Zoraptor

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.

Not sure that attributing made up stories to him is a great tribute, Mr Tucker. (That story is apocryphal and usually attributed to a random Polish or South African or Scottish pilot due to their accent making mishearing Fokker more believable. In the more well though through versions they even use Focke (Wulf) since they were actually used by the germans in WW2, or have it be a WW1 pilot's story instead. Of course in this case the fighter FW-190 was used only after Bader was shot down anyway, so it was 100% bf)

BioWare games are pretty horribly guilty of the second offense, going all the way back to Baldur's Gate 2. In Baldur's Gate 2, most characters of the opposite sex will literally not talk to you outside of a few pre-scripted one-liners (interjections) sprinkled throughout the game unless you commit to a romance with them...and if you try to demur, welp, that's the end of all of their conversations. Most of the characters period will not. The romance dialog series (which fired off randomly and created some really bizarrely timed conversations) were pretty much the only extended dialogs. To be fair, they all had an extended dialogue associated with their personal quest line whether a romance option or not. So you still got the personal quest of the female romance options (Viconia, Aerie, Edwina) even if female yourself and you still got Anoarth Skyden's personal quest if you were male. You could even still drive the annoying git insane, iirc. Ironically Bioware 'fixing' their spontaneous banter chains to be either '__ wants to talk to you' prompted or 'chat by the fireside' style led to far more chance of ending up accidentally ending up in a romance/ boinking by just being polite. My problems with game romances are similar to other people's, ie they're not often done well but more done because a certain subgroup expect them to be there. I did like the approach in Witcher 3 though, with the possibility of you being dumped- best result for all concerned, so far as I'm concerned. Witcher 3 has the big advantage of being done with predetermined characters with backstory in the books and previous games though, which is obviously rather difficult if you're doing a blank slate character.

Killjoys is far cheaper to make which is almost certainly the deciding factor- only 3 leads, very little CGI, almost all the sets/ locations being generic industrial/ Canadian Countryside. I liked Dark Matter a fair bit, but then I'm a sucker for all the other Blake's 7 analogues like Farscape and Firefly as well.

As for the White House staff, Tillerson doesn't seem very competent, so, at least someone who knows how to structure a State Department properly. Tillerson seems fine, considering the limitations he's working under. No worse than Kerry or Powell, far better than Clinton or the later GWB offerings. Kind of lol at WoD's idea of Bannon and Bolton in the same White House with Bolton as SoS. Their foreign affairs ideas are almost completely incompatible, and nearly everyone outside the US (and many within) loathes Bolton with utter passion.

Yes, and to continue... Grain/ cereal fed cattle/ meat farming is horrendously inefficient as the energy conversion is only 10%, you need to harvest and transport the grain etc and it's far more efficient to just have people eat the grain instead of feeding it to a cow since cow energy also has a 10% efficiency when turned into human energy (so there's a 1% overall efficiency from grain to human instead of 10%). As practised in the US it's also a giant sop to subsidised corn and the like, and is perfect for double dipping agricultural subsidies from growing the cereal then from farming the cattle. However, if you stick a cow in a paddock and it eats grass that is fine. Not all land is suitable for grains, and where it isn't Mr Moo gives you a 10% energy conversion you wouldn't get at all otherwise.

In France they don't even bother being polite to tourists most of the time, unless you can speak french pretty well. Realistically wherever you are you're treated a lot better if (1) they want money from you andor (2) you speak their language.

Littlefinger situation sums up the recent writing, relying on an unsubtle deus ex machina in lieu of actual plotting of either sense. Better pacing otherwise, but the series is basically a painted eggshell at this point, it's very pretty to look at but if you want an actual egg with some substance then you're out of luck. I wouldn't be surprised if the show and book were fairly similar in that respect. Arya clearly isn't going to go full/ permanent faceless man in the books either, and one obvious way to break her out from that is to have run into someone on her list whether it's Meryn Trant or someone else.

Who are you to tell me I'm thinking like ISIS? In order to do so you must be yourself thinking like ISIS, to know what they think like and what they would say. Quod erat demonstrandum. Don't. Don't think like ISIS. Though fret not Volo, there's a huge difference between called them 'bad' muslims and what they do which is decide people aren't muslim at all based on their belief of what makes 'good' muslims. So neither you nor I are really thinking much like ISIS unless we justify killing them by saying they're infidels/ apostates// nusayris/ kuffar etc etc instead of murderous nutbars but actually still muslim.

