Zoraptor

That's the accusation, certainly, though the actual proof of it amounts to "but it was Stalin!". The original objective of Bagration was Minsk, you can see from the map how much further Warsaw was from there. The Red Army's logistical tail was always problematic and their offensives always ran out of steam after around six weeks- and it was the entire front that stopped during early August not just the part opposite Warsaw. That's simply the way the Red Army worked, they'd build up supplies, roll forward until those supplies ran out, then stop for a couple of months. In order for the stop in front of Warsaw to be nefarious in nature it has to be shown that in this case they could have pressed on (preferably without the usual "their tanks ran out of fuel... Aha! Stalin must have ordered no fuel deliveries!) when they didn't on occasions in which they had no reason not to, and they would have benefited if they could. I'd have more sympathy for Poland if they hadn't been... well, apart from the war with the soviets they also attacked Lithuania, tried to get France to attack Germany at least twice ('33 and '36, iirc), plus took part in the partition of Czechosolvakia. I'm not entirely unsympathetic, but in terms of honourable conduct they certainly were no Finland.

It really doesn't have much to do with shutting their pie hole, in the sense you're using. If you ate exactly the same amount of cheap convenience food as healthy food you will almost certainly be more overweight and less healthy than if you ate the 'good' food alternative, there is an inherent quality issue at play. Cheap convenience food typically has more calories, a worse glycemic performance (ie you feel hungry quicker, even if you aimed for an equal calorie diet) and stuff like salt which makes you need to drink more as well. Obviously there are choice and non inherent factors at play as well, being lazy, being poorly educated (about food), not caring, not being able to or having the facilities to cook stuff; but there are genuine underlying reasons for obesity apart from those. Having said that, I still reckon you can buy and eat healthily for similar or less cost to eating from McD's/ KFC/ TV meals or whatever, if you know how. And I'd far prefer to see people told how to do that than the standard "we'll tax it, for your benefit!" justification, because if you don't know how to eat properly any taxes will just result in people having even less money to no health benefit. It'll also, as usual, hit poorer people harder. Incentivise healthy eating rather than punish bad, in other words, though that will never happen as it's hard while tax it is easy and makes money for the government.

I have to admit that Europe having 3 Sochi's/ year worth of corruption was something I found somewhat amusing given all the comments about Russian corruption. Physician, heal thyself!

Bro, it uses steamworks. Only real advantage is that at least we won't be subjected to the squeals of outrage from people who think steam is the only source of games about having to run multiple clients (instead of, like, buying anywhere else apart from steam where you get one client only), it'll just be the one client they happen to like and don't mind other people being forced to use. I'd bet it has nothing to do with Ubisoft themselves, more to do with THQ who were original fans of steamworks. If steamworks features had been integrated it would require time and money to identify and excise the infection from the healthy underlying tissue.

I haven't played Skyrim. I don't much like Bethesda games or Bethesda/ Zenimax as companies- plus I almost certainly wouldn't like it and thus won't bother playing just to be able to criticise it properly. I don't think I've ever said anything against Skyrim itself though. And Spartacus- then they went and made Crixus Manu Bennett an Australian in Arrow. On the other hand, Craig Parker (Haldir in the LOTR films, Darken Rahl in Legend of the Seeker, Glaber in Spartacus) seems to narrate every other documentary of the past ten years wherever they're sourced from. Alan Dale was Miranda's father in ME3, that's about the only NZer doing game vo I can think of apart from some stuff Temuera Morrison did for Star Wars, but since he was playing his movie character(s) I'm not sure that counts.

They do regularly get writing nominations (eg WGA for Fallout 3, BAFTA for Skyrim). Then again, video game awards are universally rubbish, even those with some pedigree in other fields like the BAFTAs or WGAs.

Likely issues: 1) The big publishers have more control over their own IP and don't have to pay royalties for their own IP, so they're more likely to do their own IP or a safe/ lucrative licensed one (Star Wars) 2) The mid range publisher of the type that has traditionally published D&D games are an endangered species 3) Hasbro has been litigious with its previous two rights holders. They also managed to grant two exclusive licenses that weren't exclusive. 3a) There were issues with content control too 4) 4e was, it's fair to say, not received to universal acclaim 5) It's questionable whether the D&D name would be a net benefit at this point 6) Scale. AAA/ Console? Smaller scale? 6a) Who would fund it, would Hasbro accept a kickstarter? 7) Who would make it? In terms of established CRPG makers there aren't exactly a surfeit. I doubt there's a huge queue of people waiting at Hasbro's door. When it comes right down to it they haven't managed D&D well at either the computer game or P&P level the last few years.

