JediMaster

As a big Wing Cmdr and X Wing/TIE Fighter fan (I even liked WC Prophecy, despite its lack of all the characters we really liked), I tried hard to get into X3. I got the feeling I was in a big sandbox but I had no idea where to go. I spent a couple of hours with it and finally gave up. Unless X3 TC provided more of a "tutorial" beginning than the original X3 did, I get the feeling it's one of those games that are fun if you know it but if you don't the barrier to entry is too high for casual players. Like Falcon 4 was...only reason I still fly F4 is after 11 years of flying it I just KNOW it.

To be clear, advanced shaders are DX10-based, so if you don't have Win Vista or 7 and a DX10-capable video card, you won't see that. Anyway, I plan on getting FE2 because TK deserves it (and so do I!)

It was quite good. However, I'm not going to go see every film released in 3d in 3d. It costs too much. Only for special films like this will I do that.

Still no ETA?

I can just imagine an entire musical number devoted to "Put...the candle...back."

L4D2 is good, improves upon the original, but in some ways is less impressive because it breaks little new ground. Well, except the melee stuff which is pretty fun. Arma2 came out this summer, a great game after a few patches have put down the worst bugs. FEAR2 came out in Feb I think, good game, but somehow fails to achieve what the original did despite looking better. I didn't get MW2 because I don't play MP that's not coop vs bots (ie SP with other humans on my side, like L4D), so $60 for that short SP game isn't worth it. I still don't have CoD4 or CoD:WaW because of the same thing, I'm waiting for them to be cheap. DCS: Black Shark was released on DVD this spring, but was technically released digitally the end of last year (although I think few people bought it then), so you could put that in the running. SF2 was released around the same time, with SF2V/E/I this year, but they're also improvements upon SF2, which is in turn an improvement over WoI, which is in turn... For driving fans, Race On is good, but Race 06/07/GTR Evo/STCC/Race On is pretty much like the SF2 series...each release is standalone yet will merge with the previous. Each comes with a new set of cars and tracks as well as many from previous releases if you only bought the one. I'm trying to remember what else came out this year... Anyway, I'm not sure what I'd consider the best!

Since the in-laws are going to NM for New Years (yeah...really), there's no one to watch the toddler, so we'll be staying at home as we usually do and just celebrate privately after the ball drops...hours after the toddler is in bed.

Sure, I just did that yesterday. The field in the machine is calibrated especially to scramble these things. It has to be a moving field, a static field like one of those uber magnets likely generates will wipe SOME but not all. I once tried a heavy magnet on a VHS tape, just put the tape on top of it for a few minutes...I couldn't see a single effect. Then I started moving the tape and magnet all around each other like an electron orbiting a proton...the longer I did it, the more the tape degraded.

That's why I bring my old HDDs to work now...we have an industrial degausser here that's certified for destruction of classified drives, tapes, and disks. It not only trashes the media, the motors in the HDD no longer even work properly! You can hear the stuff get thrown around inside when the capacitors discharge and the strong magnetic field is briefly generated. No one's getting anything off my old stuff.

Tom Cruise is going to be in some action flick with Cameron Diaz next year. As for Holmes, apparently all the Doyle-heads think the character is close to the books, even though the story is original.

I got my house, but if we'd known we'd have lived there longer than 5 years (the market was booming big time when we'd decided to get our "real" house, so we're still in the "started") we'd have had them make multiple changes to the layout so it would've been better for long-term living. My daughter was born last year. That's pretty much the sum of the great things that happened in the past 10 years for me. Oh, PC tech has progressed and things look better, even though I think overall I preferred the games released in the 90s as far as how they played...last X Wing game was 1999!! So I have no fondness for this decade at ALL other than my daughter.

This is certainly the preeminent problem facing the Middle East today.

I think we can argue that the years since its retirement have definitely sucked!

I still remember her in Clueless, before she went blond. Of course, King of the Hill will never die.

Iron Man was definitely a surprise hit for me, I had pretty low expectations beforehand. Of course, now I have high expectations for IM2...

Sometimes it feels more like mods being released, as they model whatever they feel most like doing without any other particular rationale.

Sorry, but Fixed Wing Flight never gave me anything for my birthday, so I'm not about to reciprocate!

Whether the game runs in DX9 or DX10 is determined by the .ini file. It was probably changed by the patch, you'll have to change it back if you want to run it in DX9.

Apparently it's a 5 hr test flight, so it's still up there.

Leisure Suit Tiger Woods works, actually.

Well...it certainly sounds fitting for Stalin's end!!

Repair usually works fine, not sure why you're getting this problem. Are you stripped down to one DVD and one HDD only? More than that can cause issues with selecting the proper boot device, so make sure you have no USB HDDs hooked up or flash drives or anything.

FYI, 12/15 is the date I've seen. They're doing their best to fly now because I'm sure they need it to fly before the end of the year or the "analysts" will say "mean things" and cause their stock to drop.

I could see perhaps nuking Stalingrad, but killing Stalin wouldn't be easy thanks to his paranoia keeping only the most loyal close to him.

Yes, back in the Win98 days! However, I think it still has a pretty active modding community last I heard.