Zoraptor

"Putin Ordered Plane to Be Downed in 2014". An article written pretty much entirely for the headline on the assumption that 90% of people won't actually read the article and presume it refers to MH17. It doesn't. Nice work, BBC.

It's inevitable consequence of steam's lack of curation. And yes, that answers both the what and the why.

The problem with that is the same problem as with any 'Unreliable Narrator' approach- people tend to think that inconsistencies or incorrect information are due to poor proofreading, bad editing and poor writing- and in games, bugs- rather than due to realism. That's why so few take that approach, as well as it being a lot of extra work for little if any reward, indeed per previous it often adds to criticism. Well, I think we all know why that's the case. "Racist Gamergate Child Murder Simulator Game Released, Ban This Sick Filth" © 2018, Polygon.

Been playing Into the Breach. Don't think it will have anywhere near the legs that FTL had. I know Chris Avellone is credited with some writing for it but there's barely enough writing to justify writing credits. I also got Origin Access or whatever it's called. 40NZD for a year was just too good to pass up. So i will be playing Batman: Arkham City soon.

Seems sensible since I cannot be the only one who always read it as "No Truce with the Furries". Which at least gave it name recognition, I guess.

90% of the time you aren't fighting but are wandering around or talking or whatever. And while a bit reductionist if you're only really worried about hitboxes then you end up with no visual customisation of the character, and would thus miss out on gems such as Big Bushy Beard, Crusty Jugglers Fisherman Hat + Orange Aviators Mike Thorton being complimented on blending in to Naples Rome by Conrad Marburg. It's actually far more about the voice for me, as I tend to pay more attention to women's voices. More people probably should play as females for that reason since (scientifically) both men and women pay more attention overall to a female voice- hence why you have far more Bitching Betty warning systems than Droning David ones.

Heh, I said near exactly that last time this came up here. (I don't mind spending hours looking at a guy's butt when it's the right guy though, like Commander Jax from Piranha Bytes' seminal masterpiece ELEX.)

On their streaming service; of course.

Even the most updated CCC is 2 years out of date, it's now the rather prosaic 'Radeon Settings' (with Crimson/ Adrenaline rather than Catalyst drivers). Immediate thought is to do a full uninstall of the graphics driver and suite then do a reinstall. It's presumably an older laptop graphics chip- hence why it's still using CCC- so it's likely to get more and more problematic as time goes by, unfortunately. Would be useful to know what the graphics card is though to confirm.

To be fair to her, all she would achieve by opposing the army is renewed martial law and more years in jail. She's not the one with the power, while a 'free' election was held the military retained an absolute veto (and had a large chunk of the parliamentary seats reserved for it). China would be about the only one able to stop it, maybe Bangladesh if they got serious about an actual invasion but they have far more serious problems.

I mean, you don't even have to go that far. If they roll a 20 against your fighter (5% chance for every attack!), your fighter is almost certainly dead, too. Levels 1-2 in BG1 really sucked. Fighters can at least wear helmets, and they protect against crits. Thieves and mages (and druids?) can't, as well as having lower HP. Don't think anyone is going to argue about the general suckitude of early level 2e D&D though.

Like OpenGL Vulkan isn't used in that many games. nVidia also has a successful partnership program which tends to be focused on things which nVidia cards do well, like tesselation.

I also have a spare FTL key from GOG should anyone want it.

That's all for BG2. BG1, especially early BG1 though? Better hope that wolf/ xvart/ hobgoblin/ kobold etc doesn't make a beeline past your fighters for your lvl1-3 caster with his handful of hit points and couple of spells. Engagement at least theoretically would help with that and is why attacks of opportunity were introduced in 3e.

I'll wait six months for a boil if it means I don't have to build a meth empire when I get cancer. Well yeah. And for that matter, if you desperately need that boil lanced, now, you can always get it done privately and pay out of pocket for it- and chances are it will still be far cheaper than getting it done in the US even when done privately. That's the other thing that people in the US often don't seem to understand, just because you have a single payer system doesn't mean that there aren't also private healthcare and insurance; they're just optional extras. That boil ain't going to kill you, so no kidding it's low priority compared to cancer, car accidents, appendicitis etc. Why should everyone else subsidise someone's Doritos&DewDiet enabled pustulent zitule removal as an urgent measure, to put it in free market terms.

Bah, Unity works perfectly well on consoles, NightDive just smelt potential for more cash if they get a publisher and ... failed. I said it previously but it stands to be reiterated: they got an immense amount of criticism about using Unity during and after their kickstarter and a lot of suggestions to use UE4. The decision to use UE4 had nothing to do with trying to get a publisher and everything to do with actual feedback from (supposedly at least, guess it could have been organised shilling) actual fans. The justification for swapping from Unity is a load of rubbish though, even an updated System Shock ought not to be a strain for a PS4/XB1 whatever the engine.

Didn't read the article (obviously, since it's the 'Fail) but I'd wager a small amount that they presented it as meaning that there would definitely be forfeitures as a result when it's still more of an 'under consideration' situation where it won't definitively happen. If there's a sensible and a sensationalist interpretation the 'Fail will always go for the latter: twice the sensationalism, double the page impressions after all. I am compelled to make Star Wars (or Alanis Morisette) quotes whenever I use the word 'ironic'. In this case it's Director Krennic from Rogue One.

