Zoraptor

Yeah, well it's pretty clear I'm not part of any consumer revolt in that respect, as I'm not a consumer and have said so- there's effectively nothing that can be done to get me back. Presumably at least Nonek and others are still consumers or at least potentially so though, and they want things to be improved rather than abandoned wholesale. You're taking, alternately, what I say and what Nonek say as being representative of everyone when it isn't, there is no canon law equivalent except insofar as there's a huge number of interpretations of what exactly canon is. And yeah, telling people that they should just stop consuming/ stop complaining is telling people to shut up, to all practical purposes, it's just a more polite way of doing it. I've seen that claimed, frankly I'd only believe the stats either side use if I'd checked myself. Far too easy to get the results whoever was looking wanted by stacking the criteria.

They do, at least up to the point reality and economics intervenes- but if they call themselves "PCGamer" (as eg name only) yet only write polemics about 'progressive' issues in gaming then they don't have a leg to stand on when people complain about them not writing about games or having an obvious bias. Their name choice implies that they will be primarily games orientated, they could simply call themselves 'progressive'_gamer.com or write it into their mission statement instead, if they want to slant everything they write one way. If they don't though they cannot then complain when they find that their readership figures have imploded or whatever. Choice and Consequence, they're free to choose to write what they want about what they want- we're free to tell them to go jump in a lake in consequence. Oddly enough, last post here (or near enough) I said that gaming journalism was largely people writing stuff I'd never read about games I'll never play. I don't read games journalism much at all, largely don't care about it and have always said that I consider censorship far more serious as an issue. But, you seem to be coming at things from the exact opposite end from what you accuse Nonek of; that it is such a trivial matter that nobody has the right to be upset about it, with the strong implication that people should just Shut Up. Well, no. They're free to write what they want about what they want and to choose what they care about every bit as much as journos are, the difference is that while journos are reliant on people reading stuff for their livelihood a lowly commentator isn't, and isn't being paid. And I don't care about Leigh Alexander at all, I have neither any animus not much sympathy towards her. Her article was stupid [edit: specifically because I consider it to have picked an unnecessary fight, and very likely deliberately], and I'd defend that opinion pretty strongly, but it isn't anything I personally feel the need to deconstruct in detail. If others want to though, well, go for it. They've as much right to do that as she had to write in the first place, if I don't like the content they produce I can just not read it, after all, exactly as I can do to journos. Ain't no one forcing anyone to read anything.

You seem to be rather hung up on the use of the word 'right'. You are correct that they have the right to preach or whatever, and about whatever they like- within reason and within any legal restrictions. But equally, preaching is not their purpose, their purpose at least theoretically is to inform gamers not to push particular political agenda. There would not be any (sensible) complaints about 'progressive' issues getting heavy weighting on a site called SJGamer for example, or one which had an explicit policy as such but it is fair to complain for general purpose gaming media as the purpose of gaming press is certainly not to browbeat their own audience into conforming with their social aims or claim that that certain parts of their audience should not be catered to; in any rational sense there cannot be sympathy for those who denigrate/ preach at their audience then find that that audience is no longer interested in them. There, they have simply got what was the logical outcome of their own actions. If my bank gave me lots of Catholic propaganda rather than rapaciously pillage and loot my wallet look after my money I'd quote Jesus in the Temple at them tell them to go asterisk themselves, and no one would blame me.

Eh, they'd be nuking Sweden (or Veliky Novgorod) if doing that. Not really politic at present, but Kiev was a descendant part of either Novgorod or ultimately Varangian Swedes, depending on where you draw the line and is neither Muscovy nor Russia's ultimate antecedent. It's kind of ironic that the Swedes gave us Goths and Rus centuries ago, and now they're a bunch of lentil eating hippies.

That was the point of watching 'Chuck'. It was written into their contract that they had to pointlessly eat Subway sandwiches and Yvonne Strahotski had to have at least one scene in her underwear during the last season. I wasn't complaining overly much about that last stipulation, to be fair. The point of ME2 however was to laugh at all the fanservice poses and male gaze camera angles Miranda was put in by a 'progressive' company that had forgotten the internet existed for such things- if you're a troglodytic misogynistic ogler, at least. Can't say I either have optimism or pessimism about ME4 personally. I'd wish they kept the MP and SP parts essentially separate but I wasn't too worried about the approach they used on ME3 for that, I never played MP and it didn't overly effect me. The overall ME structure is quite a good fit for a MP game though. As for the other stuff like supposedly being set in Andromeda and the like, some of it sounds plausible, some of it not so much.

