Zoraptor

The studio that made Descent was not being paid (by Interplay, given that it's still run by Herve that's a quelle surprise situation if ever there was one), that's why they were pulled from steam and GOG, though they're back on GOG as of last week; and NWN2 has been on GOG for years. Steam is a minimum effort for maximum return entity, and working out legal problems is not a high return for low effort formula. Same for properly curating a landslide of shovelware or proper support for their games. It's also why they're so keen on the web2.0 stuff, some random providing support for steam games in their spare time is, after all, free. Wouldn't want a few support guys or people actually testing released games to cut into Gabe's billion dollar profits now would we.

Khamanei would be a better target than Rouhani. I suspect Trump doesn't know who either is though, which might be a good thing. He'd probably end up fatwa'ed inside a week. That reminds me of when ex Brit Foreign Secretary Robin Cook (otherwise a thoroughly decent bloke) decided to hold a meeting with the Irish Prime Minister in front of a portrait of Oliver Cromwell- who infamously slaughtered tens of thousands of Irish.

I'm still playing Elex, though I haven't had a chance to play for three days and probably won't get a chance this evening either. Got around to buying Tyranny from GOG's sale which will likely be next on the list, with the added bonus of getting Starcrawlers free which looks pretty interesting.

I like waiting for other people's lists as I would inevitably forget games if I didn't. I'd almost certainly have forgotten Stalker and JA2 and that would have been embarrassing. Should that be Might and Magic IX? Don't think HoMM IX exists.

They actually did make one here (The Almighty Johnsons). Not a weekday Days of Our Lives style soap though.

Not really, an unbiased strong international body is a good idea, what we have now is an abject joke. Mladic is a maggot to be sure, but selectively applied justice is not necessarily better than no justice at all as it ends up justifying and making precedents for all sorts of things based on current convenience. Ethnic cleansing being OK because Operation Storm was done by a now NATO and EU member and them being convicted would be embarrassing or Kosovo's secession (without even a vote, in contrast Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine twice prior to 2014 they just got gazumped by the USSR breaking up then crushed by 70k Ukrainian soldiers) being legal set precedents if you have international laws yet were done for pure convenience. You're also not going to see Bush, Blair, Sarkozy, Muhammed bin Salman who's busy starving Yemen (or the Mays, Trudeaus, Merkels, Trumps, Macrons etc who are arming and supporting him); or Putin or even Assad so long as he has Putin's backing in The Hague. You'll just see ossified current irrelevancies like Mladic and those like Gbagbo who pissed the French off but didn't have Russian or Chinese protection instead. the problem you are pointing out is that of an international institution not strong enough to act effectively against strong nations. I’m all for making them stronger, which will go hand in hand with an increasing number of nations submitting an increasing amount of their power. You can't make it stronger. Firstly it won't be allowed to get stronger- it's only there in the first place because it's weak and controllable- and secondly even if it did it won't deal with itself if the 'International Community' is the one to overstep the mark. The UN even specifically excludes itself from liability, as seen with the Cholera epidemic in Haiti and the spate of UN peacekeepers caught diddling kids in Africa and not being able to be prosecuted for it. And it will have to deal with the consequences of their poor decisions effectively forever due to their precedent setting nature. If they try to get anyone for, say, the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Burma they have to deal with the Operation Storm verdict.

Pay2Win isn't gambling though, is it? If you're buying a loot crate with a chance to unlock Darth Vader then that's gambling as it has that random chance element, if you're outright buying an unlock you're just making a purchase as there's no randomness. Classic gambling requires both a random chance game and a 'stake' or cost to be gambling. So random unlocks based on time played- the classic BF2 example being the 40 hour play time to unlock Darth Vader- wouldn't be gambling either, as there's no stake/ monetary cost, just a voluntary time cost.

Not really, an unbiased strong international body is a good idea, what we have now is an abject joke. Mladic is a maggot to be sure, but selectively applied justice is not necessarily better than no justice at all as it ends up justifying and making precedents for all sorts of things based on current convenience. Ethnic cleansing being OK because Operation Storm was done by a now NATO and EU member and them being convicted would be embarrassing or Kosovo's secession (without even a vote, in contrast Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine twice prior to 2014 they just got gazumped by the USSR breaking up then crushed by 70k Ukrainian soldiers) being legal set precedents if you have international laws yet were done for pure convenience. You're also not going to see Bush, Blair, Sarkozy, Muhammed bin Salman who's busy starving Yemen (or the Mays, Trudeaus, Merkels, Trumps, Macrons etc who are arming and supporting him); or Putin or even Assad so long as he has Putin's backing in The Hague. You'll just see ossified current irrelevancies like Mladic and those like Gbagbo who pissed the French off but didn't have Russian or Chinese protection instead.

