Pop

And the forum header is all sparkly and new!

There's a link to "forums" in the lower right hand corner.

I know this might sound crazy, but a game about an American intelligence operative operating on foreign soil is probably going to involve a CIA agent and should arguably involve something important to the United States! fascists

I'm wondering why they included a real place so prominently on the page. I thought maybe it could've been an ARG thing, but that seems a little too "big deal" for Obsidz, frankly.

DX2, all the licensed music was Kidney Thieves, IIRC.

If any of y'all happen to get it (and good luck, [a piracy site that shall remain nameless has something or other]) be smart, use protection. Make sure you're not going to hurt yourself. Edited by SteveThaiBinh to remove name of piracy website.

Oh yay, somebody brought up the CRA. Down with the underclass! tl;dr

Newspaper column from Bobby May, the McCain campaign chair in Buchanan County, Virginia and correspondence secretary for the Buchanan County Republican Party. It just gets worse and worse. Looks like they've started playing up Obama's middle name, and recent speeches by McCain and Palin aren't particularly subtle in their attempts to portray Obama as an honest-to-God terrorist. The Republican Party will certainly have earned the 4+ years out of power that the financial market crisis have handed them.

30 hours? Is that a speed run or something? At the point I stopped playing I had logged 25 hours or so into the game, and I was in the... second chapter, I think. Out of however many there are. Most of that was due to endless map-running. The box promised 80 hours, and I believed it.

When they're done with SoZ, sounds like. Which will probably be a month at least.

I hadn't downloaded anything from other players when I started the space stage and I was running into some repetition. I think it's just, as usual, bad randomization.

As Sawyer has said, that engine was not terribly efficient where art asset creation was concerned.

I don't see how it could be too much of a problem if they really wanted to include it. We can reasonably assume that most of the characters we'd be using NLTs on would be ones we'd only see once. This is how Deus Ex handled it. Knocking someone out was functionally the same as killing them from a gameplay standpoint - they were incapacitated and out of the fight. It just elicited a different consequence further down the line. And even Deus Ex had characters that you couldn't knock out - the mech agents and Lebedev all died whether you hit them with tranqs or rockets. Make the big players kill-or-release (or alternatively, just kill) decisions, instead of kill-release-KO.

It'll be interesting if Id can make a game with the times, ie not something completely straightforward. Maybe Rage is it.

You mean a download, or some reward type bonus for doing something in the game? If you're aggressive in one of the earlier stages (Civ, I think) then pirate raid frequencies are reduced. But not by much, comparitively.

Braid was pretty impressive from a design perspective.

If Interplay in recent years has taught us anything, it's that when you're in dire financial straits you reach for the biggest IPs you can muster to rectify your situation. I think BG3 is a possibility, I don't know if I'd want to see it, but it could certainly happen. More time has passed between Fallouts 2 and 3, after all.

The ear can't really tell the difference between anything around 192 kbps and bitrates above that, unless you've got a really nice sound system / headset. But if you do have a high-end system, you're going to want those higher bitrates, because the bass in particular is going to be so much better. In any case, don't buy your mp3s from Itunes. Get them from Amazon (who offer higher-end variable bitrates) or the like. Less loss, no DRM.

You might want to shoot a PM to Matthew Rorie, he's the PR dude round these parts. He'll set you up with whatever's already come out, but I doubt he'd throw you anything new.

Lulz. Youtube's lack of profit is no proof of magnanimity on the part of Google. The internet economy isn't based off of profit. If it was, it wouldn't exist today. It exists based on the idea that at some point in the future it will make a profit, and a considerable profit at that. That's why Amazon is considered the greatest success on the internet today despite having been in the red every year since it started (though I seem to recall them making a very modest profit this year or last year). If it were a normal company it would've collapsed long ago. But the shareholders have colossal faith in its promise.

