What are you playing?

[gamer0004]

Thanks AEmer, yeah I've got intel and their site states a max of 90 celcius, I'm not sure about my NVidia card but I think if it stays under 80 it's okay. The CPU and GPU are idling around the 60 celcius mark. We have had a few days around the 28 celcius mark with not a lot of breeze. The good news is, the landlord's putting aircon in all the units. The bad news is, in my current financial position I don't know if I can afford to run it. *sighs*

Your Intel CPU _cannot_ handle 90 degrees celsius! It should hit at max about 70 degrees in full stress.

[AEmer]

Kevin Conroy is awesome. I recognized him the other day on the venture brothers (a satire of action cartoons), where he voices captain sunshine, who's interestingly a superman/bruce wayne spoof...

I just wrapped up Evil Genius. I'm feeling much more ambivalent about it now. There are some really dumb things going on here and there in the game that I don't like.

The first 10-20 hours are amazing, and a ton of fun, but it doesn't extend into the late game. It trails off and becomes...well...dumb.

In the end, the most effective strategy is to build your base with a labyrinth in front of it, composed exclusively of doors. To use no high-level military minions, unless you need them for a mission. To make various really counter-entuitive choices, like designing a trap to keep your enemies trapped without killing them, because then new enemies won't come.

These seem like bad things. Theres also a ton of things that make the problems you need to overcome in the game...well...not the problems you _want_ to overcome. The way they've gameified the game, that is, put in challenges, is quite plainly bad.

For instance, you have no concrete control over your minions, just your henchmen. This is fine. You can put your henchmen in a room and take them out when you need them - but you can't operate with multiple henchmen at once, and you can't use hotkeys for swapping between them, so you need to pause the game and do orders. That's dumb.

If all your guys are in the same place, and you can micromanage things by pausing and spending 5 minutes on every fight, and there exists and interface convention that lets you do the same thing in 20 seconds? That's a problem.

The fact that you can't control your minions is also fine. It's not a real time strategy game. But suppose your base is getting banged up by a team of soldiers and you want to go kill them with your 80 minions. If your military minions are just construction workers, mercernaries and guards, you can go to yellow alert, which will them all run to the armory. There you can have your henchmen waiting, and you can tell them to rouse nearby minions to form a group around them. The rousing has a quick cooldown, and with a couple of henchmen, you can easily form up a murder squad of a good size as your minions arm themselves.

Suppose, instead you had high level military minions. These don't need to arm themselves. So now, you need to send your henchmen accross the base and try to gather them manually, going from room to room, and getting a lot of science and social minions too. And the high level military minions are shoot on sight, so those outside your base are already dead.

Doing something that should be rewarding and useful, like getting more awesome minions, suddenly forces you to micromanage that much harder.

There's a ton of frustrating things like this, things where the game doesn't offer you the tools to deal with emergeancies, and you just have to sit around and hope that those 6 soldiers won't kill more than 80% of your (100) minions, because then you'll really be screwed....

....unless you build a base with a ton of doors in a maze, only go with guards and mercernaries, and make no traps.

Yeah, that's a lot of fun.

Overall, its a really fun game, but it really suffers by the late game from some criminal design paradigms that make me feel like the lead designer never really played the game much.

[AEmer]

Your Intel CPU _cannot_ handle 90 degrees celsius! It should hit at max about 70 degrees in full stress.

You know what cpu he runs how?

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Intel_Cor ... ifications

That's a core 2 duo. It goes to 100 degrees.

I mean, yeah, a cpu _shouldn't_ hit more than 70 degrees at full stress, but on some chips the thermal specs are higher. I can't be bothered to go look, but I shouldn't be surprised if some desktop intel chips handle 90 degrees fine, and that it isn't just their laptops

[Zaine]

I once years ago had the exact same problem with The Sims 1. The game would fail to recognise the disc being there so the only solution I had was to unistall it and then reinstall it. However I lost all my saves doing this and so had to start over.

[gamer0004]

Wait, he is running a mobile CPU? In that case never mind There is often a lot of confusion about max temperatures, as there is a difference between core temps and chip temps and all that jazz, so the max temps Intel prescribes are sometimes "too high" depending on how you're measuring the temps.

[bobby 55]

Wait, he is running a mobile CPU? In that case never mind There is often a lot of confusion about max temperatures, as there is a difference between core temps and chip temps and all that jazz, so the max temps Intel prescribes are sometimes "too high" depending on how you're measuring the temps.

It doesn't help that this is a an all-in-one either. It's a desktop, but I think it morphed from a laptop.

I downloaded a free temperature monitoring app coz I'm lazy. The idling temperature is a little high I think.

[Jonas]

How's it compare to Arkham Asylum?

Arkham Asylum is a little better but they're both very enjoyable games.

[bobby 55]

How's it compare to Arkham Asylum?

Arkham Asylum is a little better but they're both very enjoyable games.

Cheers Jonas, when I'm cashed up and can get my rig upgraded or replaced I'll give it a whirl. I coulda got it for $40 AU a few weeks ago too (with the discount on Steam for owning AA)...shit happens.

[bobby 55]

Yes I've doubled again. Apologies...again

So, STALKER has turned into a crashfest again. I'm currently trying to turn off the Brain Scorcher, however that might take some time as I rage quit again. I'll get back to it later and wrap it up, and in the mean time, to show I'm a complete idiot, I'll give CoP another whirl.

[AEmer]

Wait, he is running a mobile CPU? In that case never mind There is often a lot of confusion about max temperatures, as there is a difference between core temps and chip temps and all that jazz, so the max temps Intel prescribes are sometimes "too high" depending on how you're measuring the temps.

It doesn't help that this is a an all-in-one either. It's a desktop, but I think it morphed from a laptop.

I downloaded a free temperature monitoring app coz I'm lazy. The idling temperature is a little high I think.

I didn't actually know if it _was_ a mobile cpu Just saying that, unless you know what CPU it is, I'm not sure you can say that 90 degrees is too high for a certainty...

I mean, I could be totally mistaken, I just seem to recall some of the Intel CPU's from the last 5 years being able to go quite high.

[gamer0004]

A CPU that gets as hot as 90 degrees celsius under normal conditions (like playing a game, not stressing it with special software) is typically not a good thing, whether the specifications allow it or not. The CPU won't crash or burn immediately, but it will have a much shorter lifespan.

[AEmer]

A CPU that gets as hot as 90 degrees celsius under normal conditions (like playing a game, not stressing it with special software) is typically not a good thing, whether the specifications allow it or not. The CPU won't crash or burn immediately, but it will have a much shorter lifespan.

This is probably true, in the general case. My point is, would it be the case if someone was running, say, a Pentium D? A late-generation Conroe? Can you say for certain?

I don't know the answer to either question, mind you, but I do know that theres nothing inherently impossible about running silicon to 90 degrees without having anything fuse, ever.

[EER]

I'm playing Skyrim. Enjoying it so far (one hour into it).

[Jonas]

I thought it wasn't out until tomorrow?

[EER]

I thought so too, but my cousin kindly notified me that he had seen it in stores, so I checked it out and it was there

First impressions:
- It looks freaking awesome (on xbox no less). The animations are a bit odd sometimes, but not terribly so.
- There is just SO MUCH to do, I just finished a quest or two and am only in the first city but it appears that everyone has a quest for me OMG. I don't know if I'll ever get out of the city ...
- The plot so far is not really clear to me, well, I understand there is a civil war going on but I'm not sure who's on who's side and what's the point

Aanyway, back to playing