Humanoid

CPU doesn't matter, an Atom would be perfectly good for this kind of use (but then Atoms are mainly used for 8" to 11" Windows convertible/tablets). The benefit of this route though is that they tend to just come with embedded flash storage, so they'll actually feel a fair bit zippier than the absolute bargain basement full-size laptops in this price range. And recommendations for those will be very thin on the ground, it'll all be a muchness with every vendor cramming in the cheapest parts in their cheapest, most plasticky chassis. EDIT: Personally for an extreme budget I'd buy this 11.6" Asus and a 64GB microSD card to get reasonable storage. But if movies are your thing then it's probably not the right device. The Asus T100 is an even more popular device, but is even smaller at 10.1" - a bit dearer since it's a convertible (the keyboard is detachable) but it has an IPS screen which is fantastic at this kind of price point.

Don't mind the follower minigame from what I've seen so far, though the RNG element is frustrating, especially in what type of followers you get initially. On one character I lucked out and got three epic followers and three rare ones out of eight. The same eight followers on the next character has one epic follower and two rares. Eh, I hope it evens out by the time I get 25 of them. The garrison-based profession stuff seems utterly tedious though, I get to ...walk down a mine and click some free nodes every day? Geez, why not just put all of the ore in a box, why do I even employ these people? And then build a building for the sole purpose of converting gathered items into usable form - it's all very overengineered and ends up being just clutter. I mean it's functionally something that could just be in the normal profession menu, don't need a building and two NPCs to do that. As for the core gameplay, I'm okay but not loving my current choices. I took my old warlock, which I'd never used seriously, from 85 to 93 so far, toggling between Affliction and Destruction every level or two for variety. I used my free 90 boost to make a new druid - I'd played with a druid main for most of BC and LK but elected to leave my old druid on my original server - and taken it to 92 as Feral. I'd played three years solid raiding with a Balance/Resto druid, but have never even touched Feral.

My biggest complaint about MoO2 was the repetitive and flavourless buildings. e.g. build this thing that gives +25% research, then build this other thing that gives +50% research, then build this thing that gives 5 research points per turn, etc, etc. Made colony development late-game an exercise in absolute tedium. Would have strongly preferred an obsolescence system where newer buildings would incorporate the benefits of early-game ones.

The terminology of wi-fi technologies is a minefield of jargon, but ultimately it's not so much the technology but the physical constraints of your residence that will be the limitation. For example, 5G might be used to refer to wireless AC (IEEE 802.11ac standard) hardware, or it might be Wireless N operating at 5GHz. And here's the thing: the Shield doesn't support wireless AC. Dual band is also a tricksy issue. Dual-band might mean simultaneous transmission, but it could also mean it just has the option of selecting 5GHz instead of 2.4GHz. Honestly, I would try sticking with your current router and testing whether it's even close to playable. If it's close but not quite enough, then sure, upgrade, but if it's not even remotely playable, then nothing but physical relocation of the hardware will do. The most important specification when doing stuff with wi-fi is "how many walls are in between the devices" and "what are those walls made out of".

What's the use of healing magic in a world where you regain full health by hiding in a corner for 20 seconds sucking your thumb? :D

Relented and picked up Warlords of Draenor and a month's sub to WoW, now that the technical issues look to have been sorted, and amidst all the "best new content in 6 or 8 years" hype. For context, I quit some two-and-a-half years ago, and my guild had recently moved to the Sydney-based Oceanic servers, and I had pre-emptively moved with them. Couldn't not do it, since I co-founded the bloody thing back in '07. Looking like a bit of a skeleton crew at the moment though, so raiding is probably off the menu for now - and with the highest difficult raid being restricted to 20-person groups, I'm not sure it'll ever be back. (We were a mid-range progression guild from BC to Cata, though scaled down to two raids of 10s by the time the latter arrived) Can feel the effect of the reduced latency instantly, 10ms pings instead of the ~200ms I was used to in my 7 year stint on a West Coast US server. The flipside of this is that any other MMO isn't likely to be able to match it, making WoW the only MMO in town now (as if it wasn't already). Don't really have an opinion on whether that hype is justified yet - from what little I've done so far (2 levels in out of 10) the questing is more or less what's been done with the last few expansions. It took me 15 minutes to stop paying attention to quest text and cutscenes and start accepting them blindly, the writing being as perfunctory as ever. My garrison isn't developed enough to formulate an opinion on them either. Profession changes seem nice, much less taxing on bag space, and no firm need to go through obsolete content to skill up.

I didn't even know what Mountain Dew was back when Rob Lowe ordered it in Wayne's World. It's had a marginal bump in popularity since then, but is still decidedly a less common choice (in Australia it wasn't caffeinated until 2012). Personally I like my soft drinks without caffeine and without sugar, and my chips made out of potatoes, not corn, so this is kind of the opposite of what I want.