Ah, but I don't charge you for reading my pearls of wisdom- it's a service I provide for free for the betterment of mankind and as such I have no obligation to be in the least bit interesting. My posts are also not intended to be entertainment (most of the time), entertainment is meant to, well, entertain. I literally cannot remember doing anything entertainment wise and thinking 'wow, that was serviceable, an average experience which was neither overly good nor overly bad'. I'm sure I have thought that at various times, but if the experience was that bland and unremarkable then I will have forgotten about it near instantly. On the other hand I can at least remember stuff that was rubbish as well as stuff that was good, but the 'average' stuff? May as well not have happened.

I can actually. The writing doesn't stand out much (as most of us agree), but that goes both ways. Not bad, not very good. Serviceable. In writing terms being unremarkable is in most cases worse than being actively bad. At least actively bad stuff like 2-dog/ Moira/ Jean-Luc Picard Uriel Septim is memorable, if the best you can say about writing is "well, it exists" then it may as well not.

Everyone knows that dwarves are the must have addition if you want to maximise pledges.

I guess the emphasis would be on "collecting the crew for this mission against the collectors" in Bioware's (and mine, really) mind. I really don't have much problem with it for reasons tied up in why I think that ME: Subtitle would be better as its name, I see the recruitments as inherently self contained, all about this mission then people go back to their lives. The other option is them sitting twiddling their thumbs for the months you're in jail for, plus, in many cases it would not make much sense for them to be diddling around in an earth ship, they're either ex Cerberus without the Shepard name and distinguished service in ME1 as protection, aliens, no longer have a reason for being there/ have a good reason not to be there or a combination of all three. And it would also then be completely fair to complain about the recruitables from 1 that aren't recruitable in 2- Wrex, Liara, Ashden. I'd argue that is pretty much exactly what ME2 does- it's a contrived plot device to get you to work for Cerberus against everything established in ME1.

Having killable NPCs is not stupid, it was necessary and fine if you don't plan on using them again as recruitables. What dramatic gravitas ME2 has would be lost if you gave NPCs character shields. I'd also note that most of the defences of ME2 ignore that ME2 did exactly the same thing vis-a-vis ME1 that people say ME3 did to it, ie a general disregard of the main plot points, but if you look at the plot progression factors then ME1 and ME3 are clearly related and denote a- more or less- logical progression. ME2 though? It isn't just that it doesn't set things up for ME3, it's also that it doesn't really mesh with and build on ME1 either. As a standalone game it's fine enough which is why I'd be fine if it were ME: Subtitle. But you don't progress the fight against the reapers or learn anything significant about them, you don't progress the political situation in the wider galaxy, you don't progress the, er, progress of the reapers into the galaxy (until the last dlc), you're fighting for Cerberus who you fight against in 1 and 3, against a bunch of enemies you don't see in either 1 or 3. ME3 could have integrated some things from ME2 better certainly, had the odd Collector around or whatever but they were insignificant as defined by ME2 itself- a slave rave, altered and distinct from the Protheans. In the end they can barely be more significant than husks as established by ME2 itself. But there's very little to build on there (ME2) when it comes to the climactic battle against the Evil Enemy, because the game is mainly about the Evil Enemy's butler.

Yes, Iraq invaded Iran in reality. I was being snarky at the general attitude that Iran is The Aggressor all the time. The US, under Obama, rejected the deal that would have seen the Turks (note, Mor) and Brazilians supply Iran with nuclear fuel, for more sanctions. Albeit that when he still had to worry about re-election, and being mean to Iran seldom loses votes. They've got a nuclear reactor already. Ultimately, whether it was a deliberate tactic or not the US made it extremely difficult for Iran to generate power conventionally. So we have the rather odd situation of one of the champions of nuclear power, the US, throwing a wobbly at someone pursuing nuclear power. The still current public US intelligence position is that Iran stopped pursuing a bomb in 2003.

Uh. They're under sanctions- and the US will apply those sanctions to companies that ignore their own 'special' set of sanctions amounting to a total economic blockade too, so anyone selling to Iran gets zero US business- hence (1) and (2) might as well be "harness the power of djinn (which exist)" to all practical purposes. The US sanctions were imposed in 1987 in response to, er, Iran's brutal, uh, invasion of, hmm, Iraq, yet another act of aggression and instability as that war started when Ayatollah Khomenei personally head butted Saddam Hussein's fist in a truly egregious manner... Besides, renewables are Rich Person power sources, not poor. Solar is ludicrously expensive for actual power generation, though useful enough for subsidiary stuff like hot water heating. So, the US has basically made it impossible for Iran to develop enough power generation by conventional means and is now complaining that they're gone nuclear.