Rune, and Arx Fatalis both were mostly underground, and both superb. Though I always did want to find the way out ~even in Eye of the Beholder. Legend of Grimrock and Ultima Underworld as well. Practically there is also very little difference with being set underground or in any enclosed space- to most practical purposes games like System Shock could be counted as well. Mostly they use the somewhat claustrophobic feeling as an asset to add to the atmosphere.

OMG, PrimeJunta was Lord of Flies, finally it is revealed. He's even changed to a similar Colonel Sanders avatar to the one LoF had.

It is "journalism and bias in the games industry" though, not just games journalism. That's an important distinction, as most of the discussion is on topic for the games industry part of it. Plus, of course, twitter and the like are now regarded in many places as nuMedia/ citizen journalists/ serious commentators on issues and much as I may personally dislike it that is a blade that cuts both ways. Don't get hung up on the cliche of "it's about ethics in games journalism", plenty myself included care far more about the attempts at censorship than about what inducements someone I don't read gets for saying stuff about something I likely won't play. In any case, under the aegis of 'games industry' people related to the games industry or journalists or even individuals commenting is fair game whether it be someone complaining about Vavra saying something 'outrageous' or someone complaining about Schaefer saying something 'outrageous'. I think you would have a point if there were some overt harassment or encouragement to do so going on, but there really isn't and I haven't seen any apart from the occasional 'email these sponsors' type suggestion and, well, if that counts for harassment then there's been a lot of harassment going on, for decades, from every interest group. If people are looking for places their stupid tweets have been published there are far more important places to look at than here- at twitter itself or at the person in the mirror who posted them in very many cases; especially if they're embarrassed enough about making them to have deleted them post facto. In the last case the best 'solution' would be to have actually thought about what you were writing, 140 characters is a stupid limitation prone to allowing absolutely no nuance whatsoever but people should be aware of that. It's easy enough to write stupid in a forum, and you you don't have to worry about a word limit either. For that reason I'm pretty glad there was no comment here about Chris Priestley's comment re CalgaryExpo because he did actually apologise (may have been forced by cdpr, but meh, benefit of doubt so far as I am concerned) as did a couple of other people with pretty good grace- that is all you can really ask from anyone, given twitter's format. I do find the idea of trawling through people's social media looking for gotchas decidedly unappealing and generally rather reminiscent of witch trial/ McCarthyist thinking, in theory at least- everyone has said stuff that in retrospect is dumb or makes them look bad or that they regret, or even stuff that may be unpleasant but not really relevant; using that against them potentially years later is questionable and often a cheap way to try and get them to stfu. But, it is so in terms like 'often' and 'generally', it can be appropriate and where the line is drawn in terms of 'decorum' is very much subjective. Really though, if you're comparing GG to ISIS or the KKK, calling for all men to be killed or whatever on a public forum you should have a reasonable expectation that you will attract attention, and that some of it will be negative. If they think it's all going to be positive feedback then they aren't much in touch with reality.

Yeah, can't see any back seat moderating there. OTOH, apparently serious linkage to rationalwiki? Ooooookeydokey.

Would people be surprised if the host agreed with his satirical over the top statements? Youtube link, for those interested. Ye gads, that last line is near pure Bruce.

1 stupid looking lightsaber 3 shakeycam fight sequences where you can't tell what is happening 6 ridiculous amounts of inappropriate lens flare 2 pointless overlong cgi action sequences designed to sell games/ toys (not JJ's fault though, was Lucas's sole stipulation when selling) 1 time travel incident... I did think the casting in nuStar Trek was pretty close to spot on, except for Simon Pegg. To me it felt like he wanted to make a Star Wars movie though, instead of a Star Trek one. An annualised movie system for Star Wars- next, we find out who really stole the Death Star plans, yet again- does not fill me with confidence, nor does the rather staid and conservative content Disney has already released.

Needs more references to 'levelling up' or- and really, the set up is so perfect for this- 'get out of here gamer girl' Though I presume they do exist somewhere else in the jpgverse. Stalin too was infamous for his complete lack of sense of humour. Not sure about sarcasm, I doubt anyone dared to even consider using it on him. Though it might explain certain things ("yes, Josip, eliminating our officer corps is a great idea! Why don't we wipe out our doctors as well, while we're about it?")...

All the bundle deals are up now, along with some indies over the weekend and Div:OS for 40% off as well. Pretty good options there (Lucasarts, Paradox, M&B, Gothic, Divinity, Men of War, D&D especially), though I expect most will have already played/ already own most of them.

