Having just one companion feels weird, almost just like having a butler in tow instead of having two people travelling as equals (weird but honest I guess, since that's what companions in Bethesda games feel like). Two companions is like having two kids in the back of the car distracting each other so they won't bother you as much.

Just change your signature to "EDIT: Corrected typo".

It's a slower process than I'd like to see happen, but any sort of weaning away from outdated Infinity Engine traditions is always going to be something I can support. Hopefully smaller parties are just the beginning.

If you end up playing multiplayer on GOG, let us know how it works out.

Or just ....North Korea today.

But then you might notice nVidia had a disastrous driver release not two weeks ago which drove some people as far as needing to reinstall their OS and realise there are no winners in this race. It's a pretty messed up situation when games are so dependent on hardware vendors to adapt to them, rather than the other way around, and it leads to this stupid race to release "optimised" drivers for every new AAA release with manifestly inadequate testing.

Paradox takeover in progress.

To be fair, it says in the Ars article above:

Why not? It's rare enough that we get games that really let you be actually evil, but if the premise of a game is that you're serving an Evil Overlord, it should really be an Evil Overlord. I want my evil to manifest in all colours of the rainbow! I'm probably going with a Purple Evil playthrough first up, and if I'm not bored by then, I'll try a Turquoise Evil run.

It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.

I still have XCOM on the brain (plugging away at Long War still), but it seems like a fantasy XCOM 2 where you play as - or at least for - the aliens. Twist: the player character is William Thorne.

Not saying I don't want combat, indeed I think you should be able to freely initiate it anytime you like. But there should be very few scenarios where people would be willing to instigate fights against you, therefore making fighting a choice instead of a chore.

Hopefully neither. I'm hopeful since that short official blurb doesn't even mention fighting, that combat will be heavily de-emphasised. Maybe it'll be something like this: [1. Declare him guilty and summarily execute him] [2. Declare him guilty and leave the punishment up to the people] [3. Set him free] Choose (1) Sir, the people are rioting! What do we do? [1. Slaughter them all]

I'm imagining sort of a travelling Judge Judy, roaming the lands and dismissing people's complaints. Is the party-based thing confirmed from some other source? Don't see anything in the text there that would suggest it.