Daily Fail link Barti? Really? Poster of your talents? That law was proposed by Julius Malema's party of ANC defectors, ANC has lost a lot of support from sustained infighting and they may well have lost the vote if they opposed it due to their own members crossing the floor- and that would have potentially brought down the government, so they had little choice other than to formally support it. It's certainly ironic though, Ramaphosa was supposed to be a lot more economically rational than Zuma and on the first leg of his presidential race there's a law far more radical than any from Zuma's time; and that sort of law certainly was a very large component of what turned Zimbabwe from bread basket to basket case- and was repealed with extreme prejudice recently there. Didn't help that Mugabe's redistribution program was abjectly corrupt but I don't think there could be much confidence in the transparency of any South African redistribution.

Steam and Bethesda almost destroying, especially given that Bethesda now has a new paid mods system operating outside Steam. Tons of blame to go around both parties there and everything about it was utter debacle and a poster on how not to do things- crap mods, no oversight, non existent support, expensive, tiny cut to mod devs etc- and managed to generate just about every potential bad facet of paid mods in its first few days. Steam gets the blame for setting up the workshop system, clearly aimed at walled garden-ing mods into its own ecosystem for future exploitation, but Bethesda was equally clearly keen on exploiting it for their benefit as well. And when it comes right down to it Bethesda games needing tons of mods to be good is because, well, Bethesda makes games that aren't much good without mods. With paid mods it's in their active best interests to make their games even more bare bones to encourage even more paid mods to be necessary for a good experience.

OpenGL is pretty near defunct at this point, Vulkan is its direct replacement- they're both administered by the same people. There will only be more problems with OpenGL going forward especially on newer hardware. Somewhat ironically given your experience nVidia isn't that keen on Vulkan since its parallelism tends to favour AMD cards compared to DirectX.

If you have a heart defect or predisposition to heart disease it quite often shows up in your 40s. There's an actual scientific reason for that, since by that age most men have fathered their children there's no evolutionary pressure against it. As others have mentioned being fat and not exercising much are also red flags. Have to admit that I still think of Xena/ Hercules Kevin Smith (Ares) every time the director is mentioned; and he died nearly 20 years ago now after falling off a tower while filming in China.

Starbreeze is the publisher of SS3 in the same sense that Paradox was the publisher of PoE- if you make the distinction between the two concepts then both are Distributors rather than publishers. This at least I'd defend Night Dive on. They initially resisted switching pretty strongly, but there are a lot of UE fanboys and Unity haters out there and the UE fanboys assured them that a switch would be painless and result in a better product with an easier production pipeline and lower costs so long as it was done early- and Stephen Kick had effectively zero development experience to fall back on. While I thought the switch was risky (and told them so) I've yet to see anything convincing that it was anywhere near The Problem with the project or that it contributed significantly to its failure. At the stage they were at when making the switch they mostly had art assets and they can be switched painlessly to UE. I'd also suspect that they did not do the KS itself as a way to get a backdoor demo for a publisher, but that as funds depleted and it became clear that they wouldn't make it they tried to appeal to one instead. Which in the circumstances would be a pretty desperate appeal given the project did not look well run and it's highly unlikely that ND would be willing to give up much in the way of creative control or rights in return. As I said when the news broke, their problem really looks like it was complete lack of proper project oversight. They needed a hard headed Project Lead or Producer able to tell people that they were wasting time and money on frivolities instead of getting stuff done, they needed a plan and they needed to stick to it unless there were very compelling reasons not to. (Despite being a huge System Shock fan I didn't contribute to the kickstarter as I thought it had a big chance of failure. I'd also suspect that they'd already overspent the 1.3 million and dipped into the profits from the SS1/2 re-releases at least a bit)

Let's get back to designer soldier wear. Like, uh, Hugo Boss. There's a fairly strong correlation between looking stylish and losing.

Yes. I'd agree that it was better overall than the main game, due to being a bit more focused. But that does remind me of one of the peeves I had which I forgot to mention- I hit the level cap before even starting WM2. That was probably the worst level cap imbalance I've seen since KOTOR where I hit the cap about 2/3 of the way through the game and it really made any filler combat feel like filler.

Finished Pillars of Eternity, finally, and it's... an odd feeling. Overall impression is very similar to what I thought of Baldur's Gate 1, there's a lot of potential there but the execution varies from a bit off to well off in places. There's a lot of pretty boring filler combat and considering the emphasis on balance in PoE the more difficult encounters were still ruled by status effects, summons and the like as much as BG1 was, and that resulted in most of those fights having an almost binary result- I either won fairly easily with little damage or got roflstomped quickly. Character progression felt rather poor, like nothing much was changing on level up, but there clearly was significant progression happening since monsters got easier. Setting was fine, story was fine and while I would have said it was not particularly memorable I did restart a year old game and could remember the details, so it clearly was memorable. I guess that sums it up pretty well actually, it's a well designed game with pretty maps and decent progression plus some interesting story/ concepts and battles; but it frequently feels like a far worse game than it actually is. That I suspect is why it took me three attempts to finish and I don't feel any great enthusiasm for it, yet played it 120 (!) hours.