Look at the list of the highest rated games of 2010. See how many times Mass Effect 2 and its expansions shows up. I count 3 with a score of 85 or better. The game of Mass Effect 2 itself is the top scoring of the year with a 94, which makes it tied for 3rd place with a bunch of games as one of the best PC games of all time.

Sorry, got a little excited there for a second. It's a great game, with RPG elements and FPS elements that does a better job than Fallout in my opinion and has a *much* better story too. It's like Final Fantasy story and FMV meets Star Wars mythology meets RPG inventory and upgrades meets FPS combat with the unique twist of pause-and-plan combat and the best use of cover I've seen, and a pretty good balance as far as how much damage you can give/take before dying (unlike the ridiculous amount of damage enemies can take in Borderlands) and realistic feeling accuracy spread of weapons. The weapons and upgrades are good too but I have to say I preferred the inventory of the first Mass Effect, other than how you had to manage hundreds of ammo upgrades and such. I've looked for a comparable game now that I'm done with Mass Effect and halfway through Mass Effect 2 but nothing compares with all of the same elements.

A bonus is that the dialog choices and storyline options you made in Mass Effect get transferred to Mass Effect 2 by importing your savegame, and will also continue into Mass Effect 3. That's just amazing in my opinion. It's the way games should be made. I could keep going but you get the picture. I put the game up there in the same league as the Zelda series, which says a lot.

Besides the 9 difficulty levels, the many expansions, the wildly varying victory conditions, and the improved AI in the expansions, there are some interesting economy strategies that aren't outlined in any way in the game's interface.

You can use a "cottage economy", a "specialist economy", or an "espionage economy". Most people start with a cottage economy but using Great People and the new features of the expansions without using near-100% on the science slider are an interesting alternative.

I'm still learning those after playing casually for years. The real pros are on CivFanatics.com. They could tell you more about those strategies than I ever could. They can be way more fun.

Linux would be nice. As it is, Civ4 is the only reason I have to boot into Windows. Everything else I need from it runs in Wine.

Civ4, not so much. I got it to work at first, then tried everything from making it windowed to disabling audio and it just kept crashing. That's with Beyond the Sword 3.19 and latest Wine from Ubuntu 10.04. No idea what the problem is.

As long as they have the toggles for Resource bubbles (CTRL-R) and Crop Yields (CTRL-Y), plus military, strategy layers, etc., it's pretty easy to see what's going on.

Are you seriously suggesting altering a symlink every time you want to run a different session? Nevermind that it wouldn't work if you wanted to run 2 different profiles at once.

Profiles are immensely helpful if you have 2 logins (say to all of Google's services) and want to use both at the same time. Separate search histories, separate Gmail accounts, etc etc. All running at the same time in 2 different windows. Use different themes to tell them apart.

It looks more like IE7 or Chrome than it does any version of Office.

They:
- hid the menubar.
- condensed common menu items into Page and Tools drop-downs, to apply to the current page and whole app, respectively.
- merged the search and address bars (which imo should never have been separate--I always hide the search bar).
- merged some other buttons (stop/reload etc.).
- plan to simplify the 4 different ways to access bookmarks.

Full description of mockup here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback

Other than a brief mention of possibly adding ribbon styling, none of the above looks much like Office ribbons to me.

GRemote on Windows Mobile (*shocker*) did it first. Air mouse over bluetooth or wifi, anyone? Click and drag works, on screen scrollwheel works, everything is rebindable. Also works as touchpad, joystick, and game wheel for racing games.

It can be used exactly like the wiimote is used for menus except there is more than one interface you can use depending on what you're trying to control. For example, one that prominently displays media play/pause buttons.

On my HTC Fuze, it feels like a very solid, very capable remote and air mouse. Works with all games, apps, and of course also the Windows desktop.

Except that's only true for some films and some shows. Many others recorded over the last several years actually show more of the scene in the full-screen version, whereas the wide-screen version is just the full-screen version with the top and bottom cropped off. It completely depends on how it was filmed and the transfer process.