Zoraptor

Papers Please was a Gem promo very recently (when I bought it, same price as on Humble) which is probably why it wasn't in this sale. Would have been keen on getting Expeditions Conquistador, especially as Bitcomposter wouldn't get a cent but couldn't be bothered checking every five minutes, but did get SOTS: The Pit on a whim.

"interesting" rather than interesting. It's also absolutely brilliant as I have no idea whatsoever if it is serious or the most brilliant troll of all time. On a side note I now have "Tali's sweat" on my google search history...

Bernadotte was certainly Napoleon's best kingly appointment (not much competition though, even if Joseph's problems were largely not his fault), and Sweden seems to have done pretty well out of the deal in the end. I don't think anyone would seriously suggest Davout for the role.

I don't know if I'll actually buy anything, but that counter system is hypnotic, and quite entertaining. Bit unfair starting an 'insomnia' sale while I'm actually asleep.

Class action lawsuits for mental scarring are not hilarious, they are serious business! (More importantly, is Tali a reptile in those pictures and if so, does she not sweat as a consequence?)

Yeah, I've always thought the main problem was with HBS and them not reading their contract/ not communicating it properly. MS was under no obligation to fix their stuff ups and credit to them for doing so.

Not sure that that made much difference- while I'm sure HBS got a lot of pressure on it it had to be OKed by MS, and any pressure they were getting on the issue would be a minute drop in the bucket whether from fans or from HBS. Whatever the case* it's certainly good to see. Would also be good for GOG if it's accepted (which it surely has to be) since it would technically get Microsoft on board there, and apart from LucasArts and maybe 2k they'd be the biggest catch left for them. *From MS's perspective it surely has to be seen as stupid to subsidise a competitor (steam) due to an insistence on DRM and I'd suspect that was the deciding factor. Explaining to shareholders how you are insisting that people use a competitor's product would be an... interesting discussion, if it ever came up.

Faster Than Light is getting a free update... with additional writing from a certain Chris Avellone.

Bernadotte. Not one of the better marshalls and he actively hated Napoleon despite, iirc, being his brother in law. In a vaguely on topic observation it was one of his descendants who the Stern Gang (or was it the Irgun/ Haganah?) murdered just prior to the partition of Palestine when he was trying to mediate for the UN. Should have gone for one of: Davout- as best marshall MacDonald- could establish a chain of restaurants equivalent to Ikea in ubiquitousness, also possibility of forming United Kingdom of Sweden and Scotland in a year or so time to compensate for losing Norway's North Sea petrodollars. Plus Etienne MacDonald is a very cool name. Poniatowski, despite being a mere general- epically trolling P/Russia and Austria and as a sort of reverse Gustav Adolphus, plus lots of free cores on Poland and Lithuania.

Isn't it obvious? If it weren't for piracy his company could pay him more and he could afford a keyboard with a working caps lock key. Then he could revert to his preferred username, nkkkk.

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.