Yeah, they do. They also include converts from christianity and even former atheists though. In any case, a profile isn't a hard diagnostic in anything other than tv shows, it's a soft one based on probabilities and the most likely characteristics of a group or individual. For that, disaffected, drifting, purposeless 2nd gen immigrants are the most common western jihadis. That also makes it rather hard to say that they are hiding in or tolerated by the muslim community at large, because the partying, drinking, womanising 20 year old who seemingly randomly goes off to join ISIS isn't a 'good' muslim (and realistically, ISIS isn't good muslims anyway since they rely on a ludicrously narrow interpretation) and on the face of it is a better candidate for apostacy than going full jihad, similarly most of those in prison aren't good muslims either, and the converts who do it certainly aren't. If one wished to be facetious, one might observe that the christian/ atheist community doesn't do a good job of turning in their former people who joined ISIS. Fact is that some level of muslim extremism is tolerated outright by western countries not because of free speech- Teresa May doesn't give a run through the wheat fields about free speech- but because if they didn't Saudi Arabia would be mad and not buy their bonds or weapons or contribute surreptitiously to their re-election campaigns or bung 700 million into your bank account 'accidentally' (lol, Malaysia) and all the other soft power tricks. Until that changes you'll still have the people who do the real damage free to do so.

If you want large scale Christian terror attacks you can look at the CAR where there is widespread French sponsored 'ethnic cleansing' of muslims (following on from the France sponsored ethnic cleansing of Tutsis in Rwanda which everyone forgets about), and to an extent Nigeria. It's also not too far away time wise from Bosnia, and the unrest that spawned Boko Haram in Nigeria was not a one way street either. There's definitely a lot less, but there also some moral and logical chicanery going on to maximise the difference. eg, I'd suggest that if you reversed the position with respect to drones and it were christian westerners being targeted- even with an actual 100% accuracy against military targets- rather than various brown muslims then that would be regarded unequivocally as terrorism in the west. There is after all the tendency to label attacks by anyone against western armed forces, ie legitimate military targets, as terrorism even though they are legit targets and the aim is clearly not to terrorise civilians. A roadside bomb destroying a humvee or a Bradley is the direct equivalent of a drone strike, but one is terrorism and the other not with no actual justification for the distinction beyond us being the good guys. As it is a huge number of people live under the constant threat of being blown up arbitrarily by someone thousands of km away which if you take away the names is obvious terrorism; but it isn't terrorism because the government tells us it isn't and they're 100% getting bad guys with no repercussions, honest.

IIRC Shia don't have a practical potential Caliphate due to their doctrine difference to Sunnis. Iran also didn't issue any expansionist fatwas at all, indeed Iran hasn't invaded anyone in literal centuries. Hamas is Sunni, Houthis are Zaydis (separate sect sort of intermediate between sunni and shia, albeit sometimes included with shia) and aren't extremist in any meaningful way and certainly not in the 'jihad' way, PIJ is sunni as well. Hamas at least hasn't had Iranian support since they chose the wrong side in the Syrian Civil War either, their main backing is from ikwhan (brotherhood) sources, so nowadays mostly Qatar financially and politically Turkey. Qatar certainly buys weapons from Iran to support Hamas with, but that's a purely financial arrangement. In terms of 'jihadi' groups there basically aren't any shia ones without stretching the definition a lot to put Hezbollah or the PMU or IRGC in there, and if you do that then you end up including far, far more sunni groups as well.

The comparison does work to a point- the more extreme protestant sects (Westboro Baptist types) share much of their base philosophy with Salafis as much as they'd explode in apoplexy if anyone suggested it, still hate catholics etc. They aren't literally out for blood though, and there is little in the way of the more moderate and mainstream protestant equivalence. But salafism is actually an old philosophy, wahhabism is just the latest spin on it popularised by Saudi Arabia as domestic political pandering and a way to spread influence. For Sunni Islam, and those pillars come from a Hadith, not from the Quran. Shia have a very different interpretation of the source passage and follow the Usul and Furu al-Din. Which translates to the 5 foundation beliefs, and the 10 branches of practice. In the practices includes jihadIsma'ilis also have their own set of 7 pillars of which jihad is included. Jihad itself has multiple facets but is vastly predominated by it's references to actual warfare which is both physically and metaphysically a struggle against evil. Further, this aspect of jihad is Quranically enshrined, not just found in some Hadith or apocrypha. Another part of the Furu al-Din is forbidding evil and disassociation with it, infidels repeatedly referenced alongside jihad as part of that evil. That does show the contradiction between theory and practice though, since Shia are practically far less prone to going full Jihad than Sunnis despite them theoretically having a more extreme philosophy. Even shia 'extremists' like Hezbollah fight alongside and are associated with non muslim groups including both Christians and Druze in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon- can't say the same for their sunni equivalent extremists who have no tolerance at all for difference. Most salafi style extremists are also takfir (basically claim certain groups aren't 'real' muslims) whether they'd implicitly admit to it or not and refer to groups like Alawites as fire worshipers (Zoroastrians) instead of muslims.

I would. The bits that follow the books are internally consistent, the new bits aren't, that's a definite pattern. You could blame Martin for not finishing the books in a reasonable time frame so they can't follow them any more but that's about it; and competent writers ought to be able to keep to basic logical consistency and be entertaining as well. Whatever summary Martin has written for them it's unlikely to be so detailed as to give a strict chronology, and even if they did the show writers could simply decide that nobody cares about details and just do what they think is cool anyway. To be fair to them, the ratings do suggest that people don't care. Though if it were to go on a few more seasons I suspect the gripes would accumulate and shock fatigue start to kick in as with The Walking Dead.

