Using an image of a historical battle reenactment society was a masterful touch - it adds a host of nice little nuances to the visual metaphor.

Excellent explanation. Thanks for taking the time to type it all out.

Note that Ness82 makes absolutely no mention of the school's excellent Quidditch team. They're not allowed to talk about it in front of muggles.

Mandatory Penny Arcade reference:

The weekly dose of Pocket Princess is a bit of a tradition around here. Don't knock it.

*foomp*
Vacuum Plant Worker: Another child at station six! What's your name son?
Unnamed Child: Billy, sir.
Vacuum Plant Worker: Now there Billy, didn't your mother teach you not to play in the vacuum ice box?
Billy: Yes, sir.
Vacuum Plant Worker: That's right. Now run along home before I give you a clip round the ear!
Billy…

Like many things in life, how much having a baby sucks depends on the resources you have available. If you've got multiple people who can trade off parenting duties and space and time for the other(s) to get a little R&R in, then yes, it's not so bad.

Absolutely true.

Upgrading your pistol tech just received a big boost in priority.

If the anti save-scumming feature was your only deal-breaker - rejoice! The expansion's adds an option to reset the RNG seed whenever you load a save:

Scrabble Extreme™: Now with Iron Man Mode

Reminds me of Marathon 2 and the geometry tricks possible with its 2.5D game engine. There were a couple of multiplayer maps that deliberately exploited it to generate some trippy gameplay.

Fair points. Unfortunately that was all DLC content, and if (in one case post-release!) paid DLC is required to make your central story hang together, that's a major issue as well.

What you say is true, but I think that you're missing my point. I'm not concerned with whether or not it makes sense that Shepard and her allies were able to resolve the hitherto-irreconcilable conflict between synthetics and organics. My concern is that, in a trilogy of three Mass Effect games, there was essentially…

To be honest, the Red/Blue/Green bit isn't what killed the ending for me. This is grand-scale sci-fi; I'm OK with making some universe-altering decisions that make all my other choices pale in consequence, especially if the consequences of my prior choices have been showing up along the way. (Which they did. I was…

So, if I were to buy Forza 5, and exclusively play it by turning my car around and racing around the track in the wrong direction. . .

I'm not sure that $500 is a reasonable budget if you're looking to buy new; most gaming laptops start around $1000 and most non-gaming laptops simply don't have the graphics power to run modern games.

Exactly. There's some really interesting stuff going on at the top of the market right now, but for PC gamers on 1080p monitors (probably the most common resolution), there's not a lot of extra value in going above the 770/280X, both of which will max out the graphics settings on nearly all modern games.

Agreed. After the recent price drops, it looks like the trade-off will be slightly better performance per dollar (AMD) versus better stability/heat/noise (NVIDIA), with an interesting side-battle between Mantle/TressFX (AMD) and PhysX/G-Sync/Gamestream (NVIDIA).

FYI, NVIDIA pulled the trigger on price cuts yesterday. The GTX 770 dropped to $330: