Nivash

I think this trailer looks promising, and not just because of the graphicsfest. If you take a closer look at it they kind of made a big point abut how the half-way mark - the part where the group is heading towards the factory - is completely unscripted player-wise. Flanking the enemy jeep by blowing out a piece of wall, stealing said jeep to destroy a truck and then ordering the squad to suppress the enemies at the house so the player could flank are all stuff that they went out of their way to demonstrate as being due to player choice, not from scripting.

Of course, we can't tell from the trailer what other choices - if any - there are for the player to make and, granted, it's still a just a big corridor - if a wide one. But it's clearly a step in the right direction from BF3's SP and DICE clearly wants to point that out.

Sure, in the end most of the trailer consists of scripted events. But that's to be expected. It's a trailer after all and those always prefer scripts to non-scripts because they are more cinematic. They're also part of the prologue which are more scripted in most games in order to walk the player through the games' paces after which it can open up more in later levels. So I'm cautiously optimistic. Besides, MP will be where the real action is as always - and I have very much enjoyed the direction DICE has evolved BF3 through its DLCs and see no reason why that won't carry on into BF4. If BF4 turns out to be the perfect version of BF3s vision, I'm sure I'll love the game even more than I loved BF3.

Oh, and to pre-emptively debunk any cries of EA being stupidly PC by including female soldiers: newsflash people, the Pentagon just ended the ban on women in combat roles.

At this point it would be anachronistic of DICE to not include female soldiers in a game set in the near future.

@pleasedaddyno: Ha! So true. That's precisely how far I got with either show.

So X-files get my vote. I never really liked shows that get convoluted for the sake of being convoluted. Felt the same way about Lost after the first seasons. The monster-of-the-week episodes were my favorite part of X-files, although I admit the big conspiracy had some draw too in the earlier seasons.

Battlefield 3. CTF in the new expansion is crazy awesome. Complete chaos, just like I like it.

I'd say it depends on your economic situation. If you can afford a PC this year and a PS4 next year, get a PC now. If whatever decision you make locks you in for three to four years, hold off. We don't even know yet what Microsoft brings to the table but should have that information in a few weeks to months.

At least wait until after E3 in that case. Then we should know for sure what the console launch windows will look like.

Besides Giantbomb? The Swedish version of Gamereactor (which probably isn't much use to you if you don't speak Swedish) for general gaming news, PC Gamer for PC news. PCG have some pretty entertaining feature articles too even if you aren't that into PC gaming. Just ignore the current crop of platformwarz news (I swear, PC gamers can be some of the worst platform warriors out there) and you'll be fine.

My gamertag "Nivash" isn't funny to anyone but me because of how I came up with it. Way back in 1999 when Age of Empires II was released I wanted a royal nick. So I took the Hindu God "Vishnu" (who had featured in a Donald Duck comic at the time, I was like 11 back then) rearranged a few words and created "Shuvin" to which I added "IV" for some royal flare. This was my nick for several years until I played Age of Wonders a few years later and for some reason wanted a more "evil" nick for the evil races. So I rearranged everything again to create "Nivash" which sounded more menacing. I also inverted IV to VI because why the hell not. Over the years I eventually dropped IV and VI while moving more exclusively towards Nivash. I've been using it ever since because I like continuity and it's always available.

Ok, so what's so funny about that?

Well, for years I never bothered to Google any of them. But sometime in the mid aughts I did and to my astonishment, I wasn't actually the first to come up with them: both are actual Indian first names. There are close to 100 000 hits on Google for Nivash coupled with different surnames, including a Nivash Electric Company. So through some linguistic coincidence that might actually involve someone else in India using the same method I did hundreds of years ago, for close to 15 years my go-to nicknames, as a Swedish gamer, have been the Indian equivalents of Steve and Dave.

Personally, I find that hilarious.

I used to play a lot of CoD until MW2 but I just felt burned out by MW3 and BLOPS2. Anyway, I can both see why they would do this but I also don't understand it all all.

