Mr. GOH!

Is your PC much better, Ethan? Interesting how Rogue has a delayed PC release but Unity does not (as far as I am aware).

I got it to tide me over to Civ: BE, to be honest. But it's different enough from Civ that I think it will be a good appetizer. It's much easier to get your head around than Endless Space, and you don't have nearly as much stuff to keep track of. But if you like 4x games, I do suggest you get it at some point. I think it's probabl;y a better game than Endless Space, as much as I love space empire sims. The very substantial differences between races really improves replayability.

Endless Legend is an interesting Civilization-like 4x game set in a fantasy (sci fi?) world, and it was made by the same folks who made Endless Space. It's also set in the same universe as Endless Space, which is odd, but it works. The game is somewhat of a mashup Civ 5 and the terrible Fallen Enchantress game, though everything Fallen Enchantress got wrong, Endless Legend gets right. Unlike many Cov-like games, the game world in EL is plit up into dozens of discrete regions with predefined borders. Each region has a specific climate and associated biomes; so a sub arctic region might have tundra, cold forests, and cold plains, while a desert region will have mesas, rocky hills, waste, and flood plains. The regions are large; if it were Civ 5, I'd build maybe three or four cities in the alrger regions, while smaller island regions would, in a Civ map, only support a single city. Importantly, you can only build a single city within each region. That city can exploit any strategic or luxury resources within the region, once the right tech has been researched. Each city can only directly get food, industrial points, and money from hexes within its smallish work radius (rather than from any hex in the region), and there is a city building that extends the radius. So you must think about where to place a city in a given region so you have a good mix of industrial points, gold, and tech points, as well as access to special tiles with resource bonuses. The setting and races are done very well and each is quite distinct, with different military units, victory conditions, and play styles. Each race has a unique victory condition you meet by completing what amount to quests that tell the basic story of your ruler and race. The world is a mashup between fantasy and sci fi and is, technically, post apocalyptic. Like in Endless Space, in Endless Legend, an ancient interstellar Empire (the Endless) ruled everything in the distant past before falling to an unknown cataclysm before recorded history. Each race's victory quest in EL somehow deals with the Endless and the aftermath of their fall. The design and concept of each race is interesting and refers to standard fantasy tropes while also twisting them or using them in fun ways. For example, one of the factions is essentially stereotypical knights in shining armor, paladins, and fills the stereotypical Good race role, except instead of being knights in shining armor they are cursed and doomed souls of a good kingdom that turned to a sort of vampirism and are now bound in to their armor; no flesh remains. So they're undead, but still attempting to be noble, and pure, and true despite needing to chow down on innocents' souls every once in awhile. I am also fond of the dragonkind race, which is composed of ardent pacifists; they gain victory points by avoiding warfare, even though the race is literally huge fire-breathing dragons. There's a lot more I like about the game, but I'll wrap this post up. I would suggest it to any fan of 4x games.

The 9th is the most overturned Circuit Court of Appeals. It also hears the largest number of cases, so that makes sense.

Depends how your yokel-infested Kansas Supreme Court rules.

And then it will be appealed to SCOTUS.

Yup; all this hemming and hawing about inconvenience and dealing with technical glitches boils down to anecdotes.

PC specs announced, and they are eminently reasonable. Looking forward to maxing this with my new GTX 970 4GB card like some sort of boss. Recommended: OS: Windows 7 or 8.1 64-bit CPU: AMD six core CPU @ 3.2 GHz, Intel quad core CPU @ 3.0 GHz System RAM: 8 GB Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7870 or R9 270, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Graphics Memory: 2 GB Hard Drive: 26 GB DirectX 11 Or, if you're playing on a slightly older setup, here are the minimum system requirements: Minimum: OS: Windows 7 or 8.1 64-bit CPU: AMD quad core CPU @ 2.5 GHz, Intel quad core CPU @ 2.0 GHz System RAM: 4 GB Graphics CARD: AMD Radeon HD 4870, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT Graphics Memory: 512 MB Hard Drive: 26 GB DirectX 10

AH, so not a Tom Clancy novel. At least it was a novel by a reactionary, though. Not judging; I read some pretty heinous shit when I was a teen.

I spent far more money and time dealing with console issues than with PC issues if you do not count actual initial PC building time (which has shrunk drastically in the past six years or so). I mean, I ended up buying the Xbox 360 twice and had to RMA it twice on top of that.

I have not had any significant weird software problem with PC gaming (aside from emulators and trying to get really old games to run in modern Windows) since 2008 or so. Hot Heart is unlucky, haunted, or cursed. Personally, I think it's a gypsy curse.

Pretty certain Diablo 3 has the whole "start playing before the game is finished downloading and installin," Dean. Since I am not a caveman, I only download games on PC, and installation only rarely takes more than 5 minutes these days. Shadow of Mordor and Alien: Isolation were both done quite quickly. This is a newish feature, at least for Steam; I recall a year or two ago, new games still had that odd directx install step that seemed to take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes by itself. I certainly think the argument that PCs are so much more complex to run games on than consoles are is rooted in tech from a decade ago. it has gotten much, much easier to game on PC, from much easier home-brew PC builds, to easier software management and improvements to Steam, Origin and even Uplay (among other game clients/stores). The complicated stuff in modern PC gaming lies from trying to do things like deal with unofficial mods, emulate old consoles, attach Playstation controllers so they run natively in PC games, and so on. Yes, a component could fail and you'd be hassled with diagnosing the problem and getting it fixed. In my experience, however, RMAing decent-to-good PC parts is much better than dealing with Microsoft's RMA process (although Alienware, of all companies, has gone to amazing lengths to fix a couple of issues I've had with my aging laptop). PC gaming is a little bit more expensive than console gaming, and a little bit more complex. People are intimidated more than they should be by PC gaming, but I think the real reasons people get consoles have more to do with exclusives, hype, and having friends to play with in multiplayer.

