Zoraptor

"first they came for the miscacomorphs*, but I stayed silent because I didn't hate fat people"? Pretty clear thin edge of wedge though, as the policy will absolutely inevitably be applied selectively. *cacomorphobia is the fear of fat people, iirc, no idea if there's a 'real' term for hatred of fat people.

Bard's Tale is a bit of an odd sell. Wasteland and Torment could piggyback on Fallout and PST which appeal strongly to the kickstarter demographic, the later Bard's Tale games were somewhat underwhelming. Essentially, you hear lots of people who want a new Fallout or PST game, not so many who want a new BT. Plus, kickstarter fatigue looks to have finally, uh, kicked in for a 'high profile' title. In any case, looks like backers will get the original trilogy, thanks to those fine upstanding fellows at EA coming to the party. So that's four free games for early backers.

There was a question over TOR since it was ongoing with new content being added, but it was officially confirmed as legends on Starwars.com itself. It's non canon. In any case Bioware is supposedly (ie nothing officially announced) working on a new SW RPG themselves, so there's very, very little chance of Obsidian doing one.

Having posts in OT forums count towards post totals tends to encourage spamming in those forums. Post counting should remain on the gold standard, lest they become subject to inflation and devaluation.

My impression at the time was that neither side had a really strong desire for an agreement so were relatively happy to find things to disagree on and be able to blame the other for intransigence- the above situation would actually reinforce that impression for me- with the US/ Obama being a bit more keen than Maliki to have at leave some presence left. Certainly a parliamentary vote doesn't seem like a big matter, unless Maliki thought there was no chance he could win it in which case he'd have a strong motivation to be spiking the agreement. It's certainly speculation and impression on my part though. Dunno, I guess if the current US trainers etc are currently operating under an 'executive order' SOFA or a fully voted SOFA might be relevant, though obviously the situation is different now and Maliki has gone.

There have been two such Dragon Age games, iirc. Dragon Age Legends and Dragon Age Journeys. Not sure if they were strictly mobile games though rather than Facebook or similar. InXile seems the most likely destination, so the most plausible explanation is he wants to work on VB or whatever for longer than he can really take a leave of absence or similar from Obsidian. If it is InXile we'll likely find out soon since they have a kickstarter active, if it's somewhere or something else it will likely take longer. It's all speculation anyway, if you want conspiracy theories I'd recommend the Codex, they've been busy trolling each other with fake tweets.

Barack Obama is a 2016 candidate? Showing his contempt for the constitution yet again, even if it is only for a pesky amendment. I'm unconvinced that Maliki ever had an intention to actually allow a SOFA anyway, whatever he said and whatever Obama or anyone else may have hoped for/ wanted. I doubt they would have got anything that would have materially altered the current situation even had they had more extensive negotiations, and it would have lowered Obama's popularity as a broken promise. Fundamentally though, the damage in Iraq was done in 2003-4. Mistakes were certainly made later as well but they were made in a general context of juggling a bunch of live hand grenades.

CDPR? Nah. Bethesda? Nah, F4 is far too far along anyway. InXile? Nah, the 8th President of the US wouldn't make a good RPG subject. All the evidence does indicate that he's heading to Bioware- Dave Gaidar even stepped down as creative lead on Dragon Age to make room, plus there's their Star Wars RPG (rumours are it's KOTNewR) coming up as well. They might even be doing a swap, with Gaidar coming to Obsidian. Nah, he's going to work with Ken Levine on System Shock 3, as I just won the Eurobillions lottery. Good luck to him anyway and whatever he ends up doing, one of the very few people whose work I'd buy sight unseen just on the name.

They're having one of their all-deals(?)-in-sale days today so there's a large number of new and repeat deals on, plus The Wolf Among Us and Walking Dead seasons and Battle Realms free. The two Telltale seasons are going to be hard to resist, I nearly bought the DVD TWD season 1 for twice what both of them cost now, so I'd really be saving money, wouldn't I...

More SJW infighting! McIntosh is having a jab at Brianna 'Batman' Wu!

When he was played by Sir Ian I always presumed Gandalf Magneto was gay and had had a fling with Captain Picard when younger. Bit of a shock finding out he'd actually been boffing Katniss during that earlier timeframe a few movies later. Then again, I never read the comics. Not invited isn't really banned though.

