casa

Since you mention it, that's actually the route I went. My last desktop was a giant Mac Pro (oldest model), and I just wanted something small, less power hungry and quiet (I could never complain about the noise of my old machine, but power consumption must've been bad). I went with a relatively inexpensive but efficient setup after I somewhat fell in love with this case: The very cool thing about this case is that even though it's mini-ITX it has room for full lenght PCIe cards with 2-slot heatsinks, and more room for HDDs than I never need. And I think it looks rather nice, even though I bite my rearside for not going with the white one - the black one isn't half as elegant. Inside is a 80€ Asrock H77 M-ITX mainboard, which is all I ever need, along with the specs I posted above (Core i5 3470, 8GB, HD 6850) and a 430W PSU. The whole thing is an excellent gaming machine, I might upgrade the graphics again in the near future but actually it already runs everything I throw at (but NWN2) it easily. And it's finally not a huge tower anymore but a relatively small and quiet system that doesn't hurt my electricity bill half as much as the old one. Intel stock cooler must be replaced with a silent one, but that's it. And just mentioning because I come from the Mac as main work machine and this was a huge issue for me: It makes a decent and zero-problematic Hackintosh too, OS X runs just as fine and stable as on my old Mac now.

Ah, the good old ATI vs. nVidia fandom.... At this time I'd consider a nVidia again if the price/performance ratio was better. For the same performance (in all games but NWN2) you have to pay 50% more on the nVidia side. AMD can give me all I need for around 150 Euros at this moment (7850) or a tad more for the preferable 7870, while the first nVidia card Id seriously consider is the 660Ti for 260, way out of my price range. All in all I am extremely happy with my current card, even though it is on the lower end of gaming cards. If it wasnt for NWN2, which is the only game one totally has to have a nVidia card for, apparently. Also, I switched to AMD cards again after disastrous experiences with the 8xxx series of nVidia cards, I had 2 warranty replacements for a 8800, all sudden deaths, and the 8600M GT in my laptop died as well. Back then AMD cards also seemed to have a much better image quality, but that was a subjective matter. Not saying the 8800 was a bad card, it was probably the best of the generation... if it just kept working... Also biased though because I could never forgive nVidia for killing 3dfx.

Why of course the guns are not the reason for any shooting, they're just the tool. He still wouldn't have shot the kids without access to a gun because shootings without a gun don't happen, doh.

It was more meant as a statement about NWN2's horrible performance even on modern hardware...thought I'd vent a bit while I'm at Obsidian's front door. Of course it runs, and yeah I play at high settings, but it can still bring my graphics below 20FPS at times, contrary to a lot of modern games like Skyrim. Quite something for a 2006 game that isn't named Crysis. The only fault in my setup is that I don't have a nVidia card and therefore no "the way it's meant to be played". Core i5 3470 Radeon HD 6850 (transplant from old comp) 8GB RAM etc. etc. NWN2 always ran horrible on ATI cards with high quality shadows (half of them not even visible, because point light shadows only work on nVidia cards), but I thought on a new comp the CPU would make up for it... sigh.

New and still not fast enough for NWN2! Just had to say....

I upgraded recently, thanks to M$ generous offer of 29€ for the Pro version. My impression so far is that it's as good and maybe even a tiny little bit better than 7 once you're on the desktop and have everything arranged in a way you're familiar with from older systems. It's perfectly solid, it's fast, it boots fast, nothing I could complain about.... if it wasn't for the totally useless Modern UI. There's nothing good I can say about it, it adds 2 extra steps to get my comp working and there's really not a single app I'm interested in. The Modern UI might be great for touchscreens, tablets and phones, but on my PC there's just no logical reason for it being there, and the problem is really not me being to stubborn to adjust, it's the problem that the modern UI is the opposite of what makes a PC a PC. More than once it was a major annoyance, e.g. I want to follow a pdf tutorial for a 3D app... but Windows 8 assumes if you're reading pdfs you don't do anything else and only opens them in fullscreen mode. Had to get an extra Adobe Reader. Just one example out of dozens, and the whole fullscreen mode thing is a major annoyance, it takes away every reason I'm using a PC and not a tablet - I want to f...ing multitask on my desktop! Anyway, there are ways to get back the old 7 feel, I'd like to recommend Classic Shell which simply skips the Modern UI completely and gets you to your desktop, where it also added a convenient old Start menu for us again. That couple with auto-login makes Windows 8 perfectly useable and a good upgrade. Anyway, I'd only recommend it to people who either haven't got Win 7 yet or those who want to legalize their old pie-rat system for cheap, because there's really nothing Windows 8 adds that 7 can't. And 7 was for me the best Windows so far. 8 is just the same for a cheap upgrade price with some annoying extras you have to get rid of.

