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As will be Russia. But of course America is front and centre despite only having boots on the ground for less than a year of the conflict. I'm not going to say more as I don't want to send this off into an unwelcome direction, but things like this don't exactly give me the impression they'll be treating the conflict with the respect it deserves.

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html Don't know what the difference is between the free version and pro, but the free version has served my needs. Won't do anything to stop the crashes, but it's probably more useful to you than checking the temperature in the BIOS. You should at least be able to identify what exactly is overheating and proceed from there.

2K are set to release the Bioshock Collection pack in about 2 weeks. This includes remastered versions of Bioshock 1 & 2. If you own copies of either title, you're entitled to a free upgrade to the remastered version. This is supposed to happen automatically if you have them in your steam account. All fine and dandy if you own them on steam, right? What about boxed retail copies? Turns out 2K have you covered. Bioshock 2 will activate directly by entering the GFWL code into the "Activate a Product on Steam" dialog in the Steam client. (When I did this a couple of years back, I also got the Minerva's Den DLC, which was a nice surprise.) For Bioshock 1, you'll need to contact 2K support (http://support.2k.com/). Include a picture of the Installation DVD and the Manual, showing the activation key, and request an activation key for steam. I did this last night, and received a key a few hours ago. All in all, I'm rather impressed with 2K on this one. They could easily have charged an upgrade fee (such as Square-Enix did with Deus Ex Human Revolution) but they haven't and that deserves recognition.

A true legend. Most have probably seen Charlie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but Blazing Saddles and The Producers are must-watch films too imo.

And no blast processing... Seriously though, it was the first console I owned, after many years with a ZX Spectrum +2 and an Amiga 500. To this day, Nintendo consoles are the only ones I buy. They're never as powerful as the competition, but my god, Nintendo know how to make first-party titles. My nephew spent a couple of weeks with my parents a short while ago. To keep him occupied I lent him my RetroPi. He had everything from the 8-16bit eras available to him, but he spent about 90% of the time on the SNES. That pretty much says it all for me.

Changes like that really do make me wonder. I'd have to go with your theory as to why they were cut, although (since Elite's already been brought up), with far-away stuff, you do get opportunities for weird emergent game play such as the Hutton Truckers and the Fuel Rats. To be fair, there are things in Elite that were promised at launch that are still not in the game. As a veteran of the prequels I most miss landing on atmospheric planets, the realistic solar system view, and Thargoids. All of which are still 'on the list' as Frontier like to put it. Frontier have also done a pretty reasonable job of explaining their reasoning for why certain things were cut, or ended up in the game in a different form. Elite is not a particularly deep game, that is a fair criticism, but neither were the prequels when it came right down to it. It is a worthy sequel though when judged against the earlier games, and there is some depth to be found if you're willing to look for it. I've spent the last month on a 60kly round-trip to fix a travelling starport halfway across the galaxy, and coming back with supplies in the hope of helping to set up a permanant outpost in the area. After that, it's back to pootling round the Formadine Rift, assuming anything announced at Gamescom doesn't alter that plan. Getting back to NMS, if they decide to charge for things that were assumed to be in the game at launch, they might well burn through whatever goodwill there still remains in their community. You've only got to look at the reaction that happened on these very forums when the idea of paid DLC was floated for a preview, and the KSP community never gave me the impression they'd engage in shenanigans like DDOSing reviews they didn't like, or death threats (credible or otherwise) over delays.

In much the same way as Spore. Not so much what the devs set out to do, rather what they ended up doing from what I can see. There are no procedural atoms in NMS. Now, most of us probably never took that statement seriously, but nonetheless, that's what they stated in promo trailers. Now Hello Games want to whistle innocently and act like they've no idea where people got these wild expectations from. I steadfastly refuse to board hype trains for games, but even I find that a little disagreeable. People wanted what they were offered in the promo trailers. Trailers which seem to show things that are not in the game, but are nonetheless still being used to sell the game on steam. It's worth reading that reddit post. (https://archive.is/V5Zns) I was going to post it myself, but JoseEduardo beat me to it. EDIT: I do still plan on buying the game, but it probably won't be any time soon seeing as every evasive non-answer to a seemingly simple yes/no question I see coming out of Hello Games cuts the price I'm willing to pay for the game in half. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if I tweeted Sean Murray asking if there was joystick support in the game and got a cryptic tweet about using a Wii balance board in response. Oh well, roll on Winter Sale 2018.

Hadn't heard of her till now, looking at her wikipedia entry she looks like an interesting figure. I'll be watching this at some stage for sure.

