Mr. GOH!

Arg, missed the post and the WoL sale! Seriously, it's still $40? Jesus, Blizzard.

Didn't think so.

The Piston seems like it's made for folks with too much money and not enough brains. I mean, are combined GPU/CPUs all that great yet?

SC4 is compatible with Win7, but to be stable on modern CPUs you should edit the preferences in the Steam launcher to make it run on a single core. Nothing difficult or drastic.

I like 4, but some folks swear by 3000, and others 2000. If you get 4, there are a number of mods that greatly improve the experience. There is also still a robust community making new buildings and such for the game (SC4 supported user-made buildings to a wonderful degree). Edit: I highly suggest the NAM. It makes the transportation networks in SC4 even more robust. http://community.simtropolis.com/topic/25419-faqs-and-download-links-for-nam-rhw-and-nwm/

It's funny. I just got the first gun in this game. Four years ago I would have beaten it by now. I guess that's the difference between being a student and being fully employed. Ethan: aren't you a litigator? How can you take days off for gaming if you have court dates?

Yes. The always-on shit is awful. My position is that even if the servers worked perfectly, Sim City would still be social gaming trash and horribly limited in scope and customization. It's casual. It's social. It's not a robust and deep city simulation. It substitutes player enjoyment from interacting with friends for enjoyment from interacting with an interesting and deep simulation. I mean, fuck me; I like my friends, but I can do much more enjoyable things with them than play a crippled simulator. It's cheap development when a game relies on players' friendships rather than strong gameplay.

Because reviewers had low expectations and largely come from a generation enamored with shallow multiplayer social bullshit and spiffy GUIs and games they can play in five minute chunks. No appreciation for depth, just flash.

The game, even if it's working, seems more worthy of middling or low scores than the hyperbolic accolades it's gotten in reviews before the launch fiasco. These high score reviews must be written by folks who like restricted social gaming garbage.

You're a traitor, ST.

I think it broke all the videogame goal records. It beat Project Eternity to $1.1 million by a day or two. Lots of $100-$500 backers for Torment because the original was loved by smart people, many of whom now earn decent salaries and are willing to pay that much for a video game if it's done right.

It got funded within six hours. Most excellent.

I expect that it should do as well as the Wasteland 2 and Project Eternity Kickstarter campaigns, in the end. It's the spiritual sequel to a beloved old school game designed by respected veteran RPG writers set in an interesting new campaign world. Us folks who were in high school or college back when Torment came out are now adults with disposable income we're willing to drop for a product we love but which mainstream games publishers wouldn't fund. That's why I pledged $75. Yet folks who just got the RPG bug can drop $20 and still help the game get made. I love Kickstarter for these sorts of projects so much.

Not at all! It was just an observation about TressFx, which was hyped on several gaming news sites. I consider it similar to SpeedTree; nice little advancement in gaming tech that adds immersion, but not a reason to buy a game.

Here's the Kickstarter. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera Throw 'em $20.Great price for a promising game. I'll be tossing down $50, and adding more if the stretch goals are enticing.

Is the TressFX AMD-only? Edit: Oh, you're probably referring to the FPS drop with TressFX on since everything I've read, aside from forum posts by children, indicates that TressFx works on nVidia cards. My criticism is that the TressFX don't really look as awesome when you're playing the game as the hype would elad one to expect. Specifically, you begin the game hanging upside down, more or less. Lara's pony tail is subject to gravity and hangs down, but the rest of her hair just poofs out a little but still points up towards Lara's feet.

Malicious: I could, theoretically. But I loathe the fact that you can grow a super dense square of urbanization in something like four square miles surrounded by invisible walls.. It looks ridiculous and limited. The relationships between 'cities' is social gaming garbage rather than simulation problem solving. You're not building a simulated region so much as engaging in multiple social game sandboxes that owe more to FarmVille than SimCity Classic. I like designing small towns, sure. Especially if they were the suburbs to a big city. But that shit doesn't work in the predefined play areas in this version of SimCity. But I also like designing regions with my choice of transportation infrastructure, terrain, and city plots. Bottom line: I will not settle for less, though I know many players are fine with it. That's why the industry keeps shitting out the gaming equivalent of Big Macs.

The city size limit is a big dealbreaker for me. What use is a good city simulation that can only emulate towns? I mean, they should have left in some customization options. Who cares if folks playing on their shitty $400 laptops can't use the biggest settings? Allow those of us who who can handle it have the option. And the forced woodland and alck of region customization is fucking terrible.

EA closed the development studio making DS4. Makes it seem likely that it's canceled.

Only played an hour or two of the second Uncharted and about 30 minutes of the new Tomb Raider, but they definitely feel similar, at least outside of combat. I enjoyed what I got to play of Tomb Raider and am looking forward to resuming play Wednesday after work. It runs quite well on my i5/ GTX 570 rig. Prettier than Uncharted 2, but, well, duh, I'm on a decent gaming PC. The touted hair effects engine isn't as slick as I was led to believe, but it's better than helmet hair. Edit: Oh yeah, the death scenes are extremely brutal. If you are disturbed by gore, this is not the game for you.

Here's the Quick Look from Giant Bomb. http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-simcity/2300-7103/ Those cities are tiny. Fuck EA for ruining SimCity. Gonna get SC4 instead.

The previews/reviews I have glanced at do not look promising at all. Even more disheartening is reviewers' embrace of the stupid social aspects of the game. Most disheartening of all is that the play area in any given city is tiny, and there is mandatory open fields/wilderness between these small cities. This sounds frustrating and limiting, and will result in bizarre mini-cities full of skyscrapers that abruptly end at the pre-approved borders. No adjacent suburbs to make real-seeming big cities. Ars Technica's previewers suggested that it should be called Sim Town.

Find out for yourself. Do a massive beer tour of Belgium, Holland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. I guarantee you'll have fun.

So when is Blizz gonna sell the first SC2 for under $20 to entice all us newbies into getting HotS?