Bartimaeus

That's the difference: we can TALK, as in, DISCUSS, those things. There's little to no discussion value in the posting of pictures of scantily-clad women. Additionally, it clearly offends some people's sensibilities while providing nothing of value, and so the logical conclusion was finally actually followed for once. I personally had no problem with the thread per se, because I could easily avoid it...but then it started leaking outside of that, which then lead to a few reports on my part, .

C'est la mort, more like,

Yeah, I mentioned that the bbcode post editor suddenly broke probably a year+ ago, but nobody seems to care.

No problem. This is, as should be obvious now from a few of these discussions, an area of interest for me.

Well, "Istanbul" just means "The City", so that makes sense. The "official" Turkish name for it was "Kostantiniyye" for some time (though "Istanbul" was used along side it), which I'm pretty sure I've seen before, actually...

Or just be like me, and only play one new (i.e. recently released) game a year, and instead mostly play older (and cheaper) stuff, whether it's something I've played already or not.

Another irony is that the Byzantine Empire (which was the eastern half of the Roman Empire after Rome became so big and stretched so thin that it became effectively impossible to govern from a single seat of power, especially one so far away from the eastern most reaches of the empire) became a thing after the city it was named after, Byzantium, had been renamed to Constantinople, in honor or Emperor Constantine. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottomans, the city would be renamed again to Istanbul, for further spite. On the plus side, it would inspire a pretty great They Might Be Giants song. Could just as well be the Constantine Empire... The star and crescent used to also be associated with Constantinople - though its origins probably extend even further back than that. After it was conquered, the Ottomans took it and it eventually became more or less a global symbol for Islam...

My devices are the Sennheiser's 598s for headphones, and the Kanto YU2s for speakers. It'd be nice if somebody else chipped in the discussion for reference and an alternative point of view.

It might just be a certain sound signature that you prefer - I've more often heard this sort of thing applied to headphones and speakers and what people prefer (as most devices are better at certain things than others), but I suppose it makes perfect sense it'd apply to microphones as well, since it's pretty much the same idea. I actually feel as though the BG2 lines are a little better, personally - the BG1 lines have this sort of slightly unnatural feel to them, and there's like no dynamics at all (basically, it sounds like they're talking directly into a microphone at a flat/normalized volume level - doesn't sound natural to me at all; BG2, in comparison, some parts of what she said are quieter and less enunciated than others, making it sound more natural). Okay, well, you posted again after I wrote this - so basically, you're hearing a sort of static/overly-edged sound? That's strange. Even turning up my volume to max (...it's usually around 40-50%), I still don't hear any sort of static or anything like that. So yeah, not sure. What headphones/speakers are you using?

I don't hear much of a difference vs. the BG1 lines in terms of quality. Her voice has much more of an edge to it than her softer, more child-like lines in BG1, sure, but I am pretty sure that's a result of the voice-acting itself, not because of the sound quality. Can you describe more specifically the issue? Not that there's anything we'll be able to do about it, but maybe your ears are picking up something mine aren't.

Man, I am pretty triggered right now, . The so-called "Byzantine" Empire was a direct continuation of the Roman Empire - the term "Byzantine" is in fact a modern made-up word to describe the different (Latin vs. the later Greek) periods of the Roman Empire. In other words, people of the time considered themselves Roman, not Byzantines. The United States has about as good of a claim to the title of "Third Rome" as Russia does...although on different grounds, just as the Holy Roman Empire and, later, Nazis did.

If you can't play the game properly because of technical issues, that seems like a pretty big issue that should definitely impact the score rather heavily. On the other hand, it's an issue that, as an AAA release, we can assume will be fixed given some time. If this were an indie game being reviewed, though, we wouldn't necessarily have the same assumption that it would actually be fixed...so is it appropriate to make that assumption for some games while not doing so for others? And is it really appropriate to have your review score reflect such assumptions (or lack thereof) when it's something that hasn't actually happened yet? I think the lesson to be learned here...and from a multitude of other releases having launch issues...is to test your game fully and frequently, and on a myriad of systems, both old and new. Side-step most of the issues to begin with, as it were. If it's issues only affecting a few reviewers/people, though, I think it would make sense for both both the affected and the developer to try to reach out to each other to fix those issues, possibly before, yes, publishing those reviews. However, common sense is in short supply from everyone these days, it seems...

