Zoraptor

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)

There's nothing inherently wrong with having games serve a political purpose, things like America's Army are pretty overtly political- overtly enough that I don't even dislike it as propaganda. It's when you start trying to enforce a particular brand of political purpose across the board that it becomes a problem. Erik Kain is good quality, even if he is 'only' a Forbes contributor and even when I rarely disagree with him. He and Tim Stone are probably the best games journalists out there at the moment, though Stone's stuff is a lot more, er, targetted and narrow in scope. Can't agree with Stiller, Tropic Thunder earns him a Get Out of Labour Camp Free Card so far as I am concerned.

This illustrates the worst of cynicism. Nah, it's realism. The two are frequently interchangeable because much of the time reality does suck. Ideally, yes, ideally all history should be objective truth telling that gives the facts and allows the reader to make informed conclusions rather than having the author preach their views to their audience. Ideally. Realistically there (1) ain't enough time in the day to get upset at that as you'd get upset at pretty much everything short of Thucydides (2) different people get outraeged!!! at different, selective things and (3) there's no way any selection of people will all agree on what constitutes objective and what constitutes a fact- see any wikipedia article on any slightly controversial subject, albeit wikipedia doesn't actually claim to be fact based, only verifiable; which ought to be easier. In some ways I wish more people were as honest in that appraisal, in others I wish more people would be fact based. Either way I might as well wish for world peace and an end to famine while I'm at it, they're both as realistic a wish. Challenge me, I have a frank and honest view of the history of my country Country overall, not every given individual in a country. I'd say I had a pretty objective view of my country's history for example- I would think that, after all- but there's plenty of generally accepted stuff in our history I disagree with. Doomsday from Wing Commander would be better, since he's a maori so at least ultimately from New Zealand Taiwan. Has a french name, but meh. Xan's cool too, though.

Wouldn't think so, so long as nothing really momentous happens- they have near 50% of the vote tied up just in their own federations, so long as they pick a unified candidate, and the Euro tactic of picking an Asian member to stand against Blatter got no traction last time and didn't split their votes. They'll get plenty of support from the smaller assocs in Oceania and North America as well, turkeys won't vote for an early Christmas and the Anglos/ Euros are publicly sharpening the axes and bulk buying cranberries. That's all dependent upon the 'rules' being followed though. If they have apprehension it would be about the Anglos/ Euros tearing up the rule book all in the name of saving the game for whitey from (oddly, ethnic specific) corruption. As mentioned, it's hardly like Platini didn't vote for Qatar himself, nor like Germany didn't win the 2006 tournament in shady circumstances.

It's physically impossible for every game to be the best experience ever. In fact, only 1 game could ever have the best experience ever. I disagree. Primarily because time is a progressive vector construct on which our personal experiences occur in a chronological order, all our experiences do not occur on a memory singularity but in a memory stream. At various points on that stream we may judge 'bests' differently as our experiences accumulate. Think of all the games that make up the overall gamespace, those that we have not played may be regarded as Schrodinger's Games (as with F4) which exist in a state of quality flux; they may or may not be better than previous games and while they may or may not have reputations associated with them it is only by opening the box and playing them can you make the judgement of which is best yourself. As such, until played they do not exist in the subjective opinionspace of what is one's personal 'best' rated and indeed it would be perfectly possible- if distinctly edge case scenario- to have every single game in existence be the 'best' at a certain point if you played them, sequentially, in ascending order of quality. ie, at any given point the last game you played would be best and stay so up until you played the next. Or alternatively, you might have multiple bouts of amnesia... In other words while there may be only one best game ever, at a given time and for a given person, that assignation is fluid and dynamic and over a set time course there may well be multiple best games of all time at given, discrete, instances on that time course.

Meh, whitewashing history is something everyone does. Not like the average British doco on Churchill mentions the crappy stuff he did, or the US doesn't celebrate a genocidal maniac on their bank notes, or the Poles get all knicker knotted about getting partitioned but didn't do it to Czechoslovakia nor stab Lithuania in the back when they were fighting the soviets. And our national myth involves lionising lots of naive chaps going off to die utterly pointlessly in Turkey for the benefit and at the command of imperialist buffoons half a world away. You won't find a single country that even approaches frank and honest in their view of their own history. It's not what countries do, at heart they're just like sports fans- we're skillful, honest and brave supporting the bestest team in the entire world; otoh the referee is biased and the opposition are dishonest thugs who dive and cheat.

It would be interesting to see if the 6th Sense were regarded so highly if he'd done, say, The Wicker Man first instead. I actually enjoyed TWM well enough, despite the twist being fairly obvious. I've watched the first two Wayward Pines and so far I'd say it has been promising. And if nothing else it is fun to speculate on what any obligatory M Night twist might be.

