Zoraptor

There's also Hillsborough. I believe some of those responsible for it- and the utterly despicable ass covering smear campaign against the victims- not only still have their jobs, but have promotions.

No surprise there, even his name is great.

You could pay a whole extra $20 (?) to get the expansion as part of the kickstarter, so it's not exactly been sprung on people. Though it needs the fulfilment/ redemption method(s) to be up and running to actually, well, redeem it. There's also been a fair bit of talk about whether or not any sequel to PE would use KS, which was a pretty strong indicator it would be a 'franchise'.

The primary problem with police is their tendency to defend the bad apples. Expecting there to be no bad apples is unrealistic but in a (more) ideal world police would report corruption, brutality, evidence fabrication etc themselves. In practise the tendency is to close ranks and defend anything done by the police simply because it is done by the police, which ironically is exactly the sort of thing police condemn strongly in domestic violence or gang cases. I have no doubt that most police in most places are absolutely fine, it's the bad apples- and especially the tendency for even the good apples to protect the bad ones- that is the problem. A policeman who was instrumental in an absolute frame up (of Arthur Allan Thomas) was described as having "integrity beyond reproach" by the deputy commissioner here (our #2 cop, basically) and got a full police funeral. And that for someone who was bent as a paper clip.

Are there no patriotic American blokes willing to don posing pouches in celebration of freedom?

I'm less than convinced that the PS4 will be some sort of revolutionary system in terms of performance. It'll be better than the on3 pretty much inevitably since the on3's components are worse and PS4 will cost less, but things like improvements in development time are in comparison to the- frankly- dreadful and overcomplicated PS3/Cell system, not in comparison to competitors. And having access to unified memory will have a limited effect as that does not improve the underlying horsepower, which is decent enough and better than the on3, but, well it's already substantially worse than PC options, albeit currently quite expensive PC options. But, if I were looking at getting a next gen console there would be only one option and it wouldn't be the One Mind you, given the similarities to PC I can see Sony doing a bit more of the timed exclusive then release on PC, potentially. Cell made that a difficult proposition for PS3 era games but given it's AMD/ AMD now it would be practical- if they wanted to. Is much more is known of the technical aspects beyond the supposed 3/5 GB split in the on3 for the win8/ gaming OS's, given neither is released yet? I don't think Sony has said anything about how it's handling such things, yet. Otherwise there's the basic DDR3 vs DDR5 difference and latency vs bandwidth advantage issues, but that's a well known difference.

Is getting chopped into sausage by Goths natural causes or being murdered? Actually it's amazing how few Roman emperors got killed in battle, Valens was the only one I was sure of that wouldn't be being murdered by his own troops, or executed after losing. Which I guess kind of proves the point.

Hey, don't they have another kickstarter running? Oh wait, that finished a couple of days ago didn't it. Good thing they only worked out they were over time and over budget on their previous kickstarter after it ended, else they might not have got so much...

Saving my monies for the kickstarter. Moscow Symphony Orchestra stretch goal here I come. With that and Larian Belgium may become famous for more than waffles, eurocrats and the worst variant of the Brassica genus known to man. What sort of warped mind sees lots of little cabbages attached to a stalk and thinks "hey, awesome"- the sort of minds that make good games it appears...

Heh, Word point blank refused to alter some formatting for me. I ended up with about six horizontal rules at the end of the document- where they'd come from I don't know but they were undeletable by any standard means. It'd jump images around seemingly randomly, couldn't hold a style to save its life and I loathed every second I used it. Plus Ribbon, typically MS solution to a non existent problem. CS and OO 4 lyfe!

Lots of things with driving in on PC have it, at least as an option. GTA3+ for example. I found M&KB better by far in VC for car control, as I also played that on PS2 so have a direct controller based comparison, but I'd suspect that I may be in the minority there so far as driving goes- mouse precision vs autoaim on the other hand is an absolute walkover.

