Humanoid

Open air coolers, which most custom designs are, might be a little quieter in solo operation, but because they exhaust hot air internally are less suitable for SLI. So depending on your likelihood of going SLI in future, decide whether you want to pick up a model with the stock blower cooler instead.

The Qunari romance will. Maybe a Qunari and a hairy dwarf for best results.

Some people get a little nervous about the EVO because it uses TLC NAND rather than the conventional MLC NAND in most drives. TLC is used as a cost-cutting measure, theoretically having less endurance than MLC, but Samsung's controller is smartly programmed and makes up for most of the shortcomings of the memory type. When we talk endurance here, it's estimating the life of the SSD assuming an approximate consumer-oriented load, typically 10-20GB/day of writes (already very conservative). At that kind of load, the EVO might last 20 years instead of a competitor's 30 years, so it tends to be not a big deal in practice. Personally I'm comfortable with the EVO, which I'd pick over the majority of alternatives. The ones I can comfortably say are better are the 840 Pro as mentioned, the Seagate 600, and the Sandisk Extreme II. Can't find good deals for the former two, but I see Amazon has the Sandisk for $287 which is a great price for arguably the second best consumer SSD available. Compared to the EVO at $249, I reckon I'd take the Sandisk, which is marginally better in just about every metric. (If you can get the EVO cheaper than that then it's obviously tilting the balance back in its favour) P.S. I have both an Extreme II and a EVO 840 in my system, no complaints about either. (Also a Crucial m4, but that's comparatively ancient) P.P.S. Samsung has an excellent software package called the SSD Magician which is handy and is a point in its favour, allowing easy health checks and firmware updating on their SSDs. I wouldn't say it's make or break personally, it's more of an ease of use thing: my Crucial drive required me to boot from a CD to update its firmware for instance, for Samsung it's just a couple of clicks on a desktop application. The Sandisk hasn't required an update so I'm not sure about it, but it looks like they have an updater application available for their other model SSDs. P.P.P.S. I should also note an SSD's longevity scales almost linearly to its capacity. Lazily quoting Anandtech's estimates for the EVO, at a heavy usage of 50GiB/day, the 120GB model would expire in 4 years, the 250GB in 8 years, and the 500GB in 16 years.

Like the idea of the setting, but a little let down that an RPG based around a team of *investigators* ends up being apparently pretty heavily combat based rather than be more investigative and adventure-like. Happy to throw the minimum coin at it regardless.

Would've been the choice I made with an open budget, so there's that. :D

$100 is a tough budget for a build like this. Filtering Newegg's list I don't see a single under-$100 model than I'd buy, though this is taking your SLI requirement into account. At a bit over there's the Seasonic M12II 850W which ought to go okay, it's a bit of an older model though and not the most efficient. A little more past that is the newer Antec High Current Gamer M, but specwise it's pretty much the same and while it's a Seasonic OEM, I'd probably not bother. Both appear to be fully modular. Fake edit: Oh I see the Antec has a $30 MIR up to the 26th, so it'd go down to $90 effectively. Probably your cheapest bet then. Real edit: There's also an XFX Core 850W which is again almost the same, $95 after MIR, but not modular. All three options being made in the same factory, all bronze certified, would suggest they're near-identical electrically, but not necessarily acoustically. Oh, there's a Gold Antec TP-750C for $80 after MIR, probably would be sufficient though borderline for SLI, bit on the edge if you overclock. (Rough maths, OCed 780Ti maybe 300W each, OCed CPU maybe 150W)

You keep it forever*. * Until Valve goes bust. EDIT: The other clue is on the front page of Steam: Arma3 is labelled "free weekend" while Arma:CWA is labelled "free game".

Three exhaust fans and no intake fans as the default setup? Sure, trivial to change but the designer must've been high when planning that out. Especially on the floor, that's going to draw dust in from *everywhere*, making the dust covers rather pointless given they only cover the front. Assuming a 780Ti with the well-built stock blower fan, your airflow requirements are actually probably pretty low. I'd probably start out by just moving one of the top fans to the front as a single intake and outright remove the others, then seal up the vents, ideally with some acoustic foam, but frankly cardboard will do. One intake and one exhaust should be plenty for this build. The other thing I dislike about top-mounted fans is that for a case on the floor, they have the most direct line to your ears while not being meaningfully more functional than rear exhausts. I'd also seal up the grille on the side-panel there. If you don't want to discard one fan then put two as intakes. Silverstone have a good article on why they design for positive pressure here. P.S. While I've not been impressed by the quality of Antec's tri-speed fans in the past, but your mileage may vary and all that. Nexus 120mm fans are only about $10 each down the line. EDIT: Not to say there aren't benefits to negative pressure setups, the key one being that drawing cool air in from incidental gaps is easier than exhausting warm air through them, resulting in marginally better cooling around the periphery of the case - i.e. for components outside the most direct flow of air. But I don't think it's a meaningful advantage in a typical system.

