Humanoid

I'd say it sounds like a Wii U game, more specifically like all the 5 player multiplayer games in Nintendoland.

I was doing mostly okay in classic in the ground war, losing only four soldiers by the end of the third month is reasonable going I thought. But yeah, got hopelessly outclassed in the air war, and lost all 3 of my satellites. Then two of those countries subsequently were lost to panic before I could build new satellites, I instead opted to put the sole spare I had over a different continent. But too little too late, barely any income at the start of that fourth month, and Exalt (which are officially overpowered: they're being toned down in the next beta) finished me off. Main misplay was probably trying to rush Beam Lasers but finding I didn't have the alloys to actually research it (terrible luck with shooting down UFOs in the first month), thereby having to do Xenobiology instead anyway. That's a net loss because rushing aside, you want Xenobiology as the absolute first research, since it enables trading sectoid corpses for scientists.

I guess it was probably that year when I played the demo for the original game off one of those PC magazine demo CDs. It was awful, as most early 3D games were. Indeed moreso because of the insistence of adding platforming to the formula. So yeah, that was the first and last time I ever had anything to do with Tomb Raider. P.S. Totally off topic but the forum server time seems to be drifting at an abnormally fast rate. A month or so ago it was maybe 2-3 minutes fast, now it's a full 5 minutes ahead of official time.

More XCOM Long War while D:OS is on ice. Classic kicked my butt in the strategic layer (an aspect of XCOM I'm largely disinterested in), I had one game where I got in a death spiral by the start of the third month, and a followup game where I crashed and burned at the start of the fourth - they took about a week each to play out that far, so definitely painful losses, such is Ironman. So I figured I'd try Normal, which is the easiest difficulty level available in LW, and supposedly tuned to roughly the same as Classic in the unmodded game. It's definitely easier in that I find I have a fair bit more cash, but hard to tell what the other changes are. Unlike unmodded Normal, the game never outright cheats in your favour (unmodded, the game does stuff like give you silent hit bonuses, and limits the number of enemies that can actively fire at you), so it's probably subtle things like alien research and resource gathering rate scaled down. Yes, in LW alien progression is not dictated by time passed, but by a simulation of them developing new stuff and harvesting resources using UFO missions, just like XCOM needs to. They even research your soldiers' corpses, i.e. if you lose a mission, all the dead or left behind soldiers give research boosts to the aliens. Enemy count is kind of funky though, just came off a 'moderate' mission with 11 aliens, so when I got a 'swarming' mission, I prepared for the worst, took my best troops, and played ultra defensively, essentially camped at the start and exploring a few tiles at a time with the Scout. There were only 14 aliens, and none of the Mutons despite it being mid-May. Huh. But just prior to that I did a medium landed UFO which had 19, and a shot down small UFO with 7. But then apparently how many enemies you get in a mission, and what type they are, are dictated by the alien resource level. It's a sort of point-buy system where they spend X credits worth of aliens and send them at you, so I guess they spent a fair chunk on the UFO and had to cheap out on the abduction mission.

I wouldn't necessarily say I'm intrigued or anything like that, seems a pretty straightforward collaboration to me, but then I don't know anything about Pathfinder. But hey, ruleset and setting are strictly of secondary importance of what I look for in an Obsidian product, so no problem with it as such. Curious how many concurrent projects that makes it though. Long term though, maintaining two parallel fantasy settings by the same company and largely by the same writers is something I'd probably prefer to avoid, risks of typecasting and all that. But if it's contract work it's contract work.

Technical details be damned, it has rounded corners and has the letter i and the word 'pad' in it.

Now how long before the lawsuit...?

Odds are that turns out to be true, yes, but then if I applied the same logic to to everything I'd probably never have played games I ended up enjoying such as BG2, Twitcher 2 and Skyrim.

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.