It's M Night Shylamalimlam. The lame ending is pretty much guaranteed, unfortunately. The journey to that lame ending may well be good though.

Meh, as much as game journalism sucks Hatred has been about as exploitative as it gets in their marketing and deliberately and consistently set out to get controversy as a selling point. Indeed, from the reactions I've observed just about its only selling point. I'm still expecting some Stalin vs Martians like- well, probably not as actually bad as SvM- overmarketed, poor and short game from Hatred. If so it will be interesting to see how many people can admit they were duped. I don't of course think it should be banned or anything, they can make and market their game any way they want so far as I am concerned. But a game that pretty transparently aims to get people buying it on the premise that it will annoy sjws if you do is not really something I can get behind, at all. I don't particularly care if it's a GG knee jerking up through the desk or an sjw one, they're both bad. (Seriously, the number of people wanting to preorder it solely on the basis of it annoying sjws, I'm actually not sure I've seen anyone say they preordered/ wanted to buy on the basis of it being, well, a good game as opposed to some sort of principle of free speech/ censorship or being anti sjw. And really, that is about as sheep like as anyone preordering CoD or Mass Effect or AssCreed or whatever the cool people like to laugh at du jour)

Well, the money at club level is going to the right people- rich Europeans- instead of the wrong people; everybody else, and that isn't so clear cut at the international level what with WC money being used for this 'development' rort where money goes to places like Papua New Guinea or Burkina Faso rather than to Berlin, Paris and London. It is somewhat hilarious to see quite so much tone deaf posturing from the Euros about everything, combined with a blithe inability to think of any reasons why those in the asian/ african/ actually every confederation except UEFA who they'd take all the development money off don't like them and vote for Blatter. And there are tons wanting to take their ball and run off to their own tournament so that control can rightly be reinvested in those lovely whiteys who ran the game for most of the past century for their own exclusive benefit- like the last English FIFA head who wanted apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia readmitted to FIFA, plus specifically lobbied and got a match vs Pinochet's Chile. In the stadium Pinochet had been using as a base for torture and mass murder, no less. Ah, good times, when the money went to the truly deserving... My personal favourite though is the guy who managed to hit all of those points- including the why does everyone else hate us and there's no conspiracy except from people who vote for Blatter- then added that it was going to be great because Russia would lose the WC, and it would be late enough that they'd have to give it to someone who really deserved it and would run it 'properly', yep, the US or England. Who only got 2 votes and were beaten by both the BeNel and Iberian bids let alone the Russian one but clearly deserve it because Wills and Dave were so very depressed or something and people told them they'd vote for them then didn't so obvious bribery from everyone else. Yep, way to make sure there's no credence given to the conspiracy theories about it all being an anglo plot to take tournaments when they can't win legit and that there's no arrogance or self superiority in play either.

Trolls don't hide in closets, they hide under bridges. As much fun as it may be to illustrate Bruce's consistent hypocrisy and mutually exclusive positions it never, ever results in anything because he's either the most self acritical person in the known universe or he's doing it deliberately to get a reaction and to derail, in which case every reply gives him exactly what he wants and encourages rather than discourages/ gets him to reflect on anything. Again, ignore or Ignore. There's nothing to be gained from engaging Bruce on this subject, if there were it would have happened in the previous 2400 (?) posts.

England's bid was the main one criticised for corruption in the FIFA report- or more accurately, the select bits of it that were released- into the 2018/22 bid processes. Of course, that was mainly quid pro quo because they whined like a 2 year old with broccoli and brussel sprouts for dinner, but if the Swiss are going to investigate based on the FIFA report then England won't escape scot (l0l) free either. Plus they came stone cold last, both the Spain/ Portugal and BelNel bids were better supported and ought to have first dibs. The Iberian bid may not be possible any more due to financial constraints, though they should have been looming in 2010 as well but I very much doubt England would win on a revote anyway, they're almost universally disliked as born-to-the-purple self important Napoleon complex under achievers, and that's just in Europe. US getting 2022 is far more likely.

The DAI decisions were a bit odd given that they were pretty much exact reverse of the ME3 visual design decisions where Ashley and Liara both got some augmentation from the earlier games and you had an invasion of Jersey Shore extras as well. I hate that sort of thing, ever since I found out why red lipstick is attractive it's the first thing I think of when I see it, which can be a bit off putting.

