Zoraptor

I had CK1 over 2 as well. For me it was because even at the point I stopped playing CK2 it was obviously going to be a load of 'cool' ideas slapped together randomly and an excuse to have one million and one dlcs. There was always something broken that was not fixed before the next set of features came along in the next dlc and introduced more bugs, and which would thus not get fixed. CK1 had bugs, certainly, but it was also focused solely on the fantastic base idea at the heart of the series. I liked CK2, but it left a nasty aftertaste. Win98, I think, but on a laptop. Other computer had either NT4 (or Windows 2000) which were notoriously hard to run games on.

Trump just wanted to be born on Bastille Day, that's how committed he is to the principles of freedom!

Personally, I played Dungeon Keeper 2 before the 1st and had a lot of problems getting the original to run (no sound, iirc). I'm not sure I ever finished DK1 as a result though I replayed a lot of it when EA gave the game away a year or so ago.

The missing US troops pretty much certainly exist though. To be fair to Iraq, most of its phantom troops existed at one point but deserted piecemeal due to their COs pocketing their wages (some of those COs have been sentenced to death as well for their corruption). I'd suspect the Pentagon knows where most of the 'missing' troops are but they're not politically expedient to acknowledge. eg it was obvious that the Syria deployment had more than 500 troops (I suspect it's more than 3000 and maybe even more than 4000 rather than 2000) but that deployment has a number of difficulties associated with it where minimising troop numbers is an advantage. If nothing else you wouldn't want Iran to know how many men were there, let alone Turkey being peeved, potential complaints from home and the rather sketchy international legality of any troops at all being there.

Found it pretty difficult to do a top 25, though I did eventually. I could do a top 10 or a top 50 easily- top 10 are absolute favourites but I have a lot of tier 2 titles that I like a lot but aren't quite top 10. For interest's sake here's my top 50(!) I worked down from. I also made an executive decision to exclude Elex and Witcher 3 which I played very recently. They'd probably make it in a year but at the moment I don't have enough perspective on them. BG2 PST Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas IWD NWN2 w/ MOTB KOTOR2 Stalker SoC Duke Nukem 3D Elite (original 1984) Wizardry PGotMO and 8 SimCity (original) Civ IV w/ expansions EU3 Crusader Kings (1, not 2) Victoria 2 w/ expansions Independence War 2 VtMB Twitcher (1) Thief 2 System Shock and SS2 GTA: VC Kings Bounty (Katauri) Space Rangers 2 w/ expansions after some consideration Dead Space Alpha Centauri w/o AX HoMM3 Sid Meier's Gettysburg Divinity OS (1) Deus Ex Stardew Valley Dungeon Keeper 2 Eador Genesis Gothic 2 w/NdR FEAR FTL Homeworld Lords of Xulima M&B Warband Outcast NeoScavenger Pharaoh Caesar 3 Privateer WC 3/4 Saint's Row 3 Waking Mars Jagged Alliance 2 Alpha Protocol 25 made the cut, 25 didn't.

You could always wait and see if someone has a spare key at the end of the sale. I'm definitely going past the $15 mark since I want Distant Worlds but I don't own Hard West so won't have a spare.

That reminds me of how completely horrible and cringey the narrative and characters were in that game. Too bad, given the singleplayer campaign really was actually pretty decent otherwise. Dunno, I'm rather partial to dream cutscenes involving random demoness nudity and dead people dancing with each other on ships so I thought it was OK, if a bit generic. Plot etc was nowhere near as good as randomly kicking people off great heights or onto conveniently placed spike traps but then very little is as good as that.

FEAR's AI is great and its combat barks are still the best for maintaining atmosphere even a decade+ later as well. The AI in FEAR is extensively scripted rather than being 'proper' AI though- if it were proper AI its system would surely have been used extensively in other games, and that is also why you can break the AI system in some encounters if you get somewhere they aren't programmed to respond to properly. FEAR is also a very linear game with set piece battles despite giving the illusion of freedom, which helps immensely in making the AI believable. Its system would not work properly in a more flexible setting. OTOH it ought to be flexible enough to set up different behaviours with different difficulty levels.

The game is broken. It's not delightful and you should probably consider deleting it. I admire your persistence since it doesn't even sound like your selection of bugs are the fun or surreal ones like challenging yourself for a title or the wonky physics bouncing wrestlers through the roof of the stadium, just run of the mill annoying bug bugs.

'Classic' great axes probably weren't used much if at all, no. Even 2 handed swords weren't used much outside of specific contexts. On the other hand the typical guy in a medieval or dark age army was lucky to be wearing proper leather armour and equally lucky to have a proper weapon unless they were dual use ones like bows and spears. Knights and Men-at-Arms were very expensive, most armies used pressed feudal levies or if lucky, seasonally available yeoman to fill out numbers. Any peasant levy was likely to have a lot of great axe like weapons pressed into use though such as long handled mattocks, mallets or even scythes as well as short handled axes as they were agricultural implements able to be used at a pinch as (mostly ineffective) weapons.