I've had my low points in life too, I'm thankful that guns have always been far out of my way.

I believe most simple human logic means nothing against statistics paid by various lobbies. What's not to get about "it takes more effort to stab 20 people to death with a pocket knife than using a gun"? It's so simple and yet somebody will always point out that it can't be proven because statistic X says...? *facepalm* The main issue is that kids will always scream when you take away their toy, and the same goes for adult toys. As a boy and someone who played a few FPS in his life I understand the desire of having something bigger, better, cooler, more powerful, but that's not logic, that's a desire, and for deer hunting a plain old single shot hunting rifle does the job, and a plain 6-shot revolver will be enough to scare that thief from your front door. The odds that the North Korean army stands on your lawn in the near future are quite low too, and if they do, they would've taken out your army first and your chances aren't good anyway.

Not in a juristic sense, no, although we all remember there was a long and heated debate about his mental health. But that does not mean he isn't a psychopath, it means that he was in full control and can be made responsible for the crimes he committed, contrary to e.g. someone with a psychosis, depression, under the influence of whatever that affected his mind temporarily. As far as I understand, being an undereducated troll, the diagnosis of psychopathy doesn't automatically mean the person cannot be made responsible, contrary to psychosis or other more temporary effects. Breivik was still diagnosed with various disorders , none of them leading to being declared insane though.

Lol, Mr. Breivik is not psychopath. Most of these mass murderers are not psychopaths. Unfair society creates them again and again. Society not solving causes produces this ( oppression, exploitation, social alienation etc). It's easy to labeled everyone who discredits society as "Psychopath". Breivik fits the standards for a psychopath perfectly, as far as my non-professional understanding goes. Cunning and manipulative, great self esteem, lack of empathy, emotionless etc. etc. etc. I'm not going around calling everyone who's different a psycho, but from what I've learned Breivik is a shining example of the clinical definition. And Breivik was for sure not a poor victim of society and bullying, unless you count in his clinical paranoia about his country being overtaken by muslims and multicultural facsists, whatever he calls it. And I actually read his pamphlet, btw. Both signs are simply non-existant and not needed here where I live, because carrying weapons is prohibited anyway.

I'm not familiar with the term and the only definition I found with google didn't make much sense in combination with my post, so I'm a bit lost what exactly you mean. However, it's my personal opinion and I wrote that before reading your post above it, if that matters.

That it'd be easier to put more money into psychiatric care than any efforts into stricter laws on firearms is absolutely ridiculous and tells a lot about how much people know about mental illness and psychological problems. Of course it sounds incredibly easy: That kid is too quiet/shy/doesn't play football, let's check him up and feed him some pills, all good. And an incredible amount of people seem to believe that all those killers are just born evil and with the devil inside anyway and only prayers and a strong belief in god could've prevented it. First off, mental illness grows over years, many people are living with depressions without ever noticing they have one and need help until they suddenly find themselves burnt out completely. Until then they try everything to function normally and usually friends&family don't have a clue about their true mental state for years either, and nobody's to blame for that, it's just the very nature of this illness. Psychopaths like Mr. Breivik are much worse because usually nobody ever notices there's something wrong with them, and they are the ones who can play hide and seek and plan ahead for years. My personal opinion is that this "increased effort on psychiatric care" only leads to more kids being fed pills from kindergarten age on because some over-ambitious teachers or parents think they don't fit enough into their idea of a perfect society and social standards, which actually causes more victims and traumatized kids who aren't allowed to be who they are, just different from the rest without being ill at all. In any case, speaking of putting more effort into health care in a country where the idea of a health care reform caused such an uprise and hate sounds quite sarcastic. The same people who now say there should be better psychiatric care instead of a gun law reform raged against Obama's public health care plans just a moment ago.

