GMT

Communism proposes an alternative version of the monetary system, while the resource-based economy obsoletes the need of it By the way, great pictures clhigh7 with "proposes" being the operating word concerning communism. reality sadly shows that communism turns out to be a petty excuse by dictatorial leaderships to live in prosperity while the common people are deprived of human rights and wealth alike... unless they render themselves useful to the government.

outside?? no way! singleplayer ftw

if you want to consider it stolen by nintendo, then go ahead and consider a bazillion other games stolen from someone by anyone. basically all the exclusive titles are stolen from other platforms. sony or microsoft sign exclusive deals with the devs and bang, xbox only. ps only. same with pc only titles. also, if you think of a company stealing, try ea and their aggressive overtaking-strategy. buying companies with good titles just to ruin them and closing the companies isn't any less stealing than what nintendo did with bayonetta

I played sims 1 and liked it. I played sims 2 and liked it even more. I play sims 3 and, while I like it aswell and own all expansions and a truckload of cc, it feels somewhat not too good to me as it lacks real gameplay improvement over 2. I watched videos of sims 4 and I must say that, again, there's too little - if any - improvements compared to it's previous title. Now, fairness where fairness is due, the sims is a game that gets pushed out in it's most basic and "playable" form and the real content get's cashcowed in expansions, so there's plenty of room to improve on gameplay also. But history shows that this most likely won't happen and the expensions really add nothing but content and interactions with it. So, no, not gonna get it. at least not from the start. maybe somewhere down the road when it's a budget title. Even more so after reading the list of what they canned. An insult to anyone who ever played the game series. About as much a drawback as happened with sim city since 4. EA really doesn't learn from anything

all you get is to see much more at the same time, so to say everything gets smaller and smaller with increasing resolution. for example, when I changed from my old desktop pc to my new desktop I went from 1024x768 to 1920*1080. All that changed to me is, that I can fit a large city tile at zoom 1 almost entirely at the screen, which in turn means that I have to use zoom 4 to be as close as I previously was at zoom 3. plus, as basty already mentioned, the game does not support all custom resolutions. according to widescreengaming, the best you can get is 16:10 at 1920x1200 and 16:9 at 2048x1152 without running into problems. above that, it's pretty much trial and error to see if it works or not. most common problem happens in region view with corrupted city thumbnails but it can go as far as blackscreen or crashing. wsgf does not list a 4k or ultra-ws compatibility, so I guess the corresponding resolutions have been tested to no mentionable success.

What good is a nice story if the gameplay is so annoying that you throw the disc away after 20 minutes? been there, done that. literally. on the bottom line, a game should be fun. IF this happens to be with awesome graphics and a great story, that's cool. really cool in fact. if not, at least the game should be entertaining to play. I mean, look at super mario. great story? nope. awesome graphics? eehhh nope. a fun game to play even after decades? sure as hell! simulation "games". entertaining? depends on the depth of simulation (=gameplay) but yes mostly, still graphics and story often fall off the back of the trunk. after all, gameplay is what gets you "to settle into a game", not the story, because gameplay is the storyteller. how you interact with the screenplay is what drives you through the story, not the story itself, cuz it's interactive. therefore, no matter how good the story is written and screened, or the graphics are created, if the actual gameplay isn't even worth flushing it down the toilet, you'd be annoyed playing the game in no time. on the other hand tho, mediocre graphics and a negligible story are no downer if the game plays very well... heck, there's a bazillion of games that don't have either of the 2 and yet are sold in the millions and enjoyed alike. so, again, I say if there has to be a decision made, gameplay is more important than story.

gameplay

not gonna argue with that cuz you're right about gta5 sp, but if you compare it to gtao, you can't deny that R* put the emphasis on the latter. that's the only explanation why gtao offers so much more - and interesting - content compared to the singleplayer. that's what I was talking about. they teased us with an oh-so-awesome story mode while the real replay value and amount of content lies within gtao. endless space... yeah I have this. never really played it tho because I'm not a big fan of turn-based games unless I play a real tabletop game. I played homeworld 2 and sins excessively. recently I gave distant worlds and distant worlds universe a try. only 2d graphics but therefore a huge variety and extensive gameplay aswell as a giant map if you want (1400 solar systems is the max... trust me it takes ages to conquer them all). very deep and loads of micromanagement from a huge research tree and per-colony taxation to manual ship design... luckily you can adjust the level of automization from almost just sitting there watching the show to managing it all. I own homeworld and frankly, it's horrible. for quite a while, it didn't even run in fullscreen for me. I had to play in a maximized window to get an acceptable framerate (even lowest possible resolution and lowest details gave me slideshow fps). crappy generic shooter on the bottom line, but I must admit that I sort of like the atmosphere. they really managed to deliver the feeling this story gives you... until you start that grande finale which is another case of just trying to hard w/o success Well, there are those of us who enjoy making spreadsheets and will gleefully play with MS Excel for fun. there's people actually writing games for excel... just sayin...