Yeah, the edit limit may be somewhat annoying- very occasionally, mostly it's who cares- but the quote system has some pretty significant and very annoying issues where it breaks quotes about half the time if you shorten them and is (was?) refusing to delete nested quotes properly. All topped off by the plain text editor not wrapping text lines any more meaning that if you use that you have to scroll half the way to India if you're writing something longer than a sentence and it not behaving consistently with those problems, sometimes it's all fine and other times it's not at all. Mind you, I complain now but it's been like that for months and I haven't been bothered to actually write anything down before now, so the edit time people are certainly motivated.

Yeah, the new stuff from Disney or licensed by them is automatically canon, old stuff automatically isn't though it may be recanonised by being referenced by new stuff. That's pretty uniform, only grey area pretty much is TOR and whether that counts as 'new' or 'old' (or some weird situation where new content is canon, but old isn't). Currently it's a weird Shrodinger's Canon case, but obviously one very peripheral to the movie series.

More political murders in Kiev- this time a pro Russian jouno and an ex PoR politician, within two days. Must be Putin though, because something something evil something something false flag something something dumb enough to kill off his own allies something something because just evil!!! something something. Still, pretty lol (if inappropriately so, under the circumstances) that political murders of the opposition in Ukraine are past Putin's supposed 17 year total already when the year is only 17 weeks old, and what the difference in response is when it's pro Russians being bumped of rather than a pro west irrelevancy like Nemtsov.

It's a Trap! There is no trap laid for the General. I wouldn't mislead him so. No, not from the general. You appear to be taking seriously someone who writes that state sponsored channels are biased then immediately cites the BBC as an independent counterexample. He does that sort of thing all the time, it's a baited hook to get a a response- or alternatively, he's so incredibly un self aware that why bother anyway. That's why I didn't use a gif for "It's a trap!", Ackbar would probably sue me in Russia for using him against such a weak effort.

It's a Trap!

Who knows, might be both. Those aren't mutually exclusive. Aztlanian food or an Aztlanian standoff just sounds wrong though.

The only preferences in terms of vendor that really count in this case are GOG and Origin (plus backers), all other versions count as steam 'sales' since they must be registered there. The steamspy data is from general steam (publicly viewable) ownership data so a retail copy or a copy bought at most DD vendors counts towards the steam numbers, as does a steam registered KS copy (though the sales rankings on GOG don't count backer versions, our copies are separate untracked SKUs, hence why backers get PoE marked as unbought at GOG). Steamspy is not itself country biased though purchase preferences and the data it relies on certainly may be- and it does actually provides a by country breakdown of sales too, I believe. Its main source of error is potentially sampling bias; especially if particular groups or nationalities are more likely to make their profiles private so their ownership data is unavailable that may make any extrapolations to overall ownership inaccurate. I could easily believe that, say, Germans or those interested in a relatively niche game are more likely to make their profile private, which would certainly introduce potential systemic undersampling. Then again, Steamspy's data has a pretty large margin of error already, statistically speaking.

Well, I was thinking of petitioning the Powers That Be here to get rid of white lettering so I could have letters of colour on a background of colour instead of having the important parts of the forum be near uniformly privileged and hegemonic white. (yep, somebody out there doubtless would think that unironically. Though they really shouldn't use twitter if they do since its default colour schemes involve lots of white as well)

Stickmen are an unreasonable and unattainable representation of physical appearance and subliminally encourage anorexia and bulimia in their readers. They should also be referred to as 'linepeople' rather than stickmen, since 'stick' and 'men' are respectively a phallic codeword with intimations of the sexual act, and a sexist term that marginalises 51% of the population. And, of course, while linepeople on the face of it have an excellent proportion of lines of colour and properly low representation of privileged white lines this is only because the background- usually the largest proportion of the comic- is disproportionately white.

For these purposes PoE is Paradox's game as well, since they are the 'publisher' they have direct access to/ from the portals rather than Obsidian* same as for C:S which was made by an independent company as well. Though that doesn't mean that Obsidian certainly won't be the ones to release the figures, if it happens, but if they do they'll have got them via Paradox. *take with a grain of salt as unfortunately I cannot for the life of me remember who actually said this, except it was someone at Obsidz. And finding something that specific is what search engines are terrible at.

It's worth it. Beyond Divinity not so much but the other two are pretty good.

Meh, that [gfted1's pic] at least should be banned for crimes against photoshopping. Sloppy and lazy, incorrectly apportioned, poor lighting match, obvious quality variance, cut and paste artefacts. It makes my eyes bleed (mission accomplished?) OTOH Putin riding bear and Putin riding dinosaur never get old and are rather good, technically. Or maybe they aren't actually 'shopped; who knows with Putin.