Baldur's Gate Enchanted

A very popular mistake you see often with these game versions (like the Witcher): It's "Enhanced", not "Enchanted".

Ah, I see the discussion has reached the lowest level again. At least it made me check out both's recent tweeds and on Ray's I found another great example for media coverage and misguided audiences again: http://www.destructoid.com/mass-effect-and-more-attacked-over-school-shooting-240657.phtml This is to me almost more sickening than the gunning itself, because it's showing such an incredible amount of dumbness in our society it makes me speechless. If you look up the name of the gun kid's brother(sic!) on facebook now you can already see a good example for medieval-style lynch mobs, and it continues to ridiculous stuff like in the above link. Honestly, would you allow such a mob to carry guns? They'd storm Bioware's HQ with them, only takes a small spark and the feeling of "being right". Anyway, no idea who created that pic, I think it's dumb, and as much as I like Josh I'm obviously with Ray's "uneducated" opinion.

Ya, almost every European country has a history of oppression... just take all those countries the Krauts invaded or tried to... the Brits, France, Poland, Denmark, Hungaria, etc. etc. could all justify gun ownership with that reasoning.

Video time? Probably already well known in Murca, but for an outsider enjoyable heat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObE-vEFVnww

The point is that it's usually not "normal" criminals or, say, terrorists who go on such a spree, but mentally ill persons with no criminal background. I agree that harsh laws on guns won't prevent any terrorist attack, they won't stop organized criminals and all those with a source for illegal weapons. Every country with harsh gun laws has organized crime with lots of illegal weapons. It probably won't stop real psychopaths like Breivik either, people who plan for years and can easily pass any test for licenses as being mentally stable, because psychopaths like him are very good actors and appear like normal, civilized persons. What a harsh gun control can prevent though is a lot of gun sprees like the last one, committed by youngsters or people with a momentary mental breakdown. As was stated above, the man who enters his bedroom and finds his wife with another man might still be able to do some bad damage, but without a gun in the next room it won't be as easy to kill her and the lover in a momentary loss of control. Or, killing spree with a knife: 22 injured, 0 dead. A gun is probably the easiest way to kill a person, with a knife it's already much harder and there's a chance the person can be overwhelmed. Not even mentioning suicides.... I'd say it's much easier to put a gun into your mouth than a rope around your neck. Heck, if I wanted to commit suicide I'd look for a gun s the easiest solution, because the other ways appear very uncomfortable. Let's for a moment assume yesterday's kid lived in Germany. To succeed with his plan he would've had to live in one of the households that actually has a family member with a gun license. Those exist, but they are much less than in the US, the average person has none. If he owned those guns himself he would've been through many checks and would've been shooting on a range for years. If it wasn't his own, then he would've had to gain access to the gun safe - and there are laws on how secure those have to be. Ammo has to be stored seperately. By no means he would've had access to the type of gun he used. All those points can still happen, it actually happened here more than once and led to many discussions about gun laws again, and we already have a gun lobby that usually points at video games as the big evil and often succeeds with it. But as you can see, the hurdles are already much higher and the odds that a random kid goes on a spree are much lower. Also, in at least one case the guns weren't stored properly. To gain access to an illegal weapon you must know exactly what you're doing, because I guess no normal person would have any idea where to start looking. When you start looking "clumsily", the Police is knocking on your door pretty quick. So if you have the criminal energy to actually get your hands on an illegal one, you're very good at planning and surely don't do it out of a momentary depression, aka either Breivik or criminal/terrorist. In most cases, these people don't go into schools or kindergartens, again Breivik being an exception, but certainly not the kind of murderer you see regulary. To sum it up, strict gun laws can't prevent all killing sprees, but I'm sure they'd prevent the majority of those that happen out of a momentary loss of control. And most murders are relationship murders. Can't agree more on this. Here I don't agree again... social isolation of gun bearers can help of course, getting the message over that gun nuts are idiots. But in the case of these gun sprees with murderers who are mentally unstable it's more often social isolation that caused the whole thing... and they usually shoot persons they know or believe to know or have some kind of personal hate on, like usually former teachers.

