Humanoid

Japanese zoo simulates emergency management procedures by dressing employee up in an anthropomorphised snow leopard costume.

Beta 15 for XCOM Long War is now available, introducing more new features than can be listed here - so here's the changelog. As of this beta, I believe Long War is now essentially feature-complete, I don't believe there are plans for a b16, just revisions of this now current patch before a final release.

I probably bias towards single player, though that's because multiplayer has an inherent handicap in that the game genres most commonly seen in multiplayer - FPS, RTS, ARPG - are those that I don't enjoy playing regardless. On the other hand, I've been a WoW player for the majority of its lifespan, so that sort of balances out the lack of multiplayer in pretty much every other title I play. That said though, I'd played it in a fairly insular manner since a few months in, withdrew completely from the pick-up-group scene (i.e. strangers) the moment I found a guild (then subsequently co-founding my own out of the ashes of that first one).

It was good enough to play through despite my dislike of Star Wars, so that's a bit of faint praise from me. But like KP, not something I ever see myself playing again. (In itself that's not really an indictment, some of the games I'm happy to call my favourites have been play-once-then-shelve)

You're asking "why change" but that makes the fundamental assumption that a particular company was using Microsoft in the first place. If you've been running a stable *nix platform that does everything you need for decades, why change?

I see you've visited Australia last week.

The difficulty of non-modded XCOM plummets regardless of selected difficulty, and it's a deliberate design decision to do so (as per developer interview) to avoid the situation of an unwinnable game that you've invested months into. The Long War mod on the other hand is a fairly flat difficulty throughout the whole campaign - though the campaign admittedly takes about an order of magnitude more time to get through, the name of it is fairly literal. For what it's worth, "normal" difficulty Long War (the easiest option) is tuned to be approximately the same difficulty as unmodded classic, though the challenge is of a different nature. Where you go from here depends how much more time you want to put into it: normal mode teaches you a lot of bad habits (perpetuated by the "advice" the game itself gives you) which you'd want to get rid of if attempting classic - which I'd dive right into instead of finishing a normal campaign that's reached the trivial stage. Long War ....well, it's fantastic as feels like a new game, but if you don't have triple-digit hours to invest into it, you mightn't get all that far.

Doubt many people do - it's usually just something you notice when the fan speed suddenly ramp up to maximum for no discernable reason.

Haven't noticed it personally, but the only obvious thing that comes to mind might be upgrading GPU drivers.

Instead of diet and exercise, I occasionally practise diet versus exercise. The idea behind which is to have no food readily available at home, and therefore creating the situation of having to exercise (by means of a bike ride or a long walk) if I wanted to get food. I don't have a car, see. I'm only being semi-facetious with it as a serious strategy. Most weekdays I have lunch at work and don't bother keeping my fridge and pantry stocked so when I get home that's it for the day.

I dunno though, FO3 might get you a post-apocalyptic novel, but it might end up an extremely silly one if you get too much into the game.

I know they stopped supporting the CK2 GamersGate version, but it's been well over a year now that they did it, all purchasers were given a Steam key and told there would be no further updates to the DRM-free version - all future patches and DLC being Steam-exclusive. I haven't played any other Paradox games so not sure about other titles. I guess for the ones which aren't in active development, the old downloads would be unchanged so it wouldn't matter. EDIT: In hindsight I shouldn't have put "many cases" which might be misleading, it'd just be for anything they're still developing for I guess.

In many cases, they stopped supporting the DRM-free GamersGate version and converted everyone's copies to Steam. This should have been a bigger controversy that that other similarly named silly thing that's been going on.

I don't know about other countries, but in Australia political interviews can often get pretty heated like that so I don't really view it as too unusual overall. Unusual in the context of usually compliant games publications, sure, but shocking? Eh.

I don't know why people seem to think cricket is a complicated sport.

Why? Imagine the elaborate rat-race mazes you could set up for your enemies!

Useful for games you do a lot of waiting on, such as Football Manager or The Sims. MMOs by their nature too, always behave like that.

I don't think the stench of horse armour will ever go away.

Maybe get them confident enough to open voting on the next city! :D

So you're telling me that the Tex Murphy Kickstarter game was not an FPS? Goodness me.

I like adventure, exploration, text-based choices and top hats. I don't like Lovecraft, horror, or scary things in general. So tell me, would this game put me off?

Now if it was better than modded Skyrim it'd be meaningful praise.

Since your board is AM3+, you could consider spending the extra on a drop-in FX series CPU like the FX-8320E. Depends how soon you think you can hang on to that platform before relenting and going with a new Intel one though, it'd be kind of a stopgap because it's a dead end path. And yes, there was some controversy over the GTX 970's memory configuration, but it's still the best option in the price range. There may be circumstances in which the R9 290X would be preferable to it, but if buying right now the GTX 970 remains the overall better choice. That said, personally I'd go for the regular 290 and put the savings towards a better CPU, whether as a drop-in upgrade or as part of a total overhaul.

Yknow the guys at the Bethesda forums would claim Obsidian is the one with the buggy rep. I don't get it personally, cause my experience with both has been buggy, so I don't see why either community would wanna bring up bug reputation. If we were talking about remastering Alpha Protocol then I'd have posted that more or less word for word except with Obsidian listed. But when we're talking about FO3+NV, there's only one common factor. What am I going to say, "Fallout 3 and New Vegas are being remastered, and all the new bugs in Fallout 3 are Bethesda doing what they do best, and all the new bugs in New Vegas are Obsidian doing what they do best." That's somewhat awkward for a one liner, and also doesn't quite illustrate my contempt for the use of this Gamebryo engine*. * As used by these games, they're technically an innocent third party.

The 760G is no spring chicken, but it's not that old. It should be PCI-E 2.0, even if the Asus site doesn't explicitly state it. Wikipedia has PCI 2.0 listed as a feature of the chipset. And indeed the manual lists what the spec page does not. R9 290 clear winner at that price point.