LOLCHRIST

Me and my shadowcat miss Mechwarrior too. I think I blame the demise of the joystick. I really hate advertising in most of its forms. I don't like being sold to unless I'm deliberately looking for it, and I feel that the whole sales and marketting process is inherently rather pushy, and that the world would be better off without it (like an arms race). Right now, I'm of the opinion that having adverts in software I install on my computer is intrusive, and I hate to see any

Sounds exciting. I like those design decisions. The stuff about large scale, terrain deformation, world affecting spells, and just general epic wizard battling is a great flavour when done right. I am thinking of Sourcery (Terry Pratchett), where the wizards all build huge towers and throw magic at each other, with most of it rebounding off and laying waste to the surrounding terrain (it's a far better book than I make it sound). Or throwing fireballs in Black &amp

A lot of shooters have a field of view variable which you can set in the console. Certainly the Unreal Tournament series, and I would suspect by extension anything based on one of the Unreal Engines. You might not be able to use this online though, I am not sure, because some people use fov changes for cheating.

Honestly I think you changed to better games. Crysis and Farcry will be eclipsed and forgotten in a few years. Red-Alert 3 I haven't followed so not sure. The other games (if they turn out good) have the potential to be something that people will love intensely and be talking about in ten years' time.

I'm a bit of a fence-sitter I guess. I do, however, have a story of DRM gone horribly wrong. Tribes 2: I stopped playing for a few months and forgot my username and password. There's a way to retrieve those using your CD-key and the email you registered. Guess what though? Dynamix got shut down, the retrieval form doesn't work any more [e digicons]X([/e] . I love Tribes 2, I was good at it, involved in a clan. The movement and momentum was a j

I was one of the people clamouring for UAC. What can I say? It works so well on Linux, and I maintain that it's a good design decision. Another thing that breaks multi-tasking. Why does it need to steal focus? Why must it pause everything? Why does it happen two or three times for one task? It's interesting how many annoying things about Vista this thread has dragged up. I still prefer it to XP, but the niggles certainly are piled high.

Myself, I liked Battle for Wesnoth better.

I don't know if Microsoft actually have any involvement with it, but I think they should bundle Paint.Net with Windows.

Well I have a few things I'd like them to sort out. Everything pausing because I put a scratched CD in the drive or accidentally clicked on the floppy symbol when it's empty. Ok, I could turn off autorun, but really, what happened to multi-tasking? Folder views. I set everything to list, because I like list. I agree that icons that show you what is inside the folder and maybe give you a preview are very nice and useful and impressive. I still prefer li

Games without bugs are a little harder to make than milk without lethal bacteria. At least until someone invents code pasteurization. I thought the Gamers' Bill of Rights was just a publicity stunt at first, I have been convinced otherwise by the negotiations with other companies to make it into a sort of badge of quality.

There's multiplayer matchmaking in Impulse now? The hand-drawn style style on Not-MOM looks nice, you tease. What happened to the not requiring the CD to be in the drive part of the bill of rights? It's a small thing, but quite nice I thought.

Cool, that is going in bookmarks. I have been toying with picking up C#/Visual Studio since so many job listings ask for it, and it seems a small step having mostly worked in C and Java. Was thinking of finding an open source team to learn from and help out, but they're all still using languages from the bad old days before garbage collection.

I'll give it a go and then decide whether my last 2 tokens should go on the full version.

"The thing is that I think Bethesda has this "Oblivion" mold" Bethesda have made other games than just their open world RPGs you know... I think I got shot in the back by my companions too often to feel particularly enthusiastic about Fallout's turn-based combat. Story and exploration for me.

