Zoraptor

The Orville is pretty good, and I was fully prepared to hate it. Pretty derivative, though derivative of things that worked, and some of the humour (and the space combat last ep) feels like there was a Fox Exec looking over their shoulders to make sure a quota was maintained but otherwise even their stunt casting has been on point. It feels more like TNG than anything including Trek has since. Haven't seen Star Trek Discovery yet but I have seen a million and one jokes about its acronym.

Fascist state, maybe. After all, the logo of the Guarda Civil has literal fasces, and (iirc) somewhat bizarrely it was changed to that after Generalissimo Fransisco Franco had died. Hard to think of a dumber response from Madrid, they managed to turn a referendum that would have had the double negative of a low turn out and (at best) tepid support for secession- and which could thus be easily ignored- into a matter of pride where a low turn out can be blamed on repression and voting against Madrid is a matter of pride and resistance. And it's an issue that will be repeatedly revisited now and has exposed the still festering wounds of the Civil War. Utterly moronic. It's not like a referendum would have put the issue fully to bed, but continually seeking to reiterate the issue after a vote has not been great electorally, per the SNP and the Bloc.

Yep. It's actually pretty realistic, sadly. Nothing like doing a three year degree with associated debt to find that there's no demand for it in the workforce at the end. Here at least the stereotypical job for a humanities degree is a McDonalds burger flipper. It has knock on effects as well, we have far too many humanities secondary school teachers and far too few science teachers here as the teacher wage is great for attracting humanities students but awful for attracting science graduates which there are a shortage of- and because of the demand from humanities graduates the MBAs in the Education Department won't offer higher wages for science teachers as they'd have to pay the humanities teachers more as well and attract even more of them (though it's now so bad on the science side that they are bringing back some non wage inducements, when I was at uni they offered $10k and no fees for science teachers). Their waiter very likely has a better degree than the one being celebrated- but he's still working as a waiter. It's more irony funny than haha funny.

Because it's a mess. In no particular order: 1) The referendum was a threat which provided leverage on Turkey and Iraq, the reality actually removes that leverage rather than enhances it 2) Upsets Turkey and Iraq 3) The ruling KDP is deeply unpopular with everyone now, including other Kurdish groups and their prior friend Erdogan 3a) They barely had a quorum for the referendum decision due to boycotts in their parliament 3b) There haven't been elections in the KRG for ages, hence the boycott 3c) Masoud Barzani is well past his mandate and shows no signs of either leaving or holding an election. He's been around ages and has literally no integrity at all- he was even Saddam's Uncle Tom in the north when Saddam was gassing Kurds (after all, he was gassing the PUK Kurds who Barzani was fighting a civil war with at the time). 3d) They were (technically still are) actively blockading (!) the Syrian Kurds, the US's only effective ally in Syria 4) The Peshmerga have actually done very little to fight ISIS, and that has annoyed some in the US military a great deal. 4a) They disarmed the Yazidis then ran away back to Irbil so the Yazidis were genocided- and were rescued by the PKK and Syrian Kurds, not the Peshmerga- now they want Sinjar and other Yazidi areas to be part of their country which will be actively resisted 4b) In terms of fighting ISIS they're behind every other major player, by miles and despite their press attention. They've stuck to the borders they want and that's been it. 5) There's no realistic path to being a viable state without agreement of their neighbours since they're landlocked and surrounded. 5a) If Turkey turns off their oil then they're bankrupt in near literally a week. 6) If they try and keep Kirkuk, which they need for that oil, there will be war with Iraq over it, no doubt at all. 7) Crimea, and its referendum. The objection to that was that the vote was illegal/ unconstitutional (since no one actually believes the vote didn't represent the population's wish) so they cannot easily support another referendum of the same style. The US loves the status quo because it's stable- ish- and provides lots of lovely leverage against basically everyone in the region. A threat that remains a threat can be used as said leverage indefinitely, but a threat once delivered upon leads to... consequences. Support for the Kurds means that Iraq is in Iran's sphere irreversibly, and short of a continuous military intervention- problematic if both Iraq and Turkey refuse access to airspace, which they will- there will be war over Kirkuk. There's no practical advantage between an autonomous KRG and an independent one for the US, only disadvantages.

Square Enix as well.

well, he is still elected and Russia is more like oligarchy? Not sure, not expert on Russia There isn't much doubt at all that Putin would have won all his elections without potential shenanigans (most of which were favour currying from people like Kadyrov). The disputation is about how fair the elections were, plus some fairly blatant propaganda. Answer being that the elections were not particularly fair, but Putin would have won anyway and even if he didn't win outright he would have been running off against either ossified commie Zyuganov or fascist clown Zhirinovsky. The western liberal candidates lost their chance when western liberal approved Yeltsin asterisked their country 20 years ago.

