Zoraptor

The Star Trek version of that was rather good even if you knew it was derivative, always nice to see Patrick Stewart and David Warner working together. Though their best known video game efforts could scarcely be more disparate quality wise (Emperor from Oblivion vs Irenicus from BG2). I find it very difficult to have a reasonable conversation.. Well done Bruce, self realisation is the first step!

Pretty sure that Brain Fargo was making complaints about metacritic bonuses and similar practices beforehand, with Avellone just confirming they applied to Obsidian/ FONV. Most of the stuff that would potentially annoy Beth/ Zenimax actually came from Fargo as part of his pitch for WL2, iirc, as he used Obsidian as an example to whip up some anti publisher frenzy. In any case, while there are plenty of examples of very sharp practice coming from Beth/ Zenimax (including the metacritic stuff but also accusations of constructively bankrupting/ trying to bankrupt developers so they could buy them up cheap and save on costs; per Arkane where it worked and Human Head where it didn't) the accusation that they got MCA fired seems extremely unlikely- not least because Obsidian doesn't seem to have enough spare staff to be doing a nuFallout scale project if more than half are on Armoured Warface [sic, but I'm not changing that typo].

Nah, the difference in attitudes is more from one side of the hater/ fanboy continuum. If you went to the codex pre about 2007 you might get the impression that many hated Fallout 2 and BG2, but many also liked them. In general the same people still like them, the haters just hate them less. Which is understandable really, if you hated F2 because it was too silly or whatever you'd certainly have a far better target for your hate in F3, now, and that has quite logically shifted attitude to F2 as being at least less bad than F3. Of the new recent RPGs the vast majority of them have been well received (in general) by the codex: DivOS, Lords of Xulima, Serpent.., somewhat more equivocal for WL2. The only game that has taken a big hit is PoE and games that aren't really aimed at the codex at all like DAI, and many of the criticisms levelled at those two at the codex have been had elsewhere including here as well.

I'd suspect Ubisoft did OK out of it, while it took a long time a lot of that time/ money was put into it under THQ and Ubi bought it from them for only 3.2M$. On the other hand, no next gen version suggests it didn't sell well enough to justify them financing that version. That list is probably right though, except perhaps PoE and that hasn't been out long.

The term 'movement' is a rather subjective one and is a sliding scale depending on personal opinion but to my mind you need three things to have a movement 1) an organisation, and crucially self identification of members with that organisation 2) an agenda 3) external recognition Both groups fulfil those three criteria, imo. I can see how people might disagree with the organisation crierion, since neither has a particularly set hierarchical structure or with them having an agenda since there is a fair bit of methodology wiggle and variation in goals within those groups, I simply disagree with those conclusions. My counterpoints would be that you don't need a strong hierarchy to have an organisation- and certainly not to have a movement- you just need it to be organised enough to be broadly identifiable and coherent; and you don't need everyone to agree wholly with an agenda- the Democratic Party doesn't stop being an organisation if some vote for and some against the TPPA, they just have to generally agree. Both sides have reddit groups and do stuff on facebook or twitter and organise campaigns and the like, both sides largely self identify as the 'positive' version of their group (eg 'pro gamer' or 'progressive' or 'feminist') and both sides (and to a reasonable extent, people outside those groups) broadly speaking recognise each other as distinct groups.

Yeah, which is why if I were really pushed to pick the most accurate (though perhaps least inaccurate would be fairer) label I'd call the 'Cultural Marxism' phenomenon 'Cultural Fascism' instead due to the belief that some people are just inherently 'bad' due solely to the accident of birth. To be fair though, they don't really have identity as being immutable, hence the number of mtf transsexuals who are sjws and who are readily accepted. That's a pretty large change to require for acceptance though, certainly. They're definitely a movement every bit as much as gamergate is, they'd just label themselves as being 'for social justice' or 'progressives' or whatever instead of being the rather more perjorative 'sjw' their opponents call them. That's pretty much the same as GGers calling themselves 'pro Gamer' instead of 'GooberGobblers'. Nope, it should have been managed a whole lot better though and the world would be by far the better for it. But in any case few actual Marxists have a hard on for the USSR, rather appropriately it was far more about absolutism than class struggle or anything else, as Eric Blair Orson Welles showed so well in 'Animal Farm'. I'm way incompatible with soviet 'communism' and actual Marxism anyway, I always come out as a left libertarian on political tests- you're far closer to the USSR's actual philosophy than I am.

