Zoraptor

KOTOR 2 was pretty obviously inspired by certain aspects of the then current SW Expanded Universe, which included a prominent Kreia like figure (Vergere) and a species of force independent inter galactic invaders (Yuuzhan Vong). So killing the force had not (so far as I am aware) been explicitly dealt with, but it was a fairly small step to get there from where they were.

NWN2 had a new renderer, underlying stuff was from NWN1's Aurora though. And of course The Witcher (1) used Aurora as well.

So did I in reality. I was always a bit disappointed either he or Qara ended up fighting you at the end.

While I disagree overall the last bit is the most important reason as to why I would not pick K2; I'd also add that the similarities to Planetscape Tournament are also a factor. K2 is very much a try at deconstructing Star Wars the same way as PST deconstructed the typical D&D game/ campaign and shares some very obvious and direct similarities thematically and plot wise. So if you wanted to play a K2 like game thematically you could always play PST instead. If you wanted the same sort of deconstruction applied specifically to Star Wars you can go read Traitor or some of the other EU stuff dealing with Vergere- as it's pretty obvious Chris Avellone had done before writing K2- or an alternative type of deconstruction like Shatterpoint. So to my mind the question if I had to pick one Obsidian game to save is effectively "which of their best game is most unique?" which is Alpha Protocol. There isn't much to separate it from MOTB*/ FONV/ K2 in terms of personal preference, but those games all have obvious alternatives I could play to get a similar result, AP doesn't really. *Not NWN2 OC though. Don't think I've ever had such a negative reaction to one NPC before but he completely ruined the game for me.

New Zealand has basically gone full Madagascar- technically we haven't shut down all inward travel, but a 14 day quarantine is going to stop pretty much everyone who isn't a returning NZer (or Pacific Islander for some reason). Can't see any tourist, sport and business visitors coming. Guess politically it has to be done, but I very much doubt it's going to do anything other than delay the virus's large scale arrival.

I thought that was going to be a Deus Ex Intro copypasta and am mildly disappointed.

There's no chance it's a bioweapon. It may have been being studied at the bioweapons institute in Wuhan- may as in it's possible, but there's no evidence beyond circumstance. I wouldn't put it past people to use its spread as a smallpox blanket type bioweapon though. Pretty good chance it will. It's got pretty high infectivity, looks to be mutable and even if some places like China or ROK can achieve control by behavioural means others simply won't be able to so there's likely to be a reservoir virus population. The good news is that by and large such things get less virulent over time so a 3% death rate is unlikely to occur again any time soon, and the infectivity will drop once there's some herd immunity achieved- plus a vaccine at at least flu vaccine level of effectiveness is near inevitable*. The scenario where it's both seasonal and has the ability to infect ~half the world's population with a 3% death rate every year or even regularly is not one I'd spend any time worrying about in the same way I'm not worried about earth being hit by a large meteor or the poles reversing or similar. *one of smallpox level effectiveness, ie able to get to eradication, is highly unlikely though. Unlike pox viruses the 'common cold' coronavirus doesn't even generate long term immunity to itself, and single strand RNA viruses inherently mutate, a lot.

1) Malkavian has an argument with a roundabout 2) Visit the Concrete Cows 3) ... handy to London?

Complete reverse for me, I've seen heaps of classics from close up- including some near uniques like the Polikarpov- but basically no modern jets. Modern warplanes don't really make it out here, but I can literally go down to Ardmore and watch Spitfires/ Mustangs or Sopwith Camel (replicas) take off while having a coffee at the cafe (they do paid flights on the classic planes so you see them pretty frequently, bit pricey but something I will get around to doing, once I win the Lottery). I was also lucky enough to be on the Isle of Wight during the 60th anniversary of D-Day, and they had a heap of fly overs.

Coolest by a country mile was the Su-47, especially with the prototype's colour scheme. Backwings just look awesome even if they aren't really practical. There's a fairly well known plane rebuilder at the nearest aerodrome to where I live and they did mock attack runs on me during flight testing for one of their Mosquito rebuilds (I was spraying gorse and they obviously decided a red ute parked at the top of a hill made an obvious and safe target). Pretty memorable experience, but I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end if it were for real.

