Zoraptor

Ours is 'single payer' ie state funded via direct tax primarily, and state run, with optional private. Cannot see that flying in the US as it would require nationalising a load of stuff and replacing the private bureaucracy with public bureaucracy, two things the US (or at least a politically important subset thereof) doesn't like much as a rule. Indeed, the US has persistently and still is trying to get us to break up our single buyer drug purchaser as it persists in going for cheap options rather than all in high cost exclusive package deals on out-of-patent brand name drugs. From the outside it certainly appears that the biggest problem the US system has is twofold- that there's little incentive towards prevention and that such a large proportion of people simply are not effectively covered by health care except the extremely expensive emergency kind.

I think there's some sort of happy medium to be found between "crap jingoist novels for rednecks" and just finding nice stuff to say about someone who's died ("loved master to Blondie"). I thought he was basically the literary equivalent to NASCAR- I can appreciate how the stuff is put together in a general sense, but it's not aimed at me it's aimed at patriotic americans who just want something to cheer for and make them feel better about themselves, and was all too often the direct story equivalent of driving around an oval for a couple of hours while cars make loud noises and crash occasionally. Hmm. Passive aggressive way of writing "decently written but repetitive jingoistic novels for rednecks"?

I appreciate this list as it makes me feel mature and successful. Even if probably half the stuff there is stuff I didn't directly acquire myself.

Illogical? Impossible? Even Albert Einstein agrees it's possible- and he should know, he went back to kill Hitler before WW2 after all.

Double Fine Adventure had the biggest budget blow out- actually I'm not sure 'budget' is appropriate as it implies any sort of cost control was applied. I'd suspect that Clang may have been the biggest outright failure, though I cannot recall exactly how much it made and IMO it was always a marginal proposition. There have been a couple of examples of outright fraud that I am aware of where someone has run off with cash leaving the contributors and in some cases actual people doing the work without anything.

I'd say it goes back to WW2, at least the theory of it though the application was generally somewhat different. Something like a flamethrower tank or an AVRE/ Stuh42 (and arguably even a Stug) are the same sort of idea, though for the last two rather at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of weaponry delivered.

Well yeah, I'd support it. I think either a Mass Effect like RPG or even a System Shock 3 type RPG by Obsidian would be pretty cool, albeit there's no practical chance of another kickstarter going by what has been said. One game that I'd really like is a sort of combo of FTL and Privateer. Bit like Elite 3/ FFE with more RPGish combat rather than free flight, lots of missions, exploration, intrigue etc.

There was a lot of social commentary at the start as well, it was just more general social commentary rather than 'ripped from the headlines' social commentary. It's pretty much inevitable that they'd run out of the more general stuff at some point as there's a finite supply.

In news that will surprise basically no one I am somewhat underwhelmed. A console everyone knew was coming running on an OS everyone knew was coming with a controller everyone strongly suspected was coming, and not a whole heap of new information about any of them, except the controller. I'd have two immediate concerns about that controller. For legacy games, which they admit are the majority and will remain so for some time having to look at a touchscreen for extra keys will not be a good solution. It works well for phones and the like because they're implicitly designed to be used while being looked at, a control scheme on the other hand should be looked at as little as possible. On a KB/M there's a bunch of muscle memory and built in tactile knowledge about where exactly the keys are so you don't actually have to think about what you are doing, and you cannot get the same tactile response from a touchscreen. And I'd question both the need for and practicality of those stick replacements. They may be OK for someone who works in a computer software office in Seattle and has velvety soft thumbs thanks to their biweekly trips to the manicurist but for someone like me who does manly outdoors pursuits like building fences and shearing sheep and chopping down trees I'm less than convinced some slight indentation and a pair of insignificant ridges will give enough info. The good thing about the dual analogue sticks is that they give you very good immediate and instinctive feedback on position with excellent precision. Looks like a solution for a problem which does not exist, though at least it makes it look different even if it's rather, for lack of a better or less lazy word, 'hipsterish'. Yeah, they really aren't aimed at me though since I have "KB/M for lyfe*! *Except for certain games like SSX where controllers are certainly better" tattooed across my back and I'm hardly Valve's biggest fan. I'd like to give the controller a try though, mainly to see if my concerns are warranted.

That does happen rather a lot though, one of the biodocs made a comment about aiming for 10 million sales as their target a few years ago and that quickly became Bioware needing to sell 10 million a game or EA would shut them down. It's the confirmation bias thing really. Any available facts will be interpreted in a way that supports the argument/ viewpoint.