Let me explain: customization is fun. I customized the hell out of all the CoDs I played. Kick-ass personal playercard, emblems built from the ground up, lots of thought given to what camo for what weapon, the works. It's because it allows you to express a personality in-game. This is me: I designed this playercard, this is my emblem and there's nothing else out there like it, this is the gun camo I worked for hours to unlock. I've been doing something similar with the character camos and dogtags on BF3.

But buying that is not the same at all. What the hell are you expressing? Look at me, I bought this for 160 MSP so I can look just the same as the thousands of other people who also bought it? Where's the fun in that?

Wow, that's harsh man.

So all it took for her was seeing her ex and "discovering" she still had feelings? If that's all it takes for her to abandon her "strong feelings" for you then she's clearly not emotionally mature enough for you to stay friends. Nothing good will come of it. Just cut the ties and move on is my advice, and don't feel like a bad guy for taking a tough stance. The fallout is on her, not you.

If I'm also allowed to psychologize a bit I'd say that the combination of such quick swings of affection, a history of self-harm and the fact that she stills wants to be friends points to emotional instability which is just a fancy way of saying "she doesn't know what she wants". The problem is that such people are often impulsive and have a tendency towards emotionally manipulating others whether they are aware of it or not. If you feel up to it, take a look at your history together and see if she's done something like that before. If yes, then run for the hills, man!

@the_laughing_man:

1) Yes, that gives you trade routes which boosts your income. You don't need roads to resources as long as they are within your territory. Apart from that, at times it can be useful to build roads to strategic areas if you want to be able to transport military units quickly or to friendly city states if they request them.

2) Yes, and no. There are a limited number scattered throughout the map and they in turn, once developed with the correct structures, produce a set number of available resources for use that you can see at the top bar. But once you have them they don't go away. If, say, you used a horse to build a mounted unit that horse resource with be available to you again if the unit is killed. This means that if a horse tile gives you two horse resources then it can support two simultaneous mounted units, but this can be replenished indefinitely.

3) There's no direct answer to this as it depends on the wonder and the city. Wonders should be matched with what the city does: wonders producing gold in economic cities, culture wonders in culture cities, military wonders in military cities and so forth. But you need to balance this with how long it takes to produce them to avoid some other player building them first. This often results in production heavy cities often becoming wonder heavy. Use Great Engineers to build wonders in appropriate cities that otherwise wouldn't be able to build them on their own.

4) It depends on the situation. Puppets produce less unhappiness but doesn't allow you to customize their build orders. Personally I usually make a lot of puppet cities during military campaigns to avoid a happiness crash and then convert them back into annexed cities once I have the happiness to support them. But at times you need to annex cities immediately if they are strategically important to the campaign.

5) Again, depends on your overall strategy and the civilization you play. I say befriend as many as you can and conquer as many as you can afford, but avoid conquering too many unless you're going for a military victory since conquering city states turn opposing civilizations and other city states against you. Also keep an eye on the relationship between the city state and neighboring civs. If they are friendly towards one another you can spark an unwanted war. If you attack protected city states this is all but guaranteed.

I took a closer look at Contrapest and it's really quite nifty. From what I gathered from their web page and this award page it basically works by accelerating the natural atresia of the female rats ovaries, causing infertility. It's probably completely tasteless and since it has no ill effects, rats won't be able to outsmart it the way they do with conventional poisons. I can't find any information on possible immunity to the active agent (4- vinylcyclohexene diepoxide) so I guess that question remain unanswered for now. But if there is no natural immunity to it out there already then it's possible that evolutionary adaptation won't be that big a problem. OF course, if there is some small cadre that actually is immune then the rat population could rebound over several years after which Contrapest would be essentially useless. Guess we'll just have to wait and see. Another issue was that the rats need to eat quite a lot of the agent for it to fully work, but I guess that's a question for the NY authorities that buy the thing.

The pages also pointed out something that's also quite important: compared to conventional toxins, this method is perfectly harmless to everyone but fertile female rats. It doesn't travel up the food chain, it doesn't really affect any other species than rats at the doses they use and it won't contaminate the environment or water sources. So there's that.