Zoraptor

Heh, S-300s apparently. If the rebels/ ISIS had an air force they'd severely crimp their style and they cannot be ignored by anyone. Next step is US deploying F-22s and S-400s turning up. (They have already had S-300s there in some of their warships)

Have to disagree there. Both aotc and rots were good movies potentially and would have been so with some moderate retooling, TPM on the other hand had so many bad ideas and implementations that you'd have to start from scratch. The problems of the latter two movies were that almost always whenever people talked and particularly whenever emotion was required- especially Anakin and Padme- it was stultifying garbage of the highest order. Lucas desperately needed a script and story editor who he would listen too and who wasn't a yes man. The general stories of both were more or less OK, but the general story of TPM was illogical and incomprehensible requiring fundamental revision as well as having the same dialogue problems. RotS I'd actually defend as being a good movie overall, despite its faults and I'd happily watch AotC again so long as I can fast forward picnicking on Naboo and suchlike. TPM... I guess there is the Maul duel, although even that is a convoluted illogical mess if you think about it.

It's definitely the official text, that website is the official NZ government ministry of foreign affairs and trade one. Might be a question as to whether it's the genuinely full text though or if there are secret clauses/ understandings still but it is meant to be the full text. Good luck with reading the whole thing.

To be fair, the Russians do already have (albeit multirole) fighters there plus SAMs around their airbase. I can't see them responding overly much to a few F15s- which is provocative but everyone does similar- in a shooting war their Syrian deployment is already outmatched by Turkey/ Israel and at least theoretically by any Jordan/ GCC combo and it would take a very large increase to change that. Which might come if ISIS really did bomb the airliner but then it wouldn't be in response to anything the US did.

Graphics only have to be functional, but part of 'functional' is not to be obviously inconsistent and to promote verisimilitude. I'm perfectly happy with low fidelity/ dated/ low poly graphics if they're consistently applied and part of the overall aesthetic. Bethesda's problem has always been that they half arse the consistency of their approach in pretty much everything. Their motions make their models look like their joints are rubberised- I half expected waifu to do the Rick Grimes meme head telescope it was so elastic- and they have some of the worst uncanny valley effect and have ever since Oblivion- look at the bloke in the background of the chargen sequence virumor posted, fine for a 2006 era game or a retro/ small budget game but a literal lol for a 100 mill AAA title. Their AI ends with people raking their carpets and staring at walls for hours or putting pots on their heads and their RPG systems are either laughably exploitable, laughably imbalanced or (lately) laughably simplified so much so that they are barely RPG any more. And the story itself... to be fair they are at least very good at general world building so people can larp their own more meaningful story. Now, I say that as someone who hasn't played a post F3 Bethesda game and has no intent to buy F4 except in a hypothetical future where it's steam free and very, very cheap- or 2nd hand for console- but those problems are the reason why I have so little interest in buying their games. More than anything it's that they don't seem to be interested in actually fixing those problems but just treat them as part of the charm/ modders will fix it. F4 probably has more budget than TWitcher 3 and the scopes are similar, it's to that that F4 has to be fairly compared. Of course comparing the two on pre release screenshots and videos which aren't from PC is potentially a can of worms but I'd be pretty confident that TW3 will be better than F4 on pretty much every single one of the above criteria.

'Captain Worf' has been a proposal for a long time, unsurprisingly Michael Dorn is the main person pushing it. It would make sense though, since he was in both TNG and DS9 plus movies he's theoretically got a lot more draw/ hook than any other practical possibility. They aren't going to get Patrick Stewart, after all.

I'd say that's a case of the other teams improving rather than the US team going backwards, at least. What teams like the US really need are regular play and a good national administration, ironically because the US is so big both are pretty difficult to implement on a low budget in contrast to somewhere smaller like Georgia and there isn't the 'national will' for want of a better term to just throw money at improvement as there is in Japan.