Firstly, a timer is not a railroad. A railroad is what it implies, a forced progression of A->B->C where you have no choice in the matter whatever. Gameplay wise it tends towards linear corridors or the actual rail shooter, narrative wise it's a non branching story. While the waterchip is effectively a choke point decision you have a wide range of different approaches prior to that. If you take that as a railroad then any narrated game is a railroad except ones with an emergent narrative- BG2 has a 'railroad' where you need to raise money and have to go to Spellhold even if you hate Imoen, Planetscape: Tournament you have to go after Ravel who has to die, Awesome Brotocols you have to return to the AP base at the end, Ultima But Thou Must, VTMB LaCroix forces you to obey him etc etc. None of them are actual railroad narratives though, they are just points at which the narrative meanders rejoin into the main stream; something with an actual railroad narrative would be, say, FEAR because every time you play it it has an identical, linear progression where the only choice is to progress in a predetermined manner, or stand still permanently, or quit. Secondly, the main reason why F1 and F2 have better narratives than F3 is not just because F3's story makes no sense and is an illogical mess of cliché and what Bethesda thought would be cool- the main plot in F1 and F2 certainly has elements of cliché and what would be cool itself after all- it is that every town has a story which is at least reasonably well thought out and internally consistent; F3's in contrast are almost all theme parks with one problem that can usually be solved in an utterly trivial manner. The actual world design of F3 is certainly its saving grace at least up until the point you get bored of it, but its narrative is just awful.

The crucial word being absolutist, which is not exclusive to Marxist doctrines by any stretch at all, not exclusive to Marx and most certainly not invented by him. Might as well say that it's Cultural Randism because of the absolutist producer/ parasite type labels she applied to people, or Cultural Torquemadism, or Cultural Fascism. Absolutist theory is completely left/ right agnostic, rightists just like using Cultural Marxism as to them anything left = bad, because it jerks knees or because they're lazy. The phenomenon labelled 'Cultural Marxism' does exist though, it's just that the label name itself is inaccurate propaganda, at best.

Yeah, the PoE expansion is basically confirmed as an announcement. Poorly kept 'secret' anyway since it was an added extra of the kickstarter. Doesn't seem like anything else except perhaps some Armoured Warfare stuff is imminent though: "Armored Warfare [tank MMO] is looking great, hitting more than 15K simultaneous people playing it last week; [the Pillars of] Eternity [Expansion] has a ton of cool new things; and we'll have a couple of fun things to announce in the next few months." Ah, Orwellian refers to ORson WELLes, I always wondered where it came from.

Wonder why... Because Ubisoft generally uses internal studios and inherited sp: tsot with Obsidian from THQ when they went bust. It's about as surprising as Assassin's Creed: Iteration being made by an internal Ubisoft studio.

Well, it is at least somewhat refreshing to hear a 'journalist' admit he's just a glorified governmental PR person even if it is simultaneously rather depressing that he basically just wrote what he was told as tritely as someone from 1938 Pravda denouncing an unperson would. Indeed, the lack of threat of receving a 7.62x25 to the skull from Beria if you refused makes it considerably worse.