GTA isn't really a good target for misogyny accusations. It is and always has been about stereotypes- Italian mafioso, Black gangsta, Serb gangster, plus ancillaries- and the attempts to inject some depth into those characters have generally been... well, I'm not absolutely sure they weren't intended as some sort of metacommentary since surely anyone can see the irony of Niko musing on the Unbearable Lightness of Being in the midst of making sure yet another gang of mooks are tethered to the earth with some hot lead. I haven't played V, of course, but I cannot imagine it's different, and it applies to everyone in the game whether male or female. The vast majority of complete scum buckets in GTA are men, so it shows a decent amount of misterogny as well if you look for it. And yeah, there is an irony as well with people complaining about romances and a certain amount of 'issues' integration from Bioware, which are equally as expected as stereotypes from Rockstar; and a 'deal with it' attitude applies equally to both.

I would say its 95% chance its Al-Shabaab but you right its not confirmed yet. Was confirmed yesterday via Twitter (!). Though I guess there's some wiggle room as it's Twitter and they probably do not have their identification verification turned on for A-S and similar.

Nah, he wants more music from Jeremy Soule, as that is the mark of a quality Bioware game. Think he's wrong about the Indie issue though, the last movie sucked and since EA has the Star Wars license they'd be most likely to make any more Indie games as well.

EA has a lot of cash reserves still in any case, they're in a lot more immediate threat of being bought out than failing. The big problem that most other publishers have is Activision. Whereas just about everybody else is losing money they make lots of money consistently (averaging ~700m for the past four years) so everyone else looks poor in comparison. Though I don't particularly like Activision's long term prospects, personally, at the moment CoD and WoW are still making a lot of money and that is what markets like. I wouldn't be putting any investment money into gaming at the moment but if I were I'd reckon EA would be a decent bet.

My d-bag Thorton run always seems to fall victim of another play style, it's the one I'm going to do after the playthrough I'm just finishing. I really must get around to it though since being an utter Knut to Marburg is perhaps the single most satisfying thing in the game- 2nd being the reverse situation*- so being an utter **** to all the other people could well be equally entertaining. *Hmm, maybe I just like somewhat formal yet amoral older gentlemen. I must consider this carefully.

Rise thread, rise from the dead! I command you! By Jove, I do believe you're right! Oh wait, that was kind of the point... A glorious 4GB. A mere day's usage for glorious Suomi no doubt, but I'm too far from an exchange to get ADSL. And, frankly, asterix having to take special precautions about it just because some clown's garbage code is inveigled into so many games. I've found literally no other program so rubbish in that respect, every other program I've used either has an offline mode or updates that can be scheduled/ otherwise controlled, and which don't break either the program itself or everything linked to them if they don't get the update they're demanding. Oh, and what was I saying about people trying to blame the users for steam's faults? Steam isn't broken, it's the data cap that works for everything else that is!

I believe you could install most GFWL games to an offline profile even in non-supported countries, though they should certainly have some sort of warning/ instruction if selling in an unsupported one. It'd still suck that the online stuff didn't work of course, but from what I've heard that happened fairly frequently even if your country was theoretically supported. Stuck the rest of the reply into steam rox/ sux because why not.

I never need an excuse to be an exaggerating drama queen, it comes naturally. Keyrock has fun with the GFWL hate, I have fun with the steam hate with a dollop of the 50% response you get if you have a problem with steam ("works fine for me"; other 50% is variations on PEBKAM/ your computer sucks or it ain't a bug! you're supposed to shut down everything in your system tray manually before rebooting your computer! ). And you do seem... somewhat upset that I have had no problems with GFWL. Meh, not great examples. Origin has got a lot of crap for stuff that was simply incorrect pure and simple (and works fine for me, hope this doesn't offend anyone), and I'd say that Always Online Uplay had a worse rep than GFWL when it was still a thing. I don't like any client on principle anyway, but at I can tolerate them if they're ignorable. Since I can blow through my monthly bandwidth cap in about 30 minutes steam's tendency to reset its offline and 'do not update' settings randomly would be a fundamental killer, even if I didn't dislike it for other reasons. Don't care about GFWL shutting down much, one unnecessary Exploit Extend Extinguish Seattleite client down, one to go. MS will inevitably replace it with Windows Store or On3on8 or something anyway, probably under the guise of whatever they're calling trusted computing these days; since it should be free money for them.

