AwesomeOcelot

Win 8.1 is fine, actually better than Win 7, it uses less resources, runs and boots faster. The Metro Start screen is functionally better than the start menu, I rarely use either anyway. Everything else is identical to Win 7, apart from Task Manager, which is improved. Apart from using the Start screen to load rarely used applications (it has 2 screens that I have setup as a 2D taskbar launcher and an organised wall of application icons), I never use Metro for anything else, literally, I avoid it entirely which is something you couldn't do in Win 8 (thus I never used it on my PCs).

I bought Tomb Raider ('96) on release and that's still one of my favourite games, one of the best puzzle platformers ever made, it had a remake, which was great at capturing the aestetic and kept a lot of the puzzles, but was buggy, QTE infested, and added stupid elements like Lara's remorse at using her guns to defend herself. It also had a '13 reboot that's a QTE infested generic 3rd person shooter, where Lara's an inexperienced survivalist / killing machine. Real Tomb Raider games are still being released in the form of the "Lara Croft and the" series. XCOM '94 had a lot more gameplay elements and freedom, XCOM '12 is more focused but much less complex. XCOM '12 has problems with angles and its encounter system is bad, XCOM '94 is unforgiving, to the point where it's not fun. XCOM '12 without the expansion isn't a good game, it's lacking in content, too simple and too repetitive. Games I played in the 90's were far less buggy than modern games, requiring far fewer patches. Modern games are far more complex, in terms of graphics, that's where much of the problems come from but they're simpler in terms of gameplay.

Malays are not Indian, and in India transsexuals are called "hijra" as far as i know. Malay languange is 70% Sanskrit if you want to know, we don't talk Sanskrit but our language derived from it and mix with Arab, Chinese, Europeans and who know what else who visit us in the past, and so become Bahasa Melayu. SEA especially Melaka was a port cities and emporiums, that's why western people come here want to monopolize it Edit : to add : Malays are Aryan, Hitler was wrong, German is not Aryan at all, it's Malay India is where Sanskrit originates, India is the birth place of many languages, the etymology of the word Srikandi is that it's derived from an Indian fable about a transsexual warrior in very much the same way the word Amazon originates from Greek fables about warrioresses in English, and England is not in Greece. I am aware of Malaysia's location and cultural heritage.

*insert eye-roll here* is such a bass ackwards pov... not to mention hyperbolic in the extreme. the notion that "realism has to fly out the window" because in a fantasy game we is choosing not to punish women gamers for playing traditionally male roles is funny. and even then, we suspect that any popular crpg you thinks is realistic... ain't. real combat is much like hobbes state o' nature. given the avalanche o' unrealistic elements in any crpg, to rage or obsess over women being treated equal is laughably myopic. am not gonna even touch your lazy history. HA! Good Fun! And you're the one calling me lazy, with that fallacy and hand waving. Punish women? Rage or obsess? Now that's hyperbole. Is it a silly rationale to appeal to realism in the case of frame and muscle correlating with strength? No. Is your argument valid? No. Most games would appeal to realism in some form or another, competing with other concerns they still simulate reality to certain degrees. It's a valid preference and has nothing to do with the fantasy elements such as magic or monsters, that statement was illogical. That there are so many other conceits to gameplay and dev time in CRPGs is a better argument to any appeal to realism but you didn't make it. I'd love to know what you dispute in regards to what I wrote about history, because it looks like you're just blowing smoke.

Did Joan of Arc or Boudica even fight? One was a mascot and prophet, the other a spiritual and political leader. We do have a female version of warrior, it's warrioress. We have another term for female warriors, "Amazons" after the Greek nation where women would hunt and wage war alongside men. Just because a game has magic doesn't mean that it has to have equal ability between gender in martial skills. It doesn't follow that all realism has to fly out the window because you introduce some fantasy elements. it's interesting that a word for warrioress, "Srikandi", would be associated with an Indian fable of transexualism including a warrior refusing to fight a woman.

SSD is a must. Premium boards have really good sound, see if you need one before getting one.

People wouldn't be crying bloody murder because EA or Activision tried this, they'd be crying bloody murder because they wouldn't handle the situation. Valve is constantly trying new things, the gem auction is just one of them, they often have issues because these things are complicated. Valve quickly rolled it back, it's the best they could do. Activision had duplication problems often and they don't handle it so gracefully.