Eh, that's consistent with what GD has said. If it were say WoD's list, then it would be inconsistent since he has a rather more "it's OK when my side does it" approach to certain things. I do feel vaguely compelled to point out that it's 'Eminent Domain' rather than 'imminent domain' though. But if I cannot bask in the achievements of the mighty All Blacks® then I might have to look at my own personal achievements instead...

Yeah, the current Atari is Infogrammes with a 'new' label stuck on them. They sold off the only profitable part of the business to Namco Bandai nearly a decade ago and tried to sell all their IP a couple of years ago; they're basically a joke financially*. No surprise they're looking at crowd funding to capitalise (hoho) on people's nostalgia, and no surprise if it's actually someone else manufacturing the boxes and using their name rather than them themselves. Without MS/ Sony's money you'd be looking at an AMD APU in a box, so basically laptop type performance and you don't get much laptop performance for 300USD. At least in 2018 it's likely to be Zen/ Vega combo instead of an ancient Bulldozer based one. As long as Vega doesn't set the wood casing on fire, at least. *Near Interplay levels- their shares are like 40euroc or something, and I don't think they're even indexed on a major sharemarket any more.

The armour penetration skills can be very useful against low hp enemies who are either shield wielders or have Fortify applied since you can then bypass their recharged shields to finish them off. That's a rather limited utility though, and it is 'artificial', for want of a better word.

Worse than silly, it's a stupid 'balance' fixing something that wasn't broken in the first game. Case in point, archers' special arrows are now almost completely useless. Either the enemies have bloated base hit points anyway so the special effects do little damage andor- the fundamental problem when combining the new armour system and archers- their special effects are blocked by magical armour while the arrows do physical damage. Meaning that there's almost always no point using them due to the system encouraging stacking damage types on single enemies and, per below, your characters typically having far less armour than the enemy. Single (?) exception is knockdown arrows as they are a physical effect, and to a single target rather than an area. At least magic users typically have spells that stack magical damage and magical effects rather than mixing the two. The overall effect of the system is that it's a handicap against the player since you'll be vulnerable to such status effects an order of magnitude (or maybe it just seems like it) more often that the enemy will, and they can thus use them willy nilly while you either cannot or there's just no point to using them.

Still stomping around the first island. Up to lvl 6 now. Enjoyable, but I think tactician mode may have been a mistake for a first play since it's kind of like playing a King's Bounty game on that difficulty- you have to find the specific fights you can win and fight all of them until next level up, then go back and fight the ones you avoided earlier. I've had it freeze for up to thirty seconds or so when reading crafting manuals- mouse was still responsive but no input worked. The 30s case was a manual with 26 recipes (!), so quite an extreme case. Otherwise there hasn't been any noticeable slowdown at all and no proper bugs, only journal ones.

Yeah, vast majority seemed to actually be anti both, and if they voted for one it was mostly a vote against the other. If it had been an Obsidian board election it probably would have been a close race between the Vermont Commie and Mr What's a lepo? for the winner. I can only think of two pro Trump US people as well- WoD (and even he wavered) and Valsuelm (who has since disowned him).

Not in one week. That figure includes kickstarter and all other presales as well. DOS2 had sold over 300k before it was released, and sold ~180k in its first release week.

Don't really see why it couldn't just be that PoE console and Bastard's Wound both released around the time of the articles- and flying people somewhere + accommodation is not all that expensive since even if the Eurogamer guy was based in Europe most of the others weren't. They wouldn't be staying a week at the Ritz after flying in on a specially recommissioned Concorde while drinking Moet & Chandon '62 out of a complimentary diamond encrusted bust of Atton Rand. Far more likely they'd fly economy and stay at the Holiday Inn for a few days. And yes, there's certainly Deadfire to consider as we can only assume that Paradox is keen to publish that, so ongoing promotion and goodwill is a good investment. They had one and it didn't really reveal anything. Yeah, the article Infinitron posted at the top of the page (on 25pp at least) is the follow up Eurogamer article and has basically no info on the new project. The author did at least clarify on twitter that there wouldn't be much new info when people started getting excited about it. Given the way the final paragraph is written it's pretty clearly the last one in Eurogamer's series, at least.

Some random magister killed the black cat that was following me. I'm playing on tactician mode and only a couple of hours in but its combat is almost completely binary- I either roflstomp everything with no casualties or get roflstomped with the enemy taking no casualties. The latter type have all been optional/ avoidable though, so no real problem.

