Zoraptor

Shame the Swedish royal family is actually french now, or we could have a proper swedish Tsar (not one of those parvenu Romanov johnny come latelies who were, after all, german post Yekaterina the Velikaya anyway) appointed to succeed Putin I and lead Russia and the Ukraine back to glory.

Nah bro. It's like saying the RTS system is crap if you need to be able to micromanage hundreds of units' attack and position orders very accurately in order to win. That is crap because it's not what RTS is good at, but it's the implementation which causes it to be so not the system itself which works fine otherwise and in other games. So, you don't design an RTS that requires super accurate manipulation for hundreds of units and the 'problem' never occurs. If you don't design encounters where you fight 50 enemies at once you don't have that problem with TB. Fighting 50 enemies at once in an RT system is rubbish too, as they're either trash mobs where you target them one at a time to watch them explode like they're packed full of TNT, 50 times; or you autoattack (and in some cases auto use items etc) in which case you have a glorified screen saver; or you have to scramble around like with the RTS trying to do everything super accurately while being rushed by 50 enemies. Don't have crap encounter design: it's rule #1, 2 and 3 in not having a crap combat system.

I decided to give Wasteland a spin and managed to kill four entire mutants and find Somewhere Else. I do like the music rather a lot.

I'll admit that WW2 is a bit of an odd war in many ways in that the germans won just about everything for three years then lost just about everything for the next three, so it really depends upon which part you put the emphasis on. But in the end what happened happened. They lost, badly. We cannot separate off the bad bits and say "well, if they'd just done that..." or pretend that Hitler didn't asterisk up the strategy. If you do that then you have to do the same for everyone- and have the french using proper doctrine, the western allies actually attacking when Poland was attacked, Stalin not having his purges or deploying his army like an ass, or even Chamberlain not folding in Munich. And if you do that then WW2 probably doesn't happen or unfolds completely differently. People tend to excuse the german's poor performance in the latter years with a lot of 'external' factors which do not detract from their martial prowess, but do not do the same for the allies' poor performance in the first years, in effect attributing every german success to intrinsic brilliance and every loss to Hitler or superior numbers. Napoleon's similar. Clearly an excellent general with a lot of innovations- up to a point- and if he'd stopped in 1808 he'd probably have deserved his reputation. But he didn't stop then, and people still make excuses for what came later.

I knew I should have left the "come at me, prussophiles" comment at the end... I'm at least moderately serious though, I'd actively defend the opinion that historic german military supremacy was more apparent than real- and largely couched in the hero worship of certain individuals; GrossFreddie/ Rommel/ Manstein etc.

Not entirely stupid if your aim is to get them to button up/ panic and then ambush them- and it worked fine, so long as the Syrian army insisted on charging their tanks into built up areas with no or incomplete support, which they did for a long time. What else can the rebels realistically try though, given their equipment? (No doubt there's a fair amount of "inch'Allah" in the random fire as well, hoping that a miracle will send a bullet down the tank barrel and explode a shell or similar... unlikely scenario.)

And the german/ prussian army was nowhere near as good as its reputation for that matter. Worst performance of any major antagonist in the Napoleonic Wars and only survived the 7YW because Elisveta died at the most opportune moment possible and her heir was a prussophile cretin; lost their nerve terribly in the first few months of WW1 when they could have won quickly and lost- no matter the excuses from Adolf et alia- primarily to the french. They even consistently lost in WW2 whenever they came up against a credible and well lead opponent. They had a purple patch from 1866-1870 but their performance otherwise was uneven.

You're right, it does mean nothing to me. Besides, the original Torment was Planescape and, D&D which is a TB system so it's arguable which side 'canon' comes down on anyway. Personally I'd use the Jagged Alliance 2 system for just about every RPG if I had my way.