Half Life 3, exclusive to steambox! Go on Valve, you know you want to! (HL2 Ep3 instead of HL3 would also amuse)

They talked about switching from <horrific Microsoft "service" that shall not be named> to Steamworks for Dark Souls before <horrific Microsoft "service" that shall not be named> officially bites the dust. When that happens I may scoop it up myself, as <horrific Microsoft "service" that shall not be named> is the main reason I've not gotten it yet. Thanks for the reminder, I will have to pick up a Euro retail release* before Games For Windows LIVE gets replaced by <horrendous Valve service that shall not be named> since I don't want to suffer through the broken offline mode, forced patching, broken updates, noxious social features and all the rest it entails. Though of course while every problem with Games For Windows LIVE is due to MS being evil and incompetent, every problem with <Valve's unreliable shovelware trojan adware malware ate my cat and burnt my house down, Games For Windows LIVE never did that etc etc> is, of course, due to user error and incompetence rather than it being a badly coded kludgy monstrosity and tool of oppression. Never had a problem with Games for Windows LIVE, personally, as it's basically ignorable. *Or not, I don't have any real intention to upgrade my computer and have plenty of games to play already.

I didn't think they did use much artillery in Georgia (wiki suggests one SP regiment), though I'd somewhat suspect if so it was more to do with all supply having to come through a single tunnel than any concerns over fairness. The air power thing is rubbish of course as extensive use of air power was made.

I see John McCain has written a reply to Vladimir Putin in, uh, Pravda. That it's in Pravda pretty much sums up the 21st century McCain, post Rove bashing. Whereas Putin picks a newspaper of record McCain picks the equivalent of the National Enquirer based on it being famous in the 80s (and I'm not even sure it's the same Pravda, or has just co-opted the name), which is appropriately where his world view is stuck.

GTA: San Andreas was highly educational and helped me learn a new language. I used to be an ignorant redneck cracka but now I'm down with the homeys, know what an OG is and can impress people by discussing Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube and their place in popularising the rap and hip hop oeuvre. Also very useful for watching that documentary series on urban and police life in Baltimore, without it I suspect I would have been trying to set the DVD language to english. So Rockstar games are not just over the top chav simulators, they're also culturally enriching.

By way of illustration, when Activision and Infinity Ward had their falling out the employees that took action were claiming more than a million (!) apiece in missed royalty payments- and that was without West and Zampella's separate action. I don't know how many of them were management as well (most, I'd suspect from observing corporate culture) but it's clear that working on a big title can result in pretty hefty remunerations if it's successful.

The alternative is a variation on the 'kettling' tactic, as the British police would call it. His big advantage is his set piece weapons, letting the rebels come into established kill zones is good tactics. He has retaken most of the strategically important places he's gone for in the past couple of months, though that is obviously somewhat self selecting. yep, it's all speculation, but so is the rebuttal for the most part. We cannot pretend to know the situation on the ground in any detail, but we have to presume that Assad would know CW use would be a red line as Obama said it explicitly- so any authorised use should be of enough significance to offset that. An attack on the Presidential Palace, the International Airport, cutting a vital supply line or encircling the enemy, something like that. And for the offensive uses the main advantage can only be gained by following up, hard. True, but the point is more that the inspectors were there and immediately available, not what day they arrived on. In either case, usage a day prior to or especially a day after them being there makes far more sense. My reasons for thinking it is relatively unimportant are mainly based on it being in rebel hands for a year. Under those circumstances I feel a case must be made for why it was important to use CW there, 'now', as opposed to when the inspectors were gone. That's the militarily logical way of doing things, in isolation, but not all the rebels are militarily logical. And from a PR POV it would destroy the rebels internationally if they made that scale of CW attack. I also make the judgement that the thing the rebels want more than anything, militarily, is direct intervention to level the playing field. Even well run militaries are not always as respectful of civilians as they could be, when there's an advantage at stake. It's a judgement call, yes, based upon the length the rebels have held it more than anything. I'd again come back to the military significance point though. Why there, and why then? Was it really that important? As I said there are circumstances where it's eminently believable, achieving a critical breakthrough or defending a critical area. As for the hazmat, their response would clearly be "we came under CW attack from the rebels", and I'm not convinced they would need hazmat that much- if you have air superiority and artillery plus tanks you could prevent most reinforcement until the gas has cleared, and issuing atropine or similar would not be conclusive against them given they've accused the rebels prior of using gas. But if you have control of the area you can remove incriminating evidence and plant obfuscating or framing evidence. That is allegedly what happened at several massacre sites, and this was a bit above a mere massacre both in scale and potential repercussions- and they would have known that. Again, that's mainly to do with the military advantage argument. You want something to offset the risks, if you're going to do something large and obvious which courts intervention it needs to have large rewards to balance it out- go the whole hog on something important, or just use the tips of the trotters so no one notices or gets too upset. Oh, you'd be surprised. I think the only substantive difference is that while I do find it most likely that regime forces used them given the current evidence I don't think it's conclusive, and would like something which deals with motive a bit more than the cartoonish "Assad is a thug, lol" that is largely being portrayed. I'm basically treating it as I would a trial, you're prosecutor and I'm defender so it's my job to promote alternative scenarios.