I'm not surprised at all. Countries tend to avoid teaching their less than glorious history, and that which doesn't fit the national narrative. (Polish Lithiuanian War. It's off topic anyway)

Ukraine. Worshipping that unredacted genocidal fascist Bandera as if he's a hero. And most ironically supported by Poland. Well, not quite most ironic, almost as ironic as Poland whining about 1939 when they blatantly stabbed the Lithuanians in the back and stole their land when they were fighting the soviets, and also helped partition rump Czechoslovakia early in 1939. And, as always, the EIC/ Vic's Raj killed more people in India alone through capitalism than the history of communism- primarily so that they could pimp drugs to the Chinese as well.

I'd suspect that right now is a poor time to be buying unless you have to. The Zen based AMD mobile chips ought to be out later this year, and they should have an even better power/ value balance than desktop Ryzen has. Coffeelake on the Intel side should be out soon (next month, supposedly) as well. Personally I'd look at buying a new battery if I could find one for a non extortionate amount. It's almost always the battery failing to charge rather than the laptop's fault.

To post or not to post, that is the question Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of people labeling a 2000 meme as being one for the 'real internet oldies' Or make commentary against a sea of misattributed apocryphal Polish Fighter Pilot stories, and by replying end them. To post, to write no more, and by ignoring do we end the two unnatural triggerings this thread is heir to? 'tis a consummation to be devoutly wished. To ignore to leave; to get more such comments elsewhere- aye, there's the rub for in the ignoring of such comments what further posts may come elsewhere when we have tabbed out of this accursed thread must leave the back button unpressed. (literally shaking, but might be my advanced age to blame)

The DivOS companions were pretty good, but certainly nowhere near as involved as the typical Obsidian or Bioware ones. Most of their personal quests are stacked towards the end game though, so you don't get much from them if you don't get that far. Funny, I thought it had a very good reputation here. Maybe it's because I don't read the PoE forums much, I'd guess there's some competition between the two for best crowdfunded RPG and RT/P vs TB. And while theoretically their settings are quite similarly themed the practical application is almost diametrically opposed. I already have DivOS2 as a backer, but probably will wait a bit for patching before playing and as I have other games to complete.

So what horrible classics have you seen on GOG? Except Master of Orion 3 maybe, but that's arguably neither a classic nor truly horrible in the way a Ruins of Myth Drannor is. *shrug* Yeah, there's a massive difference between MoO3 'bad' and PoR2 bad (though to be fair, the most infamous PoR2 bug was actually a bug in the 3rd party installer software rather than the game itself). I actually liked MoO3 well enough, personally, as I hadn't played the first two games. OTOH I disliked Jade Empire strongly, though it's technically absolutely fine and a lot of people like it and found Rebel Assault 2 to be boring and have rubbish gameplay, but again some like it and it wasn't technically poor or anything. GOG does sell a few games which are broken in certain circumstances- eg The Saboteur won't work if you have more than 4 cores- but they are labelled as such. I can't think of a single genuinely bad old game that is on there, and several newer but unsupported games have even been culled from their catalogue recently. About the only thing that seems to get you culled from Steam's catalogue is being mean to Gabe. There's certainly no way those 5000 odd 2017 games are all going to be supported and stable now, let alone in a year or two's time. If anything GOG can be criticised for keeping things too up to date- which has led to some games losing support for legacy OS like XP.

There's likely to be 5000 (!) games released on Steam this year. That's nearly 15/ day, or GOG's entire catalogue every 4 months. I suspect the number of worthwhile titles has not quite seen the same inflation.

While it's paid for by Paradox it can't be all that expensive, perhaps even cheaper than conventional advertising. It could just be for BW and console PoE which have both released in the last weeks or so. No- Eurogamer aren't going to say "and next week we have something you won't be interested in", after all, they want people to Read And Find Out. It's the journalist equivalent of a Batman episode ending with the Dynamic Duo about to be cut in half by the Penguin's laser and being told to tune in same bat time, same bat channel. I'd expect some minor 'new' information, maybe something more substantive if Paradox is publishing it, but very well short of a reveal.

Stardew Valley's romance system is pretty much identical to those found in most RPGs though. You'll get relationship points mostly by giving people specific(ish) gifts up to twice a week and on birthdays, and the rest is dialogue choices in cutscenes, quests and clicking on them once a day. It's certainly a more involved and longer process overall than most RPGs, but its basic building blocks are very similar to, say, Dragon Age Origins (minus the small bonus if you do bother talking to them every day).

GOG version of FONV is near rock solid out of the box. Or off the download or whatever the equivalent is. I had 2 infinite load loops- no save game corruption though, just one off loops- and that's it barring some minor scripting type bugs. Considering the number of crashes I had with (retail) F3 a couple of years ago even with fixes and using older hardware (e6400/ 5770/ win7 vs 1700/ 580/ win10) it was a massive improvement. I'd usually presume that most GOG fixes are publicly available ones like presetting the executable's LAA flag, but there certainly seem to be some intrinsic stability improvements as well. Which is not much use if using the steam version, unfortunately.