Humanoid

I'm concerned that I have to walk two miles off the beaten road to use the services. How am I supposed to hold it in that long?

If you're referring to storyline or dialogue choices, then I don't really consider that to be a defining or essential feature of the genre. All RPGs have to have some kind of numerical progression in place, but not all of them have to have storyline and dialogue choices. A lot of the old RPGs didn't even have much of a storyline or dialogue at all, let alone choices to make. Choices are just something that has been taken from the adventure genre later on and added to RPGs in order to give them more flavour and complexity. It doesn't matter how you interpret such choices, they are by no means a defining feature of an RPG on their own. Those old games were rubbish and something I'm glad we've left behind. Less bluntly and therefore less in keeping with this topic title, plenty of PnP RPG sessions end without a single dice being rolled. That's not to say they have no conditionals or element of chance, but the variables aren't really numerical as such. I mean technically you could have a gender stat that's either 0 or 1 I guess - or indeed 0.5. (Perhaps disconcertingly, I'm enjoying indulging my inner Volourn in this way)

I for one am glad Bruce doesn't type with the inflections of the South African accent.

He's the secret super-difficult undocumented romance option, one wrong dialogue choice and it's over, you're locked out forever.

I don't remember anything at all about Fallout 3's DRM, which is probably the kindest thing I can say about it. I mean I have the disc edition, but if not for people in recent times talking about how the shutdown of GFWL would affect the game, I wouldn't have even pegged it as having GFWL. That said, it's partly because as a utterly terrible game, I may have only actually launched it a few times and absent-mindedly clicked whatever prompts it had away. The only game in my list I can say I know involved GFWL is Street Fighter 4, but I clicked away all the prompts there too - and again it's a game I've barely played.

An RPG is just an adventure game where you get to choose options not because they're correct but because they're in character. You want some degree of persistence in an RPG, but it need not be in the form of stats or any other numerical scale, it simply needs to track those past options, be they binary, ternary or n-ary.

You're missing the fade to black.

I think we should go back to communicating exclusively with pheromones. Hopefully some clever clogs comes up with a way to transmit pheromones electronically soon.

That one bit in Saints Row 3 (an otherwise thoroughly ordinary game), where you're just cruising around town with Pierce while singing together, distills the essence of friendship far better in the course of two minutes than all the interactions in Mass Effect put together, romance or no.

Well if the universe runs cyclically, you could go back far enough to cause an integer underflow and see thus the end of days.

A C- RPG is one that offers some diversionary entertainment but is thoroughly mediocre in most ways. Some RPGs that might warrant a C- rating include Morrowind, Icewind Dale, Ultima 8, Might and Magic 6, Neverwinter Nights 2, Divine Divinity, and Dragon Age: Origins.

No source handy, but apparently sales numbers were similar to the first game. In that context it would be a failure, since with the goodwill, added development and marketing costs and free hype, they've failed to garner more sales. At least 2K in this context have implicitly conceded that it's a matter of the game costing too much to make, rather than trying to claim that the game should have shifted so many more units. That's the sensible path to take instead of gambling on even bigger blockbusters trying to be the next GTA or COD. Remember EA saying Dead Space 3 needed to shift 5 million copies to have a future? That's the opposite approach.

True, it's one of those things they reserve the right to do, but as far as I know, has never been done. That said, if you were being ultra cautious you could register a new, separate Steam account for the game alone. (For those with the patience, it's a pretty good policy in general as it means second hand PC game sales are still alive)

Canadian adult TV channels in trouble for not showing enough locally produced smut. Won't somebody think of the Canadian porn stars? For some reason I end up posting exclusively Canadian news in these threads.

Couple days left on Tabletop Simulator. No, not that kind of tabletop activity.

Depends on how your past self would react to the unexpected windfall though. They might even report your current self to the police for suspicious activity on your betting account. Anyway, if the goal of the exercise is limited to enlightenment rather than riches, it'd be interesting to use the opportunity to solve various mysteries and conspiracy theories, such as by walking around certain grassy knolls.

Amazon generally works, you just need an, ahem, alternative billing address in the US set as the account default when making the purchase. Just pick some hotel there as the address. For future convenience I recommend a state with no sales tax, such as Oregon. Note that here in Australia, people have found US keys must be activated via VPN as well. After that's done it can be played normally (and uncensored). Since there's no specific regional version for the UAE I don't know whether this advice applies in that regard.

I want to see the Big Bang.

I've never owned a PS3 or tinkered with any consoles, but safe bet the GPU is soldered in and not user-replaceable. If you were feeling super adventurous I guess you could try pointing a heat gun at the GPU to try to reflow the solder, if that's even the problem in the first place. Guessing it's a first gen 'fat' PS3? As for saving your data, all PS3 models use a completely standard 2.5" (i.e. laptop sized) hard drive, so you could probably pull that out and put it in another PS3.

Actually it probably is Ubisoft. Amazon are happy to ship anywhere regardless of tax/customs issues, because that's none of their business - it's something purely between the customer and their country's customs. Generally when Amazon won't ship something it's because either: a) They don't export items of that category at all, e.g. food. b) The supplier for a particular item has prevented it, e.g. some brands of watches.

Has anyone else been concerned that a policy of "They speak our language, they're our citizens" effectively means the UK is obliged to invade most of the planet?I know a few more Canadians that would be ok with rejoining the British Empire. You'd have to give up the hockey sticks for cricket bats though. ice hockey with cricket bats would be interesting. Actually, cricket on ice needs to be tried asap. In Riga, Latvia, apparently. Head high full toss probably defeats the point of the experiment, however.

Has anyone else been concerned that a policy of "They speak our language, they're our citizens" effectively means the UK is obliged to invade most of the planet? I know a few more Canadians that would be ok with rejoining the British Empire. You'd have to give up the hockey sticks for cricket bats though.

I hope all the C&C involves telling various people to jump off bridges.

Looks like a small dead owl to me. Hopefully the cosplayers don't get too literal with that one.

Can you see Venezuela from Florida?