Almost done. I discovered I can't use the same pair of fan connectors for my H110 because the pump is 3 pin and the fan is 4, and the fan won't reach one of the other 6 connectors, so I had to order an extension. Running on one fan and surprisingly the CPU doesn't go above 31C, all the fans are running at sub 1000RPM, the PSU and GPU fans turn themselves off unless under load, it's practically silent. The H110 is a bitch to install on your own, I managed it, but I'd call someone to help me if I had to do it again. Something is up with the WD Black HDD, sometimes I can't boot with the MoBo error code A2, I think it might be a faulty cable or faulty drive, I've tried reseating and swapping ports, thought that sorted it but the error came back. Really impressed with the Define XL R2 case, corsair k70, k551 heaphones, and AOC gsync monitor, everything else pretty much as expected.

The CPU and GPU more than meet the minimum in terms of processing power, not enough RAM though, and probably a 32bit Operating System meaning you can't add more. It's possible that the RAM requirement will come down on release, wait until then.

Apparently the Fractal Define R5 doesn't support EATX, I thought if I removed the drive cages and mounted one to the bottom I could make it work but the R5 has a recessed MoBo tray, meaning most EATX MoBos will hit the tray around the cable management holes. I'll be getting the Fractal XL R2, it's bigger and has less features but it's cool and silent, most other silent cases I looked at, out of the few that support EATX, had glaring issues. It's possible the R4 would work, and I was really tempted to try, I've seen pics with EATX MoBos in them, but they're not officially supported and the Rampage V is bigger than most, unlike the R5 the R4 doesn't have removable 5.25" bays.

Have you tried the very bottom PCIE 3.0 slot? According to the newegg page, the board properly supports 40 lane CPUs, so while the middle slot seems to be designed purely for x8, I don't think the bottom is. (edit) Looking at the manual, it seems like the third slot is the correct one for dual x16 usage with the first. I am guessing the fact that you have a 28 lane CPU is the problem - even though the port actually supports x16, your 28 lane CPU seems to not be configured to do so. I'm not sure if Asus could correct that in a BIOS update, but it doesn't hurt to ask. The board does only supports two x16 PCIe channels with 40 lane CPUs, I think the 5820K is the only i7 LGA 2011 to not support 40 lanes. 2*16= 32, 5820K has 28 lanes, so double x16 channels aren't possible. The Rampage V only supports x16 PCIe in the top slot unless running SLI/Crossfire. It doesn't make a difference in terms of performance right now unless you're running 3 or more GPU in SLI/Crossfire. It barely makes a difference with single cards.

Complete PC refresh, ouch my wallet. Case: Fractal Design Define R5 PSU: Corsair HX850i CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.30GHz CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro H110 280mm MoBo: ASUS RAMPAGE V EXTREME RAM: 16GB Skill Ripjaws 4 F4 2666Mhz GPU: Asus GeForce GTX 970 4GB DirectCU II OC STRIX SSD: Crucial MX100 512GB Samsung 840 EVO 250GB HDD: Western Digital 4TB Black Keyboard: Corsair Vengeance K70 Gamepad: Xbox One Controller Mouse: Logitech G502 Mousepad: Razer Goliathus Speed Medium Monitor: AOC G2460PG 24" G-Sync 144Hz 1ms LED LCD TN Soundcard: Asus Xonar U7 Compact 7.1 Speakers: Creative GigaWorks T40 Series II Headphones: AKG K551 ODD: Samsung SE-506CB 6x Blu-Ray Writer Slim OS: Windows 8.1 Future upgrades: M.2 PCIe 4x SSD (>1000MB/s Read, damnit Samsung release your drives at retail already) +GTX 970 Dual SLI +16GB DDR4 for 32GB RAM Windows 10

I bought a Chromebook for my niece, Acer c720. It's very limited, but it was very cheap ($282 almost a year ago), and with ChomeOS and the standard SSD, its pretty fast, even with a Celeron CPU. No viruses, no system admin, no drivers. If all you want is web access, and things that webapps are adequate at, e.g. word processing, it's a great option.

Borderlands with its faux-cel shading textures and highly reused procedural assets. Wasteland 2 with higher quality textures and more variety. Unity engine with small games like Hearthstone, Shadowrun Returns, War for the Overworld, Dungeonland, and Rochard.

The worst part of New Vegas is Bethesda's engine and the type of gameplay it provides. Bloodlines has better gameplay and that game is clunky as hell. If they were to make another Fallout first person game, it would be better if they went down the Bloodlines/Deus Ex route, Human revolution probably does it best. The original Fallout is already the best Fallout game, it makes no sense to remake it with the worst parts of New Vegas.

a) Uncharted 3 didn't look good on the PS3, the game was released in 2011, not 2006. It was developed in 2-3 years with a team anywhere from 60-100 members strong with a budget many times higher than Pillars of Eternity. b) System memory isn't generally used for graphics when you have a discrete GPU it's used for gameplay related functions, and the Uncharted series tends to be on rails as much as possible to free up resources for higher fidelity graphics. c) It takes great effort to develop with such limited resources, Obsidian probably could work really hard to get the game working with 256MB VRAM, sacrificing performance and dedicating many man hours, limiting gameplay and exploration, but that's not really worth it. d) Higher minimums means it's easier to develop the game to take advantage of the PCs that do have 4GB+. Also the minimum might be 4GB, but in total RAM usage on the system might be 3.2GB with the beta. And Windows uses a lot more RAM than a console OS.