Some GoT/ asoiaf book spoilers below, may or may not turn out to be show relevant

So, there's going to be a new South Park, and it's being made by Ubisoft San Francisco? Is this the thing you earthlings call irony or will the game implode in a cloud of smug? (bonus: I always have a laugh at wikipedia's "too many primary sources!!!" complaints)

His leaks didn't benefit Russia or China at all, practically- plenty of perfectly normal people had a good idea of what the NSA et al were doing, you can guarantee that the FSB/ SVR and equivalent Chinese agencies especially knew what was up. The famous example is Putin, ex FSB, who is known to be almost impossible to monitor because he avoids electronic communications as much as possible on principle, and always has. The only benefit to them was people knowing their governments were a bunch of privacy invading panty sniffers and the resulting drop in regard for those countries- it's suddenly not mass monitoring but mass collection, because they aren't going to look at it, promise; using the absolute classic pedophile defence technique. If there's any practical benefit to Russia/ China it is from the pretty terrible security of the agencies collecting all the data that the NSA uses to monitor people, and there's nothing Snowden can do about that, indeed it's been one of his major points that they weren't using proper security and had very lax monitoring, per the stories of contractors passing around nudes and spying on their partners or exes with impunity. And again, they haven't cracked aes256, it's as definite as anything can be. The anonymous source is clearly lying about the source of any leak. Frankly, if they'd broken aes256 and had a list of spies (monumentally stupid if there even was one) then it would be too late to move them anyway. Cracking aes256 would go a long way to bringing down the financial system even without evidence of an active breach, the necessity of security and the appearance of security is that serious. In general though, they are relying on people being gullible with these sorts of stories. Same as the Miranda "we found his password written down!!!- actually we can't crack his file" and the Assange/ Manning "people are dying because of this!!!- actually nobody has died" they're perfectly willing to lie in the knowledge most people will just accept whatever they say. But still, I know it makes me feel secure, knowing the same people who lie blatantly for their own benefit and protection have access to everything everyone has said online, clearly they'd never abuse it...

any more details on that? Take with grain of salt. It's well pre E3 and they certainly got the Andromeda part right though.

.. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky .. Bit of a nitpick but StalkerCS actually does have health regen, I'm playing it at the moment and it's definitely there. It's certainly not as fast as in most fps though, would take about 5 minutes to go from ouchiepuffed to full health. It's a bit silly, but nowhere near as silly/ annoying as those asterisking grenades and every random enemy being a professional trick thrower.

I think I really would have preferred if the albinos had bought it rather than the McCawleys, they're the most illogically plotted group of the lot and really ought to have died last season. Defiance is perhaps the worst plotted serial I've seen, they have a habit for writing themselves into corners and dropping threads or having weird or no consequences on a week to week basis. Still, it's oddly enjoyable and consistently entertaining even at its worst.

Yeah, that is presumably what Bethesdanet or whatever their new steam clone is called is at least partly for. The problem with that dialogue system is minimal compared with the likely quality problem of the writing itself. If the writing is "Have you seen my dad, middle aged guy?" quality again it hardly matters what the dialogue system is, if the writing is good then the system may be a bit limiting, but shouldn't be a major problem.

He didn't. I've actually looked at stuff released by Greenwalt et al and it has redactions up the wazoo; you may be thinking of Assange/ Wikileaks who started out with redactions then basically went 'oh asterisk it' and dumped all the low value stuff sans redactions. He does have a, er, 'continued good health promotion' file which gets released should he 'accidentally' get hit by a JDAM aimed at Al-Jazeera the Chinese Embassy a known terrorist; but that obviously hasn't happened, yet at least. The answer as to why detail was released is obvious, it makes it impossible to refute when you have the documentation and can read it yourself; you cannot just claim it's paranoid delusion/ made up or misunderstood. That's why apologists have moved from labelling anyone who dislikes governmental monitoring as tinfoil hat conspiracists- can hardly use that label when it's obvious they were right- to saying that they trust the government and thus everyone should, or the even more cretinous "I don't care, therefore nobody else should", or totalitarianisms favourite "if you have nothing to hide..." Thing is, he didn't have the files on him when he went to either HK or Moscow, they don't even have physical access to the files- and GCHQ couldn't crack them even with physical access.

