Zoraptor

Vega's big problems are that he wasn't in the earlier games so didn't get any following there and is used largely as an intro/ info dump for new players as he doesn't know the rest of the team/ wasn't part of the action of the past games. As a consequence he was just kind of there, not good, not bad, slightly cliche but not offensively so. His voice acting was decent enough though.

Such scepticism and cynicism! CDPR is bringing their gamer friendly attitude to the MOBA genre, the game is not pay-to-win, they said so! Despite avoiding MOBAs like the plague I'm sure that's totally different from the usual attitude!

Good news, everybody! New Witcher game announced, and apparently due in 2014! At least I now actually know what MOBA stands for, I couldn't quite force "Inexplicably popular genre that I have zero interest in" into the acronym. I have to admit I do rather like the concept art banner though.

While Dragon Age lore is highly derivative (though honestly, what RPG isn't at this stage?) it isn't especially derivative of ASoIaF- which is itself derivative and based on various historical incidences, minus the supernatural stuff. There's a lot of Tolkien and other borrowing going on as well, so stuff like genlocks/ hurlocks being generated from different races is exactly the same as Melkor generating Trolls and Orcs from Ents and Elves. Sames true for TWitchers, lots of real world and standard fantasy tropes there, and TWitchers are thematically a whole lot more similar to ASoIaF/ GoT than Dragon Age is, if only for the decidedly non PG13 approach taken. Then again, I do tend to roll my eyes slightly at the fleurs-de-lys or Polish Crests in Twitchers, while most people simply wouldn't recognise their historical context. Oh, and zee uxcent fransays on the person from Beauclair, maker of fine wines...

Which doesn't really make much sense at all, since MP already works fine with the backer version, which GOG already had since yesterday (so long as you used their downloader, manual was borked) and they've insisted Galaxy will be 'optional'. Removing the "Kickstarter backer, you're awesome" decal can't be that much work. Why GOG presumes the majority of the clientele care even slightly about MP fripperies and auto patching is a bit of a mystery, most of the people there and who buy from there fundamentally don't want steam or they'd be buying from there in the first place. It's like they promoted the guy who decided on the shutdown stunt to head of PR over the past few months- or hired some idiot MBA as a consultant.

What, not the accent of Officer Crabtree from 'Allo 'Allo? Though I guess there'd be problems with the naughty filter every time he was 'passing by the door and heard two shots'. One of the actresses on the BBC drama Waking the Dead had an accent exactly the same as Leliana's, and also looked exactly like her. Always (well, it passed my mind on occasion once or twice) wondered if that was coincidence or not.

At this point many indies probably have more employees and clout than Interplay does, even if they technically still are a publisher. (And of course Interplay is still (?) trying to crowd fund ProjectV13/ the relaunched BIS, and has been for ages)

Nothing? I've been pretty consistent in saying that any bits of Ukraine that want to break off should be able to and splitting the country along the east west divide was probably the best solution, from the outset. Certainly they've done an excellent job in Kiev of making sure that if a majority of people in Donbass didn't hate them before they do now, and even the western journalists have made that clear, there's now massive resentment and outright loathing of Kiev throughout the region. There really isn't anything that the west can do to prevent Russia intervening, if they decide to (at this point I think direct intervention is unless there is a major shift in events, if they were going to it would have been in May), since the only way to definitively stop them is to intervene militarily themselves. Which they won't do. They won't get any further sanctions through in the current climate either whatever the posturing of Anders the Dane and John the Kerry, neither France nor Germany have any stomach for them if they have an excuse not to.

By way of comparison, Johan Le Roux got an 18 month ban from rugby, a full contact sport, for biting- and that was before the current PG13 rugby era of no rucking etc and was his first offence. At this point they really have to throw the book at Suarez, it isn't an isolated incident and he still does it because there haven't been enough consequences.

Lol. If Putin wants to invade he'll do it, just as he did in Crimea to an anaemic reponse. He has no need to invade 'Ukraine', now, he'd just recognise Donbass as independent and send 'peacekeepers' at their request. He may wait for the Kurds to declare independence and use western support of that as a precedent, he may not. Either way the approval for invasion of Ukraine is redundant at this point.

Meh, whether the companions just sound bad as opposed to actually are bad is an open question at this point. Write one sentence descriptions of the companions from MotB with a picture and they look like they'd be pretty bad as well, for example.

Britain declared war because ze Germans invaded Belgium, at least ostensibly*. They weren't allied with Russia- or even France- formally, and it was primarily a balance of power issue for Britain. France was allied with Russia though. *Uh, ostensible reason for war at least, I'm fairly sure the German invasion of Belgium was completely genuine.