Volo old bean, they're making a Cyberpunk game which is totally not TWitcher! It's been announced and everything, and is set in a dystopian future! OK, for all we know at the moment it could feature lead character Heralt and girlfriend Priss in a dark tale of betrayal and politics and incidental monster hunting, but then originality ain't exactly in abundance in either general gaming or the cRPG subgenre.

Nope, you basically just need a reactor as it's practically a synthetic element- it has limited uses so isn't made much though most of the commercial stuff does come from Russia, I believe. Israel certainly could make it easily enough, indeed there were persistent rumours that a bunch of scientists in Israel actually died from exposure to polonium a while back.

Yeah, killing with polonium won't be from any palestinian enemy. Too obscure (pre Litvinenko), too difficult to obtain, has to come from a (very few) external source(s) through an Israeli blockade and most any palestinian would find a 'better' use for it than killing Arafat. Polonium fits someone whose primary motive is to do it not just surreptitiously in terms of who did it, but surreptitiously in terms of it happening at all. Po says Israel and pretty much only Israel, nobody else had motive means and opportunity. I'd suspect the current crop of leaders aren't pushing it hard because they already suspected and they're getting a lot of pressure not to rather than antipathy to Arafat though

And since their previous 'record sales' figure press releases were for sell through rather than sell-in/ shipped to retail it suggests their sell-through may not be stellar. (well, comparatively non-stellar at least)

You really need to be a Swede, I'm afraid, or prove relevant ancestry. Might be stretchable to a generic scandic if there's a lack of applicants, given that people aren't certain where Rurik came from and Sweden is just most likely. And in slightly more relevant news, apparently Arafat was dosed by polonium prior to his sickness and death. Seems unlikely that it will have any direct consequences since most of the people who will be angry at the news will have suspected it for a long time.

I saw some screenshots of COD Ghosts, and I'm not quite sure they're real. It's supposed to need something like a 49GB install and 6GB of RAM yet still looks like that? Have the developers finally broken under Bobby's yoke and stuck 40GB of "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" txt file into it or something?

Most of historic Khazaria is Ukraine now, so Israel will become just another part of the resurgent Grand Duchy of Kyiv, clearly. They'll need a rebadged Swede to be Grand Duke though.

That is because the word 'normal' cannot be used with the majesty that is Grimoire. Such usage causes links to it to be retroactively deleted. Five hundred billion man hours from someone with an IQ greater than an Einstein/ Da Vinci siamese conjoined twin, with blood, sweat, passion and some unforseen seepage from a titanium endoskeleton poured into it by the bucket full deep in the blasted waste of the Red Continent, the word 'normal' simply cannot contain its magnificence and reality itself has warped to correct such an injustice. Such a game deserves only superlatives- it's has an extraordinary demo and an extraordinarily super demo, and anyone looking for it under mundane terms deserves no access to its brilliance, even were they capable of randomly mashing keys to use a browser in the first place. I believe, in Cleve.

I'd have presumed part of the SP delay was to add support for the new consoles. It's not mentioned, but it would be a sensible thing to do.

Not really for that analysis though. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly an accurate representation, but it's a representation that has for the most part been true for a long time (decade+). The Russian economy has not grown as much as it 'should' given their natural resources and the high energy prices over the past decade, not just recently. There's been plenty of political unrest of various sorts, it's just now a bit more palatable and thus noticeable to the west as it's shifted (somewhat) away from the Zhirinovsky/ Zhuganov types, though it's notable that the alternative labels most commonly seen at opposition rallies are still the old Soviet flag, and the older Imperial flag. There have also been plenty of ethnic and terrorist stuff happening (outside the Caucasus too) over the past decade+, the recent ones are just recent and a lot more high profile since the Olympics are coming soon. And there have always been discrepancies between the elite- Putin had notable fallings out with oligarchs/ power players when he became Pres first time (Berezovsky et al), nothing recent is as significant as that. Putin will of course lose power at some stage, it's inevitable. Should be noted though that Putin himself was not really a 'big shot' until relatively soon before Yeltsin left, only being a politician for around 8 months prior, and was rushed straight into the PM's job, so it's not like there's ever been a western style system to bring through the new leaders. Personally I'd tend to presume that Medvedev would be the obvious successor anyway, he's not that old.

