Zoraptor

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)

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.