Zekhariah

Baldur's Gate; the extended edition release (which I picked up) was the catalyst. I'd not played the 1st game (100+hr into the sequel though), and at the time I had no desire to jump into another shooter or break away from the top-down action stuff I am into.

I went that direction with a lot of the games that were really positiviely received at the launch of the current consoles (had not been into videogames at the time). It turned out to be a very poor way to spend time, and led to a lot of games being abandoned after the first 30 minutes. Playing a 2006ish era x360 game is rough when you played a much more polished version of the same thing on PC in 2011.

The main stuff I tried included: Turok, Killzone 2, Ico and the Shadow of the Colossus, Jak and Daxter HD, Uncharted 1, Timeshift, Sonic All-Stars racing (very rough compared to transformed), Halo OSDT, Saints Row 2, Dirt 2 (menus.....), Kameo, and Heavenly Sword.

Ludonarrative-dissonance kind of bugs me, because it seems to be frequently utilized by folks that would not say anything like that in a normal circumstance. Which means that it ends up feeling like a canned sound-bite even when it was probably coined with good intentions.

Hardcore is another one that is really troublesome, but that is more of a personal distaste at the existence of a gamer culture marketing setup. Marketing targeted at a caricature of a sub-group is kind of nakedly evil as it involves devaluing that sub-group in the eyes of the rest of society while performing a really lame sort of fan-service to a even smaller fraction of that group. E.g. Mountain Dew and Doritos cross-promotions with Call of Duty / Xbox put out the sort of stereotype that is not flattering at all.

@artemesia: I do not think it is necessarily fair to judge based on how far along someone is in terms of having physical alterations vs. not doing it at all. It takes it to a weird place of judging how good someone is at passing. So on an individual basis I can see people using it for their personal acceptability, but on a broader argument I don't think it can be relied on as a talking point. I'm fairly sure I would be a bit put-off regardless, but its one of those things that is so far afield from my everyday that it is difficult to really consider.

@osaladin: Yeah, it gets a bit weird when you start looking at either movement. This item with Penny Arcade coming up did make me look up a bit more about the state of what is considered acceptable vs. not within the community. It seemed like there was >50% consensus that being straight male, but not into trans-women is considered bigoted as that would be equivalent to making the same sort of statement Gabe did.

Which I can understand and completely get behind the logic of; clearly appending anything beyond a individuals personally chosen label is grossly disrespectful to their identity. But on a personal level I know that many people, including myself, would consider someone who is anatomically same sex to be out no interest in terms of a traditional romantic relationship. Such preferences do ignore the other person's consideration however, but on some level I feel like it is unrealistic that all acknowledgement of someone's physical state is to be excluded from consideration.

I would probably go Ico, as it seems to be a long term classic if you are going to the backlog to have a bit more reference in how games have developed.

My personal experience (playing NES to PS1, missing PS2-X360/PS3 until 2011 or so) has been that a lot of the hyped older games from this generation are not very fun to play compared to the more recent titles. Like early ones especially are remembered fondly for including some action or another that was new, but this generation was so focused on polish and incremental fixes that going back to it ends up being a bit unpleasant.

@scarecrow1991:

This might be an aside point, but H87 motherboards and Intels new generation CPUs came out recently. This year's equivalent would be a i7-4770. They seem to be the same price, but the newer one is faster (and comes with GRID 2 for whatever reason).

If your case supports mATX and ATX, I would suggest going with an ATX board because the larger size allows for more expansion options. It does not really get you a lot extra to use a small motherboard in a large case. At a casual glance, I'd go with a ASRock Fatality.

This would net a slightly better audio output than a lot of boards. ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, Intel, and MSI are all reasonable choices though. Note that 4XXX CPUs are used with H87 motherboards and 3XXX CPUs are would be the previously mentioned Z77 types. They are not compatible unfortunately. Newegg has some pretty nice deals on Intel parts right now - seems like a good time to buy.

@extomar: True, but I think you can kind of figure PS4 is where all the Japanese, indie, and action-adventure stuff will eventually land. And Xbox should end up with a few more FPS/TPS games if the first party trends hold out.

Probably best buy since they seem to be the best at local pricing (I don't really want one at launch). But my preference is to go with a Costco bundle, just depending on when that becomes an option.

I theoretically have a 7MB/s down and 0.768MB/s up, but in practice I max out at 0.9MB/sec down. I'm sort of curious if the requirement is based on a not-dial-up thing or a true raw bandwidth requirement. But not enough if any sort of streaming / other internet usage is going on in my house, so it is probably a no-go most of the time.

City only has a pop of 250k though, and the local 100mi area or so is only 8million people or so

@brendan In the states internet varies by area depending on where development was at when the initial subsidized lines were put down. In my area very small town that the telecoms do not care about are able to get fiber to the home, because local infrastructure supports it (fiber is also laid in my area, but left dark because it is a larger market that already has traditional gen1 DSL and cable). It is difficult to draw a generalization across the US, especially when areas with theoretically good connectivity might be bottlenecked further along to the point where the practical performance is bad (like how cable shares the local area). On the West coast I actually have more trouble with power than internet, since that is super janky and old.