metadigital

The Radeon X850 XT (if anyone can still get it: once it was known that the extra pipes were unlockable via BIOS flash, they were all snapped up) is in tenth place, currently: But I agree that other factors start to become important in the price-per-performance chart, like good quality and/or faster RAM (jury was still out whether 2GB is better than 1GB, though, as it can cause bandwidth problems elsewhere in the processor cycle) and a faster hard drive (SATA-2 and 16MB cache being most desirable), etc. Also CPU intensive games (like Rome: Total War) will still lag behind if the CPU is not up to the job (and this is where the new PhysX cards will come in, too).

It's a GigaWatt (GW), not a jiggawatt! [/pendantic SI comment]

No, Atari saw how small the developer costs were for the PSP, and decided that as it was less than one of their executives spends on lunch in a week, that it was worth the gamble. http://uk.gamespy.com/articles/641/641662p5.html ... And the post mortem:

They'll never improve on the original. Who do you want to play Mr Snake?

Premium Mods? Naughty pirate! Poor journalists can't afford $2.

If you can't buy the game from an official source, then I can't see the publisher/developer wanting to prevent the end-user from obtaining a copy via an abandonware site ... unless out of spite. "

Fair enough. What bugs me is the fact that a couple of years back, if you wanted to play the latest games at 1600x1200, all you had to do was buy the most expensive (e.g. $400 for the Ti4600) video card. Today, if you want to play Tomb Raider, a dual-7900GTX setup worth $1200 won't give you a flawless experience. A year from now, game developers will be developing games with quad-SLI in mind. The thing is, if a quad-SLI setup would cost $500, I have no qualms. I think this SLI game is ridiculous. I don't care whether I'm using 1 card or 2 cards or 15 cards. I want a graphics solution that enables me to play the latest games at the highest resolutions. How much do I have to pay for that? Over the past several years, the answers to this question have fallen on a linear-ish curve. With the coming of SLI, its suddenly starting to go exponential. $200 - $300 - $400 - $500 - $600 - $1200 - $2500... WTF?!?? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yeah, what the industry needs (if the nascent multi-card niche is to survive past it's criblife) is an interchangeable standard for SLi / CrossFire. That will bring down prices, and push up standards, when both gorrilas are on the same playing field. I believe all AMD and Intel processors are currently fabbed on 90nm. Conroe will be 65nm. But yes, your point is still valid, the technology shrink will enable it to be clocked higher. Also, Conroe has a bunch of non-trivial architectural improvements over the Pentium M, which make it faster clock-for-clock, especially for floating-point and SSE applications. And it's going to be plugged into a dual-channel memory system (hopefully with an improved controller). Overall, Conroe is a significant evolutionary step up from the Pentium M. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> D'Oh! You are correct: 65nm not 90nm. That'll teach me for not triple-checking. Thanks.

I found the most astonishing fact was Robert Deniro (whose film festival launched the film) actually gave an interview and spoke as himself.

:cool:

Oooo. Looks good; I like K-Pax as Lex Luthor.

People who can't afford to?

I've lived my entire life just about 100 meters from the coast (actually, Denmark has almost nothing but coastline), so I know what you mean. I don't spend much time at the water, I guess I take it for granted since I really haven't thought about how it would be not seeing the sea every morning. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I completely underestimated the effect it had when I moved from the Coast (I lived ON the beach in Surfers Paradise for decades) to Sydney. Yes, Sydney is ON the coast, but I lived about half-an-hour travel away (big city, lots of traffic), and I moved into a flat in the middle of a 24hr business zone, in a flat with no view! I agree, the sound of waves gently lapping on a beach are very therapeutic (to those who have grown used to it: my partner can't stand it, because it "annoys" her!), I think of it similarly to your explanation; the waves have been crashing gently on the beach for over four billion years, and the length of a human lifespan is incomprehensibly miniscule in comparison. I think this works with the acoustics to provide a soothing effect.

Salt water is a great detoxifier: using osmosis to take the gunk out of the body via the skin. ...I really need to start using [sarcasm][/sarcasm] tags. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Or use emoticons to give context. But do the young who conform to the these standards are doing so because they see the merits in them or because they are being manipulated to follow the whims of a handful of mouthpieces of some self-aggrandizing circle jerk society? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Who cares?

Hee hee, I watched it at school. Another good one from that era is Bachelor Party. Ah. So Hilary's suggestion that they're in deep sh*t is a metafictional assessment. I didn't realize it was a film about mining crap; I thought it was just a crappy film. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Oh, yeah. I have been waiting for a chance to pick up this film for months (there wsa zero chance I would pay good money to buy / rent it): from the moment I saw the title I knew it was a farsicle film, all that remained to be seen was whether the producers acknowledged it or not. Fortuantely, they did. :D

Other: I am sure the Native Americans would be pleased to rent /sell back some or even all the land, for a fair price.

Such a tragedy ... that a young topic is stillborn, choking on the flotspam and jetspam of teh internetz ...

Showering for longer than about fifteen minutes removes essential oils and nutrients form the skin.

That looks damn fine! Very Spore-esque. *adds SpaceRangers to buy list (avail. 20th May) *

It sounds like Obsidian have done their best to make NwN2 as close as possible to AD&D 3.5, including classes and sub-races, etc. It looks spectacular: the alignment /influence and the background / reputation system seems to have been completely integrated into the gameplay mechanic (e.g. the Keep the PC gets later on) in a way that we can only dream for K2. The graphics are very impressive, the tutorial sounds well done and the granularity of control available to the modder is startling. This game is a pre-order, and I can see myself playing it for a long, long time.

Feargus mentions (in the first video) that the tutorial plays through the harvest festival ... I played a NwN mod that did something similar, and it was actually a great tutorial (I remember it had an evil Candyman villain in it, too).

It is the best card at the moment ... and it can run in CrossFire! (w00t) Then again, I will probably buy it when the next gen cards are released, so that it drops down to about

So you are advocating some sort of pseudo-compulsion, using the gimmick of constant attention to the ensuing battle as a means to make the game seem more interesting (given the battles are just as complex)? I have to side with Volo on this one: as someone who uses queues extensively (through thorough research, beforehand, to understand the best battle tactics for my PC), you aren't going to magically make a battle more interesting just by removing the queue. That's a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, and it's nonsensical. By all means, make the battles more challenging. The queue is irrelevant to the battle difficulty. What you are saying is that DnD 3.5 combat is too simplistic. Yes / no / maybe / whatever, but the queue is irrelevant.

Sounds very interesting: I don't think it can ever be valid to criticize a group-think project, like the Civ sequels (especially IV): all this stuff is straight from the fanatics who play non-stop, so it must be good for the overall gameplay. I am not playing it at the moment, partly because I don't want to lose myself for a few days without food and water and sleep as i play the game. But I am sure I will play a good chunk of games on it soon: probably followed byDoomsday, for good measure.

Homunculus? Doesn't sound very frightening. I reckon mankind would give them a spanking ...

How much do you want to spend? The Radeon X1800XT, since the X1900 XTX came out, has dropped in price to about