Oblarg

Why am I reminded of Han Solo's line in A New Hope? "No reward is worth this!"

Alan Parker - 10 Albatross - 11 Ali Shaheed - 10 Conrad Marburg - 10 (+1) Grigori Pazinhov - 9 Henry Leland - 10 Hong Shi - 11 Konstantin Brayko - 11 Madison Saint James - 0 Mina Tang - 10 Omen Deng - 12 Ronald Sung - 10 SIE - 12 Scarlet Lake - 14 Sean Darcy - 6 Sergei Surkov - 7 (-1) Sis - 13 Steven Heck - 15 Yancy Westridge - 8

Unfortunately, you can't point your pistol at the target and spam click - that's a wonderful way to waste all your ammo. Line up a crit headshot from cover. If you're incapable of doing that, this probably isn't the game for you. Oh, and I've never missed my knee-to-the-face after charging an enemy. Ever.

Very sad news, indeed. He was an interesting guy in conversations, though I only debated with him a few times. There were times when I absolutely could not tell if he was being sarcastic or not (I really hope the former, but who knows).

I laughed.

You mean like most of the Rome hub? Things like this make me wonder if people actually played the entire game before coming here to complain about it. Oh, and Obsidian mentioned multiple times that they were going for "action movie espionage," not realistic espionage. That doesn't automatically make the game a failure.

I've done the hardest version of each minigame with a fairly high success rate - they're certainly not impossible. As for money being limited, that's not a design flaw - it's a feature. You think we should have infinite money and be able to buy out the entire damn clearinghouse? No, that would be moronic. You have to prioritize, and it adds depth to the game. Even so, I'm usually able to afford 3-star armor and main weapon, as well as most (not all) of the available intel. I find myself constantly looking for money on missions, which means the system works well. Perks are not supposed to be something you work towards or something you buy. They're supposed to be minor bonuses the game gives you to match the style with which you are playing through the game. You're not supposed to actively try to get each perk in the game - that's idiotic and defeats the purpose of the system.

I'm surprised you aren't too busy frothing at the mouth for Starcraft to be honest. Isn't the clan going to reassemble for that? I didn't play War3's vanilla multiplayer but I agree that some of the mods were spectacular. I used to love 'The Seven Blademasters' and 'Hero Arena'. Probably not, unless the (previous) leader makes Genesis of Empires 3 for SCIII. The clan sprung up around the guy who made the Genesis of Empires mods, which were utterly incredible in their complexity.

Any SoaSE fans here? I take a bunch of screenshots. I rotate them as desktop backgrounds.

If we're going with the animal metaphor, BP may prove a fairly difficult animal to milk. Litigation is not fun and tends to make it fairly hard to get companies to pay for ****ups like this.

There was a fairly long stretch before DotA gained popularity when a large number of really, really good mods were made. That was probbaly before I REALLY got into online.... I do remember the Castle Defense maps with fondness. I was thinking more of the Genesis of Empires era. Ah, back when games that required thought could actually be popular on bnet. I remember Battleship Command before all the lame ripoffs - now that was fun. Only good derivative map that was ever made from that was Tank Commanders, which was never particularly popular, sadly. There were other games, too - that clever Marine Survival game, for example. Good times, those were. DotA actually came fairly late, thankfully.

There was a fairly long stretch before DotA gained popularity when a large number of really, really good mods were made.

Surely you can remember the days before the DotA plague? The modding community used to be fantastic.

Just watched it again and your correct, my mistake. I wonder were I got the broken from. Because every other reviewer under the sun said it was broken unless you went tech/tough/AR because they were playing the doom marine? Yahtzee has shown, if nothing else, that he will not jump on the love or hate bandwagon with the rest of reviewers for a given game. I think his review of AP was rather fair and levelheaded compared to the majority of mainstream reviews I've seen - that's pretty sad, to be honest.

Because calling a game weak and broken is kind? Compared to his usual treatment of games? Yes. True, however that is pehaps the worst thing you can say about an RPG. He called it weak and unbalanced, not weak and broken, and it was in reference to the boss combat. He praised the choice and reactivity, as well as the fact that you needed to skill up in a given weapon before being able to use it. His main complaint was that the game forces you into situations which can be very hard if you didn't choose the "right" skills, thus the weak and unbalanced aspect.

I do love how the codex describes space combat in the Mass Effect universe as taking place at ranges of thousands of kilometers, yet in all of the cinematics the ships are right on top of each other. I guess it wouldn't be much fun to simply see projectiles because the enemy ships are so far away that they're not visible (actually, come to think of it, that could be pretty awesome if pulled off correctly).

Go check the computer and console thread if you're interested in what it was.

My long-time WCIII clan just died from neglect, and now I'm getting all nostalgic for the game. There were some truly amazing things done with that game - the modding community was incredibly vibrant and supported by a gigantic playerbase. Sadly, it's all dead now. Was anyone else around during WCIII's glory days? I can't be the only one.

posted in wrong forum

Sad thing is, that was a more accurate appraisal of the game's strengths and weaknesses than what most of the major American reviews gave. He didn't fall back on "clumsy shooting," in fact, he even praised that you had to skill up the guns before being able to use them effectively - he instead noted that the situations the game places you in makes it hard to work with the system in place, which was the real problem. The general surprise that he didn't rip the game to shreds in the comments is rather unfortunate, though. I guess it goes to show that as unreasonable he can be at times, Yahtzee is not one to jump on the hate bandwagon. I thought it was a pretty good ZP. Quite funny.

I'm pretty sure the original poster can decide that for himself. Using both a SSD and a standard hard drive is pretty tech-geeky, and not at all something that is usually done.

