MasterDex

I'm going to have to go with the 360 pad. Before it, the Dreamcast pad was my favourite and that was used as the basis for the first Xbox controller which itself was used for the 360 controller. I just find it the most comfortable and the most solidly built. The analogs aren't too loose like on the DS3 and the buttons have a nice action to them. Shame about the d-pad though.

I'd go with a different motherboard. There's not really anything wrong with that one but it doesn't have crossfire or SLI support which may become an issue for you in the future. What you want is a board that will allow you to upgrade a bit before having to replace it so one that supports crossfire (if you're getting the 6950) or SLI or both would save you some money if you find your graphical capabilities waning. As the others have said, a good brandname PSU in the 700-750 range should do the trick. Personally, I'd go with a 750w or even an 800w so you have some room to play around with (liquid cooling, more ram and a second graphics card can really drain the power). Don't get a case that's too small. Don't go for anything smaller than your average midi tower and make sure there's enough fans to induct and expel air efficiently. For the HDD, I'd go for a Samsung Spinpoint F3, they're one of the best 7200rpm drives on the market, at least they were when I bought mine last year. The Spinpoint range is good anyhow. If you decide to go for a good soundcard, I advise grabbing one that has a front panel for your case. A gaming grade mouse is a must if you plan on playing many FPS too. I'll be throwing up a How To guide sometime next week on PXOD that will show how to put a PC together so if you're unsure about the construction, check in there and (hopefully) it'll help. - shameless plug

Here in Ireland, we tend to call them fizzy drinks but we'll be more specific when it comes to for example asking someone if they wanted a coke or a fanta, even if there's only one option available.

We (in Ireland, it appears to be the same) generally reserve "roll" for the foot long baguette whereas the rest are their own unique types of roll. Have a Blaa!

You could be right, the direction may have been one driven by hopes to make it more like Call of Duty but the level design of the original Crysis wouldn't work on consoles with the level of polish and the framerate it has so I'm inclined to think it was a technical decision. I don't think it's elitist to assume that in the absense of any contradicting evidence, especially when console driven development and quick and dirty PC porting is becoming an industry norm. I also think my assumption is backed up by the other changes to Crysis. The "Press start" thing, the lack of graphics customisation at release, the lack of high textures and DX11 support at release as well as the total facepalm of not having cheat protection for the multiplayer still. I'm not disavowing Crytek or Crysis 2 however. They've done some work and we're getting a the SDK but there's reason to voice complaint, disappointment and anger at Crytek I feel. I feel it's important to let a developer know how we feel about their products. "PC features" definitely is not elitist. It implies that PC games have a different standard because PC games do have a different standard. Wii games have different standards to the 360 and PS3 games, they all have different standards to handheld games and they have different standards to phone games. The existence of different standards of games isn't elitist, it's just the way it is. Why waste the technology we have right now not trying to see what we can do with it? Let's see what we can get out of the latest smartphones, let's see what we can get out of the handhelds and consoles, why is it wrong to want to see what we can get out of PCs? Also, as an aside, PC gaming has laid, and should be allowed to lay, a foundation for the consoles to follow and improve upon. Without PCs, gaming would be a whole lot different. A lot of games may never have been created, a lot of genres may never have been created. I like to think of the PC as generation 0. PC gamers are willing to put up with some headaches, we're willing to jump through a hoop here and there to enjoy a great game. Hell, sometimes we enjoy the act. We don't like being treated with disrespect and indignation by the industry. As consumers, we're just as valuable as any other gamer. *Sorry if this sounds a bit rantish, I'm tired and I've been debating this issue on slowtaku the last few days so I'm pretty riled up right now. Nothing personal though, we'll agree on something eventually!

That's exactly it. I don't think that thinking such a thing is elitist.

A PC gamer complaining about a game lacking mod support and dedicated server support when those features have been standard for years now on PC isn't a PC gamer with entitlement issues, it's a PC gamer with standards. Additionally, quicksaves and custom remapping have also been standard for a very long time. The sense of entitlement you think PC gamers have about this stuff is the same sense of entitlement that console players have. We all expect certain standards and sure, PC gamers standards might be different and higher than console gamers standards but that's because the PC is different and more powerful and versatile than the consoles. I also don't get why console gamers aren't asking for dedicated server support, hell even custom remapping is uncommon on consoles still. Except that Crysis 2 wasn't a genuinely high quality game. Firstly, the whole premise of Crysis was in being a sandbox FPS, it wasn't bought just because it looked pretty. Crysis 2 threw all that out the window. Why? Because they had to if they wanted the game to run well while still looking good on consoles. It became a mediocre corridor shooter with good graphics, nothing more. Keeping with Crysis 2, it doesn't have any cheat protection in its multiplayer so you're S.O.L if you expect fair games, it also released with no way to change graphics settings in-game. It wasn't terrible but it wasn't what it could have been and should have been and that's what PC gamers are angry about. That's not being elitist and if you take it that way, it's your own issue. If a PC gamer uses console port as a pejorative, there's a reason for it. It's not to bash consoles, it's not to put down console gamers. It's to express dislike and anger at recieving a game where the developers have made no effort to adapt the game to the PC. It's used as a pejorative for shitty console ports. There are good console ports too but often, they're shitty because the developers couldn't be bothered making any effort above the bare minimum for the PC. I really don't understand why console gamers would get so butthurt over that and think PC gamers are being elitist. If console gamers got a Call of Duty ported from the PS2 that only supported local multiplayer and the graphics of a PS2 game when they're after paying 60 quid for it on the 360 or PS3, they'd be pissed.

