Zoraptor

Looks like it's Cruz winning by about 20% and Bernie by about 8% in Wisconsin. Probably not quite enough of a win for Sanders, but enough of a loss for Trump that it's unlikely he'll get a majority of delegates prior to the convention.

The classic versions are already gone from Gamersgate, which I thought may have escaped notice. They were GOG versions there. There is some precedent for this, there have been three Space Rangers 2 versions with the two earlier ones disappearing when (well, prior to actually) enhanced versions were released.

That was time saving for DA2's abbreviated development cycle, iirc. Unrealistic, but understandable given time restraints and that romances of all types are kind of expected from Bioware. As for blaming of GG for negative reviews they do seem to be following Bioware's play book there where they'd blame 4chan or whoever for review bombing at metacritic. To be fair, there's at least some truth in it too, it's just far too simplistic and absolute. And Bioware would defend their decisions collectively too, whether or not they personally agreed with them. I can distinctly remember Bioware peeps saying that they had enough time to do DA2 properly when it was patently obvious it was rushed, and I've seen David Gaidar defend decisions which were later found to have been opposed by him. A house divided against itself and all that. At the end of the day though, and with all other cliches being equal it is pretty much a direct equivalent of how many posters wished Obsidian had dealt with the 'transphobic' backer content; ie close ranks and say that they support [backer/ staffmember], nothing is wrong and nothing will be changed since it's just a vocal minority complaining.

Yeah, there's obviously some obligation not to change the existing dialogue in BG1/2 and only make new or additional content. (That may be because despite WotC owning the setting etc Bioware and hence EA actually owns the existing dialogue. They even updated the copyright record to add EA in as an interested party.)

Easy, Wikileaks has a copy so the bed is going to get some suspicious brown stains and an agricultural odour even if they tried to put down PVC sheeting and compulsory Depends Brand adult nappies on everyone who used it. They cannot protect anyone, at best they can manage the release- which they would do anyway, months of salacious headlines is better than a day or a weeks worth. They've already implicated Dave Cameron's dad and Cameron himself by extension since he gave a no comment/ private to whether it was still operating. Plus the President of Argentina, the first US friendly one in ages.

While Frictional make good games they are neither ambitious nor innovative. For ten years they have focused on and do one single genre well, from Penumbra to Amnesia to SOMA. That's a conservative strategy with the main change being that of setting. It's a successful approach and they make good games, but that doesn't make it ambitious, if anything it makes it conservative. Plus, you can't really go on about the need to own your own IP and then cite CDPRed. Twitcher is owned by Andrej Sapkowski and only licensed by CDPR, and even the unreleased Cyberpunk is based on someone else's system. Wanting Obsidian to do different 'better' games is fine, but you seem to be basically citing a bunch of aspirational ideas- it should be ambitious, successful, innovative, their own IP etc- rather than something more grounded and your choices of example don't match the aspirations.

I'm pretty impressed at how quiet the press managed to keep it considering how many people knew about the leak. At the moment it seems to be a whole lot of smoke and very little fire and some nationalities are conspicuously absent from the documents released. Definitely more to come.

I'd put pretty much any money on the transsexual being their attempt to 'fix' the problematic Edwina storyline, which literally everyone except Edwin treats as a joke and has being turned into a woman as a punishment. That, Beamdog could not change but they could add someone who makes very little sense in the context of a magical world where there's a sex swapping object and magic. In all seriousness, I always wished I could romance Edwina. And if she eventually got swapped back to Edwin, oh well;

Why would he bother when low effort rubbish still gets a response? Not even the alternative angle shakey cam can make that stunner look good, though it looks far better than the 'official' angle did.

As Oerwinde mentioned, they're going mobile which theoretically broadens their market but would require additional costs. It's one of the reasons why I'm so sceptical about the float, plenty of companies have floundered going for money in mobile gaming and it's a crapshoot as to what succeeds; and Paradox's existing fan base is largely hostile to the mere idea of mobile gaming. That and more console gaming too and they seem to be moving away from what an MBA would no doubt call their core competencies. Which is fine, but gaming history is littered with the corpses of those who tried that and failed.

Their technical aspect QA has certainly improved immeasurably. But they still tend to break the balancing when patching or releasing dlc, and it often isn't fixed. The real question is why Paradox would go public if things are going so well as they are now. It's so they can get more money; and there's no way the people who are giving them the money won't want to both make a profit on their investment and have a say. And that's without a Chris Avellone type situation where one of the private shareholders (Johan or Fredrick, say) wants to leave, they've both been there over a decade much as MCA was with Obsidian.

Nah, only the last part means that. Doesn't have to be EA anyway, they can just be guaranteed to get knees jerking. When Elevation Partners came on board with Bioware, Bioware said pretty much exactly what Paradox is now saying. Nothing practical will change, we'll just have lots of lovely moolah to spend, no strings attached. As if there is ever truly no strings attached. Two years later, they were owned by EA. Publishers buy up other publishers, uh, pretty frequently. Not that long ago EA was going to buy Ubisoft and only got blocked by the French government, IIRC last publisher they bought was Popcap, their financial situation has precluded anything else recently. To illustrate: Activision is three publishers (except Blizzard each bought other publishers prior as well) that are merged- Activision, Vivendi (game publishing arm), Blizzard. Zombie Atari is three as well (Infogrammes, GT Interactive and one other whose name escapes me- Hasbro's video game arm), Ubisoft has bought bits of or wholesale Blue Byte, 3DO and multiple others, Square Enix is three amalgamated publishers (Square, Enix, Eidos) plus others, Take 2 is 2k and Rockstar merged etc. Paradox is an uncomfortable size and has rather a lot of flops and cancelled projects, balanced by the occasional break out hit like Magicka or Cities: Skylines. Whatever they say if they can't make a decent return and someone is offering money to buy them they'll get plenty of pressure from shareholders to sell out.