Target demographics is pretty important. If gambling by minors is illegal, and if you determine that lootboxes are gambling then it's a big deal if they're also being aimed at minors as that is a more deliberate breaking of the law than an incidental one- you haven't just made the mistake of saying that lootboxes aren't gambling, you've compounded it by having them in a game marketed to children. Trouble for EA is that Star Wars is clearly a kiddie orientated franchise, so as soon as (if) lootboxes are determined to be gambling it instantly looks like they're also marketing gambling to kids rather than the comparatively minor problem of having unregulated gambling aimed at adults. The overall reason for it being a big deal is the same for gambling in general, or for smoking or alcohol. Adults are expected to be able to be responsible for their actions, children aren't- and you're not expected to try and get children to gamble/ smoke/ drink by targeting them either. Perhaps the best example would be something like a casino- everyone knows that a certain percentage of under age people will get into a casino using fake IDs or via carelessness. It's a big deal especially if due to negligence, but it's also expected. On the other hand if you have a casino with daily after school specials advertised around the local high schools you might suspect that they're not entirely aiming themselves at the adult market.

You need to keep your terms clear- are you talking about games being primarily purchased by children or played by them? I presume the latter, since that's what the ESA report is about (bonus for linking directly: avoids hits for Polygon). Their data shows that children are disproportionately game players, even if you include those that literally could not play due to being too young 29% of game players are under 18 while they make up ~25% of the US population. If you exclude those less than 4 as being highly unlikely to play games you get ~18% of the general population but 29% of the gamers. In any case you can and often do aim a product at one group while having a secondary group be the actual largest market. Programmes on TV usually are aimed at young people because they garner the best advertising rates, but they're almost always watched primarily by oldies instead since oldies watch standard TV a lot more than young people both absolutely and as a proportion. In this particular case we also have the game being part of a franchise (Star Wars) that is specifically aimed at children and has most of its other merchandise specifically aimed at children.

Hariri is back in Lebanon and has withdrawn his resignation. No great surprise there. Should be noted though that despite most reports saying his family left Saudi as well his two younger children are still 'guests' there, it's only his wife who went with him, and his elder son was always at uni in the UK.

Don't listen to the square. Sounds like a natural Berserker, that guy. All the cool kids are doing Elex! And it's heading into winter in the northern hemisphere, cold increases are only natural.

40% of them being illegals should not effect accuracy though, and it's certainly not a defence of employers since that just means that those employers are doing two illegal things- rather than one- and hoping that employees won't complain about the first because of the second. That's worse than just clipping wages, it's clipping wages while also illegally employing those you're clipping wages from. I certainly wouldn't trust the survey and chart to be accurate, by their nature those sort of studies are notoriously difficult to do well. Though that could actually mean that they're underestimating the problem rather than overestimating it.

Plot twist, it's the 1991 Neverwinter Nights being remade... NWN is probably my most disliked game ever so anticipation would be at r00fles level anyway, but at this point I also have a pretty strong antipathy towards Beamdog's business model as well.

Yeah, I'd like a transaction tax as well to be honest. It technically goes against my principles on not taxing already taxed income, but there's been a whole new exploitation area with high turnover automated trades and the like which need some way of being discouraged and don't really do anything for the economy except manipulate it, sometimes dangerously so- and generally speaking the less money you have the less you'd be effected by it as well.

Still no custom Vega cards released, but on the other hand the reference v56 are available here for a decent price at 750NZD and ~80NZD less than a 1070Ti. Since I can still sell my 580 for a decent amount a v56 card and a new monitor are on the menu for Christmas. Only drawback is that 1440p is probably the natural res for a v56 card but we only have have 1 IPS freesync monitor available in the whole country apparently.

Some of the laptop Raven Ridges are out now, based on r5 and with a few Vega cores. They seem to be competitive vs equivalent Intel but not a gamechanger except for there being genuine competition again. There are also quite a few 8 core r5s turning up now, so people getting a 1700 in a 1600 box, which suggests that the fabrication process for Zen really does have a fantastically good reliability and they're having to pad out 6 core models with 8 core ones- and aren't lasering off the extra cores either.