Can't agree- most of the reasons why those plot elements did not carry across are self contained within ME2. The base for example is either destroyed or handed over to Cerberus depending on the choice made in ME2, not by a choice made in ME3. And those choices effectively remove it from consideration for ME3. Similarly, it is ME2 that established that while Collectors may once have been Protheans they aren't now. We already knew that Reapers used organic tools since Saren in the first game so that isn't quite an earth shattering revelation. In terms of SW ME2's plot is more like finding out that the stormtroopers are clones rather than an "I am your father" moment. And then not seeing a single stormtrooper in RotJ. It's not like there weren't opportunities for developing the Reapers more- you talk to both Sovereign and Harbinger, and meet 'Protheans' at least as holodevices. But BW really ducked committing in those conversations and ultimately that left ME3 having to fill in the gaps far more than it should have and made the whole thing look rushed.

The simple historical fact is that women were treated differently than men in the medieval period, and very significantly so. If you're going for an accurate representation of those times then such things have to be taken into account. Else you'll have the catholic church and everyone else wanting to be portrayed a particular, ahistoric, way- after all, the RCC stopped their witch and heretic burning ways long before you regularly had overt women in armies. If you have a woman protagonist and it is a realistic depiction then you either have someone pretending to be a man or being asterisked over all the time for being a woman- accused of being a witch, possessed, a devil, forcibly married off etc. Those are the things that happened historically. Society was deeply sexist then, as well as being deeply a whole lot of other unpleasant things. So long as they don't decide to airbrush selectively the realism argument is all the argument needed. (Yes, as virumor notes, having a basic yokel achieve greatness and power isn't exactly the most realistic approach either. But without that you don't really have a game...)

And for the trifecta of things I say every time it comes up, ME2 should have been Mass Effect: Colon Subtitle, though it certainly wouldn't be perfect even as that. ME2 is the game equivalent of the person that borrows a car in order to do an important job but instead drives around having fun and picking up a bunch of friends while promising them all lifts later, then returns the car having failed to do the tasks it borrowed it for with the tank nearly empty plus said big list of people who've been promised lifts. It's the 16 year old spoiled middle class teenager who's just got their drivers licence, in other words. Then again I'd be more forgiving of the departure from the usual Bioware formula if it didn't focus on the thing that I typically don't like in BW games- the recruitables in ME2 are like the plot/ gameplay in DAO, fine up to a point but there's just 20% too much, 20% too same and holy smokes is there anyone who doesn't have daddy issues? I far prefer fewer, more in depth NPCs. It probably did a better job as a sequel than DA2 did though, especially as they are (sensibly, imo) using a Colon Subtitle for DA3.

The other area where it is very obvious where there was long term planning- parts which are, generally, praised even by those who hated the ending- are the genophage and Quarian/ Geth storylines which were interwoven throughout the plots of all three games and met a logical denouement where the 'not quite perfect' resolution felt far more natural and, er, organic. It's a shame the main plot was not treated the same way. I genuinely don't know whether a more ME1/2 style gung ho, humanity asterisks yeah! ending would have been preferable to what we got, but I bet I would not have liked it in any absolute sense.

Well, I would make a very significant practical differentiation between your/ my/ anyone's 'ideal' woman and their 'idealised' woman. You do have the potential to meet your ideal woman because, ultimately, the ideal woman in real life is the one who makes you happy. The idealised woman on the other hand cannot really exist precisely because she's idealised, perfect, designed by you to, ultimately, please you. Her, you are never going to meet, she will always be on the pedestal of imagination, a perfectly formed object. Also, I'd happily concede that you could have something like an idealised orc if they actually existed, or similar, where the traits would only be positive From a Certain Point of View, it's just that I cannot think of anything in the real world that isn't a facile example or about something that is an object and thus not subject to objectification. On the MT description "old, pious, selfless woman" is itself, imo, a cliche and caricature. In this sense I'm certainly using 'role' as mental shorthand for a classification/ archetype system, and most cultures do have a 'pious old woman' stereotype, ie it's a bit more than just her literal role, hence not using the literal descriptor 'nun' in my description. If you use that description too there will be a large set of preconceptions based on the expectations of the archetype. And yeah, there's a fair bit of mental gymnastics being performed. It's more trying to communicate the philosophic reasons why I think that way rather than attempting to get at a set formal debate style argument.

