Funny, "Sea Dogs: City of Abandoned Ships" is likely to be my only purchase this time around too. A tip of the hat to Treasure, who keeps up the "Where to find missing game manuals" GOGMix, for finding a manual for the expansion!

I've tried to play the base Sea Dogs in the past, but could never find so much as a list of command keys for it, much less a manual, rendering it unplayable.

Thanks for the advice, but it doesn't work very well. I imported my data while signed in, then used "My tags" to to exclude my "Owned" games, but it still lists a lot of the games that I own. I own over 500, so it would be a lot of work to do it manually; and all just because GOG hasn't go around to implementing either an easier to read & parse sales display list or a better, more flexible filtering system. Like I said I probably won't buy anything this sale because GOG doesn't make it easy enough for me to find game that interest me without having to weed through hundreds of games that have no interest for me. I have others things to which I want to devote that amount of time.

So funny story. I didn't want to make a new topic and usually there's a lot of hanging out in sale threads so you get to be harassed. You can tell I don't have any "computer" friends (in other words, if I told anyone else this story they'd think I was speaking Swahili) so you all get subjected to it.

Yesterday I cracked open my case and did a bit of dusting. I even popped the GPU out of the slot and moved around a few power supply cords. When I go to fire up a game last night, my fan is going NUTS. I'm finally getting around to finishing up the first Witcher, and I'm near positive I've never heard the fan do this before. I start to second guess myself and think maybe it has but I really know it hasn't. Plus, there's no way this game should tax my system so much (right?).

To make matters worse, I recently installed Afterburner. So I Alt-Tab, start it up and see that one of my cores is at 100%. A bit of digging around and I eventually figure out this is okay and probably not the issue. I think maybe Win 7 reinstalled my GPU drivers because I popped the card out, so I uninstall my drivers, delete a few of driver programs from program files and do a clean reinstall. I was hoping the "automatic" Win 7 driver install (if it even happened) over my existing drivers maybe messed something up, and so the game wasn't using the GPU anymore (I know, I'm reaching here).

Still the fan freaks out. I mean, I can barely hear sound over this jet engine vacuum in my computer case. So I crack open the case to see if maybe I messed up airflow or see if I should do some dusting of an enormous bunny that clogged up the works somewhere.

Seems like there's nothing too egregious or glaringly wrong. When I twist off the CPU fan to see if I should dust off the heat sink, I feel a little wiggle. Huh, is that normal? There's a bit of "play" on the heatsink. I wiggle a few of the "pegs" that connect it to the motherboard and a couple feel tight, but a couple feel loose. I "open" and "close" them a few times, move the pin up and down and finally feel that satisfying "snap" as it drops into place on the motherboard. LOL, at least two of my heat sink pegs must have popped up from the motherboard when I popped the GPU into its PCI slot earlier in the day (pushing down on the GPU "over there" must have caused the peg to pop up and out).

I pop them all open (or closed - who knows - maybe I never locked them last time I mucked about with my CPU heatsink) and I push them all down until I hear that click from each one in turn. No more wiggle in the heat sink, it's nice and snug against my mobo / CPU.

Restart computer, fire up game, The Witcher is now totally quiet, all is right in my computer's world again. I don't think my CPU temps ever got too high and if they did it would have been over the course of under an hour.

And that's the story of "Why Ixamyakxim Will Be Reapplying Thermal Compound to His CPU Tonight" (Right? If there was wiggle room between the CPU and heatsink I should probably put on a fresh blob shouldn't I?)

In regards to Yacht Games and the recent of jacking up the price "because of all the free content that was added" proving that it's not really free content has given me the resolve to commit to memory the names of principal individuals involved and to never purchase anything that has any involvement of any those said principals or Yacht Games. I wonder how "not devaluing" your game is going to work for you guys in the long run?

Thanks for the tip on the manual.

I've been mildly interested in Risen 3 for a while. It looks like a poor man's Witcher 3/Shadow of Mordor, but with pirateships! Reviews seem to be generally negative though. Has anyone here played it? Would it be worth it at this price?

Ditto. This was one of my purchases as well.

It'll be one of mine as well. Still haven't decided entirely on the rest, so I'll give myself a few more days to decide.

Play the first Risen instead. It's by far the best game of the trilogy.

I can definitely second this. When you get past the learning curve, you've got a game you can sink hundreds of hours in. It's also nice to see an RTS that has ACTUAL STRATEGY in it :D

Just for the hell of it, I tried a completely aggressive play through on an 80 planet map. I was able to take 43 planets and got the AI's rage-o-meter to over 800. It seemed like I was doing okay until the AI warped in 54,000 laser gatlings and 34 starships at a choke point I was holding. It took me like half an hour to clear those ships but when I did the AI warps in another 24,000 fighters. I lose the choke point, AI splits his forces and goes on a death march through my planets and eventually destroys my home world.

Good fun :)

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Technobabylon are absolutely worth their current price. Yes, they are both a bit on the short side, but if quality matters over quantity, they should be a no-brainer.
I warmly recommend a controller for Brothers, though, as it may be a little difficult to move the two protagonists precisely enough with a keyboard.

"Our Favorite 3D Action Games" lists Darksiders II on the front page but only contains Darksiders (1).

I highly recommend Technobabylon, it's a great technothriller!

Hey Enebias! ;) About Technobabylon, I wouldn't say it's on the short side -- at least didn't felt like it when I played it; if I remember correctly, I finished it in a week with about two hours of playing each day so I guess it was around the 10-12 hours mark for me. Anyway, it's a great game no matter it's length. :)

Ha, ha..."Just joking"

Hey Vytho! ;)
Long time no see. I have been mostly absent in the last few months... how are things going here?