They're called circuits because, back in the late 1700s, the Supreme Court Justices would travel in groups of two and, later, alone (though each would decide cases with a local district judge) to each district court in a given area and hear appeals, and conduct trial court hearings for suits in which the parties were citizens of different states, federal criminal cases, and civil suits in which the United States itself was a party. The route each judge would travel was thus called a Circuit. over the 1800s, the circuits courts developed and changed; in the late 1800s the modern Circuits Courts of Appeals were created, but the old-school trial circuit courts held on for trial matters until the beginning of the 1900s. There's a long history of judges at all levels of the law used to make circuits to hear cases or appeals, both in the U.S.A. and elsewhere, incidentally.

How are the animations in remastered? Is Remasatered just a reskin with much higher res textures and added visual affects with no changes to the underlying game and geometry?

Not exactly; state appellate courts' rulings on state law matters, including state constitutional matters, must be followed by all federal courts when that state's laws apply, in general. There are exceptions (especially when we're talking about procedural law rather than substantive law), but the default is federal courts must follow state court's rulings on pure state law. There's even a fun procedure for federal courts to ask state high courts how the state courts would rule on a matter of state law when a relevant case is pending in federal court. I am not aware if there's a procedure for a state court to ask federal courts to rule on a matter of federal law. I do not think so, because state courts generally have blanket subject matter jurisdiction while federal courts do not. I can guarantee that the interaction between state and federal courts is almost as complicated as the geochemistry of magmas and that it makes a lot less sense. The Federal Courts and Conflict of Laws classes were considered among the most difficult at my law school.

OOOH! Fed Courts question; my favorite type! The federal courts in the United States are structured as follows: there are 94 federal judicial districts int he United states, and each has a corresponding federal district court. In some districts tehre are multiple courthouses, but all district courthouses in the same district are considered the same federal district court. These courts are the trial courts, the lowest-level federal courts. They make findings of fact and law and are the first federal courts to rule on the vast majority of federal lawsuits filed in the U.S.A. Above the federal district courts are the Circuit Courts of Appeals. There are 12 Circuits in the U.S.A., and each federal judicial district is subject to one of the Circuits. So, for example, I practice two federal District courts; the Southern District of New York State and the Eastern District of New York State (New York City encompasses two different federal districts). Both of those district courts are in the Second Circuit. The Circuit Courts of Appeal are exactly what they sound like; they are the appeals courts for every federal district court within their circuit. Circuit Courts' rulings must be followed in their subject districts. So when I argue in the Eastern District of New York, I look to the rulings of the Second Circuit for guidance on legal points. The Circuit Courts generally do *not* make findings of fact; they generally only rule on the law and accept whatever facts are established by the federal district courts. Decisions by the Circuits courts may be appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), which may agree to consider the appeal or deny certification, which is what happened in the gay marriage case. SCOTUS is only required to hear a very few types of appeals (and, interestingly, SCOTUS is the original trial court for a very few number of disputes, notably disputes between States). With regards to gay marriage rulings, it is important to remember that each Circuit Court makes rulings that affect every district court in its circuit but NOT district courts in other circuits. For example, one Circuit may interpret that the Constitution requires recognition of gay marriage, while another Circuit may not. What SCOTUS did in the gay marriage case is acknowledge that all Circuits THAT HAVE RULED ON THE ISSUE are currently in agreement on the point that the Constitution of the Untied States requires that each State recognize same-sex marriages. However, not all Circuit Courts have ruled on the issue and one may disagree. In this case, there would be what's called a split in the Circuits and SCOTUS is far more likely to take up an appeal if the Circuits have different interpretations of the Constitution or other federal-level law. To further confuse you, each State has its own court system that is competent to rule on all laws, including federal law and the Constitution. The state courts' interpretations of federal law and the federal Constitution, however, are subject to the rulings by the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Circuit in which the state falls (each state falls wholly within a single Circuit). Conversely, rulings of state law and on the state constitution by the higher courts in each state must be followed by the federal courts, including the Circuit Courts and SCOTUS, so long as the state laws do not conflict with federal law. But the interoperation of state and federal law is horribly complex, and probably even more boring to you than the rest of my post.

A lot of Moria is outside; terraces, peaks, and other features. There is a lot of potential verticality in its design as seen in the films.

If another Circuit Appeals Court rules against gay marriage, then SCOTUS will likely have to rule to eliminate the split.

You are objectively wrong, MisterJack. I haven't had a problem with either for years. And neither requires a paid subscription!

There can be only one alien, at least when you're talking about Alien: Highlander.

Uplay and Origin are not nearly as annoying as console ownership.