Other countries managed to ban firearms after centuries of them being legal too. Sure it's a lot of effort, especially in a country like the US that has as many weapons in private hands as it has citizens. But it's only a question of how much you want it. And yes, I'm all for a strict gun control, I just can't get into my head why it's so important for so many people to own one - other than the fear of your neighbor who owns one too and being able to shoot him before he shoots you. There's absolutely no other reason to own a gun than being able to kill another person. Well, fine, or deer hunting, but that's not my favorite sports either. The problem of illegal guns will always persist, and it's not that a country like Germany with strict gun controls doesn't have those too. The gun rampages that happened here were all committed with legal guns though, guns that weren't kept safely enough in dad's safe, legal for sports or hunting. So I'd say even in Germany gun control isn't safe enough and there's no damn reason for those who have them at home legally to keep them there legally. Criminals will always get a weapon anyway, but those are usually not used in school massacres and gun rampages with dozens of innocents killed. And usually way out of reach of someone who has a mental breakdown and decides to run mad. How you want to find those individuals with an improved psychiatric care system as mentioned above is btw. beyond me. Mental breakdowns can happen suddenly, and usually first something happens and then psychiatric care steps in to help. Anyway, I'm not a hippie or die-hard pacifist, but IMO gun control is very much needed, everywhere.

Major gore (Exploding humans ala District 9 and lulBG) with dismemberment and detailed inner organs and all, please. But no nipples and sexual innuendo, my kids (12y) might get harmed.

<- is a Hamburger and that's nothing to eat you silly murcans!

Absolutely on my sheet too. And it doesn't only apply to female players, trust me, as a guy who likes playing female characters (partly because I'm so horribly bored by male stereotypes too) this is exactly what I love about games like Fallout 3/ NV and other good examples. You're doing the same stuff as the guys without being a guy with breasts - the game takes your gender into account without forcing directly a female stereotype on you and putting you into ridiculous harlot outfits. I guess the large popularity of The Sims or the Disney cliché of women might make some men believe that once the female population also starts acknowledging their favorite games they might want to turn them into the same little princess stuff, which of course is absolutely ridiculous. I think most girls just want to have the feeling that "this game was made for us too".

I totally agree and it proves that many people didn't actually read the first pages at all. The mod changed the title and included the word "feminism" and everyone goes nuts. Any chance to bring back the original title so we can just have a decent discussion again?

Another circle... I think the "white knights" agreed pages ago on the Witcher being a rather good game (if it wasn't for the silly cards in Witcher 1), because the Witcher does NOT put Triss into a chainmail bikini and lets every female NPC run around like a harlot. As I said long ago, I like sexism, racism, un-PC things in a game if it's actually part of the setting and storyline and helps the immersion. Triss is one of the strongest and most memorable female characters from a game I know. Why don't you guys just get that this isn't a fight for female liberation and turning every game into a Bioware-like "everyone's equal and bi and whatnot" setting, but simply a discussion about ridiculous outfits and sexism that isn't in the storyline but in the art design that caters to the dumbest sort of male virgins that would also shout "Green shirt girl, go shirtless" in a livestream chat? Edit: Oh, and by the way, I think Disney is much much worse than any of those mature examples, Game of Thrones or whatever. The latter feature very strong female characters, while Disney usually feeds the kids with female rolemodels I want to vomit on.

On that topic, I think there's a serious misunderstanding here, although some posters might actually fall into the above category. But when I say I don't want chainmail bikinis and huge boobs and whatnot (also not barbarian/GI males), this has nothing to do with fighting the PC fight for women liberation - as I said before, I like games that scratch the topics of sexism, racism, etc. as long as it leads to a deeper story experience. What I want is an IMMERSIVE game with a decent and subtle style. I'm not thinking only that chainmail bikinis and oversexualized characters are sexist, I simply think they're stupid, dumb, unerotic and an annoyance in many games. I like women, and hell, I even look at their "features" from time to time because that's just human nature. But that doesn't mean I like porn starletts with blown-up features only running around in ridiculous lingeries. I actually like normal women. And the same applies to games. I have nothing against erotic, but I hate the way most games only cater a male virgin audience on the lowest level.