Zoraptor

and Geeks. (insert innocent question about Kinect and Oculus Rift support in Twitcher3 or alternatively how I'm shocked they've made even the name sexist since the number 3 looks like a top down view of most of the female cast)

Pfft BF4 is usually ~82USD here, or ~52UKP. Brits got it eeeeasy. Unbelievably this sale appears to not only be happening here but to be using 'proper' prices as well. Mirror's Edge for less than a cup of coffee! Shame I already own it. The only thing I'm really interested in potentially is Mass Effect dlc (which isn't on sale? Or are BW points on sale?) and as always the Origin website either doesn't sell them or makes it unnecessarily hard to find. OTOH the Origin client actually asked before updating, and gave me the option to go offline instead. That's rather better than some other clients out there.

And how many Chechens were trained by the Soviet army? I don't have much doubt that the Georgians and west are being and have been hypocritical about the whole freedom fighter/ terrorist divide, but at this point OMG Georgian in Syria! means very little even in those terms.

I'm really not that worried by how people capitalise it, everyone knows what is meant either way which is the important thing. It really was more of a question about why people capitalised it that way since it was illogical. Got a sensible suggestion (ta, Hurlshot) so I'll go back to laughing at the people who do get very upset about things like lower case o's.

GWB is a born again Christian, I'd have no problem at all with the prospect that he'd go to such a meeting and just say what he really does believe. There are plenty of Christians who want to bring on the Rapture so they'll get to go to Heavan (and, of course, all those nasty sinners, heretics and heathens would get their oh so deserved comeuppance). Conversely, they'll also strongly support Israel due to Revelations, as well as supporting conversion efforts. Such is the lot of those who believe that Revelations is literal rather than metaphorical.

There's a difference between ethnicity and nationality, guys. I wouldn't know this guy from Adam, but 'Batirishvili' is definitely a Georgian form name (see, for example, Mikael Sakashvili). Since the Chechen and Georgian regions border each other it's eminently plausible to have an ethnic Chechen who is also a Georgian national and hence, Georgian every bit as much as he'd be British if a British citizen. It's pretty silly point making anyway since there are plenty of jihadis of all nationalities and a lot of ethnicities too.

There was a BG3-as-continuation story suggestion from George Ziets which sounded pretty cool. If it were kickstarted it'd be a no brainer back, more so even than PE. (Link is from the 'codex, whatever formspring has morphed into is just giving me a blank page for some reason else I'd have linked that)

I'd like BG3 to be made, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lose my critical faculties and swoon as soon as it's mentioned. At present Overhaul lacks pretty much everything necessary to make BG3- the licences, the finances, the resources for a full scale game development, an engine. There's literally no information beyond the simple desire to do it, a desire which has previously been expressed by others that I'd far rather see do it, who I have more confidence in doing it well, and who are in a far better position to do it. I'm not the type of person who will celebrate something being made or the potential for something being made just for the sake of it, I'd want some confidence that it will be done well too. I don't want a rubbish BG3 just for the sake of having something, anything, Baldur's Gate. If they do get to make a BG3 I'll approach it with an open(ish) mind, because a lot of the unanswered questions will then have to be answered, until that time I will remain extremely sceptical.

Where does GoG come from? Seriously, it drives some people utterly bonkers (and I'll admit it tweaks my inner autist's nose*) and has never been used officially yet half the population of the internet seem to use GoG rather than GOG. Why? It's clearly Good Old Games, GOG or- after a couple of wines, a meal and a nightcap- gog. I'm baffled. *He just rationalises it as standing for 'GoG of Games', since he likes recursive acronyms. (little o's in acronyms are used only for 'of' or 'or', anything else should be capitalised, hence why it should not be GoG)

DA2 has too much baggage and is too 'easy' a target. Far better to pick a generally well regarded and certainly less polarising game which illustrates the flaw as part of its generally well regarded whole rather than one where we'll end up with the DA2 wars #32456 in a set of 1 million. It'd also invite comparisons with some more polarising TB titles- Arcanum, whose TB combat was not always the best implemented, designed or balanced; or Wizardry 8, which had the potential to make the Deep Roads look like a quick frolic through a field of wildflowers even when using WizFast (though at least Wiz8 was consistently challenging...). Fundamentally, trying to prove one or the other is better/ worse by looking at the worst implementations is generally counter productive- you have to hope that whatever method they chose they'll take the best from the system and design to its strengths, not its weaknesses.

