Garacesh

I personally don't mind the Screwdriver as being a multi-tool/tricorder combo. We've had that since day 1* (let's not forget Setting 2428D to reattach barbed wire!). I don't think that's intrinsically the problem. It's just how the plot is based around it and the ratio of screwdriver-works to screwdriver-doesn't-work is too heavily skewed at the moment. In a 45-minute timeslot each scene has to serve a purpose, and what purpose does a door that's locked serve if our heroes can just 'now it isn't!' through it? The idea is fine, it's the execution that's lacking, which again just comes back to the writing. * Well, of the reboot.

.... how? O.o I've only just kicked Team Rocket out of Silph Co. and my party are all low-to-mid 40's. And I've hardly been blitzing catching stuff. Just caught enough to get the starters.

Well I feel that The Witchfinders was quite enjoyable. Yeah, the dialogue was a little bit clunky in some places and there was quite an obvious 'being patronising to women is old fashioned and backwards' which did feel a little bit forced, but overall the episode was a nice mix of reflecting on history and its atrocities, a healthy dose of 'just because you don't understand it, doesn't make it evil' (which is the much more needed societal lesson IMHO, since most of us tend to have the 'don't be an ass to women' thing nailed down) and good old fashioned Doctor Who alien hijinks... But then the last 10 minutes happened.. And the episode was left feeling hollow, rushed and anticlimactic. That ending was a huge let-down to an otherwise good episode, and I'm not sure the season can survive any more of it. It's a shame, because I genuinely do like Jodie and I feel she's fitting the role well, but I feel we're going to need another Blink or A Good Man Goes to War, else the season's going to have too big of a slump in ratings and they're going to shake up everything - cast, writers, the lot. The writing is the issue, I feel. It's all down to dialogue and pacing, and this season they're just commonly just a bit shy of the mark.

Move Jodie up a bit. extend the image downwards and add John Hurt at the bottom, as the dot

Ooh.. To add to this, the conveyor belt CGI was terrible. And the jumping between them bit was especially carp.

Kerblam!*

I always assumed ether A) Don't question it, or B) The Doctor plucks them out of their timestream and drops them back off moments after it happened. More than likely it's the former. But it's Sci-Fi, I don't expect every little detail to add up. As far as I see it, Graham, Ryan and Yaz haven't 'popped home' outside of Demons of the Punjab. Have I missed some dialogue that implies otherwise? As for Kerblam!, I finally got round to watching it last night and, up until the final few minutes, it all felt very 'Who' to me. The Doctor and pals nonchalantly going undercover to investigate an issue where they had no real information, the little sparks of companion ingenuity, the red herring sleazeball who it turns out isn't actually the baddie, The Doctor giving a grandiose threat-warning, creepy robots, and a misguided baddie who did have a bit of a point (though he was, admittedly, a bit of a wet-flannel). The reveal was a bit rubbish though, and I think they should've spent a bit of time explaining that 'the system' had become an AI over time, I think we were supposed to sort of just figure it out but it felt a bit out of place considering nobody else ever referred to it in such a way. Also how did 'The System' know of The Doctor? How did Charlie manage to reprogram the robots to steal people? And also the doors of the TARDIS kept out Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde, but a delivery bot can just teleport in and out? Then again, the continuity of TARDIS security has always been a bit, er, wibbly wobbly, in order to accommodate the plot.

The plot thickens.... Selecting Microsoft Helana Desktop - Spanish (Spain), Microsoft Hortense Desktop - French, or Microsoft Paulina Desktop - Polish produces the error: [b]Speech Properties[/b] This voice cannot be played. Please try selecting another voice or selecting a different audio output device. However both the audio, and the default languages (Microsoft Hazel Desktop - English (Great Britain) and Microsoft Zira Desktop - English (United States)) work fine. I've found people online discussing copying registry keys from SYSWOW64 to the 32-bit directories (the keys already exist in both) and installing Microsoft Speech Platform - Runtime (Version 11) (done both x86 and x64, neither has helped)

I've found that too.. The game is incredibly easy with an Eevee with multiple elemental attacks. I'm using the Fire, Electric, Dark and Water moves and little Yeet* stomps basically everything. I think my second playthrough may be Eevee-less (or at least, starter-eevee-less) * I was going to call the Eevee 'Kratos', since thanks to not being translated it keeps shouting BOY!?, but it turned out I got a female one, so it got called Yeet, as that's the other noise it makes when it leaps into battle.

Very much so. Especially as you take on patients with more and more illnesses. You won't be disappointed.

I picked it up on release and played a fair chunk of it, I'm maybe 4 hospitals in now, and I think I'll be leaving it for a little while before going back to it. I don't wanna rush through it, it'll be my 'Eh, I've got an hour to kill' game.

I have never heard of that in the real-world. Only ever in gaming circles, where one refers to a well-executed high-risk-high-reward action as 'B. D. Plays'

Yarp. All candidates using laptops here are given either a physical or a digital copy of the paper (subject to their access arrangements) so it shouldn't be too difficult for them to put in the correct information.

As much as I'm enjoying this series for the most part, I'd have to agree.

DISM-ing it into the image appears to have worked.. I haven't done any extensive testing but the languages are showing up in the Text-to-Speech settings now. Shame I can't retroactively apply it to machines, but it gives me an excuse to build a 'proper' exam image, so I'm OK with that. Thanks @Arthur!

