Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Update here:  http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/12/extending-life-of-my-gaming-pc-update.html Further update here:  http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/12/pc-update-3-ssd-caching-software.html Yet another update:  http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/12/pc-update-final-piece-of-puzzle.html I realised it was time to upgrade my gaming PC when I read the minimum specifications for Far Cry 4 : Win7 64bit Intel i5-750 4Gb Ram Radeon HD5850 1Gb  I have a marginally faster i5-760 but otherwise this describes my PC perfectly.  Very few games have such steep system requirements yet but I suspect that FarCry 4 and the even more demanding Assassin's Creed Unity may be the fore runners of a new wave of hardware hungry games. For the last few years system requirements have been held artificially low by the need to support last gen consoles and the 32 bit memory limit. Now Xbox one and PS 4 are firmly established and the 32 bit limit has been breached. So

My trusty Radeon HD5850 has served me well since 2011 but the time has come for an upgrade. I have long been a fan of Tom's Hardware recommendations and the Nvidia GTX970 which offers great performance  with low power consumption is tempting me at the moment..The   video card performance hierarchy chart at the back of Tom's guide sparked a bit of nostalgia so I have used the chart to plot the cards I have used over the years to power my gaming hobby. Here is my personal video card history (all credit to Toms Hardware guide  http://www.tomshardware.com/t/graphics/ for providing such a useful chart): The image is large so be prepared to zoom in and pan around a bit.  EDIT: Graphic now fixed. It was harder than I thought it would be to convert a large table in Word into a picture file.  The dates are the years that I recall acquiring each card which is not always the year that model came out. Some allowance has to be made for hazy recollection but I thi

Hostile Waters: A bout of Nostalgia cause me to drag out this overlooked classic from yesteryear. Medal of Honour Warfighter: I will generally play any shooter good or bad but I am struggling to finish this one. The execution is competent if unoriginal but to be honest the game feels over the top racist to me. Brutal Legend:  I played a couple of hours of this was was reasonably impressed but other games have since distracted me. Enslaved: Odyssey to the West - An unexpected pleasure a short third person action adventure with a good story and fun gameplay. As a bonus the PC version comes with an extra adventure "Pigsy's Perfect 10" which has a completely different play style based more on stealth and guile than strength and athleticism. The only downside is that your sidekick for the main campaign is an annoying beyond belief at times and does everything possible to put themselves in dangerous situations which you are left to sort out. The fact that this sidekick

I am trying to figure out why I hated the ending of Mass Effect 3 so much. (Spoilers abound). I played the game several years after release and I had the benefit of the extended edition patch so I didn't feel the pressure to engage in forced multi-player or to buy unwanted dlc that so incensed early players. Merely by playing the game the way I wanted to I managed to amass a high enough score to unlock all endings.  I can understand why the perception of forced dlc and forced multiplayer upset people when the game was initially released but these were not my concerns. My dislike is more fundamental and has to do with the ending itself. It made me think about the relationship between games and stories and about the conflict between narrative and agency. Mass Effect is a monumental role playing game series that offers the player many choices about how they develop their character and how they interact with the game world. This gives the player a tremendous feeling of age