Oh yes, because $8 billion alone in the MMO genre (which is PC-exclusive at the moment) is certainly a "niche market," especially when PC gaming sales only continue to increase as the years go by. Exactly. PC gaming was never a niche market (unless you count the period of time when gaming itself was an absolute niche but that's going a long way back.). Sure,its not the majority but we have this habit of grouping all consoles together and then treating PCs seperately so it ends up as console market=majority and PC market=minority where in actual fact the markets of the Wii, 360 and PS3 are different enough that even when comparing them to the PC, they should be treated as seperate entities. In such a case, the PC doesn't come out so lowly. The problem with gauging thePC market is that it's so hard to get concrete numbers. If I was to speculate based on the amount of people I've met, I'd say the ratio of consoles to PC stands near enough 2:1 rather than anything like 5:1.

I think the best chance of anyone getting into Eve is to start with other people. Playing Eve alone is not only hard as hell but it's boring as hell too. I've been looking into reactivating my account and I'm sure there are other Eve players here so perhaps trying to synchronise subscriptions at some point and starting a corp together would be a good way for people to see what all the raving is about.

Dean has said a lot of what I have to say but I'll add my own feelings on this matter. Lately it seems that all I see, even in an article that console gamers have no purpose commenting on, is console gamers railing on PC gamers and calling them bitches and whiners, etc, etc, etc. We're entitled and elitist and all that shit. Buuuuuut when it's turned on it's head, when console gamers don't get what they expect, there's pure justifiable outrage and it's not bitching, it's not whining, it's justifiable anger. PSN down for a week? It's not "Wah!Wah!Wah!" that you hear, no, ohh god no, it's justifiable outrage. It's double standards. PC gamers are treated like shit by everyone these days. It's not enough that we have to suffer through awful ports, we have to suffer the indignation of other gamers, who should really be sticking with us since we're all consumers at the end of the day. It really gets me, seeing all this. The "elitism" that console gamers rail on PC gamers about is, more often than not, a PC gamer expecting a certain standard for PC games. That's completely fair. 360 and PS3 gamers don't expect to get a game that runs in 480p that's designed to work with a Wii controller. No, they expect a game that runs in 720p that's designed for a controller. PC gamers are no different. From now on, anyone that proclaims that PC gamers are elitist, I'm just going to write off as ignorant because in all my time playing on PC, I've come across very few people that I could label honestly as elitist but I've come across plenty of people with the same sort of attitude towards others that game exclusively on consoles. Take that as you will.

Get back to other games?! It's time to play The Witchah 2, ya plougher!

That's the time when they really want trade-ins. Once the initial buying surge has ended, the trade-in value drops quite a bit.

Ahh! Legend of Galactic Heroes! I'm only making my way through that at the moment! Great anime.

Has anyone mentioned Osu! in this thread yet? It's a rythym game, a bit like Elite Beat Agents or Taiko except it uses the mouse. It's got a whole bunch of fan-made beatmaps, one you may remember is Queen's Don't Stop Me Now.

Awesome! That means between my two accounts I can get all the games on offer! Sweet!

Can you do that with a single account after getting the 2 free PS3 games?

But corners can make games super camp happy as well but that doesn't mean we should get rid of them. Like I said, prone done wrong can mess with the balance but in the end, prone is a must. It was really annoying in BC2 ducking behind cover (that was initially created to accomodate prone) only to get shot in the head because the cover isn't high enough and they didn't change it after they removed prone.

This is the way it should be. I hated the medics having HMGs in BC2. What medic is ever going to carry a HMG into battle?! With any luck, this will be disabled in hardcore mode - there better be a fucking hardcore mode! Dangerous to the balance, fuck off! The exclusion of prone is dangerous to the balance and bad prone implementation is dangerous to the balance but prone, in itself, is a neccesity. This the old excuse that we were given when it started being excluded from games. It's not our fault that the consoles struggle to run high enough resolutions to make out a proned character and it's not our fault that it's hard to fit a bunch of commands onto a controller. In short, prone was removed because of a focus towards console development. It wasn't for balance (at least on PC). Also that revive opt-out has been asked for from day 1 of BC2's release; even before day 1, during the beta. If I remember correctly, it was in BF2 and it was certainly in BF2142. It's certainly needed but not something I'm going to give Dice credit for including this time around. With all that negativity out of my system, I'll finish by saying I can't fucking wait for BF3. It seems they really have taken a PC-first approach with it so it should be great. I just hope we get the commo rose back as well. I don't want a single button callout that doesn't work half the time.

As far as buying two versions is concerned, I think you'll have to but I don't think it's going to bother us much in the end as we've been doing pretty much that with the PSP since release, albeit without the connectivity between games. For example, Wipeout 2048 isn't going to require anyone to buy a new Wipeout game for the PS3 since it allows Fury players (don't know about vanilla Wipeout HD) to play with 2048 players. I think for the most part, the PSV version and the PS3 version of a game will have differences among them, apart from maybe Ruin but so far that's just been announced for PSV, so I don't think having to pay for the two seperate versions is too bad. That said, it'd be great if we didn't have to.

I'm up for a few races anytime.

Yeah. Gotta keep the hope alive though, I mean not every PC developer has abandoned us yet.

There's a strong enough precedent to be worried about the future of CD Projekt games on PC but it would be premature to start getting angry before anything actually happens that does affect the quality. I'm glad more people will have a chance to play it but I'm not certain CD Projekt will be able to keep strong PC-first support once the console money starts rolling in. We'll just have to wait and see.

I wouldn't say it outright sucks at the beginning! It's really slow to take off though. Good to see you're starting to enjoy it though. I told ya ya would if ya kept at it.