to get the obvious off my chest firsthand: every simcity since sc4. this includes sc13 which is a step in the right direction, but merely feels like cities xl 2.0 to add 2 recent games, GTA5 and Watch Dogs. the former for showing what can go wrong when you get to hyped with multiplayer as a producer (really, this game consits to 75% of multiplayer) and the latter for being hyped with awesomeness and it just fails to deliver imho (same for GTA5 but at least the world is awesomely made and full of details to discover). MS FSX. So much wrong on so many levels, starting with the insanely high system specs and simply wrong coding. luckily most can be adjusted w/o being a tech wizz and the lack of depth and realism is helped with billions of community and 3rd party addons. while I'm at it, MS Flight. Really? Flying around an "accurate recreation of Hawaii" which turns out to be anything but accurate? at least it's for free. everything after NFS Carbon. I liked the streetracing / tuning theme that started with Underground, had it's high with Underground 2 and then with Most Wanted and ultimately Carbon, died. Not just because of the increasing lack of tuning, but also because after Carbon, they quit the open world + streetracing theme. ProStreet was ultimatively the last NFS game I got myself.

Until you can cash in big time on selling giant collections, like recently the one who sold 11000 games for like 3/4 million. or in 2012 when someone sold over 5000 games for about 1.2m dollar, many of them sealed still.

Trust me, it is. I've collected about 260 games on pc (105 from the pirate bay bundle alone; awesome collection of free indie games btw), across all platforms another 60 or so on consoles and handhelds, incl tablet/smartphone. also I got 2 other bundles that add another 840ish dos games I play via dosbox and over 4000(!) snes rom copies for znes (not sure how many individual games as some are in all released languages) to the list. so what? other people buy pink flamingos or lawn gnomes or funny stickers for their cars... game collections are quite cool. now that I mention it, the 60 is way too low for consoles/handhelds as there 2 or 3 nintendo game collection modules there. 2 for gameboy (the old white one, 1st gen) and one for snes... maybe twofold this 60ish games on console/mobile. no need to mention that I haven't played them all, especially the emulator-collections. I played most of them here and there then and now, just played into some of them and never came back... and there's a bunch of pc games I haven't played yet aswell, mostly from game series. for instance, I have dead island and riptide but still not thru the first part, I have all 3 mass effect games but am yet to finish the first title. same for witcher, I only recently started playing witcher 1 but got both 1+2 a while back already. jeez if I had the audience, I should've blogged or vlogged.

so I hope someone in here is tech-savvy enough to help me out a little with this: for a couple weeks now (in fact it's the third time now) I run into a weird problem with my pc, because seemingly out of the blue, it get's stuck when booting, according to the onboard diagnosis display in postcode A2 which is IDE detect. What then solves the booting problem is taking out the 2nd HDD. Problem is, 70% of the stuff I need/use is on this drive. When it happens I go bonkers and fiddle around with everything I can, losing track of the steps I take and seemingly as sudden as the problem popped up, it goes again. Then everything runs fine for a few days or weeks and then, again, the circle starts again. 95% of the internets tell me that the HDD might have died and then these topics don't really continue, a cause which I think I can rule out as once the problem pops up and get rid of it, the system runs fine with both HDD and read/write on the concerned HDD has no problems. Also, at any point of time, I can hook this drive up to any pc in the house via a (powered) USB adapter (unfortunately not as a regular HDD because only my pc is "young" enough to have sata plugs) and it works like a charm aswell. what logical steps I've done so far is to now success: CMOS reset both via button and battery used different BIOS - my board comes with 2 BIOS chips I can select via an onboard switch, BIOS 1 I normally use is the latest provided by the manufacturer, BIOS 2 untouched as it came from the factory updated all concerned drivers changed boot priorities and also tried one or another option in the BIOS checked all SATA cables, changed their placement removed all components and tried one by one, everything fine unless this HDD is used undo oc changed both HDDs through their available slots (the pc case has a quickswap system similar to servers, fit the HDD into it's frame and push it in) when the system gets stuck in A2, I can't even access BIOS, but from swapping the HDDs through the slots I can see that the system recognises the HDD fine and since it runs fine outside this problem, even on the same pc, I'd say it might be a software problem? I somehow feel - but this might be a bit of an unlucky correlation - is that this problem pops up whenever windows updates are installed. But a rollback doesn't help either. one step I've read about that solved such an issue on another system is updating the firmware of the HDD, but I somehow can't find instructions nor related downloads from the manufacturer to complete the list, here's my system specs: MSI x79a GD65 8D with latest AMI BIOS 4.7 flashed on chip 1 and I think it's 1.2 or 1.4 flashed on the untouched chip 2 Intel Core i7 3820 3,6Ghz autoclocked at 4Ghz via onboard switch Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 CL9 8GB 2 Dimms MSI GTX560Ti 2GB TwinFrozr2 WD Caviar Blue 640GB 3 Partitions incl OS WD Caviar Black 2TB 4 Partitions Asmedia 106x SATA Host Controller Win 7 Ultimate 64bit Delta 750w PSU Enermax ELC120 CPU liquid cooling with 1st fan used for radiator and 2nd fan used as case blower EDIT: and for the fun-record: yes I tried switching it on and off

So after formatting the drive and watching what happens for a while I dare to say this finally solved the problem. no boot-lag since I did this. I hope it stays this way.