Civ 4. I swear, either the AI is really smart or really erratic. So I'm ze Germans, playing the Earth scenario (somewhat tightened map of the Earth). I started off in Europe, with the Greeks and Romans to the immediate South. I built my first defender and second settler and took Spain, then built a second settler and took the Balkans, filling out the gaps over time and moving North, occupying the majority of the European subcontinent and all of the UK. This effectively trapped the Romans such that they had their three cities and expansion would have required Open Borders, which I denied them. Greece had only a slim area of expansion in Eastern Europe, between my eastern frontier and the western frontiers of the Persian and Indian empires. Africa was cut off by the Egyptians. But the Greeks were doing better than the Romans were, having an unbroken corridor of territory starting in Anatolia, west through Greece and then east again along the coast of the Black Sea and up along a row of cities from the Northern Black Sea up through western Russia. At some point, my borders started pushing eastward, and Greece suddenly declared war. Now, I usually play Civ as a cultural / technological expansionist, trying to get the best tech and most developed cities quickest. As a result I usually come up short on units, aside from an average of 2 fortified units per city. So the declaration of war sort of blindsided me. I lost my easternmost settlement. But I bounced back rather quickly, as my strongest cities to the West started churning out units quickly. I did what is my tendency in these games as well as in RTSes, which is create a huge, lumbering strike force and go on the hunt. I seized the Black Sea settlements, creating a gap between Anatolia / Greece and their Northern frontiers, and liberated my city, and I forced a peace treaty with a few cities added. Trouble is, for some reason Rome declared war. So I crushed their two cities and became the sole power in Europe. Here's the rub - Greece was in a weakened state but still acting like **** to everybody else. Eventually 2 or 3 other powers declared war on Greece. It looked like Alexander was living on borrowed time. So I, being a fan of expansion, decided to act quickly and claim some Greek cities before anyone else did. So I declared war, mobilized my 25-30 strong force of cannons, riflemen and cavalry (always cavalry) and moved Eastward towards the interim Greek capital. That's where **** went down. As I moved the force close to my border, two things happened. One, Alexander got smart and swore fealty to the Persian empire, the third most powerful civ behind myself and the Chinese, and the Persians declared war on me in turn. No sweat, I thought, and proceeded to move ever closer to the Greek capital. Just then every single goddamn power in the game declared war on me, except the Egyptians, who were vassals of mine. Now, I'm in a really tough spot. No one's talking to me. I moved up from fighting the greeks, who were still using chariots and phalanx while I was using gunpowder units, to modern foes. And now I've got 4 powerful civilizations sending forces against my Eastern borders. I don't know how well I'll hold out. I just researched machine gunners, who are about as good of defensive units as you could ask for, and I'm churning them out to send out to the frontier, but I don't know if I'll be quick enough. So yeah, either the mere presence of my siege forces caused the entire world to consider me an immediate threat that had to be destroyed, or the AIs just randomly and arbitrarily decided that I had to die. tl;dr Does anybody know if the AIs react to troop movements in Civ 4?

Anybody got a line on who Josh Gilman was in CoD4? If we do, we might have some idea of what Thorton's gonna sound like. Mobygames and the like have him as "additional voice talent". This is gonna sound a bit odd, but I really hope AP doesn't have Mass Effect's problems when it comes to using the voice on a non-white, non-Canadian character. Also, come on Funcroc, step up your game. This should be your bag.

You'd have a point here if 70-80 percent of black voters didn't already strongly trend democratic in the first place. But they do trend that way, so you don't have a point here. I see you've picked up the term "liberal" as a pejorative. You don't seem like the Fox News type, where did you cultivate that charm? Regardless, even if there was some sort of "reverse racism" going on (what a silly term that is, as if favoring one's heritage were an abomination. I wonder why ~Di's ilk doesn't boycott St. Patty's day, or Black History Month), there's a reason black people are called "minority voters". It is because they are literally in a minority, in some states more than others. So picking up a larger percentage of them might not be particularly beneficial. Actual racism is a factor because a smaller percentage of white voters exhibiting it will handily cancel any advantage getting even 100% of the black vote will get you, especially in places like West Virginia or Ohio, or any of the Western states, or ****in' Iowa. These are the states Obama has trouble with, coincidentally or no. I've got lots of history to judge on. Brown v. Board (that's the start of the Civil Rights Movement, more or less) was just 54 years ago. There are voters who remember it. Strom Thurmond only recently passed, having been celebrated by southern political heavyweights since shamed. I'm not as quick as others to declare that, since that generation is dying, racism is dying too. Institutionally, racism is still latent, particularly in an education system that relies on property taxes. It was just a few years ago that Katrina hit, and the response to that was completely inexplicable and inexcusable. The war on drugs has incarcerated thousands upon thousands of non-violent black offenders and created countless violent ones, while slapping white offenders on the wrist, mostly due to different preferences in drugs (technical difference - crystal vs. powder), and income differences. I could pull you figures on all of this, but I think you're smart enough to see the lay of the land as to the existence of racism. Now whether or not it's going to influence the election is the question. I just assume it will. I did mention the push polling in North Carolina against McCain in '00, alleging that McCain had fathered a bastard black child. The day those calls went out he had a 5 point lead, and he lost the state soon after. As with ~Di's 70-80% figure up there, there might be a more plausible explanation, but negative campaigning really seems to work, and in that case it contained racist propaganda. The racist factor will be a marginal effect, hopefully, but the margins will really matter this November.

Of course it is. This isn't a post-racial country. Weren't you around for Jeremiah Wright? People were scared by the idea that Obama might have been "blacker" than he looks and acts. If Obama had done anything but disown Wright he wouldn't have the nomination. And he's got an unusually difficult time shoring up support amongst working class whites, even when he's actually softer on the social issues they care about than Clinton was. ****, McCain's fictitious "illegitimate black child" may just have lost him a good deal of votes in South Carolina in 2000, in any case far more than it should have. This election is going to be close enough that racist sentiment could certainly be a factor. Besides, more people will tell you that McCain "looks Presidential" than they would Obama. In a country that elected George Bush because he was the kind of guy you could drink beer with, it's really not unthinkable at all.