Fixed. Personally, I'd far prefer CDPR (or any other developer) be able to get full 100% potato rather than GabeN saying no! I want part of potato! you get medium potato only! but I'm funny like that. You might like to consider whether the 'convenience' and lack of 'paranoia' is worth $16 going to Valve rather than the people who actually made the game. Or not, entirely up to you. (Of course CDPR will get only half potatoe from me, download will be far too big otherwise but at least that's a technical limitation)

Mentioned in the random news/ EA ate my dog! thread, but TW3 is confirmed to be DRM free, except for people who hate freedom, wodka and potatoes and buy on steam, of course. Which is nice, I guess, but given that the retail version last time could be made DRM free in about fifteen seconds I'm more interested in whether we'll get saddled with Australia's moronic puritanical censorship and the Namco Bandai antipode tax again, as fixing the consequences of those took a whole two minutes!

Troika is the very definition of why you do get businessmen rather than 'artists' running companies. Full of ideas (not really original ideas though) but desperately needed a Bobby Kotick type applying periodic pressure to their dangly bits to get them to work in a somewhat more efficient manner.

I knew them NKKK, a company of infinite jest? Friends, Obsidianites, internauts, lend me your eyes; I come to bury EA, not to praise them. The evil that companies do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their shares. So let it be with EA. The noble RPGCodex hath told EA was decline, if was so 'tis a grevious fault, and grievous hath EA answered for it. Here under leave of 4chan and the rest- for they are honourable men- come I to speak at EA's funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But GabeN says he was ambitious; And GabeN is an honourable man. I hath brought many games home whose cost did the EA coffers fill: in this did in EA seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, EA hath wept: ambition should be made of sterner stuff: yet reddit says he was ambitious; And reddit is an honourable man. I speak not to disprove what RPS spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know. You all did love him once, not without cause: what cause withholds you then, to mourn for them? Oh judgement, thou art fled to ActivisionBlizzard, and men have lost their reason. Bear with me; my heart is in the coffin there with EA, and I must pause till it come back to me.

Unfortunately Bruce is right- it wasn't a movie, it was a documentary. So was Bad Taste, for that matter.

Bought/ donated by supporters (Turkey, Qatar, Saudi) for the most part, with a dollop of quid pro quo expected in the event of them winning. That is why there's been some fighting over the (very limited size) oil fields amongst the rebels as they allow more flexible purchases on the open market via bootlegged oil. The situation is actually pretty similar for the government at this point, I'd fully expect them to be buying entirely on credit with the understanding that Chinese and Russian firms get reconstruction contracts, and getting donations from Iran/ Hezbollah. I very much doubt Assad is getting much at all in the way of taxes or custom duties at this point...

If Obama did not know it was almost certainly because he was advised it would be sensible not to know so he could plead ignorance in at least a semi honest fashion. That happens all the time with such things. It does get somewhat amusing to see the same people claim to have strong oversight and ownership over intelligence matters when it's a positive thing (eg Obama and ObL) but suddenly and oh so surprisingly not have the same sort of oversight when it's a negative thing; but politicians gonna do what politicians do, else they wouldn't be politicians. It's certainly not limited to the US, our PM defended allowing our CIA equivalent to spy on us by saying he would oversee everything strongly and follow a strong moral code to protect privacy (which, of course, could not be enshrined in the law itself because... well, just trust him, he's got a nice smile after all!) and that was after it was found he'd allowed many (80+) previous illegal spying activities- which somehow despite his 'strong oversight' he still "didn't know about". Wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if Key/ Cameron/ Plastic Hair/ GillRuddAbbot as well as Obama knew it was going on, even if they too deliberately avoided the details.