Humanoid

I'll try the games I backed as soon as I get them, of course, but whether it's to completion or just to sample for a day depends on how that first session goes. Heck, I'm still sitting on D:OS until the major August patch, and also haven't gotten back to Dragonfall, now waiting for the Enhanced Edition. DA3 depends on you guys selling it to me. I never got through DA1 and ignored DA2 completely so that's a fair hurdle to overcome.

Oh I'm sure lots of people run them with no issues. But then some people ran IBM Deathstars with no issues either. But outside of pure anecdotal observations, the return rates of those products is measurably and significantly higher than the alternatives. (My own anecdote is that the only SSD I've had fail is a Corsair Force 60GB, a Sandforce drive) The Vertex 2 is also an interesting example here because not only that, during the middle of the product's lifecycle, OCZ replaced the NAND chips they were using with significantly slower ones on a smaller process node in a pure act of money grubbing. Kingston have also done this relatively recently, so both companies are kind of on my poop list. P.S. In response to an earlier post, SSDs are more vulnerable to power outages, true, but taken into account as part of overall reliability, SSDs still come out ahead and that's really the important thing. Disregarding backups, I'd be easily more comfortable with the integrity of my data stored on an SSD than on a spindle drive.

Well the real rules of SSD purchasing are as follows: 1) Don't buy Sandforce 2) Don't buy OCZ EDIT: These clauses are not mutually exclusive, and the repercussions of each are additive. Should you get your hands on an OCZ Sandforce drive, be sure to quarantine it inside a 1" thick lead case.

I used a pseudonym in the backer credits part of the survey, and it seems to have defaulted to using that name for my shipping address. Something to look out for I guess, lest you have trouble with the post office when it's delivered.

Not a particularly insightful comment I know, but working for me. (And apparently I never finalised my survey, so, erm, this post turned out more useful for me than for you.) EDIT: If I made reading the PE forums as a habit, then I'd know just how far behind I am on events.

If it's just a label for outsourcing the actual work on them, then fine.

Or maybe it's just Activision's answer to Origin.

I recently received some movies in digipaks where the retention clip wasn't actually on the spindle (which was seemingly only there for show), but on the edge of the disc. There were a few of them - probably four - but only one can actually be pressed to release the disc. Arrrgh! Someone needs to legislate some standards on this kind of thing. P.S. "Eco" cases are apparently designed by the same people who design plate armour with boob windows.

While it does seem a weird notion, the Sandforce controller does a lot of funny things with data compression, which is where a lot of its raw speed comes from. If you look at comparative benchmarks, Sandforce-SSDs often come out with a huge lead in compressible data transfer, but are either at parity or slower when dealing with incompressible data.

Well figured that it might be a final test before returning it or somesuch (though I didn't notice it was that new), in which you might as well try everything. Or are you just putting it down to Stalker possibly having a specific compatibility issue and everything else is running fine?

So after a secure erase and a clean install of the game? I guess the lesson here is never buy a Sandforce drive.

I'd hardly call Flashback an adventure game. Every single puzzle in Flashback was "how do I open this door?"

Can't say for sure because I've always done clean installs as far back as I can remember. It's worth noting that Win7 is Microsoft's first SSD-aware OS, and as part of installation will set up appropriately (including things like not scheduling defrags, moving the swap file, etc), so perhaps something was missed by not doing that. Hopefully it's not just another Sandforce-based disk doing a dodgy, firmware is more important to those than just about any other controller.

General SSD advice would be to check its alignment, update the SSD firmware, update the Intel/motherboard drivers. Use something like AS SSD to verify the AHCI driver being used.

I think you can probably do it yourself, I believe Pro versions of Windows 8 come with automatic downgrade rights to Windows 7 Pro.

I checked my aluminium foil and it doesn't have them. I'm sad now.

But yeah, for those who might be thinking of disputing Ashes Cricket 2013's status as the worst release of the year (in face of stiff competition from the likes of Colonial Marine and Rome 2). It's an ineptitude only matched by the actual England Cricket team in the actual Ashes 2013. A snippet, featuring the wonderful AI fielding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zjGgau3iF8 EDIT: If you only know baseball, imagine a situation where the fielders just throw the ball amongst themselves for a good while, as all the runs are scored. Then the fielder throws the ball over the fence for a home run.

They treat that option as more of a suggestion than a request though. Look, you can use Steam in its minimal capacity as a download client for cheap games, ignoring all the frills. That's the good part of Steam. "Just ignore those extra frills if you don't like them then" is the usual follow-up argument, but it doesn't work that way: Steam's ubiquity unavoidably affects everyone, including people who don't have Steam. It is absolutely a bad thing if Steam becomes the de-facto One and True platform for PC gaming, but the 'features' they add, even the superficially innocuous ones, are most certainly being added with that end goal in mind. By features I mean the achievements, the trading cards, the increasingly integrated screenshot system (to the exclusion of being able to do it manually), the voice chat integration (on by default). It's a conscious design to keep 'em on Steam, and keep 'em online. Even the seemingly rational "I don't care about trading cards, I sell them all, it's free money for playing my games" is problematic as it very much contributes towards this monopolistic behaviour. You see people saying stuff like "I want it on Steam because it has achievements" or "I want to keep all my games together in the same place" - hell I've seen "I need to use Steam to keep in touch with my friends". It doesn't have to be sensible, and it doesn't have to even be a majority position. It's building momentum towards a critical mass, a Gabeutopia where Steam *is* PC gaming. And that's what I ultimately have a problem with.

I had some fun with the International Cricket Captain series back in the day. It's a management sim, like the ubiquitous Football Manager series. I don't think I've played an actual "play cricket" game since Brian Lara Cricket 99 (renamed Shane Warne Cricket 99 in Australia). I have vague memories of a cricket game on the NES too.

Well for watching movies filmed in 2.35:1 it's perfect. It's a niche product to be sure, but it has its uses. It's also probably a bit more appealing if you've already settled for just having the one screen.

I think Dell only have the one model? So assuming the ridiculously wide 21:9 (should just say 7:3 ) ratio U2913WM. Hopefully won't run into too many compatibility issues with that.

Eh, to be fair it's probably a bit tongue in cheek. You can't evaluate similarity on a list of arbitrary dot points which are arbitrarily given the same weight. (Not that I can strictly dissent, I've played neither game, and indeed no JRPG other than the ubiquitous FF7) (EDIT: I lied, I also played Super Mario RPG)

Revolution have backed down on their Steam-only physical copies decision for Broken Sword 5 and will provide DRM-free discs for boxed copy backers on request. Nice to get a result and all that, but it's getting predictable that all these projects are making the same mistake and all then having to incur the extra expense for correcting it. Who will be the next Kickstarter developer to fall to this assumption that everyone would settle for Steam?

Got bogged down for the same reason, haven't played it since last week. That said, at least I can send away items I don't know have a future use to my "stash", thank goodness for small blessings I guess. Might just wait out the supposed content patch (the new companions will hopefully be more tolerable than the current duo), assuming it's not too late in August.