Not going to happen. It's too late both in terms of getting bids redone/ reholding the vote and in terms of having a sound legal basis for it ie getting the robust legal case and convictions for corruption necessary to stop them getting sued to oblivion by Russia, Blatter would have to go anyway (and seemingly nobody seems to think he actually will be voted out, though he is... not great, to say the least) plus Russia was not a very controversial choice in the wider world- and unlike in most things Europe and the US doesn't get much especial privilege in FIFA any more, one of its few governmental bright spots. Qatar on the other hand... its main opponents were the US and members of its own asian confederation, it's annoyed the big euro leagues by having its WC have to be played in the middle of normal league time and some important sponsors (ie beer) won't even be able to sell their product at the tournament. That's the sort of stuff the power brokers really care about, far more than Qatar evil subcontractors working Nepalis to death or Dave Cameron becoming a quivering jelly at the thought of Vladimir Vladimovich's pectorals.

Legend of Grimrock (1) did, as did Twitcher 2. But they're useless as they're from mid-late 2012, so heading towards 3 years old. IIRC it was ~20k for Twitcher2 and ~32k for Grimrock at that time, but that's iirc. And GOG archiving their forum seems to have completely destroyed Google's indexing for checking those numbers, unfortunately. OTOH you can make some conclusions from relative positions. Since DivOS on steam has roughly twice PoE's sales but their positions on GOG are practically identical- DivOS's position includes ks copies while PoE's doesn't, after all- we can conclude that the proportion sold on GOG should be twice as high for PoE as for DivOS, ie whatever number you'd add to PoE's steam figures to get the total ought to be about the same as that for DivOS, not half as would be expected if just looking at steam sales.

Yep, though Qatar is definitely an outlier, decision wise. You hardly ever hear about Germany winning in shady circumstances for 2006 any more, but it happened. Our delegate voted against the instructions of his confederation for Germany instead of Seff Effrica and the margin was 1 vote between the two- if he'd obeyed instruction the Brucies could have destroyed the world's ear drums with their droning plastic trumpets four years earlier. Kind of ironic (or maybe illustrative, depending on view) though, the other major international organisation with bribery claims (IOC) mainly had them over awarding venues to Salt Lake City and Atlanta; slightly different from Brazil/ Russia/ Qatar albeit of all of those Qatar is the only real and genuine wtf decision. Britain and Australia not doing well wasn't surprising despite what the media said, a lot of people really didn't like their casual anglocentricism and both came last in their ballots and were not even close.

It's almost certainly a bit of both. To illustrate why: The best and most accurate simple description for complex genetics/ developmental systems I've heard is the one used in 'The Science of Discworld'- essentially, genetics is like a recipe as it is generally taught in schools; but people tend to forget that a recipe requires both the set of ingredients ie the genes and a set of conditions as well to get a successful result. If you had 'genes' for mince, onions and tomatoes you can end up with a massive variety of end results depending on those ingredients and the way they're treated (ie the developmental conditions). But while you can get basic results from the ingredients (stereotype simple Mendelian level stuff, the equivalent of tomatoes being able to be used raw) you cannot get a meringue from those genes/ ingredients, no matter how much you try and how much you vary the conditions, nor can you get a tasty meal out of an empty oven. So you might have a burger pattie (heterosexual), a kofta (bisexual) or a bolognaise sauce (homosexual) depending on proportions of ingredients used and conditons of cooking but if you lack the ingredients you have no food, and if homosexuality were a... meringue, say, then you couldn't get it from those genes/ ingredients. Plus of course actual human behaviour is a lot more complex than just a recipe, that is indicated by twins not having a particularly strong sharing of sexuality. To torture the analogy a bit more (frankly, I'm expecting a commendation from Richard Cheney any time), it's like putting the same general ingredients into an oven then taking a kofta and a bolognaise out of the same oven in nine months; with the added possibility that after a time cooling the kofta might genuinely think it's actually a burger pattie whatever the recipe says. Saying it's due to any one of developmetal, genetic or later envirnomental or societal issues alone is certainly incorrect though.

Telltale adventure game series are coming to gog- perhaps unsurprisingly given the TV series is currently active the GoT series is first with a 40% discount. Gog also won't be selling Hatred, though whether that is due to censorious moral panic or due to it being Stalin vs Martians style crap with media attention is not known (and it's very likely gog won't say either).

Mods will fix it.

The problem with that is the same essential problem there is with there being a 'strong' genetic base for homosexuality- twins. If there is a strong basis for homosexuality based on genetics then there should be a strong correlation of identical twins sharing the same sexuality as they are nearly genetically identical, if it is due to in utero factors there should be a strong correlation in both identical and non identical twins as they share near identical in utero conditions and its maternal/ environmental factors. There is some correlation in both cases, but it isn't strong enough to justify either explanation except as a factor rather than a cause.

Just that it's currently at place 5 (Hero) and 16 (Champion) of gog's charts - no absolute numbers. You can get the historic/ overall relative sales as well, since you can do a sort by bestselling. That's for RPGs, since that is where the most direct comparison to similar titles can be made, it's 356/1094 by sales against all titles. It's probably the highest placed game that hasn't been on sale, excluding Twitcher3 which probably includes registered retail copies anyway. For PoE at least it seems that KS copies don't count towards that ranking either as I get it marked as unowned, though for example DivOS is marked as owned and is a KS copy.