5 years. Intel is probably too big to fail even if it were seriously threatened, much like Boeing. The big medium term threat is if their 7nm gets delayed or runs into 10nm like problems, they've now acknowledged they'll be behind AMD for nearly the next two years which is bad enough. But they've had problems now with their last two processes, albeit the Broadwell pipecleaner was far less an issue than 10nm, and if they make it 3 in a row there will be serious questions about them maintaining their own fabs, let alone the sort of damage further delays could do to their most lucrative markets.

You've either got the wrong plane or the wrong definition of ground attack*. Su57 is the Russian F22 equivalent. And while P51 could be used in ground attack it was far more useful as a long range escort, and other planes were better at the task (eg off the top of my head, Typhoons for UK. Thunderbolts on the US side. And the Sturmovik for the Russians) I'd have difficulty putting the Warthog first though as it's never operated in genuinely contested airspace. The Stuka too looked great when it was in uncontested skies. *Though I really don't like wikipedias list, way too many listed that can be used but really aren't intended to be used as such.

They probably wish they could just overtly blame the NSA for the problem. I presume at some stage we're going to get books and articles about what's been going on at Intel in the same style as there have been about Boeing's decline. Certainly seems like Krzanich's tenure as CEO was a complete disaster on the technical side that they still haven't recovered from, even if it isn't significantly hurting their bottom line yet.

I doubt Biden would do anything near the more ludicrous Trump feats; I doubt Biden could do some of Trump's more outlandish feats if he wanted to. No hotels so no currying favour by staying at them, it's unlikely that Biden's son in law (does he even have one?) is going to be appointed to write a middle east peace plan while financing illegal settlements for one party to that peace plan and being massively in debt to Mr Bone Saw; as obvious examples. With Biden it would be the same old ways of taking legalised bungs to protect special interests, but that is hardly equivalent to Trump. Which I guess is why Trump's pushing the Hunter Biden/ Berisma thing so strongly, since that would potentially be a lot closer to Trump's behaviour. Funny thing is I actually rather like Joe Biden, but I have very little doubt he'll lose barring some major perturbation. He'd have been a better candidate than Hillary 4 years ago, and probably would have won then.

Yet another ceasefire in Syria. Looks like it's basically a Turkish surrender, Syria gets to keep every bit of reclaimed territory and the rebels effectively hand over everything south of the M4 too. Turkey gets literally none of the stuff they were demanding beforehand- no return to original Sochi lines, no M5, observation points still surrounded. Looks like another 6 month delay to the rebel loss rather than anything permanent. Pretty much everything is being done the same way as last time. Absolutely no lessons learnt whatsoever. Anyone with any enthusiasm is a BernieBro, who couldn't be bothered voting so don't matter, what are they going to do if Hillary Joe is picked vote Trump?, everything has been done perfectly above board, [candidate] is electable Bernie isn't, Bernie isn't even a proper Democrat and will run as an independent if he loses, and, of course, there is absolutely no anti Bern bias. I've seen two different D talking heads on BBC and AlJ run through exactly that set of talking points with barely concealed glee, which also happened last time too. At least Biden isn't actively disliked as much as Hillary was, but then he also wouldn't have the draw of being the first woman candidate. I find the emphasis on being 'electable' particularly stupid since electable for the Democrats always seems to mean run of the mill and inoffensive to party sensibilities. Every single candidate picked primarily for 'electability' has lost, because if you're labeling your candidate as 'electable' it's pretty much saying that there isn't anything better to say about them than that they can win. The successful D candidates of my lifetime- BClinton and Obama- were not the safe options, far from it, they were the ones with some ability to actively enthuse those who aren't apparatchniks. Every time they've gone for the safe candidate they've lost, and lost to extraordinarily flawed candidates like GWBush and Trump who at least had some ability to enthuse.

Oh no, you can most certainly romance the skellington in DOS2*. Not absolutely sure since it's been a while since I played and my memory is a bit shaky but I think you could romance every companion, at the same time. *+1 for DOS2 over Kingmaker, where's the Jaethal romance option Owlcat?

