Humanoid

I'd be happy if the stereotype of rogues being dual-wielding light fighters died out altogether, but then the rogue archetype I play is the thief with no meaningful combat skills. I especially loathe situations where *not* dual-wielding is outright disallowed. Godammit, WoW.

Actually its not, there are many cases of women being involved on various levels historically in military conflicts. But there contribution was and is overlooked by narrators and some historians Sounds interesting, care to provide links? Because for the most part I'm certain that in trained forces women were kept out, irregular armies and special corps might be a different story. They're too busy inventing COBOL to fight, obviously.

It's not an RPG if a game has a combat system that isn't purely auto-resolve. You character should be able to handle the entirety of combat autonomously because it's the character's tactical prowess that should determine the outcome, not any interference by the player. A true RPG has only two buttons to handle a combat encounter: fight or flee. You then get a pop-up window showing the outcome of the fight. (Actually, my non-facetious answer is that a true RPG implementation of a CRPG would require the development of a natural language parser with an infinite decision space)

My one-month renewal to WoW expired yesterday, and as the single-player content is uncompelling as ever, I'll leave it alone for now, will try another month next year once people are back from holidays to check out what's happened in the raiding scene over the last couple years. With less than a week before I leave for holidays myself, I'm going to avoid any big commitments like Wasteland 2 or XCOM Long War which I've been wanting to (re)start for a while, and just mess around with The Sims 4. Holiday period itself will likely be a whole lot of co-op local multiplayer gaming, so not doing any of that yet either. Incidentally, new Sims 4 patch just released earlier today, couple new careers which were inexplicably mission obvious inclusions - being Business and Athletics - plus some other minor things. At this rate it'll be worthy of being the new title that it is in 6-12 months. (There's also a free Holiday Celebration Pack DLC but it's just fluff)

No live link because of forum rules and all that, this is as SFW as Oglaf gets.

Wasteland 2 was at my doorstep when I got home just now, so that's my official answer as of now. The second last physical game I got ...is also Wasteland 2 because I'm in the tier that gives me both the CE and the regular boxed copies. (Third last would be Super Smash Bros for Wii U) For a while there I was worried it'd arrive while I was away for three weeks over the holidays, so I'm pretty happy to see it arrive this week. For what it's worth, I got the shipping notification email on the 4th, so that's a pretty standard delivery turnaround to Australia.

Could go ahead and grab a motherboard with a legacy PCI slot then so you can reuse your sound card. They're not uncommon, I know the mainstream Asus boards have them for example. For PSUs the definitive resource remains (the stupidly named) RealHardTechX, which links to professional reviews for just about every PSU out there, but more critically lists the technical details of OEMs that the vendors aren't usually keen to publicise. For example, the EVGA G2 that you listed can be easily looked up to in actuality be manufactured by Super Flower (link). Not a bad thing as such, they make good PSUs for many vendors.

For those with limited download quotas, the install discs can save a few gigabytes of downloading, so that's one thing I guess. Can be the difference between downloading 5-10GB for the whole game, versus ~1GB for the launch-day update to the disc files.

Didn't know anything about the Audigy Rx, did a bit of poking around and it looks like%2 **Oh wow, never knew a post to go through partially if my internet dies while posting it** Didn't know anything about the Audigy Rx, did a bit of poking around and it looks like it's just that, an Audigy (2), barely changed from over a decade ago. Sounds like the 'current' Creative line is the Z series which has good reviews, though again I have to admit knowing precious little about it. If you're going stereo only, the Asus Essence STX would be the better choice though - I do like Asus' sound card range better than Creative's these days, though driver updates can be slow. Then again, Creative has been famous for iffy drive updates for two decades now. I'd note that it appears that the MSI Gaming series boards' main selling point seems to be its audio processing, so if you're set on a standalone sound card (and it's still strictly superior to do so), you might find a cheaper board would have no meaningful downside. Miscellaneous notes: - Personally not convinced on these pre-packaged liquid cooling solutions, as in terms of performance-to-noise ratio, they're still handily outdone by simple tower coolers. Can perhaps see a point if you plan to absolutely flog the CPU with a big overclock/overvolt, but for milder uses I don't see an advantage. - 1866/2133MHz RAM, while a very marginal performance improvement, doesn't cost meaningfully more either, so unless you're going with low-voltage DDR3L/DDR3U (1.35V/1.25V), there's probably no reason not to bump it up. - No model number on the PSU so no real comment on that.