The fundamental problem with that sort of encounter is that it's just something to do to fill a space, and serves no other purpose. That problem is not unique to TB- something like the Deep Roads in Dragon Age Origins would be an example in RTWP style of too many weak monsters in too many similar encounters bogging down a RTWP game. Would the Deep Roads be worse in TB? Yes, but the fundamental problem in both cases would be the poor encounter design, DAO's (and indeed, Fallout's) combat is fine when the encounters are designed well. For TB you just need fewer enemies, and more 'meaningful' choices to use to balance out the decreased apparent speed. There is a bit of a dichotomy between people who prefer fewer, more tailored and challenging fights who usually want TB and those who prefer more, but less individually challenging fights who tend to prefer RTWP. Personally, combat for the sake of combat sets my teeth on edge whatever the style, but if they're going for few but tailored encounters then that and '10 rat syndrome' should not be a problem.

Yep, there's no information on all those things any good kickstarter gives you info on- such basic things as engine, what edition of rules would be used let alone whether the game would/ could actually be made, or allowed to be made. If it were to be compared to a KS it would be one of those slightly dodgy sounding Indiegogo flexible funding ones which are basically "here's my cool idea, give me money! (no refunds)". Which isn't really accurate either, but it's a lot more accurate than comparing it to something like PE. At the moment the whole thing relies on a vague idea of getting BG3 later by buying something now, and relies on (1) the thing they're selling being worthwhile and (2) you wanting them to make BG3. For many people neither will be true, I certainly don't want a shovelware BG3 and at the moment I have little faith in Overhaul to provide worthwhile overhauls, let alone new work.

I missed the simulcast showing of the Doctor Who special due to social commitments but knowing that they were reshowing it in prime time I wasn't worried. Then had a power cut half way through the reshowing...

I do rather feel like voting for TB, specifically because the people whining about TB have motivated me to do so. Cannot really agree with that part. There may be some overlap in speed between the two where a quick TB is faster than a slow RTWP implementation, but RTWP is definitely a quicker system most of the time as you only have to pause it when you want to rather than as in most TB systems at the end of each round, and because if you have, say, a six second round then it's played out x times by x actors to cover that full 6 seconds in TB, rather than one time simultaneously by all actors. But conversely that extra time allows for planning and tactics to be better implemented, rather than a blizzard of pause/ unpause and twitch reflexing. It's a bit more hazy when you get a hybrid or non standard system like wego/ simultaneous turn based... But yeah, they should do what they want, they know the game and what should work far better than we do.

Nah bro, that's rubbish. The primary problem with the KAL flight was a problem with that flight, ie it was a huge distance off course, any soviet problems were purely secondary. If it hadn't been off course nothing would have or could have happened. In contrast, the IranAir flight did literally nothing wrong, the primary cause was that it was identified as an F14 because the AEGIS software was designed poorly and allowed one aircraft to be highlighted while a different one was actually locked without being obvious about it, plus it could not properly identify and tag civilian id squawks- and that is a fundamental flaw in the system, not just operator error, and an accident waiting to happen. In a combat situation or if the situations were reversed and it was an F14 in the air and an Airbus on the runway then that would be a potentially fatal situation for the Vincennes. You're not going to find me arguing that the Russian/ Soviet military is a paragon of competence, just that the western ones aren't anywhere near as good as their press makes them out to be. Everyone knows, now, that an Abrams isn't indestructible but I've seen plenty claim it was, prior to 2003. Same with the Merk's that Hezbollah was popping in front of the world's media in 2006, plenty said they were invulnerable in 2005. They weren't, and I see no reason to presume that any putative 'invulnerability' of warships is different.

Not even slightly comparable to the Vincennes in anything except the end result. The KAL flight was literally hundreds of km off target and nowhere near a normal flight path plus actively flying over the USSR without permission at the time while IranAir655 was scheduled and behaving exactly as expected yet somehow even with the infallible AEGIS it was misidentified as an F14 (!) diving quick (!) rather than an Airbus climbing slowly. The soviet technology actually performed near perfectly in the KAL incident, can't say the same for the Vincennes'. Meh, people never want to admit their multi billion dollar stuff can be taken out by anything costing a few thousand, and they never have. Same with tanks, lots of stuff about how they're practically indestructible with their DU ceramic reactive armour and lists of impressive numbers, then some joker sticks a couple of hundred dollar artillery shells and a detonator under the tarmac...

