Humanoid

To be fair, with nVidia's current tech advantage all it likely means is that Mantle levels the playing field performance-wise for Frostbite engine games, rather than giving AMD an advantage.

I think you can ignore everything in those screenshots except the squirrel and have a thorough understanding of why Keyrock is unreservedly positive about the game.

This is Bethesda we're talking about, they could take notes from literally anyone and it'd be an improvement.

Played a handful of missions of F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0, but ultimately my enjoyment is being hampered by the lack of responsiveness in the controls, which makes precision stuff like landing and manual bombing much more of a chore than it needs to be (though the latter issue can be avoided by taking missiles instead of bombs). God, I wish there was a modern stealth 'fighter' game - and I don't mean F-22 sims because they miss the point about what the old game is about - a Thief-like experience where you avoid contact at all costs. Anyway, relented and bought myself The Sims 4. I know, I know. But if I don't like it, I can just pass the game (i.e. the whole Origin account) to my sister who didn't like Sims 3's scope and might prefer the back-to-basics style of the new game.

Contractual obligation to take even longer than Prey 1 to develop.

I'll give it a go, and as it'll technically mean that DAK is my first run through DA2, I get to experience all its good points and none of the bad.

Personally I'd have preferred the sequel to not be set in the same licenced setting, to avoid some of the issues I had with the original game being straitjacketed by canon. Stuff like the various non-tribal cultures surrounding the game map being literally a "you lose" encounter, that kind of thing. Still, pleased to see it go ahead.

Plus SHIVs cost 50 simoleons. Rookies only cost 15. The council wishes to extract maximum value for money.

Formed of the harshest flames, would that not mean Volo is Obsidian?

It's a shame that half of the launch titles are ones that have already been available for purchase digitally (Indy4, Monkey1, KoTOR), when so many other titles have been out of print for well over a decade. Still, we've been beggars for so long that we can't be choosers. P.S. Don't forget that Grim Fandango is being 'remastered', which might make getting the rights to it a bit more complicated. Not sure if they'd be happy selling it DRM-free on day one.

In an earlier beta there was an issue with the Overseer UFO that potentially required a console command to fix, but that's a fair bit after the part involving capturing the Outsider. That part is largely unchanged from the standard game (multiple alien bases aside), and I'm not aware of any known issues with it. Long War is definitely completeable, but I haven't done it personally - I crashed and burned on a base defense on the previous beta and am waiting for this current beta (as of last week) to mature a bit before going again. EDIT: Oh, unlike vanilla, you need to launch a satellite over the country with the alien base to be able to assault it, in addition to having built the skeleton key.

Invisible War?

Now that you've seen it work, it's fairly easily gameable and you can make sure it plays out the exact same way every time even with starter equipment.

This is an alpha of an alpha so nothing yet: they will bring the sexual pleasure later, after thinking about it with great respect.

Dirty Orlesian Phrasebook. I had assumed this was a hoax before realising the ESRB stuff was publicly accessible on their website, so er, yeah. Maybe they installed some mods from the Nexus?

Well, well, well. 10 years on, World of Warcraft opens Australian locally-hosted servers. Sadly too late for my own time, but that's a pretty significant development - especially in the wake of the closure of SWTOR's local servers which finished off my interest in that game. And that "special peering arrangement" is being done with my ISP too, geez. With character transfers to them being free as well, I'll have a test with a trial account to check out the difference: the average latency back in my raiding days was 400ms, which was a bigger foe than any raid boss.

I think you only have to do that when it's a four month old bomb threat at a far away convention centre. Gabe trying to run would probably finish him off faster than any assassin could.

WoW in 2005, finding groups as a rogue (or hunter I guess)... good god. You could say it was a multi-month effort in effect, you had to sort of build a reputation for reliability and competence through the limited opportunities you did get, and generally ingratiate yourself with the people that tended to lead those PUGs. That's what I'll always raise when people try to bring up the point that the game was better "in the good old days". So when I played TOR for a month and found that finding groups was no easier than old WoW, I decided to not bother at all and did zero dungeons in the entirety of my trial month.

Um. I'll gladly participate in any RTwP vs TB vs RT debate but this one time it's not about combat mechanics. It's more about professionalism and attitude towards the community. inXile let TToN backers vote on which combat system would be used. TB fans won but it was pretty close (48% vs 47%). So almost half of the backers believed that RTwP would be preferable and Ziets then said that RTwP exists "to appeal to a mass-market audience." In other words, it's an inherently inferior option and half of TToN backers are mass-market audience, casuals who don't know what's good for them. I guess I'm with the 5% that presumably voted for "no combat". * By 'No Combat' I don't mean it literally as such, more like I'd prefer it use an auto-resolve system.

But DA2 didn't let you use it, IIRC. Then again why do you need a whorehouse when you have Isabella, same number of VDs. You can hire bunch of male and female prostitutes to entertain you in the brothel (The Blooming Rose), so I am not sure what you mean with "DA2 didn't let you use it"? "IIRC" Anyways I never used it. Prostitution in games is stupid, paying for something that doesn't improve your stats. Well, looking at it from the opposite perspective, it could be something that improves your money 'stat'.

Yeah, both Dreamfall and JAF keys were delivered silently through Humble Bundle, if you didn't know you needed to use the key resender to get the games, you'd never get them. Bit of an odd mechanism, since as far as I can tell, Humble doesn't send any notification despite the products being tied to your email address. On using the key resender just today, I found another couple of games tied to my email that I'd never gotten around to 'claiming' to my account in the first place, suspect they'd been there for a good while now. Wish the tool was smart enough to mark which titles in the list are already linked to the account, but I guess usability was never their strong suit.

So this week so far there's Dreamfall Chapters, Jagged Alliance Flashback, Massive Chalice beta, and Long War beta 14 (which is damn near a release candidate). And that's just the stuff that's landed in my inbox, Civ:BE being the obvious omission. Games, games everywhere!

Oh God no, No one should have to join them unless they want to be forced to make TES games forever. If it means that they're not making any Fallout games, then that's great news.

Every time I think of Darklands, I can't help but wish the combat was just abstracted into text based form just like the rest of the game. The 5-week training course I've been on is in its final week now, so I should finally be able to find the time to fire up some non-throwaway games. Wasteland 2 probably at the top of the list, I've missed out on the first wave of discussion about the game here, and that in itself is unfortunate enough. Contingent on being able to get past party creation though, I tend to get paralysed by the tyranny of options, which is a large part of why I prefer single character creation over whole-party planning. Besides that, I kind of feel like playing a little F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 in the meantime. As for WoW, I've been out for about two and a half years now, but I had promised an old guildie to come back for at least a little while if they returned for WoD, so we'll see about that.

Yeah, but if you only play for one second, you can get your money back afterwards from Origin.