My biggest fear about having a voice protagonist was borne out in the presentation. When you have voiced dialogue, developers don’t want to “spoil” the voice over by actually letting the player see exactly what his or her character is going to say beforehand. So you obnoxious, “gist of” shortened versions like “No” ==…

I feel exactly the opposite, actually. Salvation wasn’t perfect, but it was at least a decently watchable movie. T3 is full of “dark moments” that are dumb for an ostensible science fiction movie and violate both of the first two movies both textually and spiritually. The “Judgment Day is unavoidable” business is…

I enjoyed Terminator Salvation, although it’s such a wildly different movie in terms of both story and tone that I sometimes have trouble remembering that it’s part of the franchise. T3, though, is a trainwreck, IMO. The plot is a pointless rehash of the first two, the acting is, at best, all over the map, and it…

There are. A lot of them basically just reenable the very functionality Microsoft disabled, though. Other than that, the only significant one is Rainmeter, which is a bit of a bear to set up properly, but nice once you do.

There’s a certain logic to that, though. If you’re the kind of user who would turn off automatic updates, you are hopefully familiar enough with the care and maintenance of your computer to at least keep things secure and up-to-date on your own. And that’s the intended audience for the Pro version of Windows.

They are not. Microsoft even pushed an update to Windows 7 that removed them, IIRC. They didn’t want to support them (making them a potential security risk), and saw them as competition to Windows 8’s live tiles.

Windows 8 already dropped DVD support, actually. If you’re playing DVDs in Windows 8, you’re already using third-party software. Nothing about that should change with Windows 10.

VLC is versatile, but of poor quality. The video and audio quality is uniformly poorer than a decent DirectShow filter setup using LAV filters, and doesn’t support bells and whistles like avisynth post-processing (which I use for frame interpolation).

Sure, you can open separate programs to monitor things, but that’s a bit kludgy and awkward if you’re planning to do so regularly. Even the much vaunted start screen live tiles introduced in Windows 8 are a poor solution: not only do you need to open the start screen to see them, but they’re sandboxed by the OS in…

I’m glad someone said it. VLC is play almost anything, but it’s neither as good at it as a good DirectShow setup, nor as extensible as one. I’m dreading the day when Microsoft finally kicks DirectShow to the curb entirely. The writing is certainly on the wall, given that they haven’t used it for Windows Media Player…

Media Player Classic uses Windows’s native DirectShow multimedia framework. DirectShow itself is just a framework: it requires decoders to be installed for every format you want to support. The issue here is that Microsoft is no longer providing the MPEG decoder needed to decode DVD video with Windows 10 itself. So…

Did Windows ever provide native Blu-Ray playback support? As far as I can remember, you’ve always needed some other software to play them.

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, though. Bethesda could be using it for publicity or some such. But given the date’s significance to the Fallout series, even if that does wind up being the release date, I wouldn’t say it amounts to much more than a decent guess.

Well, they were unpleasant and generally unlikable, but I wouldn’t call them the bad guys. They were at least grudgingly on board against the Enclave in Fallout 2.

This is actually close to what I always imagined feral ghouls to move like. They didn’t move that way in the first two games because the turn-based system didn’t really allow for that kind of movement to be expressed, and (I figured) in Fallout 3 and New Vegas because of the limitations of the engine at the time.

I kind of wish they weren’t using “the Commonwealth” as a name in Fallout 4 (I know it was actually first referred to as such in Fallout 3), actually. It’s a bit confusing, given the alternate history of the United States in the Fallout universe. In the 1960s, the U.S. was reorganized into a system of 13 regional…

I’d rather see a group that sticks closer to the original Brotherhood’s isolationist approach. The Fallout 3 Brotherhood of Steel was not only an in-name-only version, but was a terribly boring “generic good guys” faction.

My biggest concern about having a voice protagonist isn’t that Bethesda won’t provide different gender options, but that it’s going to have negative repercussions for the way the game isn’t written. The Fallout games are heavily scripted (I believe New Vegas still has the Guinness World Record for lengthiest video…

I’m still nervous. I still half expect Bethesda to drop the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system and VATS in favor of a more action-oriented approach. After they took a hacksaw to the mechanics of the Elder Scrolls games with Skyrim, I’m no longer sure I trust Bethesda to make an actual RPG.

I’m pretty sure Sunset Sarsaparilla is supposed to be a regional beverage that was only really popular in Nevada. It didn’t have any presence in California in the first two Fallout games, either.