Yeah, for a system of that calibre, SSD all the way. You may be able to get some of the savings back by going for a WD Red hard drive instead since with the SSD present you won't really ever need the Black's performance advantage. Also worth noting that the Define R5 is now out, incremental improvements in every area, but particularly so with the included case fans.

EA or Ubisoft don't feel the need to compel their users to check in every 6-8 hours to get some token or whatever to get some virtual trinket.

Well the CD spin-up, post 90s anyway, was generally only the copy protection doing its disc check anyway. And that could be, *ahem*, creatively avoided. The last widespread use of from-the-disc asset use was probably the red book audio track for the game music, which died off in preference to low-bitrate MP3s. Whether I go for a physical copy these days depends on my estimation of the game itself. If it's a throwaway title then I don't mind going digital. If it's a game I expect to love, I'll want a physical copy as a historical record of "hey look at these awesome titles I've bought over the years".

Play the first two and then don't play the third at all. In all seriousness, yes, go through in order because the third will likely kill your desire to ever go back if you start with it.

Necromancy? It's not even CPR. It's more like a gentle tap on the shoulder to someone who's nodding off.

Maybe it's literal, an 19th century political RPG revolving around van Buren himself. Because that's the only reasonable use of acquiring the trademark that I can see.

Fallout and BG2 were certainly highpoints in the genre, but they were more flash in the pan products of serendipity rather than the fruit of any perceived "golden era". They were the exceptions, not the norm. It seems there's a lot of dodgy extrapolation their virtues are extended to other RPGs of that era, which frankly were almost all rather terrible. Your Wizardries, your Might and Magics, your Gold Box games, all had writing even more perfunctory than Skyrim. They had mechanics that may have been interesting and addictive to some, but that's in no way different to the CRPGs of today. CRPGs both then and now consist of a few islands of greatness in a sea of uninspired mediocrity.

Yeah, the nice thing about EU appliances is that I can use a $5 travel adapter just to change the plug shape. For US appliances I need to use an expensive and bulky stepdown transformer (something like this[/url) and even then that's an imperfect solution as it doesn't change the frequency, the output is 120V @ 50Hz which not all appliances work well with. Fortunately with the advent of HD content, the PAL/SECAM vs NTSC thing isn't such a big deal anymore. Then again, most TVs in PAL regions could do NTSC, but the reverse was usually not true.

I bought my current card from Amazon too, though it was a far more modest R7950. The free shipping thing is just a promotion they've been doing for the last few weeks, don't think it's meant to be a long term thing. I've also bought a complete road bike from the UK and got it under the tax threshold, we do have it pretty good with imports. Indeed usually the biggest obstacle to American imports is the silly 110V standard they have there.

It's too hot to do anything for Christmas in the southern hemisphere. Stay cooped up indoors with the air conditioner on.

More end game bosses need to be like Prince LaCroix.

The price difference isn't all that huge to Australia, but still, bless Amazon free shipping (with Amex).

Is it better to try and fail, or to not try at all? Bioware vs Bethesda writing compares thusly.

You're meant to build a labyrinth to house the cheese.

I'm a bit torn on the merits of it. It's great to have another character with a different playstyle to use so I like it in that regard. In a narrative sense though, I dislike the concept of jumping between characters (specifically jumping between them on a linear timescale) because it undermines player agency somewhat when you drop control of a character and they become writer-controlled NPCs for whatever length of time. Y'know, the feeling of after having played Geralt for a while, then switching to Ciri or whoever, talking to Geralt from that alternate perspective and having him respond like an NPC, overall I think there's no non-awkward way of framing such a thing. However if the sequences were done in parallel time, I think they could get away with it - i.e. you play out a gameplay sequence with Geralt then wind back time a little and have a "meanwhile..." segment. For what it's worth it's the same reason I don't support the 'compromise' decision in Kingdom Come where you get to temporarily play a female side-character who interacts with the 'main' player character. Not because it's necessarily a token gesture as such, but because it undermines playing the main character quite a bit when you know who the other character is inside-out when interacting with them. You'd know much of their goals, their history, their personality already, instead of having to discover them through interaction. Ideally there'd be two full-blown, full-time player characters, and you'd have the ability to play the game from beginning to end with each one, completely independent of the other. If they managed to write two entirely different Chapter Twos in the previous game, why not go the whole hog and have two completely separate streams? :D

The one thing that single-handedly ruined SR4 for me was the superpowers, and I was mildly hopeful they'd not reappear in this semi-sequel. Alas, Wikipedia disagrees.