The ability to enumerate the flaws a particular game possesses has little correlation to the quality of the end product. What it does show is that we value different aspects of a game's construction differently, and that is entirely reasonable. Someone who likes the mechanics of a TES game might be sufficiently be entertained by them to genuinely be able to place a game in their personal favourites regardless of any other aspect of its design. That's totally fair and legitimate. My valuation of game mechanics in an RPG, unlike in that of other genres, is comparatively low such that I'm perfectly willing to name a game I believe to be mechanically poor to be a good product overall, and some people might rightly find that horrifically incomprehensible. So be it. In my view New Vegas has poor mechanics, has a well-developed gameworld, and features a good sense of character, and that is sufficient to ensconce it firmly within any top ten list of RPGs I might name. Fallout 3 has the same poor mechanics, terrible world-building, and an abysmal sense of character and agency, and that drops it out of contention in terms of making it a game I could enjoy, let alone put on a best-in-genre list. Further, it raises the question: what does the presence of a title on a list like this mean? Does Fallout 3 belong in a top 70 list of RPGs? Frankly I don't think I've played 70 genuine RPGs, so that's a pointless categorisation. But even if I say I've played 30 RPGs, and a particular game is the worst I've played. Would I then technically have to put it in the list at 30 in a list of "30 best RPGs ever!" No, a game I would rather not play at all doesn't place anywhere because it's a negative value in terms of being a use for my time. The reasonable way to construct such a list would be to list the games that merit playing, even if that means only five or fifteen titles end up in the "top 70" with no further entries. Hyperbolically perhaps, this means I'm totally fine saying Fallout 3 doesn't merit a place in the list of top billion RPGs ever. But there's only be 20-30 items in the list with the remainder left blank. Or does E.T. merit a place in the best million games ever?

In many cases, you are correct, but, as a blanket statement, I disagree. There are cases where voice acting can add a lot to the gaming experience. There are cases where simple text on the screen would have been a much better choice. I like the infinity engine deal - important characters get occasional voice acting to set themselves out from the rest of the NPC's in the game. Giving the player a broad idea of what an NPC sounds like is a useful tool for the writer, yeah, but I found the cutting out of the voice acting mid-dialogue to be somewhat jarring. If there's going to be a full paragraph of initial text presented in one block, then the whole thing should be voiced, not just the first sentence or two. Maybe then cut any voice after the player character's first response. Minor complaint, mind.

I guess the other thing, which while particularly relevant to Bethesda games also applies to games like KoTOR2, is how much third-party content should be considered (if at all) in the overall verdict of a game.

Yeah, I should probably clarify my only experience with the series is Origins, where they're just indistinct lumbering lumps of wrinkly flesh that charge you or just stand anchored in place and plink away at you as you charge them.

Fallout 3's world is the same as any other Fallout world insofar as any other generic blasted wasteland is if you put a Fallout sticker on it. Thematically it is in no way similar, indeed it can arguably be considered to be diametrically opposite, to the BIS/Obsidian games. The theme throughout the other games is one of civilization being rebuilt, each game progressively showing steps in the process as agriculture, regrowth of urban environments and the pursuits of interests beyond pure survival return. Fallout 3 features a barren, bombed out Washington and stops there, as if the fact that there being a bunch of rubble makes it equivalent to the prior games. Its habitations consist of makeshift repurposed shelters and there's no sign of any effort by their inhabitants to expand or even live beyond scavenging 200-year old food of which there is a seemingly infinite supply of. Fallout 3's world is nonsensical in context and reflects more a world two years after a cataclysmic collapse, not two-hundred years. "Fallout New Vegas is one of the best RPGs around and Fallout 3 is a completely crappy one." I'm willing to make that statement and stand by it 100%. They share a programming technology and are similar mechanically, but that's only scratching the surface of what makes a good RPG, and what *is* ridiculous is claiming that because two games are mechanically similar, they are therefore similarly good. No, in the aspects of what makes for a good RPG, the games are in no way similar.

MM7 had a lot going for it over its predecessor, but a bigger world was certainly not one of them. Indeed one of the possible criticisms that could be levelled at MM6 was that it was *too* big. ....also it had better portraits.

While I was not able to detect intelligence in the AI routines of the darkspawn, I do admit I found none in any of the other enemies either. So I guess they're all zombies, just that some are uglier than others.

It's giving them too much credit. They're just zombies. Tall zombies and short zombies.

I miss the days where we had even more choice. Abit, Epox, DFI, AOpen, Soltek and more! Also choice in video cards. The present suspects plus 3dfx, Matrox, PowerVR, Rendition Verite, S3, etc.

People install the bundled bloatsoftware?

If I remember right, ravenous ghouls have a sort of retaliation mechanic where the more you try to hit them, the more attacks they get during their round. So when fighting them, it might be advantageous to not melee if you're low on HP.

Hopefully they've learned not to use cliffhangers this time or ever again. My god, who ends on a cliffhanger and takes eight years to make a sequel? I don't even remember what happened now except for a handful of scenes and characters. Pfft, Tex Murphy Overseer left a *sixteen* year cliffhanger.

Hey, if it's a fully functional lockpick set, you could earn your investment back pretty quickly.

If I can get a Wii U for reasonably cheap, then probably next game is Mario Kart 8 (releases 31 May here). Divinity Original Sin naturally comes up next, but will have to check with my sister whether she's interested in a co-op playthrough first up or if I go solo. Unrest is on the 26th, not the 24th by the way, and have backed that too. I don't really have any sense of immediacy though, my gaming has sort of been by drip feed lately. I haven't finished Dragonfall, I've not really begun the Banner Saga, I haven't gotten around to Broken Sword 5.2, Moebius, Tex Murphy.

Oh yeah, he's going to take you in a dark room and pour developer liquid all over you.

And also be in contravention of the Geneva convention. Dead link, by the way.

Wrapped up Stick of Truth after having left it alone for over a month when I ran out of steam in the Canada section. My position is the same as it was in the first few days after starting it: the game is at its strongest when it maintains the pretense of the LARP centred around the few key characters and the exploration of common CRPG tropes. As the game began to wander off into the more generalist South Park jokes, so did my interest begin to wander. In this way, it's not unlike Bloodlines where each chapter grew successively weaker. Score: Don't regret buying but will not be purchasing any further content released for it. Also XCOM Long War, up until the point where I rage quit when four interceptors landed a grand total of three hits on a small UFO, failing to down it. Dumb, dumb revamp of the air combat system. Not sure what I'll be playing next. I can't even download Tesla Effect at the moment because it'd blow out my download quota.