Ditto. Ever since playing Onimusha on PS2 I've loved media that takes history and weaves sci-fi and fantasy into it.

I would have assumed they'd have thought of that and prevented those ports being used for external storage. I'd have assumed, but I don't own one. Maybe they didn't. Maybe they know it's a let down and they're banking on people modding them so they made it easy to mod. I dunno. I've done literally zero research into it since they released the lacklustre games list.

Not that I'd be encouraging it, because that would be illegal, but I'd expect almost definitely. If the emulator is open-source, it shouldn't take long for the community to figure out how to disable or override the internal storage and attach your own. And then just like 'chipping' your old PS1 back in the day, guides shall appear online on how to do it. I doubt you'd need much more than a soldering iron, some cable and an SD card reader. Once that happens (if it hasn't already), we'll see sales figures shoot up, I'm certain.

Spoilers follow Well I liked it. And it was a much better episode than the Pting, so it's got that going for it straight away. I don't think we needed a big scary alien for this style episode. I think it worked well just the way it was. The red herring in the plot was very 'Who', and the realisation that the 'big bad' was in fact humans was also very 'Who'. This was your typical the folly of man episode and I feel it hit the mark with its sombre tone. Considering its themes of war and dividing countries, I can't help but feel its proximity to armistice day was intentional, and I'm OK with that. How many have died in human history because of things like disputes over land, or religion? It seems silly, sometimes. I actually found the Vajarians an interesting concept.. An assassin race who returned to find their planet destroyed and in their mourning vowed to change their ways, who symbolically carry the ashes of their planet with them? Well that works fine for me. I reckon I prefer that to 'the big bad is aliens who just like to kill people because reasons', y'know? And who knows, maybe it's just this chapter/sect/group/whatever that have become the silent watchers. Maybe the rest of them are still out there gettin' their murder on. Or maybe they're the last ones? Could be that Vajarian culture only has one group of assassins operating at any time, like a cultural honour. They've left enough empty that they could do some interesting things with them. We'll see. That being said, as always, I do have some criticisms. The biggest being that I do wish The Doctor had worked out for herself how the Holy Man had died, rather than just being told. Whilst the Vajarians were clearly in a situation to know what had happened, I feel that having them tell her instead just resulted in a bit of a lack of agency that brought things down a peg and made Jodie stop just shy of feeling like The Doctor for this episode. I reckon if she had figured it out herself, then confronted the Vajarians with that ("You're supposed to be the galaxy's greatest assassins, but I know you didn't kill him... So why are you here?!"), then learned their new nature, things would have felt a whole lot better. Secondly, Yaz is a police officer, and Prem has clearly been to war. They should know what a gunshot wound looks like, and gunshot wounds tend to bleed. How did nobody notice an injury like that on the Holy Man? And thirdly, the Vajarians made a very clear and direct threat to The Doctor and chums, which seems at odds with their remorseful watcher nature. Obviously it felt right in the moment because we thought they were the big bad, but looking back on it, it doesn't feel very fitting. Overall, though, I do think it was a very good episode.

I assume it won't be long before it's cracked and people are uploading their own ROMs to replace the subpar collection provided officially.

RIP

No idea. How do I find "Manage optional features"? If I click on English (United Kingdom) and then Options[1], it brings up another screen that has a Speech heading with a Settings link underneath[2], but if I do the same for the Spanish option I don't get that[3]. Clicking on the 'Settings' just takes me to Settings/Time & Language/Speech, where there is no options for any other language but English and no voices but the 3(?) English ones.[4] (No idea where George comes from) [table=] [tr] [td][1][/td] [td][2][/td] [td][3][/td] [td][4][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [/table] Web version would be no good, GCSE exam laptops have all their networking capabilities disabled.

Some of our pupils are allowed to use a computer reader for their GCSE's, and this includes Languages, where we assume the papers (and thus the electronic copies) are going to be written in not-English. Our Exams Officer has found a piece of software (Orato) that reads out highlighted text using Windows' built-in Text-to-Speech engine. In LTSB 1607, this gives us the choice of Hazel and Zira. The problem is that TTS voices appear to be 'languaged', which makes sense from a space-saving perspective. Zira and Hazel appear to only know how to speak English and (barring a few Spanish words like 'Que') proceed to completely butcher foreign languages in the charming way only us Brits know how. I've been flexing my Google-fu but I've not found anything that appears to work, or be reliable. I've downloaded the every-language-pack-possible iso from VLSC and applied Spanish to my machine (via lpksetup.exe) and whilst Español (España) is listed under Settings/Time & Language/Region & Language, and it does say "Language pack installed", both Settings/Time & Language/Speech and Control Panel/Speech Recognition/Text to Speech still only show English voices. So now I'm a bit stumped. I have no idea how to make Windows speak Spanish (also French), so I need to do that, or, find a reliable piece of TTS software that can do multiple languages, preferably without opening our wallets or providing a spellchecking function.

Easy! They sang that one Christmas song on it before the androids decided to get their murder on (Plot wise, the episode was actually taking place on Christmas Day, though, IIRC, just everyone except Wilfred Mott was in hiding because weird alien-stuff keeps happening at Christmas)

You can always jump into the BIOS and not disable the onboard display adaptor in the presence of an expansion card. That way you only need to get a GPU that can do 2 outputs and stick with the onboard for the 3rd.