Oh come on, VW and no Your Mileage May Vary disclaimer?

Paradox? Oh, that's right. What EA Arctic used to be known as. Shame Dragon Age Kings and Star Wars Universalis failed so spectacularly or they'd still be around. I was quite looking forward to Hearts of Battlefield, too. And that WoD game with Obsidian, shame the first thing EA did back in 2018 was shut that idea down. Funny how everyone suddenly started seriously complaining about their terrible dlc policies and platform exclusivity once EA bought them and their titles got made Origin instead of Steam exclusive... (2018 might be a little soon)

That's the add on. I don't use nuke user scripts personally as I generally have enough self control not to need them (and don't mind some mouse wheeling) so I cannot recommend any, but there are a fair few variants for vBulletin and one for XenForo- which I think the forums here still uses- available that should do the job.

Use the greasemonkey script that nukes any quoted post of those on your ignore list. You need never see another Bruce post again.

That was my impression as well. Luckily I never even bought this game because everything I saw and read about SCL, just made me wonder who the hell was the target audience for this game. Target audience was reasonably obvious, it was just unrealistic: appeal to the established D&D fanbase (which is bigger than niche, NWNs and BGs were each multi million sellers) plus some from the more 'casual' audience of Diablo 3/ Skyrim types, plus consoles in future. The game just fell uncomfortably into the 'appeal to neither significantly' hole, as most such attempts inevitably do. They'd have been better off aiming for one market or the other instead of both, but aiming for both markets will always be tempting because if it comes off it means more money. But, the alterations from D&D, lack of proper GM mode and the like puts off the D&D audience, being D&D at all puts off most of the casual audience- and it didn't have great word of mouth, didn't have great sales numbers to provide funds to fix the problems so just kind of... stalled. It doesn't mean much for the state of RPGs, except perhaps putting another nail into the coffin of D&D as a cRPG system. Probably good news for Beamdog though, as it gives them better bargaining with Hasbro for a BG3.

That's a fair point. I don't think anyone here would argue the Afghanistan intervention was needed. But every one since was a bad idea. Congress could have stopped every one of them it's worth mentioning. You all know where I stand on US foreign policy and of of these 5 candidates the only two who favor a more reserved, less interventionist attitude are two who probably won't win. From a FP perspective do you think there will be a bit of difference in the actions of a Clinton, Cruz, or Kasich State Dept? I don't think there will be. So again, what does it matter? It's not just invasions and the like, there's also trade agreements and there there is some differences between candidates. Probably theoretical difference as I'd suspect when it came down to it all of Clinton, Cruz, Trump and Kasich would sign up to the TPPA/ TTIP whatever they say now but at least theoretically Clinton/ Trump and Sanders oppose TPPA with only Kasich outright supporting it.

They do rhyme if you speak with a scottish accent (and most northern english ones too). Albeit speaking with a northern brit accent may not help with audibility overall... Finding an accent where rough, though and bough all rhyme might be rather difficult though.

If they're using state capital names for crowdfunded projects the unannounced kickstarter wouldn't be either Louisiana or Indiana but a state capital name post New Jersey's Trenton. That would make the unknown KS project something like Annapolis/ Hartford/ Atlanta/.. There's only one project known to have a state capital name though, and what the practical difference is between a project with a capital and a state name isn't known. Could be crowdfunded games get a capital name, could be smaller scale games of any type, could be just to asterisk with people who like making lists based on state names.

Yeah, Shtora probably wouldn't have made much if any difference in those circumstances, it being turned off is more indicative of the government forces not always being as competent as they should be, as were the open hatches. Shtora would definitely help against older missiles or their Chinese/ DPRK knock offs though and there are plenty of them around. They've spent 5 years getting shot for sitting still like they're invulnerable citadels (as here, though at least they had some cover) or charging around wildly or charging into built up areas, and almost always without proper infantry support. Nowadays they probably have the help of Russian helicopters to target ATGM teams but it's still no substitute to proper infantry screens or moving your tank around after a few shots.

That was a T90, it has Kontact-5 Explosive Reactive Armour which is designed to defeat TOW's dual warhead, plus the hit was on the best armoured part of the tank. It had the Shtora countersystem but it was off either due to incompetence or maintenance (it can only be operated relatively briefly/ not continuously due to heat/ battery life). It was probably functionally knocked out, ie could not be used further, just not destroyed. You can tell almost instantly the result from videos as rebels cut the video off quickly if the tank isn't destroyed by a hit. Most Syrian tanks have either no/ partial ERA of the old Kontact-1 variety that is now basically useless except against simple RPG rounds, plus are less armoured or have jury rigged partial extra armour so have been very vulnerable.

Nice classic selection. Will probably get the FF and Railroad titles, already have the XCOM series and (pretty sure) Pirates! elsewhere.

Software as a product has been the rule here for more than a decade via the Consumer Guarantees Act (which is a genuinely excellent bit of legislation). I haven't read the SSA recently but at one point there was NZ explicit stuff dealing with software-as-product issues and we'd obviously be a smaller market than Aus.