... roflcopters. Yes, the people who bundled various brown chappies into arbitrary constructions without any care for those 'ancient [ethno]religious schisms' have nothing to do with the latter disintegration of said countries along those ancient ethnoreligious lines! Nothing at all! It's coincidence, a Russo Iranian conspiracy, anything but our fault! Aliens! Orcs! Illuminati! Conjunction of the Spheres! Mars in the quarter of Pleiades! Anything! You know what the problem with Sykes Picot was? It didn't take into account any of those ancient ethno religious schisms. You know what the problem with the colonial administrations were? They weren't concerned with an 'approach to civil society', they were concerned with colonial convenience. You know what the problem with post colonial policy was? Support for convenient 'reliable' strongmen favouring one ethnoreligious group over 'civil society'. You know what the current problem is, at least in part? Support for the 'toxic philosophies' when convenient. That's not to say that those are the only reasons for the current mess, but trying to airbrush them as factors is at very best naive. The west does not understand the middle east. Never has, and all indications are it never will.

I should find the over the top patriotism of the US annoying, but for some reason find it immensely endearing in football. Helps that they're playing Ronaldo, of course. I'd say it's as simple as too much money in the Premier League and it being too successful as a league are the main problems for the english national side. Sides have the money to buy in over the top of local talent, while english talent finds it hard to get into foreign leagues so it's the worst of both worlds. Even though those that do play in the top sides are exposed to many of the best players in the world regularly there simply isn't the critical mass of native english players there to really benefit from it, they're just too diffuse. Don't think that having only a handful of really competitive teams means much though- realistically, people could have accurately guessed the top 4 teams in the premier league for most of the last decade from the beginning of the season, apart from Liverpool/ ManU this year maybe.

The great British public should not be bothered. British interference is one of the factors which has left Iraq a mess, at some point you just have to stop and let them sort things out themselves. 1918 would have been good. They don't have any chance of achieving their Caliphatic dreams in any case, they can aim for the moon but it doesn't mean that the little green men should be worried. As soon as they try inflicting their vision on the gulf states- which they'd have to, can't have a caliphate without Mecca and Medina- their funding will dry up instantly; they lack sufficient support and have only achieved anything in areas where the existing public authorities are already massively compromised by other factors. Their narrative has a certain cachet in being similar to that of the actual Caliphate- bands of committed men fired by religious fervour sweeping out of the desert to supplant the decadent [Roman and Persian] Empires, against all odds. But it's not a good actual parallel in reality, it's just a recruiting tool. They don't have a Khalid ibn al Walid and they don't have two empires that have fought themselves to the brink of bankruptcy and implosion in the decades previous. They may be aiming for a Caliphate but the best they can achieve is a (localised) Timur. Anything concrete they achieve will fall apart at the first sign of weakness. Syria would crush ISIS, if they weren't also fighting a bunch of other groups. Iraq would crush ISIS, if they weren't also fighting tribals and ba'athists. And as Syria shows, ISIS are allies of convenience to other groups, they'll naturally end up fighting their allies as well at some point. The only thing which can convert ISIS into a long term threat is something like couping Saudi Arabia.

Trouble with RTD's run is that if I look at the episode list from those years practically every episode I like is written by... Stephen Moffat. RTD had some good ideas as well as Moffat did but... hmm. Best way I can put it is that while some of Moffat's ideas seem confusingly resolved/ not resolved/ just confusing in retrospect RTD's ideas went south in a rapid and utterly linear fashion. For example, Derek Jacobi as The Master is a brilliant idea, and that was brilliantly played even if the base premise of the episode was moronic (and largely cribbed from Blake's 7). John Simm being smug, ok, chewing scenery and being shouty, not so much. And the denouement, everybody thinking of The Doctor fixing everything was one hundred billionty percent worse than anything that has ever been on TV, ever. Just cringeworthy. Might be a slight exaggeration on the last sentence, but that whole arc just about sums up my feelings towards RTD's run perfectly, promise followed very rapidly by disappointment. Having said that, RTD's involvement did include Children of Earth which was very, very good.

