Dewar

I wonder what was actually on that disk.

Yay, announcing an announcement

So, I think I'm going to start up a Shadowrun 5 campaign despite my customer service nightmare with Catalyst Games. What's the go-to dice rolling and white board type program these days? I don't really need minatures and maps since I like to describe the scene rather than play D&D style minature warfare.

Additionally, I bet the number of people that actually download their free games is smaller than you think. I've only downloaded 2 out of 6 (I think) games since Xbox started offering their free gold deals.

The hard drive is a 5400 rpm drive running SATA 1, so yeah it's pretty slow, but that's not the point in the end. Say you have a scene with 10 different objects in it, whose textures range from 1 - 10 mb in size (made up numbers of course.) That's 45mb of data to transfer. Even if the DVD drive is five times slower, you can offload the first three of those textures (totaling 6mb) to the DVD drive instead, resulting in a 10% faster load over all, and those smaller textures loading at about the same time as the other, larger textures. Now, let's say that you copy the disk to the hard drive. You'll be waiting a little longer (maybe not even enough to be noticable) but those three smaller textures are going to have to wait for all the rest of the data to be transferred first. They'll be noticably the last thing to load in, and you'll get pop-in like the videos showed up above.

Unfortunately, in many retail locations it is policy that a customer complaint requires a punishment, even if it's as unreasonable as that story. It's partially why asses get so far with that attitude. Edit: Working as a contractor for a large tech company, I was often sent in to talk to the more touchy clients. I'd get occasional complaints and, while my manager listened to both sides of the story and was understanding (even when I had actually made a mistake,) his manager and the account manager from the large tech company would have long yelling type meetings about it after. I'll forever love and respect that manager for keeping me out of the line of fire.

It's "optimized for optical media" because it's bypassing the bottleneck of the hard drive speed by offloading some of the load to the DVD drive. It makes sense, it's just a shame that they didn't think ahead about downloadable versions.

It's certainly why I stopped playing.

Unfortunately it can get you a long way. I'm not sure if I would have had the strength to deal with it as gracefully as Nachimir did. I guess it would have depended how tired and angry I was already.

Since I'm not getting GTA for the moment, I bought Monster hunter 3 for my wife's 3DS XL to entertain me while the rest of the internet runs wild over Los Santos. It turns out it's another Monster Hunter game, just in case you were curious. Also, it made me realize that my eyes just aren't suited for staring at a 3DS XL screen for long periods of time like Monster Hunter requires. I never finish these sorts of games because I just get tired of looking at the tiny screen when I have a nice big TV and PC monitor. The last PSP that had video out (and I guess the new Vita TV thing) were such a good idea.

There's an awful lot of static out there, that's for sure. To address the least of those points, I'd simply say that even unemployed folks need entertainment of some sort. GTA5 is likely to pay out in fun per dollar than a lot of choices out there.

I was unaware that oranges caused indigestion. Thank you for warning me Atari.

I feel like an idiot, I looked at that picture three times but didn't get that they were trying to show me the available titles. What ever happened to having a text list *grumble* get off my lawn *grumble*

Meh, reselling games. However, the HDD in the GTAV bundle is twice the size, so I'll keep that in mind. I missed the sale that Fred Meyers had where it was $20 off the regular price, plus a $50 gift card. Looks like Gamestop is selling the Uncharted bundle for $20 off as well. Edit: Wait, is Uncharted 3 free? I don't see it on the list of games. Is there an exhaustive list of what's currently free, or do I just have to search the PS blog?

I'm really tempted to get one of the PS3 + Uncharted + 1 year of PS+ bundles.

I was playing with *Hyun-ae... I have a feeling I'd like the *Mute side of the story better...

I still feel weird about the forced delays, especially the delay between days 2 and 3 when I had uncovered the mystery but then had to wait to pick up a few somewhat less interesting crumbs. I think that if I had known ahead of time it would have those gaps, it would have bothered me less, but I was coming hot off of Analogue and really wanted more. I'm trying to decide if I want to go through the other two paths or not.

Just finished Hate Plus. I liked it, but I still think I liked Analogue more. Edit: Oh, I got the cake achievement

Armchair tech support, but problems doing just about anything are often either hard drive issues, or overheating issues. Good luck with your new machine

The Giant Bomb review focuses a little more on those sorts of mechanics. Sounds like there are better in-mission checkpoints, but the mission content is about the same.

Henry Hatsworth?

Early access is single player only right now, since they don't have a server infrastructure up yet. I'm not sure about future plans.

Wireless has been pretty rock solid in my house since we got a more powerful router and I got a USB extension cable for my desktop so I could put the antenna a little ways away from the rest of the electronics. Speed differences don't really matter to me as I don't do a lot of transferring inside the house, and our Comcast connection is only 50 Mb anyway. I imagine your milage would depends on what's in your walls, how big your place is, and what other wireless devices you have.

Edit: Nevermind, I just listened to the actual sound byte, and I don't want to get involved.

They haven't even talked about what interactions will be possible between different folks on the world map. Right now, PvP is only available through specialized combat maps.