Humanoid

I didn't like DA:O so the more I hear feedback about how DA:I departs from it, the more I'm interested. Still a long way off the point where I'd take the plunge though, at the very least I want to hear the opinions of people I respect after they finish the whole thing. And as I said before, I'm going full-on open spoilers mode, so feed me your best spoilers about key decision points (and key decision points where the game doesn't allow you to make any decisions).

Can't check now because of maintenance obviously, but I either had ridiculously good luck on followers with my "alt" or somewhat bad luck on my "main". (I use quotation marks because both are essentially throwaway characters I'm levelling on a somewhat arbitrary basis) Out of the first nine available in the starting zone, alt got three epics, three rare. Main had one epic, two rare I think. Alt is parked at 92 so no more followers anytime soon, main has picked up just one more epic follower in the following two zones and no more rares.

Might be your hardware throttling due to heat. Yeah. I think I've finally hit the wall, I had trouble with AC: Black Flag too. Time to either enjoy some older games or man up and buy a new system. Or I could buy it for the PS4. Which I own. But that sounds like defeat talking. And I don't want to pay twice for it. Well, yes and no in that it sounds like your "normal" system performance is fine, so it might be just an issue of sorting out the cooling parts, cleaning out dust, applying new thermal paste, etc.

Might be your hardware throttling due to heat.

I dunno, the first one reminds me of the prince from Bloodlines.

I use a similar device (Samsung 700T) which had 64GB internal and a microSD slot. I put in a spare I had on the day I bought it and haven't ever removed it, so it's essentially permanent storage (unless you need the card slot for something else). It does require some judgement about what to put on it, of course, applications go on the internal storage, media on the card. Total data I've accumulated over the year and a half that I've owned it is still only about 40GB including Windows, so as a machine solely used for Internet stuff I haven't run into any practical limitations. And yeah, numpads are an endangered species these days, even most 15" laptops seem to lack them, let alone anything smaller. Heck, tenkeyless keyboards are becoming increasingly popular even on desktops. EDIT: Indeed no ethernet ports, such is the case with any device emphasising portability these days, it physically doesn't fit on the thin designs of today. But yeah, USB adapters are an option, and at negligible cost.

Nah, these are full version Windows 8.1 tablets, they're full function PCs, just in a tablet chassis. The cloud storage is optional, though given <100GB storage onboard even with the microSD card, it might be useful. You might be thinking of the discontinued Microsoft Surface convertibles that ran Windows RT, which made them incompatible with regular Windows applications. Those would indeed be a bad idea.

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.