I do wonder how much of the failure* of the ME ending was due to Bioware not really having done an epic continuation tale since Baldur's Gate/2/TOB more than a decade previous. The cracks in the narrative for both Dragon Age and Mass Effect were pretty evident between DAO/2 and ME1/2. ME2 tends to avoid or get only muted criticism nowadays for its wtf? moments like working for Cerberus and DA2 was at best a parallel narrative to DAO. I've said in once (well, once every time in comes up, so probably several dozen now) but I'll say it again, ME2 failed to do its job properly in either setting up or progressing the narrative, which left ME3 with far too much to do in that regard. Introduce the stuff used in ME3 which was just about literally deus ex machina earlier and you can avoid the jolt from it a lot. *** **** is still likely to be a complete waste of space and you'll still have the moronic Malak Moment of kicking his butt then 'losing' by cutscene but if he had been set up as a credible threat from the first or second game at least it may have been more credible dramatically. What ME desperately needed was proper planning for the whole trilogy. Another thing I say every time is that the ending is not fundamentally flawed, the same ending style worked for Deus Ex itself because it was set up properly through the game and not just sprung on you towards the end. There were hooks for the set up given you talk to reapers and prothean databases and the like. *I do also wonder what people really expected as well. As someone who basically dropped Babylon 5 after the ludicrous "Get the hell out of my galaxy speech!" I'm at least glad they did not do the equivalent to that.

For the physical description part I'm not sure it's even possible to do that. There isn't really a happy medium between 36-24-36 blonde 19yo triplet and a robotic litany of mathematical formula that literally objectifies, because whatever you say the implication is that you'd be unhappy and reject the brunette 19 yo triplet because her elbows are too pointy she isn't blonde or because her hip to waist ratio isn't 1.414:1 and that mole means she doesn't have excellent symmetry- and you are listing a bunch of physical characteristics as if they are important. The best you can do realistically is a dodge and say that the physical appearance is unimportant or say 'my wife/ gf is perfect' and avoid it that way. But I rather suspect that the vast majority of people would have an ideal appearance in mind for a partner if they were 100% honest about it. I do agree that people gonna people but that has to be accepted, you cannot exclude human nature in a discussion about, essentially, human nature. And especially so when there's argument here about what constitutes objectification in the first place. Unfortunately, one cannot rigorously apply objectivity to something that relies on subjectivity- Bruce purports to find things to be offensive objectification that others purport not to, there is no rigorous approach to that because where the line is drawn on objectification and idealisation is dependant on personal opinion. I'd apply it to pretty much anything that is (a) subject to opinion and (b) where objectification is appropriate as a concept. Conceptually, I make the distinction of being 'objectivised' similarly to the earlier distinction between character and caricature. If all you're saying about a person is their role, or just a physical description then you might as well be describing an object, it's bereft of nuance. By that measure, idealisation is just saying specifically positive things without nuance. Detail and knowing the person ('characterisation') is the enemy of both objectification and idealisation because it adds that nuance. Meh, don't really know if I'm doing a good job of describing it. Take Mother Teresa as an example. The idealised view is that she was a great woman who lessened suffering and lived a life of selflessness- to my mind that isn't describing her though, it's describing her role, without nuance, and you might as well be describing a light bulb for all you know about her from that. Once you get more detail though you start seeing her more as a human, and the 'Mother Theresa' ideal image starts to fray at exactly the same time you stop describing her by her role only.

Have some respect for the fallen. The Russia tread transcended mere threaddom and became something more. RIP in peace, sic transit gloria treadi etcetera.

Yeah. Basically, objectification is regarding something as an object and assigning arbitrary 'values' based on that; a simplification and stereotyping of something more complex- which is usually negative when applied to something as complex as humanity because it reduces people to a set of criteria and list items. Idealisation is exactly the same thing, just with choosing the positive parts or using positive descriptors for your list items. It is different for actual objects like flowers or abstract stuff like stories or poetry because, of course, they cannot be objectified in the first place but for the sake of this discussion we're assuming that video game characters are 'human' analogues and should be judged as such, by and large. To give an example, if I were asked to describe my idealised woman then no doubt that would be seen by (some) others as objectification in several respects- and certainly so if I limited it to a physical description. Plus, it should be noted that the vast majority of truly awful things done in video games are done by men, not women. That's hardly ideal.

Personally, I'm sure that Bruce is 100% totally serious about everything he says and is totally not early stage Volourn or obyknyven's more successful 3rd alt. Idealisation and objectification are, of course, exactly the same thing just with -/+ spin applied by the person using them. Language is much like subatomic physics in that respect.

BT is notoriously bad for such things. Not sure I've ever heard anyone say anything positive about them. Since it's them and only them being effected and they are terrible logic dictates it's their network at fault, not Ubisofts. May even be the NSA monkeying about with a french company to benefit a US one, given Snowden's revelations :tinfoil: Still, ironic that RPS decided to blame Ubisoft despite knowing how rubbish BT are when the previous week they'd automatically exonerated steam for MG: Revengeance needing a constant connection for a while. Almost as ironic as John Walker complaining about sexism then telling companies to ignore the complaints from fans which he doesn't like.