Potential book 6 spoiler, though I guess most of the stuff on the show now is potential book 6 spoiler...

Soaring rhetoric can get you a long way towards popularity though, even if it achieves nothing. Despite agreeing with the vast majority of those points and examples I have to agree with Bruce on the overall picture, if not the detail. In places where the US is generally liked it is liked more now than under Bush, in places where it was disliked under Bush it is generally disliked less under Obama. There are exceptions of course, but I'd say that holds true in general. Partly it's because Obama has made popular decisions, though practically speaking a lot hasn't been 'good' but more along the lines of "well, McCain probably would have been worse, and Bush was worse" in amongst some stuff which has worked OK; his follow up to everything has been almost always terrible, but that is not usually what sits in the mind of people in general. There's also an element of him being inherently different and special through being the first black president, that represents a lot to many people. Plus, much of the world either hated Bush or feared what stupidity he'd visit next on the world and saw McCain/ Romney as Bush 2.1- so Obama did not so much have a mountain to climb to world popularity but a precipitous ravine to climb out of. I certainly don't think Obama has been particularly competent though, just relatively popular.

Except everyone- everyone- knew Assad had WMDs, Syria wasn't a member of the CWC until 2013. For the same reason Israel (and Pakistan/ India for that matter) ain't a member of the NPT. In contrast, it was just anyone with any sense who knew what jollying about in Russia's back yard would get as reaction.

There's as much actual chance of Putin attacking NATO as there was of Saddam hitting London with an anthrax packed Scud in 45 minutes, though he's obviously not willing to put up with NATO asterisking about in his back yard any more and probably wishes that abject moron Yeltsin had drunk himself to death a decade earlier.

The purpose of the equivalent US and UK (and Israeli, and Chinese, and everyone else's including commercial astroturfing) programmes- not the 5 eyes/ XKEYSCORE etc stuff, that's for monitoring not for manipulating, the manipulation stuff is the software that allows one person to run 100s of social media accounts seamlessly- are exactly the same as the Russian ones. It's to manipulate the narrative to their best interests, and in state actor's case specifically the security apparatus's (if you're lucky; if not it's the people in power's, per our little NSA branchlet trying to get dirt on people to get one of our politicians a job) best interests not actually the country's, it's not any noble goal of informing the public or battling the infernal hordes of Chinese/ Russian/ whoever 'trolls' putting out obvious lies and calumny, that's PR every bit as much as their other output. As for Snowden, if centuries of diplomatic precedent had not been bent over a table and given a good hard rogering when forcing down Morales' plane on the rumour that Snowden was on it then he almost certainly wouldn't be in Russia at this point, let alone if certain elements of the US establishment and intelligence community didn't cause a world shortage of haemorrhoid cream every time his name was mentioned. Funniest part being that it was supposedly Julian Assange who had started the rumour about Snowden being on the plane. Impugning Snowden's character in that way is utterly circular, and ridiculous at best since he obviously has no choice in the matter and wouldn't have been in Russia- at all, let alone still- sans the butthurt reactions. If Obama wants someone to blame for Snowden being in Russia, well, mirrors have been a thing for a fair while now.

I did resist buying any games previous. But I have now bought Saints Row 3, Banished, Majesty HD and Shadowrun: Dragonfall. Verily, I am a drone of capitalism and slave to acquisitiveness.

High quality movies? And frankly, oby ain't a paid shill, he's just trollin' for biological waste material and giggles. Not particularly well imo, but you can't argue results and he certainly wads some people's panties. Generally though all yet another FAOusername: you're a troll lol! thread does is encourage them, if you're convinced they're a troll ignore them or Ignore them if you have no willpower, problem solved.