For anyone that's curious as to why you don't encode from lossy to lossy, here's the spectrum of a song in CD quality FLAC. Nice and complete spectrums, high level of detail. Here's what the track looks like when you convert to a lower quality MP3, but one that you would still be pretty hard-pressed to hear the difference from the FLAC with just the one re-encoding. To hear the differences, you would need a trained ear and at least decent equipment to hear it, and they would be small differences. A pretty big data/spectrum loss, yes? However, humans begin to have difficulty hearing above a certain frequency (somewhere between 12kHz and 15kHz - the latter of which is where this track cuts off), and most people cannot hear anything at all above 18kHz, and virtually nobody can hear above 20kHz. Here's this same track when it's re-encoded a few times for the same settings. If you open up these two images in separate tabs and switch between them, you should start to notice that while these two look the same on a surface level, they don't look quite the same upon closer inspection. The track that has been re-encoded several times has lost some amount of detail...all throughout - from bottom to top, that is - the spectrum. This is detail that you can absolutely hear, and it creates a rather poor listening experience, as the song sounds somewhat warped. This is why you don't re-encode from one lossy source to another, as the effect gets worse and worse the more you do it. You can hear the actual difference here, which I think speak for themselves assuming you have at least an O.K. pair of headphones/speakers: original & re-encoded So yeah, don't pointlessly re-encode things...and as a supposedly professional company that should know about these things, you ESPECIALLY shouldn't be doing stuff like this...and even more so when the sound quality of these files was already pretty darned low to begin with.

I checked my copy of BG:EE - from what I can tell, they seemed to have converted sounds from .acm to .ogg. It's pretty universally known that you don't convert from one lossy format to another lossy format, so that probably decreased quality of all the original voicework a little...but I don't think to the degree you're speaking of. The top is BG:EE, the bottom is the original. As you can see - if you know what you're looking for - the top track is much more blocky and less-detailed looking than the the bottom. Notice specifically the very tops of each track - the EE version is just flat data blocks while the original version has a smoother/softer transition to the higher frequencies. Those dummies - they couldn't figure out a way of adding higher quality sound support without removing support for the old sounds, and so they just decided to re-encode all the old sounds into the new format? What kind of clown show are they running over there? It's too bad they couldn't get the master recordings and put them in stereo...thank you BioWare for your terrible record-keeping abilities.

Here are three lines by Imoen extracted directly from Baldur's Gate (non-EE): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/fphdrsrkarznzm4/_IMOEN04.WAV & https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/n1ttb9ny1uzdq09/_IMOEN05.WAV & https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/6hf12qzayef12ca/_IMOEN06.WAV Here are three lines by Imoen extracted directly from Baldur's Gate II (non-EE): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/xizyclh9245uusu/_IMOEN01_.WAV & https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/lloj2bonatpsv7o/_IMOEN04_.WAV & https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/3nan40as0t1jsbk/_IMOEN10_.WAV Here's a spectrum difference between one line of each game: Both are in mono with frequencies that extend up to about 11k (...the closest 'comparison' for modern MP3 quality in terms of spectrum cut-off, such as it is, would be somewhere between 48kbps and 64kbps mono - note that unlike music, though, these are not too complex sounds, so obviously, it doesn't sound as crappy as an MP3 song of this quality, and actually, the REAL kbps is probably somewhat lower than this). They both appear to be exactly the same quality (although I'd guess that recording equipment/setup probably differed - BG2 sounds a little better/crisper to me), which is what I figured from memory. Do these sound better or worse than what you remember or currently hear in-game in the Enhanced Edition?

You'll have to clarify - the actual sound quality of the BG2 voice-acting seems lower than BG1's? Are there any specific lines you're thinking of that seem evidently lower than the majority of lines in BG1?

I finished EarthBound/MOTHER 2. Well, that was a weird ending. Just about had a seizure...

Meanwhile, acting director of FBI says that the investigation will continue...but that the White House will not not be kept in the loop.

Yeah, I'm going to have to say absolutely no to that. I'd like to be able to buy Hitman games in the future.

Although half of the name is, . ...and also the franchise they were working on.

Hey, there's still time: the company is for sale, after all, .

The "downsizing" has been misframed somewhat, here and elsewhere: nobody got laid off, people were just shifted to other projects/teams, which makes perfect sense, seeing as the game has been released and all they're going to do now is do patches and maybe some DLCs (unless the "Mass Effect put on ice" means no DLC, too, I guess).

...Avoiding impropriety? This is Trump we're talking about: I'll be surprised if he doesn't initially try one of his sons, Michael Flynn, Alex Jones, or even Putin himself.

McConnell rejecting calls for a special prosecutor because it would just "impede" the investigation. As opposed to firing the guy in charge of probably the most major one of those investigations...

I'm a zombie right now after having gotten back from a funeral and subsequently spending the rest of the day watching Stranger Things, so whoops, good call.