Grumbel

I think it's pretty valid seeing as how so many fans were told from Mass Effect 1 when it was released that the games would become these complex stories involving your choices and each story wouldn't be the same.

The real problem here is that players spend an absurd amount of time dead, 

My last gen consoles are currently connected to a 14" Amiga monitor and the image is as crisp and sharp as ever. There is no need for HD when you don't blow up the image to 44".

The video was quite good in giving a quick explanation on how shadow maps work, it could however have been a bit clearer on why shadow maps end up aliased and thus answering the original question, i.e. the main reason why they are aliased isn't because they are rendered in lower resolution, but because they are rendered in ligthspace, not screenspace. Rendering them at a higher resolution can make the aliasing smaller, but it can't make it go away completely, as you always end up essentially stretching a lightspace image over the scene and depending from where you look at it, it can always be stretched out extremely and thus pixelate. The lightspace/screenspace aspects where demonstrated quite nicely in the beginning of the video, but then not really connected back in answering the original aliasing problem. The final graphic also obscures the issue, as it makes it look like the shadow is evenly distributed, while in reality the shadowmap gets stretched out onto the wall. That's also why shadows in raytracing look better, they are rendered in screenspace, thus there is no stretching and no aliasing.

Funny how this keeps coming back to shitty passwords. Like I said in my last post, there are steps Microsoft can take to make this process harder for the hacker (like limiting failed login attempts), but even with that this is still going to be an issue as long as people don't take their account security seriously.

I collected some mod tools at http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/dreamfall/ I don't know of any hi-res texture packs, that bit of modding that happened with the game was mostly just for-fun texture swap stuff and browsing through the data files to extract music and stuff.

Playing them in order of release is the best:
 
RE1, RE2, RE3, RE:CV, RE:0
 
I prefer RE1 over the RE1-remake on Gamecube, when you don't want to complete everything, RE3 and RE0 can be skipped as they don't add much to the overall story, they are just more of the same.
 
I consider the RE4 and RE5 to be essentially a separate series, while some characters are recycled the series had such a  drastic shift in gameplay and story that one can pretty much ignore everything that came previously and vice versa, RE4 and RE5 answer none of the open questions one might have had after RE:CV.
 
People claim that RE4(Wii) is the best version, as for the older games, the PS1 version will do.

anyone remember The Secret World? 

@Grumbel: Scripted events do not equal cutscenes.

Cutscenes generally invoke a shift in camera perspective, taking control away from the player and advancing the story that way. I wouldn't consider in-game plot points and dialogue to be cutscenes. There is only one cutscene Dead Space and it's at the very end, and it's used for a very specific purpose. The same with Dead Space 2. And once again in the F.E.A.R. games, everything is through your perspective.typ