There are several different possibilities (and others, such as plain metal fatigue or a door failure causing explosive decompression). Of the two linked the China 611 is perhaps the most likely since the Airbus321 involved here had also had a significant tail strike incident. This analysis brought to you by multiple hours watching Air Crash Investigation/ Mayday. Analysis of the black boxes is required to actually tell. And yeah, they would say that since it exonerates them of blame.

Yeah, a good send off for all the retiring players, the Aussies tried hard but it was quite one sided except for the brief period when Ben Smith got himself sinbinned. We'll probably get Sir Richard McCaw on 1/1/16, if he accepts it. An excellent tournament overall too, the Japan vs RSA game and performance of some of the less fancied teams (Georgia, Scotland as well as Japan) brought a good deal of interest and most games were entertaining.

But there isn't a single PoC there, and a distinct lack of rainbow hair. That doesn't look inclusive at all. And I bet the poor old supermutants are actively discriminated against, as are ghouls radiologically advantaged persons. Bethesda, Bethesda never changes. But seriously, are the F4 graphics the best graphics they're capable of? No wonder they're desperate for paid mods to work.

Not convinced. Shooting down is definitely out of question unless they got specialized surface to air missile systems, which would mean that Sauds or USA delivered them to rebels. I doubt that any of that happened. The Saudis or US would not be arming rebels in Egypt. There were rumours that the ISIS chapter in Egypt may have got hold of a high altitude capable SAM via capture off the Egyptian army, but I don't think anyone seriously believes it given that the whole rebel force in Syria has captured one functional non manpad SAM system despite being far more organised and having captured far more equipment and territory. On the other hand, an airliner that had to reduce altitude due to cabin pressure loss or similar would be in the danger zone for man portable air SAMs which it is very credible that they would have a limited number of. Overall though it is highly unlikely to be a SAM even given that, and I think 'Sinai State' have actually denied it as well.

Erdogan's main aim at the moment is to get the pro Kurd party below the 10% (!) threshold for getting into parliament as that is the only way his AKP can get a majority. That 10% being designed specifically so that Armenians/ Kurds/ Greeks would never get representation especially after the expulsions/ genocides in the 20th century. That strategy isn't working, fortunately, and most polls put them into the low teens support wise. The refugees are excellent leverage against Europe but leverage against Europe requires Erdogan to be in the Executive Presidency of his dreams, so everything is secondary to getting a majority for the AKP. If that doesn't happen the knives will be out, and that is what he's really worried about. Having said that, a million plus refugees in your country is most definitely a legitimate concern, and if Europe wants them to stay in Turkey they certainly have a part to play in that as well as Turkey.

Which episode of Buffy/ Angel is that from? I did rather like Legend of the Seeker TV, and not just because seeing local actors hamming it up at the Hunua Falls or Piha is always amusing.

There actually is a monetary reason to kickstart as well. While there are cheap pledge options, but a lot of people dish out far larger pledges than they'd ever normally spend on a game (I know I did). The average pledge for PoE was about $54, that's a better deal than they're getting from current sales. KS also has a lower cut than 'traditional' pre order systems. Pre order through GOG or Steam and they'll take 30% of the $40 price themselves so Obsidian or whoever is only getting 28$ of that money (minus Paradox's publisher cut too for non backer site PoE pre orders) while KS takes a far smaller proportion. That is somewhat balanced by needing more admin for KS and especially any physical rewards but still, it is ~45$ nett per kickstarter pledge which you can also earn interest/ use of money on vs $28 at most per normal pre order. In many ways once you've got the stuff set up for handling a kickstarter you'd be foolish not to run them as basically a pre order system. That is, more or less, how InXile or Harebrained Schemes have been using KS.

lolwut Volo. You're not checking the lists proper like if you cannot find PoE at all. It's ahead of WL2 (significantly) and DivOS (marginally) despite only having had 1 or 2 sales. Put in some effort son. We do know how many DivOS has sold total (1M+), and can extrapolate from SteamSpy how many of those copies were on steam (~850k). As such DivOS 'must' have sold 150k+ on GOG. And since the vanilla PoE SKU alone let alone kickstarter/ royal etc is ahead of DivOS on GOG there 'must' have been 150k++ sales of PoE on GOG.

