Humanoid

For people without AoE2HD, you can get the same AIs (and indeed, probably more updated versions) here - it's actually a thread about competitive AI building where people compete to program AIs to beat other AIs. The UserPatch is required for most of them, but there's no reason to not use it, since it turns the original game into something like AoE2HD, but better. Apparently of those, Barbarian, The Horde, Khanate, Crusade and Promi are implemented in AoE2HD.

From what I understand, AoE2HD has the option of picking a 'random' new AI (these AIs are community-developed) or using the terrible original AI. Custom AIs have some hardcoded limitations, e.g. always sending out single monks to pick up loose relics, not being able to attack villagers on sub-moderate difficulties, etc, that can't be overcome by scripting, but in general they're very impressive - and perhaps importantly, lag nowhere near as much due to using more efficient routines. And these AIs know how to optimise trade routes so in teams they can manage a very healthy economy. Perhaps the best measure of the new AI is pitting them against the old AI in a non-player match. The new AI can win 5vs1 against the old.

A lot of the booting process is disk-independent stuff going on with the BIOS and whatnot. Modern motherboards boot a lot faster in general - e.g. my 2010 desktop takes maybe 4-5 times longer to boot than my Haswell HTPC, despite the desktop having a faster SSD in every way. The other stuff, well, depends on the applications you load really, office suites and that kind of thing are notoriously slow loading. It's also not having to wait for a spinup to access documents, music, etc. I'm all SSD these days - no spindle drive in my desktop - so I see the benefit in my games as well. Back when I played WoW, levels were several times faster.

That's the classic reaction, yes. And without the early-adopter tax to boot - that said though I have no regrets paying $400 for a 120GB some 4-5 years ago (now $400 buys a terabyte).

Maybe he was just in New Orleans? :D

Also America's insistence on 110V mains power.

Nah, us Aussies usually concede we're the worst. And we often are, once a critical mass has gathered, usually marked by idiotic 'oi oi oi' chanting.

Yes, but he left his car on the moon.

All I've gained from this discussion is probably that my dislike of Dragon Age can now be explained by my existing deep-seated dislike of Star Wars. Apparently.

It's time UU showed up Wolfenstein 3D for the pretender that it was.

Why use 3 beta keys?? Well given that they were supposed to be temporary, I liberally gave them away to people who wanted to demo the game. Ironically perhaps the beta I redeemed to my own account I never actually played, the others got some use, and indeed one turned into a purchase. So actually, that solved the issue of getting one of the copies back, the person I gave one of the keys to purchased the game for themselves in the Steam sale as a tradeable gift copy because Steam works that way when you have the beta registered, and so they've just sent me their purchased copy instead and I'll not recall that beta key. Just waiting to be able to convert the other copy to a GOG key (I requested a Larian Vault copy originally, but looks like that's no longer an option). As to the whole GOG incident, I too find it hard to believe anyone thought that a two month delay in releasing a game made any sense businesswise. It does make me think that perhaps the delay is actually that GOG Galaxy was meant to launch much earlier but met some delays. I'm not so hot on the idea of Galaxy either, but recognise that the old games business is pretty stagnant these days and that they probably need new revenue streams.

Levels are a fairly easy abstraction of character ability, I have no issue with them, but neither are they the only way to represent power, as demonstrated by game systems which decouple skill gains from levels or remove them altogether. That said, there are some trends that I do like and some I don't. One I think works is starting at a level above one, which neatly takes care of your starting skill allocations, and helps provide some illustration to your backstory. This works even if it's "fake" skills or levels: DXHR for example started you off with various augments already active and having put points in them - but you can never not have points in them. It represents what you've been doing in the months since the augmentation, that you're not just some guy fresh off the operating table. A long standing dislike, on the other hand, is the concept of empty levels, where you are not given the chance to make interesting decisions. At the barest level, it's those levels in DnD where you're just given an extra hit dice and maybe an incremental automatic improvement to your hit rolls but literally make no decision. But not much better is the tiny incremental skill increases, often seen in MMOs, where every single level you get one point which you put into a passive 'talent' that requires multiple points to max out. Most commonly this just increases the damage of some ability by 2% or so, and that you're expected to do the exact same thing for the next four levels to gain a net 10% increase. This can often be a problem in systems where levelling is too frequent, which tends to dilute the design space of devising those interesting decisions. It's a waste of a levelling system.

Ugh, this turned out messy. I used three beta keys, for the three digital copies I'm entitled to, but I need all but one of them back. They say they'll have a mechanism to convert them to GOG keys, but that's good for only one of the copies, I need to unredeem the other but for it to remain a Steam key, but there's no apparent way to do that....

Well pertinently for the PC, it's worth buying them even with no intent to play them, if only because Josh's mod requires them. So I guess not only is the DLC for console more expensive, it's missing the most important perk PC owners get for buying them.

Adventure games are short enough as it is, cutting them up into pieces has in my experience compromised the final product: narrative continuity is lost, and puzzles tend to get compartmentalised. And that's from having just two episodes, not five. It's a cost reason, I get that, and the alternative might not be getting a full game at all. But it has an inevitably reduced potential because of that. I mean, I'm disappointed that after all these years and relative success, Telltale have not been able to migrate to 'full-fat' games, or perhaps it's just them being stuck in the comfort zone of their old ways.

I'd like to be earning 75 grand a week but I suspect that statistic is slightly off.

Everyone does, given the options are more accurately labelled lakeside, tundra and swamp.

The Sims 3 performed abysmally even on the best machines, so from those noises I don't think the situation has improved terribly much. That said, that degree of customisation isn't something I've ever made use of personally. It's not oversimulation as such, in that it's optional, but there's a thing where when presented with too many options, I'll just mentally switch off and ignore all of them. It's like when I'm thrown into the middle of a massive shopping centre - there's an overwhelming amount of places to go stuff to check out that I'll just end up walking around for a couple of hours and buy nothing.

They don't own the Descent property, so they can't, legally speaking. I'll get my coat.

They're among the better DLCs for any game out there, but the way it turned out is such that I only ever got around to playing one of them and don't feel the urge to start a new game to get to the others. Which is probably a useless non-committal answer for the purposes of this thread. For a 400% markup, I wonder if it'd not be technically more efficient to just buy the base game for now and save the DLC for when a really good special comes along. But I don't know how that works on console, admittedly.

Mildly curious now, aside from 'Murica*, what other countries have domestic leagues wherein the national anthem is played before every match. That'd be probably at least mildly instructive. * Admittedly most of my knowledge of American sports tradition comes from The Naked Gun.

No no, it just goes to show that the, erm, "physical" side of romance (via mods) sell far better than the emotional side of it.

I didn't end up playing it through because the very gamey combat system put me off (lower each enemy's HP but avoid killing them). But I like the concept and haven't ruled out going back to it sometime. The other reservation I guess is that you could probably nab it DRM-free for the same price by waiting a little, if you care about that sort of thing.

Let him play for a inter-prison XI for the next couple of years.

See the advantage of soft toys is that you can put them into one of those vacuum-sealed space bags.