Like USA where such thing doesn't exist? You're right, it's not a VAT, they call it "sales tax" and leave it to their individual states to determine which goods and services are taxable and which aren't. Shockingly, most states do have a wide assortment of taxes that we generally subsume under VAT in Europe. But sure, whatever. Let's keep splitting hairs. Sharpie can't argue his way out of a paper bag, but the fundamental point is a valid one. VAT/ GST/ sales tax is a tax on income that has already been taxed once. I'm not a fan of estate tax or 'stamp duty' or other taxes against spending that has already been taxed once; but for example a reasonable Capital Gains Tax is a good idea since it taxes added value. The really fundamental problem is that the rich, especially the really rich, almost always have access to loopholes anyway so stuff targeting them seldom works as they can use Trusts, Companies, Partnerships, tax havens, or combine them all into a Double Irish variant; and the average Joe can't. Things like VAT are also a deeply regressive tax if applied to staple items like food rather than just luxuries since if you do that it disproportionately targets poor people- who have to spend money on food, accommodation, clothes- rather than those with discretionary spending who can choose when and where to spend most of their income. Even if you exclude food and have luxury tiers/ brackets they're almost always inconsistent and still gameable by the rich; here you just bung as much discretionary expenditure into a 'business' (which desperately needs a new 8700k dual 1080 Ti system, so I can work at home!) and then claim the GST back, plus you can write off depreciation for your shiny new 100k Tesla against any income and any net loss against your personal income. It's a lot more difficult to game straight income tax or a CGT.

Elex. Not perfect, but 100% a Piranha Bytes game which is exactly what I wanted.

Seems that may be changing. Some of the things they talk about there would definitely fit Obsidian pretty well, some not so much.

Everything wasn't free, they had paid dlcs for maps and the like. They were a disaster as they fragmented the userbase and BF1 was a content poor game so boring and low interest without the added content which they provided no incentive to get. BF2 is far more content rich, and won't have paid dlcs so there should not be userbase fragfmentation and it should have a longer shelf life. The dlc revenue model has been replaced by the microtransaction/ lootbox model. However the real comparison that does the damage is to the original 2000s Battlefront 1 & 2 games from LucasArts. They had more content and game styles, and due to the time they were made no microtransactions and the like. They also hold up very well today and GOG just remastered them (they did the steam version as well, so there's even crossplay) to add a non defunct GameSpy native MP.

Yes he was an owner and theoretically at least creative manager as well. Said it last time that this stuff came up but ChrisA is not coming across well at all with the passive aggressive stuff and some of what he has said strongly implies a lot of it was his fault, reading between the lines. Only one friend left at a 150+ person company? The old adage about **** applies; if you meet one occasionally it's probably them, if you meet them all the time it's probably you. The passive aggressive stuff is exactly what will make otherwise reasonable people roll their eyes and ignore you because you're being obnoxious, even if you do have a point originally. The 'theory' is that Chris left due to clashes with JESawyer, who turned PoE into a bland overbalanced bore fest instead of the vibrant unique awesome that it would have been had Chris been doing it. It's a more prevalent theory on the 'Codex where Infinitron mostly posts and where holy war is waged over the status of PoE as a good/ bad game that makes the 30 Years War look like a sit down picnic.

Don't use steam as I don't like monopolists. Otherwise I have about 400 games on half a dozen other services. With just about everything else I have good self control but I'm never going to get through 400 games and I know it.

Troika had publisher troubles with all their titles- Arcanum got needlessly delayed for months (with a pirate version already out), ToEE had those cuts (rumour at the time was due to WotC's supposed moral clauses though, not the publisher Infogrammes) and VtMB had to be delayed until after Half Life 2 launched due to using Source and there was some disputation about funding game fixes during the delay. Wouldn't blame TC at all if he didn't want to deal with publishers with that record. That may just mean he wants management or the game producers to deal with them though and as above there are publishers who let the dev just get on with things. If Obsidian is making and retaining the IP they'd probably have a fair bit of freedom as well.

Swiped shamelessly from the funny things thread. Did you ever hear the tragedy of Battlefront 2, the Star Wars game? I thought not, it's not a story that DICE would tell you. It's an EA legend. Star Wars Battlefront2 was a computer game so anticipated and desired that PR could manipulate buyers to create preorders. They had such knowledge of human nature that they could even promise not to have any paid DLC* to not fragment the user base when planning on having lootboxes instead. Concentrated PR is a path to many purchasing decisions some consider to be impetuous. The PR strategy was so successful the only thing they feared was not making as much profit as they could from their players- which eventually, of course, they failed to do. Unfortunately 40 hours to unlock a hero and a reliance on lootboxes caused many to cancel their preorders and save their money. Ironic, they tried to shamelessly milk their userbase but ended up reducing it instead. 2kgames: is it possible to learn this power? *so the one thing BF2 won't actually have is literal high ground dlc. Isn't it ironic, don't you think?