We do have a pretty good idea of how it would likely be set up from previous similar situations. But yeah, there's a lot of 'likely's and 'typically's necessary and nothing is definitive. To illustrate, Steam actually is a distributor, and they definitely collect their cut before passing the money along. It's most likely the same will happen with Paradox, it's also what happened with boxed copies of Valve games that were distributed by EA, the retail money went to EA then was passed along to Valve. The relationship is not typical publisher/ developer in the FONV mould but that is not the only alternative. Ironically and also to illustrate, Paradox became a publisher because they were originally relying on a distributor themselves, and they believed they were getting diddled out of money by them since the distributor was getting both sales figures and money and they weren't. That's why they/ their owners originally created Gamersgate too.

I'd compare it to taking pre orders, and pre orders without having to pay 30% upfront to steam/ gog + x% to Paradox if they are used as publisher again. In many ways you're dumb if you don't take the 10% KS (or equivalent) cut over the normal pre order one. The only way it's a problem is if you get KS fatigue equivalent for a second project you want to fund at a similar time as may have happened with Bard's Tale for InXile. Though that may also just be a less attractive game than WL or Torment. They could do early pre orders through the backer portal without a KS, but they wouldn't get the advantage of extended coverage that way.

It's definitely not the FONV model, that requires the publisher to own the IP and pay someone to make the game under contract; Obsidian owns the IP and Paradox was involved late when development was well underway and largely funded. But as the publisher the money should first go to Paradox, they would then take their cut and send the balance to Obsidian under whatever terms their agreement specifies. Obsidian would get per sale money, but it would have to go through Paradox to get to them.

The Paradox statement does imply it's Steam only, but doesn't state it outright: "..over half a million players have purchased the game worldwide, making it one of the best-selling games on Steam this year." Though it certainly also says it includes kickstarter backers. Though given it is Paradox I wouldn't put it past them to have forgotten that alternatives to steam exist. The money from PoE almost certainly goes to Paradox first, as they are the publisher. That would exclude KS and backer site sales but would include everything GOG/ Steam/ Origin and non backer site pre orders.

Yep, source with full statement. Though I'd put pretty much any amount of money that PoE has sold closer to 700k to this point than 500k. Paradox may well have only paid out on 500k copies to this point though or as their full release implies it has had 500k steam sales only. Steamspy's methodology is pretty robust and the figures for DivOS don't leave much room for PoE selling less than 150k on GOG.

Proper STV is a great system, us going for mixed member proportional instead when we switched from first past the post was a horrible decision.

I'd suspect there are tax breaks involved, but then I'm pretty cynical.

It's the first time ever it's been all southern hemisphere. Probably shouldn't have been given the admission that the final penalty in the Aus v Scotland game was incorrectly awarded but results are results. Shame really, an Argentina/ Scotland semi would have been a pretty cool result.

"Boring to who [sic]. Our personal opinions are irrelevant."-- Volourn; Avellone working on DivOS2 thread 3 Oct 2015, Obsidian forums Computer & Console subforum. This quote is going to get some usage, I think.

At least Christiansen was less annoying than Jake Lloyd as Anakin. Really though, Sir Laurence Olivier couldn't have spun silk out of the pig's ear prequel dialogue, that and the 'faster, more intense' direction is on Lucas. McGregor and McDiarmid managed to do well despite the material, albeit in McDiarmid's case by playing the panto villain and alternately mugging the audience/ chewing the scenery but Portman, who is a pretty good actor in other things had similar problems to Christiansen in the prequels. As for the trailer, well, it's Star Wars and I have to admit it makes older me feel like I'm ten again so mission accomplished there.