That report is bollocks. Breaking the encryption on Snowden's files requires breaking aes256- if that's broken then there are Major Problems since it is used very extensively by a wide range of internet applications and services for encryption- and, crucially, by the NSA itself. And a brute force penetration is statistically impossible. That Bruce takes something said by an 'anonymous source' to Rupert Murdoch as gospel is unsurprising, as is the usual acritical repetition by the media; but the story, as a whole, isn't credible in the slightest. I can perfectly well believe that they're moving agents, but it's far more likely that one of the latest security breaches included something monumentally stupid like a list of active agents in plain text, or a list of crypto keys in plain text, or both. Oddly enough, one of Snowden's bigger but more ignored (well, by the NSA parrot choir) points was how much information is collected and how widely available and insecure it is. Which is pretty obvious, given the two breaches we know about came from someone not even employed by the NSA at the time but by a contractor, and a soldier with the lowest (?) regular rank possible. Frankly, China or Russia could just do it the old fashioned way and pay an equivalent person to get information surreptitiously if they need it, it would be up to date, easier and the person could do it multiple times. Reminds me how it was leaked that David Miranda was carrying a password around on him when he got detained at Heathrow and all the tutting about how that was terrible and a security risk. Of course, GCHQ then went to court to try and hold his stuff longer, because they couldn't crack the encryption on his hard drive even with him supposedly carrying a password... Slander and misinformation, and still you get hapless drones without an independent thought in their minds saying how we should all trust the gummint, trust the NSA/ GCSB/ GCHQ etc and they have our best interests at heart. Yeah, they only lie to protect us, they only listen to everything they can for the same reason. Meh, all terrorists can do is kill you, those 'patriots' and their shills would make you a slave and not even let you know until they need to force your hand for something.

Clearly the answer is that if the robots didn't have sexes where would the baby robots come from? Actually I'm more amused not by having extraneous sexuality in asexual machines but her appearing to have either extra boob/ crotchplate or be wearing only a sort of armoured bikini. That's really going the distance on extraneous sexuality, can't have her non existent/ non functional/ why on earth cybertron would you have them in a designed 'species' sexual organs being exposed to the world, might corrupt those impressionable ten year olds. In before Bruce: will she be in the game, and romanceable?

And one of the Queen's guards gave a little girl a smack in the chops when saluting too enthusiastically too. Having someone be mildly rude to you at EuroDisney for being un bifsteak or le yank pales in comparison to crashing a rollercoaster or being beaten up by a Beefeater/ Yeoman Guard/ Horse Guard/ Household Guard.

Well that sounds scummy as ****. Anyone else doing something similar? I don't know actually, I'm not really following steam pricings much myself. I don't think it is a genuinely widespread phenomenon though, some early access games seem to be labelling discounts against the release price (rather than the EA price) of the game is about all I've heard of it otherwise. Still, I'm pretty sure most people would not like that practice to become widespread. (It should be noted that they changed the price back on GTAV standalone and applied the discounts to its 'bundles' instead. Still a deceptive practise though, since instead of saving 25% on GTAV you'd actually be getting a free GTASA copy- or some game cash that renders its bundle unrefundable. At best the 'free' game is an ~6% discount on GTAV, taking the <$4 sale cost of the bundled game off the $60 base price)

In some ways it's a shame that the reddit censorship thing has blown up now, I'd like to see more about Rockstar upping the base price of GTAV 25% then having a 25% off sale that saves cents. That's actually illegal, here, (albeit what could be termed little i illegal rather than big I Illegal) and it really ought to be everywhere since it's an intrinsically deceptive practice.

Clearly this is spoilers for the ongoing Musketeers series where to the point I've seen it Rochefort is stubbornly biocular. Really though, the forum software should start every fact about Christopher Lee with :cool: not just one.