MasterDex

The Irish government has a monopoly on Ireland. *sits back and waits for people to nod in agreement*

Yeah, from what I remember the blur was well done in The Witcher 2. I remember thinking "This is actually something I don't mind leaving on.". That said, I did turn off motion blur. Of course.

But Ethan, you're forgetting something. This is the games industry. You can call your audience scurvy-ridden pirate crybabies, fuck 'em in the ass without the lube, charge them for such a pleasure then sell them a follow up stuffing a few weeks later, and all you've got to do to make it all right is diminish the power of the consumer's complaints by writing them off as no more than the cries of a self-entitled minority. Ok, I may have exaggerated just a tiny bit there but you know where I'm coming from. It'll work because the general consumer, as we all know, is ignorant to the minutiae of the industry's news. John Doe will pay full price at retail on Day 1 and Jane Roe, spending little time in games stores and making use of digital distribution, will come along months later and buy it at home, not even considering if she could have purchased it cheaper.

I started reading the first book earlier this year and while it was good, it was a aimed a bit too young for my tastes these days so I never made it through to the end. If you find yourself still able to enjoy the Harry Potter books at this age though then you should enjoy it quite a bit. I'm reading The Black Company at the moment. It's the first of a series of books about a mercenary band that isn't quite so mercenary and they're not really do-gooders. I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far. The other books I'm slowly making my way through are Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series, Songs of the Earth, a new fantasy from a new author called Elspeth Cooper that seems to be getting a lot of great reviews and the first book of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. I've gotten someway through Mistborn and Malazan and can recommend both but haven't really made headway with Song of the Earth just yet. I strongly recommend The Black Company though if you haven't read it before.

Something tells me he's going to hate having played this role later in life. I mean even Cersei has some redeemable qualities.

Me too! So long as it doesn't involve colonies and gundanium - that never works out. On a more serious note, I'm right behind Dean. Waiting until we're really squeezed for the resources before making the leap to space mining wouldn't be a very good idea. Even if the project was able to acquire unfettered supplies of any rare materials they needed, there'd be such tight time constraints to make it possible that the chances of actually achieving a viable space mining program would be slim at best.

It sounds like ya REALLY need to try Iorveth's side then. You learn so much about the "terrorists".

From my experience, you're more likely to hear "Fuck you, M16A3/USAS/JET/HELI/etc/etc/etc noob!" or something similar. The only time I really see that straight-up exclamation on servers is when someone fucks up and kills someone else and they're apologising, which itself is a rare act. You have a fair point though, you don't need to swear to insult someone but I've found having a no swearing rule helps to maintain control on a server, and it has the benefit of weeding out the dickheads who'll join the server, ignore all the rules and then get angry when they're warned about swearing - Speeds up the kicking process. I should have some chat logs around here somewhere if you want an example.

Sure why not! You'll always be able to find your way home! Headsets arrived last Thursday. I like mine, the surround is good, it's comfortable and it's loud. The mic has also been reported as being "very clear and rich". The downsides are that it can be a bit fiddly to get the right speaker levels, there's no sound proofing so sound from the speakers goes outside and the smaller speakers means that individually, they're not as powerful and the sound quality at high volumes suffers as a result. Overall, I'm happy with it....don't know if I'm cost price happy though... As far as I know, Excel is happy with his. It has good speakers in it for sure.

Let's be fair here, it's across all EA forums, not just Battlefield ones. To be honest, I don't have a problem with that rule - provided I'm not being banned from playing my games if I break it, that is. When the =iBF2= BF3 server was going (Still is but we're not renewing and couldn't be bothered keeping it seeded), we had a no swearing rule and there'd be people using that argument but in that case, it's passive swearing. By that I mean that it's not really directed at anyone in particular whereas players swearing usually means someone is insulting someone else and it could get very ugly, very fast. I imagine it's for the same reasons that EA don't allow swearing on their forums. Now, if only they had half-decent moderators to run their forums effectively.

Half-way there. You still can't play BF3 multiplayer if you get banned from the battlelog forums and if any of EA's forums were to make you swear and insult someone, it'd be them.

ENGLISH PIGDOG! YOUR MOTHER WAS A HAMSTER AND YOUR FATHER SMELT OF ELDERBERRIES!

I've been wanting a new headset for a while now...I think I may have mentioned it here before. Anyway, I finally got around to getting one and my choice was....(drumroll)... Excel also ordered a headset at the same time. He chose the Siberia V2:

This is not what I thought this tread would be about. Who knows the chaos that could have ensued if the anti-gay protesters heard that EA had a breeding program for their gay-emails!

I love your style. It's like 80's Disney had a head-on collision with Japan. Really nice.

Won't be buying it again. I have the PS3 LE so screw the PC version. Great to see it getting released though. And to think, at the start of this console generation, we were being shunned by the industry at large.

Did the ram have any kind of heat shield on it? It's just a thought but if it's right under the heatsink, it could have received more heat than it could take at some point. It might be something to think about if you're replacing it.

RPS have an interview up with Chris Avellone talking about Wasteland 2 and Kickstarter.

How many sticks do you have? If it's just the two and you can get one out of there then just test the one that's left, you'll know if it's the one that's gone. If it's any more than that, I'm not sure of any other way but I'm not ruling out the possibility that there may be one.

That could be a sign of bad memory. Run a few memory tests and see if anything pops up. http://www.memtest.org/ If you have more than the one stick of RAM, you could also try testing them one at a time and see if the problem disappears. If it does then you'll know which stick needs replacing. It could be a bad hard drive either so I'd run a test on that and see how it performs as well. http://majorgeeks.com/download4181.html Best of luck, hope ya get it sorted.

This seems as appropriate a place as any. I just got done watching the latest episode of The Savage Eye. It's a comedy documentary that casts a critical eye over Ireland and the Irish. Some great stuff in it, even if you're not Irish yourself. How our government is elected: http://youtu.be/TsnLyHKWtrg Drinking: http://youtu.be/7acUNw-SegY (Subsequent parts can be found on Youtube)

Mhmmm. That's right. It's a poor investment. Now, that we've gotten that out of the way several times already, can we move on?

Really? You don't see any moral difference between giving money to a multi-million dollar corporation and a small developer? Of course we're not talking the moral ravine between giving money to a dictator or giving it to charity but c'mon! You can't view yourself so morally superior to the rest of us that you can't see the moral justification for giving a small start up a chance at success over giving a megacorp like EA some more pocket money to piss away on self-important investors and marketing fuck-ups. The concept has been really well explained to you by now but your response keeps going back to "No, it's stupid, it's of no moral advantage, it's not a donation, they don't need it, you're going to get screwed over". I don't like being completely blunt but I don't think that a lot of people here care what your view is of Kickstarter now. You've made your position on it, and those of us that support it, clear. I don't think there's any further need for you to tell us how silly, pointless or morally inadequate it is any more than you already have. Like many other indie games? Like what? The successful ones? That often take donations from their site? The small ones that don't need donations? Why didn't they just go to a publisher? Oh that's right, because they want to make it true to the original and not a "modern" adaptation. Maybe, just maybe, the developers of wasteland saw the success of Double Fine's Kickstarter project and said "You know what? This would be a great way to get funds to create this awesome sequel we've always wanted to create without licking the shoes of a publisher or compromising our vision. Lo and behold, it was. And people hoping to see a sequel to Wasteland, just like the developers, gave their money towards the project. Because they want to see the game made. Just like the developers. P.S. The fact alone that Kickstarter allows developers to avoid the strong arm of publishers is justification enough for me to see Kickstarter as morally superior to investing in a corporation like EA. Don't think so? I don't care.