My only real ergonomic complaint about the 360 controller is that the battery pack in the back can sometimes get in the way if I adopt a "non-standard" hand position. Not as comfortable as my 90s Sidewinder gamepad, but nothing is. For the record, I've never liked the Playstation 1/2/3 controllers which seem to be a triumph of geometry over comfort (no idea if it's changed for the PS4), though admittedly I rarely get to use them.

Ultima 7 had some gender-indiscriminate hanky panky going on in the Buccaneer's Den baths.

Logitech M905 "Anywhere Mouse" is the closest I can think of, still has scalloped sides, but not too funky shapewise. No personal experience, but I believe it's the successor to the well regarded VX Revolution I once used and was happy with.

I have three of them. :D

MSI indeed have recently launched a laptop, that in a practical sense is a non-portable device. An 18" screen and yes, that's a tenkeyless full height mechanical keyboard on it. Adds up to a 5cm thick machine weighing 4.5kg (2 inches and 10 pounds). Better bend at the knees when moving this one.

Game would be better if the player character had the option of flinging goats, instead of being a victim of said crime.

It was a notoriously unreliable drive at the time of release, done well to last this long.

Gaider wants to be Salman Rushdie?

I hope that's not code for "we're launching with no viable solo content". By that I mean an offline mode sort of implies the presence of a mission structure, a campaign of sorts. With a fully online system, you can get away with just creating the world and allowing emergent gameplay - UO was kind of like that, though the model of contemporary MMOs is mission-based. I haven't read any of the dev updates since backing the game so no idea if this has been covered.

Putting my support in context a bit: a) Quite frankly I'm no great fan of the IE games and would have preferred the project be not as clearly derived from it; b) I'm no fan of fantasy settings in general; c) I prefer to have a solo player character; and d) I haven't been following the development specifics at all since the KS campaign closed anyway. But if a follow-up game is developed using those same parameters I'd still back it without a second thought. Maybe it's irrational, I don't know, but while I might not get the game I want, I'll still get a game worth playing, I don't doubt that. And that's good enough for me.

I now have the somewhat amusing image in my mind of a smartphone with a 30" monitor, full-size mech keyboard and gaming mouse plugged in.

Sounds good to me. You make up for Mr Mag's contribution, and I'll make up for Malekith's.

I don't get it, isn't Star Wars all about swords and magic?

At the start of the weekend I was thinking that if the new WoW expansion turned out to be any good, I might pop in and give it a go for a while, hang out a bit and mess around with people I haven't played with for two-and-a-half years. But well, obviously the launch didn't go quite so well - indeed it's giving AC5 a run for its money. So scratch that idea. Instead I'm giving The Sims 4 another earnest go. I got it a couple weeks ago, but it wasn't doing anything for me. Well, it's working a bit better now. The problem was that in trying to play it like I did the previous game, I ran headfirst into TS4's biggest weakness: single-sim households. Now I've always played the Sims games in two distinct ways: a) singleton sims which I play actively, taking part in their daily management in a pseudo-RPG setup; and b) multi-sim households where I largely leave the inhabitants to their own devices: a virtual ant-farm if you will, or a (very) light Dwarf Fortress-style arrangement. The former gameplay style doesn't work at all in the new game as it stands, the new short-term mood system and the stripped-down wishes functionality that is linked to it has no synergy whatsoever with the life of a lone sim. You only have a maximum of three wishes, you can't 'promise' (i.e. save) them, and can't cancel them to generate new ones. One wish slot is tied directly to your current mood and therefore comes and goes as quickly as your mood swings - sometimes you get less than half an hour to act on them. The result of this is that very often there are literally no practical short-term goals to pursue, kind of like having an RPG with no quests. Now that I'm experimenting with the latter gameplay style, I'm beginning to see the strengths of the new system. With other Sims almost always around, wishes that would otherwise go ignored (the social ones, which is the majority of them) become relevant, and interactions between Sims are a lot more dynamic and interesting to play than any previous title. Unfortunately this is currently hampered by the limited AI functionality that makes large households unwieldy; for example, the 'claim bed' (or any other item ownership) functionality does not currently exist, so Sims will sleep in whatever bed they wish, often leaving another Sim without anywhere to sleep because of relationship statuses. That at least, unlike the single-sim issue, is a weakness that can be patched, so I look forward to usability improvements over the coming months. For the moment, I reckon to get the best out of the game, two to four bedroom households is pretty much the usable range.

Though for some of the newer ones, your battery would run flat before the intro cutscenes can even finish.

XCOM: Enemy Within just hit both Android and iOS today.

Well the other 50% was about killing Darkspawn in tunnels.