That's pretty much my take on it too. The devs could go on to have good careers a politicians if the company tanks, judging from the evasiveness of their answers to direct questions. I'll be waiting for a few patches and a sale personally. It's a pretty game to be sure, but I haven't seen anything that'd demand that I play the game right this minute, and I'm already pretty well served in the exploration department with Elite:Dangerous.

Dumb question but, asides from all the technical issues, do we really want to go sticking fission reactors on planes? What exactly happens when a fission reactor has a high-speed encounter with the ground? (This may explain why I'm unqualified to write for the BBC.)

I'm not a huge fan of racing games, so I'd probably go for one of the Battlefield games.

I'm certainly anticipating it. I'm not sure excited is the word, but I've been playing Civ since the Amiga days, and I still have a ritual of playing at least one max-length game of the latest iteration of the franchise every Christmas. At a certain point it's just become about updated graphics and tweaks to the rulesets. I still love Civ, but it's more a nostalgia game for me at this point. What they've announced about the changes that they'll be making in 6 sound interesting, but I'm not expecting it to completely reignite my passion for the franchise. I expect to get a couple of hundred hours playtime out of it, and it'll sit in my steam library, much the same as 5. And I'll be perfectly happy with that. (As long as they do some more of the CIVAnon videos, that is.)

I played ETS2 a bit a few years ago. For what it offers in terms of gameplay, it punches quite a bit above its weight. My only real complaint was it didn't (and still does not) include Ireland - there's something to be said for being able to stomp around your own home turf. (There were mods available, but the community were told Ireland was on the way and the mod makers dropped the mod.) Its quite a relaxing game, haven't played it in a while, but I did pick up the expansions during the sale because I could see myself picking it up again at some point.

That's one I am very seriously considering. Its at a very attractive price, and I remember people raving about it at the time.

Still have the CD's for all of them somewhere Already have Banished, and I share your opinion. Invisible Inc. is high on my shortlist. I'll be waiting for the GOTY before I get Fallout 4 (also I'm still meandering through New Vegas, so I'm good on the Fallout front for a while yet.) I've 102 games on my wishlist. Problem is trying to balance a sweet spot pricewise against the likelyhood I'll actually play the game before the next sale hits. I've still got physical copies of games that are ostensibly still on 'the list'. Out There and Neo Scavenger look interesting. Grim Dawn looks interesting. I have some of the Rainbow 6 sequels on the wishlist, really enjoyed the original back in the day. Prison Architect, Factorio and Supreme Commander I already own. I have the original Shogun on CD somewhere. I'm tempted by the Total War games every time they go on sale but never pull the trigger. It definitely looks interesting. Thanks for all the suggestions! I've grabbed the Monkey Island Special Edition bundle, Telltale Game of Thrones, Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls 2 and Stardew Valley so far.

Yeah that's an old one. Seen it a couple of times in the wild myself. I had a neighbour that ran an open wireless network called 'private do not connect'. Took me 5 minutes to change his ssid to 'use a password then'. Even WPA2 isn't bulletproof security-wise, but if you're running an open network you're just begging for it to be abused.

So it's that time of year again. My wallet is ready, but with 192 games in my account, I'm starting to run out of games I actually want to buy. Anyone got any recommendations they'd like to share?

I own the boxed retail copy which came with red/cyan glasses. Press Shift+3+d for awesomeness. It's a fairly short but interesting game, and seeing that they're giving it away for free, go get it!

Figured it must be something like that.

(Wow 10 people in a class is tiny, don't think I was ever in a class that had less than 25 in it.) Sorry to hear about your circumstances, I went through my entire academic life and only knew of one student who lost their life in that period and, even at that I didn't know them personally. That's not to say it didn't affect me, their death was utterly tragic and, worst of all still goes unpunished to this day. These things are orders of magnitude worse when it's someone closer to you, and while it's important to mourn, it is equally as important to realise that life is for the living. I'm glad you've been able to find a moment of levity at this dark time.

I'd second the recommendation for the Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS X. Bought mine about a year ago for Elite:Dangerous, it's served me very well. There are better offerings if you're willing to pay of course, but price-wise it's a winner for me.

It's a horrible thing to have happened. I have other thoughts on the subject, but they're not appropriate for the forum. The best thing any individual can do in response to this is keep living your life, and keep seeking happiness. And give someone a hug today. It won't save the world, but it certainly won't hurt.

You do know that in the real world nothing exists in a vacuum, right? Things affect other things. It's kind of how culture operates.

The thing I find most impressive about Q is how little screen time he actually got, compared to how iconic his character is - 8 TNG, 1 DS9, 3 VOY - 12 episodes total. Every time I see John de Lancie in another role I immediately think of Q.

People have done many things just as elaborate for giggles. Also, you do have to bear in mind crop circles have been a thing for decades. One-upmanship between circlemakers is the most likely explanation as to why designs like these appear.