Eh, I dunno. How stuff works practically rather than theoretically is always a question- while a bit old you do have things like the Stark, the British at the Falklands, the Vincennes managing to misidentify and shoot down a commercial airliner and the like. It's one of those situations where you have people saying that their multi billion dollar systems are great and wonderful, but they would say that. (I still remember the war games in which our 1950s era Skyhawks 'sank' most of the Australian fleet)

It's a good idea if you don't want time wasted on trivial issues or stuff that you think is peripheral. If only 10% of people cared either way and they were literally the only people giving opinions then you get a rather skewed view of an issue's importance and it looks like some massive irreconcilable divide. On the other hand people who post multiple times about how little they care and get actively upset about other people caring is something I find very odd.

I guess the success of Star Citizen may demonstrate there's still a market for space sims and a Star Wars one ought to be a good mark. I always wonder how Privateer Online would have gone if it hadn't been killed off, it's always seemed like such a natural fit and Eve seems to have been pretty successful... I'm probably somewhat biased in that my main experience with a flight 'sim'/ gamepad combo was with what I found to be the utterly horrible GTA flight portions on a PS2- which I somewhat enjoyed (well, didn't actively loathe except that asterisking dweeb and his model chopper quest; I have to kill Tubbs in VC but can't pop a cap in him and his rival? There's no justice in the world) on PC using KB/M. I played Elite when it first came out using keyboard only and it was fine, at the time. But it was only roll pitch velocity, with yaw being an optional upgrade plus a few things you'd use occasionally like ECM iirc, so far from a complicated scheme and one that would easily translate to any other model. The thought of trying to play something like an Independence War without my joystick does not, uh, fill my heart with joy.

Well, it does rather depend on whether the horsepower difference is actually taken advantage of. If the games all are targeted at the on3's specs and the PS4 versions play at the same locked framerates at the same res and using the same textures the difference will be marginal- if you play default version Dark Souls on a quad Titan PC there isn't much practical advantage over playing on an old console despite the massive power difference. You'd hope that people will take advantage of extra power but at least for multiconsole releases history suggests that is not likely, very few cross platform games took advantage of the PS4's abilities. I don't really agree with the logic- everyone knows that there are slow downs and frame drops on consoles whatever certification says so power will always be an advantage- but if you're looking for a logical reason to downplay the difference that would be the reasoning.

Wish EA would get the back catalogue as well, really. At least then it would be likely that the old LucasArts games would become available again.

I got my MS joystick to work with all the WCs when I replayed them earlier this year, though it needed some work from the GOG defaults so I played a fair bit of WC1 with a mouse, and joystick twist roll would only work with WC3+. You'd need roll pitch yaw velocity, fire weapons/ missiles, change/ cycle target as minimum for the early WCs. Also comms, though that could be worked around most likely. For the later ones power management and the like would probably have to go though. So I'd say a qualified yes, but with the proviso that there's a reason real pilots use joysticks instead of gamepad equivalents, ie joysticks are just fundamentally better tools for the job.

Though shalt not covet the Jewish Khan's ass.

It makes sense to consumers, but not to those making (or more likely producing/ running the making of) the games. The general rule is that if you're going to have a 'minimum target' for a control scheme then you have to make sure that your game works on that minimal scheme. It's easy enough to make anything work on a positional input+keyboard scheme because you have effectively unlimited buttons available, so even if you have a mouse and thus don't have a built in roll control (only yaw/ pitch) you can spin that off to a key- or even the mouse wheel. If you want to have a controller scheme only option then you can very easily end up with controls simply not fitting onto the control scheme. Of course the satan steam controller is supposed to have the ability to add buttons/ keys but how well that works in practice is a more open question. It's all very well to argue that they shouldn't be making that choice in the first place and should decide that [control scheme] is fundamentally too limiting, and it may well be the case here though I obviously cannot comment first hand. But, if they make that choice then they will annoy some people who then won't buy, and they will limit their future options. It's not hard to see why they and many others come down on the side of 'lowest common denominator' first approach.

It's Matrix/ Slitherine, so don't expect it to be on other websites any time soon. Nah, site registration is from Poland. Thus I can categorically and definitively say that CDPR are announcing their third game in development. (I would be highly amused if it were a follow up to that Polish Fallout clone from a few years ago whose name escapes me)