In short: Case: The more expensive cases often have more space inside, a better airflow through the case (important for high end parts) and little special details that are more convenient than anything. Like, rubber holds for the hard drives (to reduce sound from vibrations), detachable hard drive cages (for easy access), soft rubber feet (to not transfer vibration sounds to your floor), hinged insides, etc. The more you pay, the more extra features like that you get, unless you buy a design case.. then you may pay premium to have your case formed like a skull. Not recommended. Motherboard: Very difficult part to choose, even for us who are interested in this. You have to weigh your needs with your budget and try to plan ahead of whatever happens to be the next fad in the computer industry. Right now there's USB3, SATA3 and a few other things coming up. I overclock my equipment heavily so I'm probably not the best advisor on this, but make sure you don't buy the cheapest board available and buy a trusted brand. Just make sure it supports whatever CPU and RAM you choose and then pick out one with the features you think you'll need (built in sound? built in Wi-Fi? support for SLI/Crossfire? USB3? dual BIOS?) RAM: Three things to think about when it comes to memory: speed, amount and latency. Speed is measured in MHz and is how fast your processor can communicate with your memory. Amount is just how much RAM you're getting, usually measured in GB (gigabytes). Latency is a bit special, but the short version is: lower is better. It's basically how many clock cycles it takes for a certain memory address to be fetched by the CPU, so it's measured in CL7, CL8 and so on. Higher MHz, more GB and lower CL is more costly (and gives better performance) than low MHz, few GB and high CL. I'd recommend at least 4 GB of 1600 DDR3. Don't worry about CL, but if you can afford CL8 or lower, go for it. Processor: Again three things to think about when it comes to processors: speed, cores and cache. Speed is the frequency with which the internal clock in the CPU operates. Higher is better (and more expensive). A core is a processor. To improve performance without raising the clock speed (increasing clock speed generates more heat), manufacturers add more processors on the same chip. So a 2 core CPU is actually two CPU's bundled into one. 4 cores is four CPU's in one, and so on. Cache is an extremely fast memory that's directly connected to the CPU. The CPU uses it to "guess" which code it will re-use over and over. The more it can use cache instead of fetching stuff from RAM (or even worse, hard drive), the faster it goes, thus more cache most often equals better performance (to a certain limit). So, higher speed, more cores and bigger cache will be more expensive and faster than lower speed, fewer cores and little cache. I'd recommend a 4 core processor from either AMD or Intel. GPU: This is the hardest part to determine the performance in. You used to be able to get a certain hint from the name of the GPU, like the Radeon 9800 was generation 9, 8 meant it was the high end and the double zero.. stood for nothing. Problems arose when they went for X800 for the next iteration (generation 10) and then 1800 (which should logically have been 11800 since it was generation 11..). Right now they're at 5870 (and 5970) which is generation 15, the 8 for high end single GPU card, the 70 for the highest clocked single GPU.. it's not very logical or transparent. Nvidia is even worse, as they've rebranded old generations of cards to new generation names and mixed it up with actual new generation parts. It's a mess. There are a few things to think of though: price and amount of RAM. The price is actually your best hint as to what is faster and what is slower. If it's the latest generation of cards (4XX from Nvidia and 5XXX from ATI right now), you WILL get better performance the more money you spend. Just don't think that the amount of RAM is somehow connected to performance! You need massive resolutions to get any tangible increase when going above 1 GB RAM on your video card. I can't give you any unbiased advice in this regard as I am still in love with my ATI Radeon 5870, but get an expensive card with at least 1 GB RAM and you'll be set. Hard drive: Two types available, SSD and platter based. Platter based offers gigantic amounts of storage for almost no money. SSD (solid state disk) offers enormous performance but at ten times the cost of the platter based hard drive. My suggestion would be to get a small SSD and one huge platter based hard drive. Maybe an 80 GB SSD and a 2 TB (2000 GB) hard drive? Something like that. That way you'll get fantastic performance and massive storage all at once, as long as you don't want to have ALL your games installed at once (80 GB fills up in like 15 minutes..). You're going a bit too in-depth for a first time computer builder. Really, you don't need a SSD, hard drives are almost never performance bottlenecks, and 80gb is TINY. Don't worry too much about RAM latency, just make sure you're getting RAM with decent speed (value RAM is underclocked). Buy an ASUS motherboard, and you won't have to worry about anything - they're stable as hell, even the cheap ones (the one I'm using in this rig only cost $80 and I've had no problems with it to speak of). As for video cards, the best thing you can do to determine what card to buy is google search for some benchmark tests with recent models. That will give you a pretty good idea of how each card performs, and you can make a decision on which card to buy accordingly.

This is just too bizarre. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cower in fear. American politics are absurd.

Making me envious. I'm using my 2.5 year old computer that I built ages ago to be able to play some newer games (Supreme Commander and others). AMD Athlon 62 x2 6400+ 3.2ghz dual core processor 8800 gts g92 512mb (Was a new card back when I built this computer. That was a long time ago.) 4gb DDR2 800 5-5-5-12 1.9v Some cheap Creative Sound Blaster so I can actually use my 5.1 speakers Seagate Barracuda 320gb sATA hard drive (this thing makes a lot of noise, not recommended at all) ****ty $20 case with 1x 80mm fan. My video card temperatures are fun (~85 degrees under load) 22'' ACER LCD monitor (Yeah, it was cheap, but the image is fantastic). Still, it has lasted me 2.5 years, and I love it to death.

Screw Steam, how about Impulse? Much nicer, IMO. I love Stardock. Really, I do. I recently saw Total Annihilation for sale on Impulse. It made my day.