Do you think you can explain the humor here? I don't get it. It's an ironic lol. Dunno why it's posted now as the article is 18 months old and still has Carter as Secretary of Defence; guess they've just visited Serbia. (Specifically, going to Serbia and saying you're from Kosovo would be like going to Madrid and saying you're from independent Catalonia or Kiev and saying you're from Crimea, Russia. The views on Kosovo in the article all also a bit... controversial; when NATO's version of what happened in Kosovo and the facts match it tends to be pure coincidence)

There probably are more than ten people who think Trump's an idiot, which might qualify as being a hater. Tacitus >> that gossipy, but entertaining, hack Suetonius. So it's pretty unlikely that Nero was even in Rome let alone fiddling during the Great Fire.

I'm starting to think that Muhhamed bin Salman is reverse Midas. Ali Abdullah Saleh was the power broker in Yemen for the best part of 4 decades and it took MbS 2 entire days to get him killed. Same day that Hariri fully withdrew his resignation in Lebanon and the GCC imploded. And it looks pretty definite that Trump is going to move the US embassy in Israel, which will no doubt please his son in law and apocalyptic born agains but pretty much no one else.

The only near direct analogy would be to a postal service which swaps from a mandate to deliver the mail/ parcels fairly to one where they don't have to offer a level playing field but can solicit better payment for better delivery times from both the sender and the receiver. And where the postal service is usually a monopoly, so there's no actual consumer choice except for which particular type and level of reaming they'd like to receive. You either have monopolies and regulation to stop them ripping people off, or you have no regulation and proper competition. No regulation and monopolies is always a recipe for both a rip off cost and a qualitatively bad service. We don't have net neutrality here despite most people thinking we do, and it doesn't matter. Here, if skodafone or telescum decided that you had to pay extra to use unchoked netflix- or tried to get money off netflix to prevent being throttled- you can swap to a dozen or so other ISPs within a day; it literally took me 5 minutes to change, though you might need to have a modem mailed to you so a couple of days tops. So instead of having monopolist base plans and monopolist extra costs you get offered proper bonuses for loyalty. Like free netflix equivalents, ironically enough.

Prequel hate? It's treason then. I actually put TFA into the same basket as Jade Empire. Theoretically it should be a fresh take, but instead it uses rehashed characters and situations taken from previous works- for JE its plot and characters are the standard Bioware template ignoring most of the stuff that would make an oriental setting interesting while TFA ignores the interesting stuff that should happen after RotJ for an almost direct New Hope rehash with a few bits of ESB thrown in. If you thought ME3 had masses (heh) of exposition there is a good reason for that- because ME2 failed to meaningfully advance the overarching plot at all until its last dlc. Which most people didn't play. ME2 would have been fine as Mass Effect: Recruitment but as a sequel and predecessor it was dreadful in retrospect and hamstrung the final installment terribly.

She went to Ohio and especially Pennsylvania plenty. Less than Trump, but for all his faults Trump was a fantastic and energetic campaigner. Wisconsin (zero visits, heh) and Michigan definitely were ignored or close to though in the end those 2 states alone didn't cost her the election, they just made the loss even more embarrassing. In some ways her campaigning was actually worse than ignoring them wholesale anyway. Firstly her insistence on staying on safe ground meant that she only reached those 'safe' voters who were always going to vote for her and she probably didn't even reach those who voted for Bernie- securing those votes should have been priority one. Secondly and most importantly she told a good part of the traditional democrat voter base to, essentially, curl up and die or get with the program. Her take was probably more realistic than Trump's promises (and to be honest, Bernie's too) but people in general will always take the hope that something bad won't happen over the promise that it will- and they hate being lectured by some multi millionaire lawyer politician about the 'real world'. It was a truly stupid thing (and time) to choose to be honest about.

Yeah, there's no chance of areas like the deep south switching to vote Bernie or whatever. Unlike commies the average southern voter is religious and won't vote for a godless commie- and even the democrats there preferred Hillary to Bernie by a large margin. France also had 4 candidates not two. That effect did happen in the US last election, it just happened in a near direct parallel to how it happened in France, ie you had traditional left voters in the rust belt voting Trump. The main difference being that many did so after Hillary was dumb enough to tell them they were irrelevant and offer them no hope while still expecting their vote. Stupidest mistake in a campaign replete with them.

They wanted to build on the legacy of Looking Glass Studios and the easiest way to do that is to throw in an obvious betrayal as per System Shock 2 and Thief*. OTOH Oblivion's plot actively destroyed brain cells as they revolted over the monumental stupid involved. *Aimed for LGS legacy, hit Ken Levine's signature instead. Sums up Arkane pretty well. But then again what can you do when the people in your focus group while testing refuse to try exploring your test level because the fricking guard told them to stay at the party so they just followed instructions and stayed at the party.

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.