While that is true the more complex the behaviour/ the control of the behaviour the more difficult it is to breed out said behaviour because there are more factors involved. If, for example, there were a gene that 'turned people gay'- or conversely, turned them straight- in their twenties through hormone inbalance there would be a fair chance their genes would be carried on, as would anyone's with 'gay tending genes' who was involved in a heterosexual relationship at any point. With something as complex as human behaviour it is almost always a predisposition towards/ away from something rather than an absolute process; we're not stereotype amoeba stimulus/ response behaviour wise, we're stimulus/ think/ response for most types of behaviour and this makes behavioural selection rather... fuzzy where we are concerned. That leads, of course, to the main problem with any statistical analysis that is required to detect any 'gay influencing genes', while it sounds rather like something an evangelical preacher would say it is possible to suppress behaviour via will power or lie about it since it is behaviour. Sociopathy is not really- or perhaps is, depending on perspective- a good example since last time I checked there wasn't even a globally accepted definition of sociopathy (it was called something like type IV psychopathy, iirc, and disputed that 'sociopathy' existed seperately). Essentially though, neither sociopathy nor homosexuality can 'die out' due to genetic factors so long as there are complex genetic and behavioural systems in play as some with either trait set or incomplete parts of a trait set will still have children to carry on the influencer genes.

Despite having done (basically) no research on it I'd be pretty confident in saying it doesn't work that way- it's actually extremely hard to breed traits out even with an organised effort. There's been thousands of years of work on shorter lived species like pigs and sheep yet they'll revert to wild types quite quickly- especially pigs which will go from fat pink hairless porkers to smaller black hairy wild boar in only a couple of generations. The stuff on 'gay genes' on wikipedia (heh/ meh/ L0L) is extremely unconvincing about there being any strong genetic link of the type people usually think of from stuff like eye colour. Or in other words, homosexuality won't strictly obey the archetype Mendelian genetics, ie there won't be Z = 'straight' z = 'gay' --> ZZ = straight Zz/zZ = bisexual zz = gay and you wouldn't be able to get bisexuals by breeding 'pure gay' with 'pure straight' and breed out teh gay by only breeding 'pure straight' with each other. If there were it would have been found already, albeit analysing a behaviour type by genetics is inherently difficult since it is a behaviour which may be suppressed/ enhanced by social pressures or conditioned in/ out at various times and there are people who don't realise they're gay until late in life etc. Something like eye colour is an objective trait, homosexuality is far more subjective and complex.

I found it very interesting in the Canadian election thread that their government is doing exactly the same sort of stuff for exactly the same sort of reasons- plus the Tories in the UK used almost exactly the same strategy our National Party did here. There's clearly a lot of synching of strategies going on. And as always, the politicians' job is not actually to serve the people but to get re-elected and they're probably getting advice mainly from cookie cutter MBAs; on the look out for some lovely Directorships as rewards from the same companies whose interests they served while in office/ advising those in office. Last big company we bailed out was an insurance one after the Christchurch earthquake, which was at least reasonably justifiable as being due to a genuinely unique circumstance. There was also TV3 where the government gave them a $43 million interest free loan and oddly, so very oddly, the current affairs program that has been most consistently critical of them got the axe despite regularly being the network's best performer. Oh yeah, their new CEO is a good buddy of our Prime Minister. Coincidentally. It's funny really, people here vote ourselves the least corrupt in the world because they can't recognise quid pro quo/ payola if it got up and turned their house into a wholly licensed product of Monsanto behind their backs.

From that I'm not sure Nonek is the one needing to know what a 'strawman' is. Plenty of the people who now constitute GG have been concerned about games journalism, for years previous. Otherwise we have to conclude also that- logically- nobody cared about world peace until the United Nations was formed, nobody cared about international health until the WHO/ IRC/ MSF etc were formed, nobody cared about internet freedom or overweening and overbearing copyright rules until Pirate Parties were formed, nobody cared about social justice until the sjw term was coined etc- after all, nobody was a member of those organisations (or 'organisations') until they existed either. The idea that any movement sprung de novo from the aether direct into people's minds and they didn't care previous is... a bit ridiculous. Games journalism has been criticised and pilloried for its failings for decades and if anything it's just got worse over that time. But anyway, as said, the whole thing would have blown over in a week sans Streisand Effect. Remove the censorship and invective against anyone not toeing the line and there wouldn't be a GG either; there would still be perfectly legitimate criticisms of journalism to be made with or without it and gamergaters would be some of those making them, with or without the label to make them a recognised movement.