4GB seems reasonable, although higher than I expected, hopefully it's a sign the games puts RAM to good use. Over 60% of Steam users surveyed have 4GB+ and a proportion of Steam users have non-gaming PCs that play old or simple games like CS1.6 or Thomas Was Alone. 4GB does mean that a 64bit OS is required. Pre-rendered backgrounds means the GPU requirement is low, we already knew that. CPU requirement is lower than I expected. They're still optimising and testing, these minimum requirements could change, I wouldn't be surprised if the minimum RAM goes down to 3GB.

1.500.000 starting goal. Not only multi million kickstarters aren't over, the final budget is going higher and higher with each big name game. Care to elaborate? Only kickstarter for game that got more then one milion this year was Kingdom Come. And it was such sucess because they had sh*tload of things to show. That's because the companies that can get large totals are already working on one or two Kickstarters already, there's few large independent devs because publishers have been killing them for over a decade. There can't be Kickstarters from a small group of large independent devs every year, they're taking 2-3 years to make each game. The reason you got a strong 2012-13 is because the large independent devs created their first Kickstarter, they're not going to create more Kickstarters while still deep in development of their first. The slowing of large Kickstarters does tell us that the pool of large independent devs that are going to start their first Kickstarter is small. This year we've had one large Kickstarter fail, Uber's Human Resources, but that says a lot more about Uber than it does about Kickstarter. Devs that have made a game their backers are satisfied with, aren't going to have trouble funding their games. I'm not going to be backing a Tim Schafer lead game any time soon, considering Broken Age has been badly managed and Act 1 was disappointing. On the other hand Brad Muir has been a great lead on Massive Chalice, and I'd back any game DoubleFine tried to Kickstart if Lee Petty was lead. The only thing that could slow Kickstarter growth is publishers, with less power over independent devs, they might actually consider funding good games.

Whoops.

Only so many (relatively) large independent studios, Double Fine and inXile already double dipping, 2-3 year development cycles, so KickStarter will operate in cycles. Good concepts constantly launching on KickStarter every month: Super Hot, Whitmarsh, The Flame in The Flood, Bedlam but they're never going to get large totals, they don't need large totals, but could still be great games like FTL and Shovel Knight. Uber recently launched Human Resources campaign after Planetary Annihilation release. Uber, inXile, Harebrained Schemes (and a handful of other studios) wouldn't exist in their current form without KickStarter. Are some of these (around ten) indie studios going to be launching campaigns in 2015? We will see if they can get $2-4m again.

It's never been an issue for since I don't travel a lot, and I have the 16GB version of the Nexus 5, even if I did travel the 32GB version would probably be all I needed. At home I just stream everything I need from the net or my HTPC.

I bought a Microsoft Optical and Logitech MX510 when they came out. Optical was ambidextrous so in practice only had 4 buttons, as the 5th was pretty hard to use. After the MX510 I've gotten the same shape mouse, g5v2, g500, was given a mx500 aswell. If the MX500 were still around I might just buy those when needed. One thing about laser mice is that they're less likely to have issues with hair or fluff than optical. DPI, sensitivity, arm positioning, practice, friction, acceleration, these are all way more important to gaming than the mouse. So my priorities are comfort, build quality, and a good scroll wheel.

Save games saved to the cloud can be in the Steam directory but Steam tends to only save some of the files if a game has large save files e.g. New Vegas, therefore it doesn't seem to use much space at all compared to saved games in documents, you definitely should go delete the unnecessary ones. WinDirStat (amongst others) maps a drive and shows you what's taking up space. Windows 7 has a utility called Disk Cleanup that deletes a lot of temporary files and can clean up system files.

Cards have been decreasing in value in general, but older cards are less expensive than newer cards, their cost is also tied to their rarity (how large the set is, how many owners the game has). My first foil I got was from Bioshock Infinite when it first came out, sold it for $5.06. Some other foils I've gotten have been worth $0.30 e.g. Costume Quest or Toki Tori. 5-6 cents per would be for games that are older, cheaper, with many owners, that have sets that are 8+. Being in a Humble Bundle drops the price of cards by quite a bit for at least a week.

Any MMO I've played tends to have more female players than other types of games. In 2005/2006 when I was playing WoW at least a quarter of my guilds were female.