Personally I liked a lot of the changes Oblivion made. The 'console UI' was mostly sensible streamlining - Morrowind had an attrocious UI. You had to pause to pick a spell for crying out loud. The new physics and combat mechanics were a lot of fun too. However, I do think it lacked a bit of soul compared to Morrowind. I modded out the scaling, but yes that was a bad feature. Rare daedric artifacts should not be two-a-penny. The auto-generated dungeons

I find myself agreeing with a lot of the criticisms about Spore, but the game is so original and has so many little moments of joy in it that I can't feel too harshly towards it. Nonetheless, it's always fun to unload on criticism: In terms of goals the game sets you, it is weak. The cell stage is probably my favourite, because it's the only part that doesn't suffer from this and actually works as a game as well as a creature creation thingimy. It's good that they ke

Whoops, missed the last year bit, well I'll give you a year and a bit. Well this is a bit depressing, according to GameRankings there were 10 PC RPGs released in the past 12 months. 3 of them were rubbish (Loki, Two Worlds, HellGate:London) - although I didn't play the first two so I'm just going by the reviews there. 4 of them were MMORPGS, meh. 3 of them were Mass Effect, The Witcher, and NWN2 - Mask of the Betrayer. Have you tried Oblivion yet? Very good game, plus the S

Knights of the Old Republic has already been mentioned, but I'll second it, great game. To be honest just about anything Bioware have done is worth a look at. Since you liked Vampire Bloodlines, you might enjoy Arcanum, which was made by the same company (Troika, now sadly bust). Again, older, top-down isometric graphics, but still a lot of fun. The Witcher was kind of a shame. There's a really good game in there, if only they'd left out the grind quests. Plus the final plo

Have been running Vista 64 for about 6 months. I still find there are troubles with driver support. 3 devices: bluetooth dongle, wifi dongle, TV tuner card, two bought this year, the TV card a few years old. The manufacturers did not provide 64-bit support, but I was able to find alternative drivers from other manufacturers who used the same chipset. You won't see much in the way performance benefits yet, optimisation still needs to be done. You can address up to 3GB

I've been using Vista 64 for about half a year now, so some thoughts on things I've noticed: The 64-bit version has quite bad driver support in some cases, the normal version has thankfully outgrown this problem. The manufacturers of my wifi dongle, bluetooth dongle and my TV card don't provide 64-bit drivers, and I had to find drivers from alternative vendors which used the same chipset. It has better security than XP. Crashes are pretty rare and tend to only bring down the

Well there are a few problems with that: graphics embedded in motherboards is much lower performance than discrete graphics cards. Similarly, system RAM is much slower than graphics RAM, and the path from CPU to your system memory is still much less effective than that on a graphics card. Graphics relies very heavily on memory bandwidth. I like the idea of integrating a GPU into a multicore processor, but it's probably going to start out as just improved performance for the baseline.

I had Encyclopedia Britannica on CD fail to install because of Norton Antivirus. By that point it was already well on its way to being that little program that's so smart it thinks it should be in control of everything about your computer. Haven't been back to that sort of virus scanner since. Have a couple of anti-spyware things and Clamwin which I use to scan a couple of times a year when I can be bothered and never picks up anything. I do use Netlimiter as a firewall though

One thing to bear in mind is that all the graphics card reviews now seem to focus on 1900x1200 and top performance GPUs. Lower (and more relevant for most people) resolutions mean that the CPU performance becomes a bigger factor. Although I think for most gamers any modern dual core would be nice and they won't need any more for a while unless they want to play Supreme Commander.

It kind of depends what sort of games your son likes to play, and how nice he wants the graphics to look. The high end of computer components does exist mostly for gamers. WoW is not very graphically demanding. He probably doesn't need Vista. I don't expect many games to require Vista over the next two or three years. There are a couple of them from Microsoft - their attmept to push people into getting Vista - but they're nothing special anyway. He doesn't need 3 gigabytes

1) Turn down the invasion screen sounds. If I'm playing at night and its quiet, they're too loud and not actually very nice sounds, so it kind of grates and I skip the invasion screen as quickly as I can. 2) Revert the invasion screen to the old version, it was more interesting, and cleaner (easier to understand what was happening). 3) Multiple constructor modules on a ship. 4) When you add a module to a ship, don't switch away from the module tab. This gets kind of