I wouldn' call it fear, I'd call it skeptisism. Common sense shows that there's just a lot of questions - that inevitably include safety/security - that have to be considered and not few aren't even answered for powerplants yet. Especially if you wanna get civillians within an arms length of small reactors powering ships or aircraft. Nuclear power is an extremly complex way of producing energy and frankly, it's anything but clean.

Of course you can't blow up everything nuclear, but the radioactivity persists and can be hazardous, intentionally or accidentally spilled. An oil spill can be contained but you can't contain a fallout that easy as it contaminates everything it touches and therefore easily mixes, unlike crude oil which to the biggest extent floats and "just" sticks to everything. Just imagine what would've happened if the Clipper Maid of the Seas was a nuclear-powered aircraft or MH17. It wouldn't come down to a disaster like real nukes are, but for sure to the same extent the dreaded "dirty bombs" are. And, what also was a point for quitting afore mentioned experiments, how to shield the crew or even passengers effectively from the radiation? Mass is a big factor in aviation and effective radioactive shielding is darn heavy. And what about the waste disposal? If I take a look at how careless nuclear waste from the powerplants is treated even today, I don't really wanna know what happens if this stuff is turned into an acceptable means of transportation fuel.

As a matter of fact, considering actually widespread actions taken and not just some prototype bull, no other fuel-driven means of transportation has made such an immense cut on engine-thirst in the last almost half a century as aviation has. we're talking maximum cuts of almost 40% in the last 25 years alone and plenty to come because for all carriers, fuel prices are in terms of operating costs created only second to crew costs. these two, depending on the actual airline can easily make up for as much 75% of the costs. I mean, only a few decades ago we were talking costs of $1 per gallon jet-a or even less, and now we look at about $5-6 (Phoenix area @ Cutter Av.) and another dollar more for Avgas (which is used in general aviation propeller driven AC and is basically your 100 octane gasoline but blended to accomodate for the higher altitudes). Also, at least commercial aviation, is a public transport method. thinking of it like this, broken down to the per capita gallon-milage is by far the best you can get from combustion engines. Another matter of fact, russian military propeller-driven aircraft in the post-ww2 era have been experimentally stocked with nuclear reactors. went pretty well until someone realized that this creates thousands upon thousands of Fat Mans and Little Boys in the sky and that it's only a matter of time until a real disaster kicks in. If we really want to get rid of oil-guzzlers and corresponding pollution, attack ships. they burn only rarely refined oils with little to no exhaust filtering. That's really a problem both in crude oil consumption and pollution.

Finally I can recreate Coruscant and Nar Shaddaa

I like the story of C&C 2 and it's alternate reality. But the "original" story of the C&C series isn't to bad either. World in Conflict has a nice storyline. Also COD MW which is techincally a war game but not a strategy game so I don't now if this qualifies... Defcon which is more an anti-war game also has a nice story as far as one can call it so, the story lies more within the escalation through the defcon stages until you inevitably reach an all-out nuclear world war, perfectly trimmed down to a strategic point of view w/o any fancy graphics. Like I said, not much of a story in common sense but it gets through to you. Story isn't as important as gameplay to me. What good is a perfect story if gameplay is so ruined that you quit playing? The other way around tho, who cares about a bad story or none at all if the game plays well and keeps you entertained for days, weeks or even years? Often enough I catch myself just skippting through any storytelling elements just to play the game.

While it's true with the BIOS limit, these 2TiB are a thing of the past. GUID partition tables, as compared to MBR, allow for bigger HDDs and also more than 4 partitions. Win7 and 8 natively support this and even Vista could be enabled to work with GPT, so the OS side is prepared, and modern BIOS all have EFI support, so even on this side, there's a native or at least additional support of internal drives bigger than 2 TiB. WD made use of this a few years ago already with the release of 2.5 and 3 TB drives, clearly crossing the 2TiB limit. even so, my 2TB drive lies well below the 2TiB limit... decimal vs binary advertising gimmicks ftw. Of course I could have replaced that drive by now, but before I do it, I wanna make sure that it's really broken and not just some weird hickup going on, that's why I run thru all these testing and experimenting. By tonight or at leat tomorrow morning (CET), when swiping the drive clean and partitioning it again is done, I'm another step closer to what hopefully is the solution of the problem. And if it really comes down to getting the drive replaced, so be it then... but like I said, only if this turns out to be the only solution

pastels. ricers or detroit muscle?

because the problematic rig is my gaming machine and there isn't a real compatibility. I know I can emulate a Win surface via wine, but it's results vary and are, for most hardware-demanding games, not satisfactory, at least not consistent. anyways, I was a bit quick with my judgement. again, this only solved the problem for a short period of time. I'm fed up and now writing zeroes to the drive and see what happens then... long process tho, 14hrs in, still some 6 hrs to go.