If you take a look at my vid tut here I show pretty much what Kanga explains above: (relevant bit starts at 2min 20) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg8FRbqSNt8
Bah so true man. I had the same kind of people, they would play WoW the entire class then bugging the teacher 20 min before class is over about how to do the work.
Oni, valve has been very public about being interested in new hardware for gaming -- http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/20/gabe-newell-ponders-if-we-have-to-sell-hardware-we-will/
It's £15 in the UK :/ ($24 USD / 17 Euro) - discounted to £11.24. It's supposed to be 18 Euro and about 13.50 Euro with the discount? The US version should be $20 and $15 respectively. Apparently Valve set the pricing.
Ryse original characters were 150k before optimisation. That's probably the highest it needs to go on hero assets, all depends on engine and type of game really, but can literally be anything from 20-150k.
posted this in the awesomeness thread. Thought it would help here as well. [ame=" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY"]The First 20 Hours - How to Learn Anything: Josh Kaufman at TEDxCSU - YouTube[/ame]
Seems like Metacritic scores affirm my feelings, as almost all recent Blackbox NFS games, The Run isn't scoring too hot, about 20% less than Criterion's Hot Pursuit.