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Zoraptor

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Everything posted by Zoraptor

  1. Zoraptor
    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.
  2. Zoraptor
    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.
  3. Zoraptor
    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.
  4. Zoraptor
    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
  5. Zoraptor
    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)
  6. Zoraptor
    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.
  7. Zoraptor
    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?
  8. Zoraptor
    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.
  9. Zoraptor
    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.
  10. Zoraptor
    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.
  11. Zoraptor
    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.
  12. Zoraptor
    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)
  13. Zoraptor
    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!
  14. Zoraptor
    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.
  15. Zoraptor
    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.
  16. Zoraptor
    Unfortunately Bruce is right- it wasn't a movie, it was a documentary. So was Bad Taste, for that matter.
  17. Zoraptor
    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...
  18. Zoraptor
    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.
  19. Zoraptor
    1) Wow, great allies you make. Selling RPGs to Assad and then turning around and selling them to the Rebels so they can fight Assad. Priceless. Russians even backstab their friends. Yes, and we'll now get a comment from Fox News Special Correspondent and totally not convicted criminal Ollie North on how the US would never, never in a million years do such a thing themselves. The russians are fairly honest about arming both sides because they know if they don't arm the rebels as well (albeit through intermediaries), someone else will.
  20. Zoraptor
    I wouldn't say hypocritical, because both the tendency to excuse stuff from your 'side' and to demonise or make unpleasant/ racist/ homophobic chants or even just generalise from example at the other side are the same base phenomenon with differing outward effects. The real problem lies with our inherent and fundamental tendency towards tribalism, rather like religion football tends to give a framework and purpose to people who are... idiots really, but if they weren't being idiotic in that way they'd almost certainly find another way. At its heart the football phenomenon says "wear our colours, sing our songs, chant our chants, support our team; and those [opponent] fans suck totally, as does their team" and many people take it extremely seriously. That's not a recipe for reason and moderation anywhere.
  21. Zoraptor
    'Texanistan', not Texasistan. This is a very important differentiation! They could even keep the state flag as well, just add a crescent moon to it...
  22. Zoraptor
    They abuse their own as well. Big stink a year or so back when a (St Petersburg?) team got its first black player and he got flak from the home fans, though there was some talk that it was due to them using exclusively Russians up to then so not explicitly because he was black but because he was foreign. But it's the sort of thing relatively little attention is paid to when it doesn't have a useful second role as a stick to beat with, Lazio had to play several games behind closed doors last year due to similar issues for example yet you don't hear that being used to show that all Italians are racist, and you don't generally hear people complain about the far harsher anti gay laws in places like Saudi- or Qatar, given that they've got a world cup coming as well. That might be because they'll just tell the west to FOAD, but it isn't like Russia won't either, to all practical purposes. It's not that they aren't bad at all though, it's just that when something happens in Russia it tends to become symptomatic of the whole country to some people, when it happens elsewhere it's just an aberration that is being worked at hard to correct, even if (as in Lazio's case) it's actually happened multiple times.
  23. Zoraptor
    UKBall has clearly been eating, uh, Pakistanballs, and plans on eating others perhaps a crypto afghaniball at the back for dessert. There's a fork in the picture (badly drawn, but it is mspaint) and the pool of suspicious liquid is green, like pakistanball, so that part's a lock. I'm not entirely sure what it is meant to mean though, perhaps that soylent green is pakistanis, I have heard that 'indian food' (a euphemism, no doubt, and using Raj India rather than modern) is very popular in the UK and is in fact their most popular dish. Some might say it is a commentary on how far the UK has fallen, clearly this is not so as UKball is wearing a Burberry cap- which is a premium brand just like the top hat in previous times.
  24. Zoraptor
    You know, if I could just convince myself that that was a satirical dig at the sort of stuff obyknven posts...
  25. Zoraptor
    I rather suspect that analogy is not far off what actually happens. Probably with more powerpoint presentation involved than the average kid's presentation, but essentially accurate. Be a shame if things get bad in Mozambique again, they and Angola had largely got over their cold war era problems.
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