Calling it Baldur's Gate is fine. NWN was a MMO, then two SP(ish) games. Then an MMO again? So out of the loop with MMOs I'm not sure. Not like the IPLY BG3 was going to be a sequel either. Publishers love their brand recognition, and BG has brand recognition which hasn't yet been tainted much. This is most certainly the correct answer. Not a useful comparison for computer D&D unfortunately, whether TB or RT, though I wish it were.

No you aren't. Non taxpayers pay for healthcare in most countries with a universal system- though most normal treatments are considerably less expensive than in the US even at 'market' rates. Visitors are supposed to have either travel or medical insurance to protect them from medical costs.

Pathfinder Kingmaker still, and no real feeling of slowing down at all. Definitely a worthy successor to the Baldur's Gates in terms of boss fights, you either get your party wiped or wipe the floor with them. Fought some dudette that spammed destruction spells and I'm sure the AI scripting told her to target the PC preferentially just because a failed saving throw instantly meant she 'won' the fight via game over. So you hide the main character and she gets chunked in about twenty seconds after a couple of lucky criticals instead...

I've often- well, occasionally, if a bit bored and thinking vaguely on the subject of game combat systems- wondered if a WeGo system would work well for D&D type games. ie you do the planning for each character as if they were operating in a turn but the turns all execute/ resolve 'simultaneously'. In theory that would allow for the detailed planning possible in a TB system without the potential slowness involved in waiting for 20 rats to each take their turn crawling and mostly missing their 20 individually animated attacks. (The answer is probably it wouldn't work well for D&D, but I'd like to see someone try at some point. And yeah, in theory that is more or less what Infinity Engine RTwP was with the pause at round end option selected)

They are toy soldiers on a battle map, when in combat and in computer RPGs. In D&D overall though they're meant to be more than chess pieces, they are meant to have personalities and skills beyond that. You can't get a chaotic evil pawn that decides it would be fun to kill his own side's queen because she's a bit snooty, obviously has money, and tried to get him killed...

I think you'd also have to question how committed the Democratic Party is to getting out the youth vote for the nomination process though, as compared to older demos. It's all very well to blame youth, but if older voters are being actively courted and encouraged to turn up and they aren't it does make a difference too. As a strategy it's immensely short sighted and was a major problem last time in the presidential election when youth didn't turn out for the enthusiasm black hole that was Hillary Clinton, but it's not exactly surprising that a party establishment that wants to blame Russia, Bernie, anyone but themselves for losing last time will repeat the exact same mistakes again. Even with South Carolina being an open primary the focus would be on getting turn out from D party members who tend to be older, more little c conservative and intrinsically less prone to vote for Bernie. Overall I get the distinct impression that some of the more ludicrous talking heads on especially MSNBC are representative of mainstream capital P Party thinking- they'd expect and prefer 4 more years of Trump rather than a Sanders nomination. The great thing about suppressing the youth vote is that you always have someone to blame- those feckless zoomers who were far too busy doing ice box challenges and planking to vote as they're meant to for the awe inspiring, totally hip and not at all 1990s option of Bloomberg/ Clinton or whatever charisma singularity they favour.

Is that 3% mortality for infection or world population? Because most of the figures I've seen have a 8-10% mortality rate for those infected by Spanish Flu, with about a quarter of the world's population at the time being infected. The covid19 figures are for death rate of infected, so about 1/3 the rate of Spanish Flu rather than the same.

Kind of amusing watching the media spin the SC result as being the Berniepocalypse. Much as last time with Clinton and her winning in the south it's completely irrelevant to being a good candidate overall, since the only scenario in which the Dems win SC vs Trump is a landslide one where they win anyway. And Biden did atrociously in the states which they'll actually need to win to beat Trump. A brokered convention would be hilarious and cringe/ facepalm inducing, in equal measure.

What was his plot element on the prison island? Unlike all (?) the other P/NPCs I could only remember his plot starting on the 2nd island, which would have explained how someone who didn't play much would get the impression he had no plot compared to the others.