Don't blame me, I voted Ron Paul? (might have been interesting to see if he'd actually stuck to principles if he'd won, but that was never going to happen anyway)

You cannot invalidate a 2 dimensional oversimplification with another 2d oversimplification. Complex buffered systems are resistant to change, certainly, but the tendency is towards 'defaultism'- difficult to change, but equally difficult to change back- not some magic median. That is why you end up with 'Ice Ages' and warm periods, not Ice years/ Warm years, the 'default' position of the system shifts markedly for a period of thousands of years.

I've been playing the Wing Commander series from start to finish, up to the SOs for Prophecy now so nearly finished. Had immense fun with it so I'll almost certainly move on to IWar 1/2 next, or possibly Privateer. Ratings, story wise: 4>3>2=Prophecy>1 Ratings, gameplay wise: Prophecy>3>2>4=1 All worthwhile though, even 1 for fair dinkum Ocker Hunter who was obviously written by someone with a Steve Irwin overdose (and Angel, who actually looks better than her live action 3 version) and 2 for manic depressive french maori Doomsday. WC4 still has the weird inverted difficulty curve where the early missions in hellcats and longbows are far more difficult than the last missions in a Dragon, let alone anything using a BWU ship and missiles are instakills most of the time.

Not really, no. Depends entirely on your preference, as you point. It's not a fact that a controller is better. A controller has clear advantages that translate directly to a racer: 1) Analog steering, allowing you to steer more or less depending on how far you move the thumbstick. With a keyboard it's all or nothing. 2) Analog triggers, allowing you to feather the throttle. Again, with a keyboard it's all or nothing. It is mouse and keyboard that is being compared to, right? Not keyboard only? Because it strikes me that those limitations do not apply to mouse control where you can use distance and speed of mouse movement as an 'analog(ue)' input method, you don't have to use the binary keyboard input. M&KB is not the greatest combo for everything of course, I don't think you could play SSX very well with M&KB, and most flight/ space sims wouldn't work well either. But, of course, space sims don't work well with a controller either.

That sucks major balls. I feel sorry for everyone who bought that game. I think the fundamental question must be asked: if a bad game stops working should you feel sorry for a purchaser from the point at which they bought the game or the point at which it stopped working? Indeed, is the lack of working actually a net positive as it will prevent anyone accidentally replaying it? Hmm. This needs some pondering.

Guaranteeing something that you can not actually guarantee is foolish, even if it does make for good rhetoric. The burden of proof should always be on the person who makes the claim*, as is the case with ravenshrike and his "guaran****ingtee that no liberal org had to answer anything remotely intrusive as them". If that statement was not intended to be a factual statement, that should be clarified. *Imagine what science would be like, if any yahoo could claim any outrageous thing without having to provide any evidence whatsoever. I'll agree that others should be able to prove it right or wrong, but the person who makes the claim should have more proof than "liberal orgs weren't bitching" to support their case. Oh, I agree. This is the internet though, and this is a political thread, not a scientific discussion. A certain amount of rhetoric is... inevitable.

Then guaranteeing it seems a bit foolish doesn't it? Well no, it's eminently sensible in a rhetorical sense. In effect you never have to provide evidence because the statement is constructed so you cannot provide it and means that the onus of proof is moved to the other person.

Prove it then. With evidence from reputable sources and not politically biased blogs. Can't prove a negative. ACORN probably proves a positive, though I suspect that will be Different. I wasn't specifically saying that he had any involvement in the IRS thing, just that it could be seen as part of a pattern. The trouble is that at some point in the political cycle the burden of proof on such things almost always reverses- once there's a sufficient critical mass of problems and the perception of problems it becomes in effect necessary to prove innocence rather than lack of guilt. People just plain stop believing you even if you're telling the truth, in other words. That's a very subjective thing of course, and the threshold will vary markedly from person to person but I've generally noted a decreased tendency to defend Obama in the past few months.