Most of that sounds like the problems with SP, just applied to MP. I should also clarify that it isn't so much SP and MP that I see as separate issues (generally they are too interconnected to be separate) but I see the MP as being separate from the root cause of Andromeda's problems- bad organisation and bad implementation on the management level. That bleeds down to both SP and MP. That is the fundamental conflict with the MP model it a nutshell- companies are always going to try and milk the player for more money with less effort. In this case I find it more likely that it wasn't deliberate EA policy and was just more incompetence from the studio since that level of micromanagement doesn't seem to have been applied to anything else Andromeda wise.

Shame Forbes is such a pain with its anti ad blocker (and such a bigger pain if you turn your ad blocker off) since Erik Kain is always an interesting read. (Google cache version) I'd see MP monetisation as a separate issue. I also fundamentally don't care about it, since I don't play it. But by and large I wouldn't defend anyone's MP policies, I was even mildly annoyed by something as trivial as Larian having the MP rps minigame in SP DivinityOS, and stuff like the 'forced' MP in ME3 to get war score was obnoxious- but it was only 'forced' since I never did it. In Andromeda's case I'd need a fair bit of convincing that MP or EA's policy towards it was the reason the game failed, and BiowareM knew the requirement for it before development started. It's also, in the end, the player's collective fault that such focuses on MP happen, if nobody bought premier packs and loot boxes and game currency and trivial skins etc etc etc then the companies would not do them. Can't generally say the same for a poor SP game though there are examples (Fallout 4).

In theory it was the freighter that hit the Fitzgerald as well, given the position of the damage to it. Who hit whom is not the sole determinant in blame though, if someone turns across a railway crossing and is hit by a train then the train definitely does the hitting, but it isn't the train's fault unless it could stop in time but chose not to.

How do US warships keep hitting massive slow moving oil tankers and the like? Even if your radar was down you can literally just look around (if they don't still post lookouts I will eat my keyboard and post video of it too), and even if... dunno, Russian agents were hacking the freighters and trying to get them to ram the warships the warships are an order of magnitude more manoevrable and far quicker so should easily be able to evade.

While islam does not make that distinction there are plenty of muslims who want to keep politics and religion at least semi separate, and plenty of christians who'd happily have the ten commandments or Leviticus- except that bit about not eating bacon or seafood, just the gay bashing and other convenient bits- as the ultimate law. Historically there was also very little practical separation of church and state up until the reformation in christian nations, and it often continued well past then. After all, the English reformation was basically Henry VIII throwing a tantrum because he couldn't divorce Catherine and making himself head of the church and state at the same time- technically, Queen Liz is still both now. It really doesn't help at all when the west actively promotes the 'Saudi vision' of the middle east and at very very least tacitly supports the Saudi vision of islam which is based on literal 7th century thinking and islamic absolutism (chaperoned by the Guardians of Mecca, the Hashemites Sauds, of course). There might be a realpolitik point to the west letting the Saudis asterisk around in the middle east since they're inept yet spend money like few others, but they let their ideology pollute their own countries as well which is far more difficult to understand. And if there's one thing the Sauds have done genuinely well at it's insinuating their stone age philosophy everywhere there are muslims, but their one point of competence is a disaster for everyone else involved.

At that time the muslims were far, far more progressive than the spaniards who replaced them. That's why there were so many jews for Izzy and Freddy to expel. They also can't rename it to al-Andalus as... there's already an Andalusia region in Spain- both ultimately derive from 'Vandal' though Andalusia region is obviously after al Andalus chronologically.

EA gave them plenty of time and (it seems at least) plenty of freedom to do MEA, can't really see anyone to blame other than Bioware for the project not being well run. Only thing you can blame EA for perhaps is deciding Battleborn 2.0 Anthem should be a thing in precedence to anything else, the sensible approach may have been to have the Montreal team do that (since they did ME3 MP) and have the Edmonton team do Andromeda. Then again if Anthem works it'll make a lot of money, if it works. Only good thing for Mass Effect as a whole is that at least Andromeda is discrete, if they want to do another game it can basically be ignored or used as much or as little as they want.

Origin had a refund policy in place long before steam finally caved into market pressure and added one themselves. Steam was legally required to institute a refund policy to continue selling in some areas- here for example. If it were just up to market pressure, well, market pressure hasn't done much to improve, say, steam's dreadful support system nor to stop them selling broken/ shovelware/ abandoned games. Their market position is too dominant.

Origin has a 7 day return policy on preorders. Don't know how long you can play over that week before they decide you're taking the mick asking for a refund, but it's probably longer than steam's 2 hours.

Due to my strong willpower and ability to resist commercial urges I'm not playing ME: Andromeda. I may be playing Inquisition though- and I may quite like it, at least at the moment and with realistic expectations.