Finished a TWitcher plathrough favouring the Order, for the first time. And it took some time as well- as I suspected I felt like a Very Bad Person and a Bit of an Idiot at the end of it. Siegfried may be a bro and Yaevinn may be an arrogant... chap but that is literally the only plus in picking the order, all your true bros like Zoltan hate it, you're complicit in genocide, an abject moron for believing Jacques and you've basically been supporting the polish fantasy equivalent of Al Qaeda/ the nazis/ Torquemada. Nice job Order Geralt, you're an utter tool and should be ashamed of yourself. I actually decided to replay because I hadn't played since TWitcher2 and apart from not having an Order save game I wanted to check how well the two games held together, I was under the impression that the Wild Hunt and other stuff really wasn't foreshadowed much at all in TW1. Overall I think that impression was not entirely correct or incorrect, the foreshadowing is far better than, say, the complete lack of Catalyst foreshadowing in the earlier Mass Effects, but not really enough to suggest that it would be the thread holding the trilogy together.

Oh gods no. One more of his 'power of love saves the universe' deus ex machina and farting aliens and I'll... be mildly annoyed and post about it years later on an internet forum. Doesn't help that I was nowhere near as enamoured of Tennant's doctor (or Rose) as most of the internet. Moffatt's problem's are the same in Who as in Sherlock. His writing starts out seeming subtle and nuanced, with a plan, but ends up looking an incoherent mess once you've seen enough episodes- and that feeling travels back through time to effect episodes I previously liked as well. Too much 'this is going to be awesome', not enough actual awesome. While he was certainly the logical replacement for Davies in retrospect he was far better as a writer than as a show runner. I actually still like his run better than Davies overall, but it has left a feeling that it could have- and should have- been a lot better than it turned out.

BitComposter owns Jagged Alliance. They won't have given away a licence so Full Control will be paying for its usage. I don't really need a source for that, bC is a company rather than a charity it's common sense. So one way or another bC will be making money off of the property and they will have paid (or be paying via percentage) for the right to use the name. That may not be a classic publisher/ developer relationship, neither is the Obs/ Paradox one fro PoE, but it is relevant if "[you] have to make sure [publisher] does not get any profit from [you]".

All of ISIS want an independent state in Iraq and Greater Syria- that's their name, that's their entire raison d'etre. They simply don't recognise borders, to them they're meaningless. It's the other more moderate sunni groups that don't want that or have a different interpretation of things. ISIS fundamentally believes in the Caliphate, and Iraq and Al Sham (Greater Syria) were absolutely integral contiguous parts of that. The Ba'athists and tribal sunnis just basically loathe al-Maliki. But Maliki could have been the Iraqi Mandela and ISIS would still hate him.

Already been done a while ago for Jagged Alliance: Flashback.

Or in other words, they aren't actually ISIS insurgents however the media simplifies things, but a generalised sunni insurgency. In many cases they're the same secular sunnis who either supported Saddam/ the Ba'ath party right to the end or the tribal groups who fought against al-Qaeda when the US was paying them to and Zarqawi and his successors had peeved them sufficiently. As always, they'll start fighting each other once/ if they actually achieve their military goals because the only thing that unifies them is antagonism to the central Iraqi state and their long term goals are largely antithetical apart from that. Stick a fork in Maliki, he's done. He might linger on for a bit as a lame duck because, frankly, who would want his job at this point- but he's lost everyone's confidence outside Iraq and the army's capitulation has destroyed his credibility inside. Will be interesting to see the reaction if Iraq breaks up though, whether it will be a 'travesty', 'against international law' etc etc. Probably yes if it's ISIS doing it, probably not if it's the Kurds- especially now they've taken advantage of the situation to grab their one major outstanding territorial desire, Kirkuk. And associated oil fields.

And we went through the tournament unbeaten, too, even finishing above Italy in our group. Though there certainly is a bit of a difference playing off for a place against Mexico as opposed to Bahrain. OFC only really exists for political reasons, a bunch of small easy to manipulate countries that'll vote whichever way they're told to. Heh, I had little doubt my memory was rubbish on this. And you even, mercifully, left out Germany - England (4-1)...

Cameroon just needs to bring on super sub Roger Milla, problem solved. Bit weird this world cup, I really cannot recall anywhere near as many large margins in previous tournaments. There was Portugal v DPRK from 2010 but that's the only one I can remember from 4 years ago.

False. It is content that is downloaded outside the standard base game, hence downloadable content. Not to mention, 99.95% chance it will be available as a separate download for $3.99 or whatever a month or two down the line. Well... sort of. If you still buy physical media a lot of the pre order dlc is simply activated from the disc rather than downloaded, or only a very small activator file is downloaded. Pretty sure that has typically been the case with Bioware's pre-order stuff and was with their last game, ME3. (Really though, it's nitpicky to make a distinction either way, the principle of pre order content is practically identical to that of dlc- but, it doesn't always obey the dl part of the pseudoacronym)