Yeah, I think anyone with any sense thinks that the Polish culture == US/ 'white' culture opinion is pretty moronic. The same people who think that would probably be deeply offended if you implied Ethiopian culture and US Black Urban culture were the same thing, or Chinese and Indian. Or not, who knows with sjws. Funny thing is, TWitcher1 did have a non white guy (well, at least not whitey white, from his name Azar Javed is presumably meant to be vaguely arab/ subcontinental) and a guy with glasses and they're the bad guys up until you get to the white privileged male oppressor (or alternatively the guy who overcame a hard childhood to become a strong and powerful leader on his own merits, a man willing to do what needed to be done to prepare humanity for an inevitable bleak future) at the end. No CIA agents though Alpha Protocol has them, along with a plane crash. On the other hand, saying that CDPR are good storytellers and could put 'pocs' in seamlessly if they really wanted is a bit of a specious argument; they may equally have considered doing so and decided that- as good storytellers- they couldn't do so without shoehorning and tokenism that would itself act against good storytelling.

Yep, not sure about donated though, I think the Ukrainians may have actually paid for them. I think the old London buses would have been about as useful, they're nearly as good as a saxon at stopping bullets and offroading but more reliable, lighter and cheaper to maintain.

Arguments about slavic culture in Witcher 3 are nonsense, to prove it I'll cite... terminally-incoherent.com? Even if there was nothing wrong with the blog content you'd think he could at least have used a URL shortener.

I think the outsourcing works well enough, for companies, for certain things (eg texture farms in gaming) and in certain situations (mostly natural monopolies or those with a high cost/ high inertia towards moving provider) but is generally a false economy. It's one of those things, if I go into a retail store and am served by an Indian or Filipino or Chinese I couldn't care less- but if I phone someone or someone phones me and I get "Hi I'm Sanjiv Philip, I will be reading a script to you today, be unable to respond to any questions outside my flow chart and not be able to fix your problem as a result" I'm immediately expecting crap service designed solely to save the company money and my problem not to be fixed. Life is too short to spend four hours talking to someone whose job is basically not to provide service but to be as cheap as possible instead. Not "Philip's" fault of course, they're just doing their job with very little leeway and very little actual cultural understanding and training. But every time I speak to his equivalent I end up annoyed frustrated and basically with a asterisk you [companyname] attitude, hardly constructive for them. Despite the stereotype it has also happened with a British based call centre, though at least the person I talked to then admitted straight away that they wouldn't be able to fix the problem and needed a supervisor; shame that the supervisors were on duty 9-5 UK time- ie 9pm to 5am our time, with the hours the business I was working at being... 6am to 8pm.

Look at you person who doesn't own System Shock 2, a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you drown in your mediocrity. What can challenge a perfect, immortal top 10 game of all time! of all time!!! Actually I'm so cool I don't even own a DD copy of SS2, my installation is from the original big box edition, transferred across multiple computers to this day. I'm thinking of getting Grimrock 2 and Risen 2, and maybe Trine 2. My resolution to stop my backlog growing larger is fraying already.

On the Steam refunds thing (probably more constructive than yet another argument about whether Twitcher/ Kingdom Come/ etc need to kowtow to SanFran hipster 'cultural marxofascism'/ should embrace enlightened modernist cultural sensitivity; only answer is that people should make the games they want whether they be neanderthal slavic cultural supremacists or lentil eating social justice coders, the market can sort out whether there are buyers) there is a very obvious point- why would someone abuse the system by going to the trouble of buying it on steam, then going to the inevitable rigmarole of dealing with Steam 'Support' in order to get a 'free' copy of a game when they could just... torrent it? And it seems fairly likely you'd get store credit in many cases as well, so you'd still have spent the money, plus they will be looking for abuse of the system. Same with the complaints from some about GOG's refund policy with them being DRM free, it's always easier just to torrent the game than get it legit then go for a refund. Pretty much definitely people worrying about the ability to refund for games being 'crap' where previously the buyer would have been SOoL. In any case I rather suspect for a lot of games on steam requesting a refund would have a greater cost in terms of time wasted getting the refund than just eating the cost of a bad decision and chalking it up to experience. If anyone lives deep enough in outraeg!!!ville to get upset about buying a bad 2$ game to demand a refund then, hmm, it is their time and money I guess. (Credit where it's due, steam's new policy is in some ways actually a bit better even than our Consumer's Guarantee Act which forced a pretty similar policy on Steam for NZ buyers even before the update; though they still have games as being licensed rather than the products the CGA defines software as)

Backed as well. InXile/ Fargo sure know how to run a kickstarter campaign, every game company thinking of running a campaign should take notes. (I am also now officially amused by how many potential extra keys for games I already own I could/ do have)