Obama has a pretty big problem with perception now. It isn't just the IRS stuff, it's the systematic spying on journalists for doing their job even if everyone* agrees what they've done is legal, it's prism, it's the persecution of whistleblowers, the unbelievably ill conceived notion of claiming the right to summarily execute by fiat of terrorist label and the overall conclusion has to be that the guy who promised transparency (hey, he's talking about it right now in RSA) really meant that the US public would be transparent, not its government. He looks more and more like a US version of Tony Blair- articulate enough to deflect criticism for a while, but ultimately immensely disappointing and not likely to be remembered kindly. *well, those who want to criminalise journalism would like it to be illegal to publicise a leak as well as actually do the leak

For GOG specifically they have both DRM free and 64 bit compatible versions* which makes them different from others on sale. If the only changes are single bits then its likely to be some sort of boolean true false turning on/ off something that causes problems and that's about it (eg maybe turning off the update system since it's now unnecessary for the GOG release and could cause problems). Doubtful there's any real point asking here for an official response though, none of the support replies say that Obsidian implemented the changes, and anything from users will be speculation. *I've never had any problems running my disk version on 7/64, but Gamersgate for example has securom, and notes 64 bit incompatibility.

Companion NPCs would generally be a special case though- as a designer you would not want them to be 'missed' by players. DAO has Leliana and Zevran as rogues/ thieves and it's possible to kill both of them leaving you potentially without a thief archetype. Realistically you want to avoid that happening very often, if for no other reason than you'll end up with lots of complaints about the lack of rogues/ alternative companions. I'm not particularly advocating authorial imperative though, just saying that it is necessary- something like the Cerberus joining in ME2 is baffling from an 'objective' story perspective given the events in ME1 (and ME3 too really, which was entirely predictable). But while you might be able to rejig ME2 to remove Cerberus entirely and have someone else rebuild The Shep/ not kill her at all, provide the ship etc it would not be trivial and you could not realistically provide both as alternative choices; in effect it would have to be a different story without 'positive' interaction with Cerberus. Once the story has been decided upon outright refusal of Cerberus becomes an impossibility and players just have to Deal With It, or not, as preference dictates.

You don't have to do every permutations, no, which is fortunate since that would be impossible. But as noted, you do do the choices that you think that players will want to make, and even then only to the limits defined by budget and what can realistically be achieved within the confines of the story you want to tell. Ultimately you have to assume that the player actually wants to play your game and if your game has a strong storyline then that assumption includes that they want to follow the story rather than create their own. They may be able to customise your story in some allowed ways, but it remains your story at heart, not theirs, as everything story wise has to be- ultimately- the author's creation. It's like one of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books. There can be a lot of freedom in how you go about things, but you're still always turning to page 352 written by [author], rather than page 352 written by [player].

I don't think you can design a game with a (strong) story any other way though. A storyline is a set of progressive steps leading to a conclusion, and it is impractical to program every possible permutation, or even a reasonable number of permutations without ending up with some sort of procedurally generated system which will, pretty much by definition, end up as a generic approach. You can basically ignore the story in, say, Fallout- don't bother with the water chip or defeating the super muties- but there's nothing there to replace it with. With the peripheral stuff you have a choice of generally binary decisions like whether to help MacGuyver or help the fat desk guy, you're never going to be able to, say, set yourself up as town store owner and gangsta even if you think the overseer is a complete goober, hate everyone in the vault and just want to settle down with Tandi. End of the day I'd far prefer writers to be writing stuff that they like and they find engaging, and which hopefully overlaps with my tastes as well. Because they cannot ever tailor stuff for everyone and shouldn't try, and getting people to try and write stuff that they don't like just because that's what they think the players will want is the kind of thing that leads to over reliance on focus groups. Then again I have a pretty distinct dislike for Bethesda style games and always find them shallow and unbelievable rather than full of endless possibilities as others do.

Do not lie with a man as with a woman is straight (hoho) Leviticus, iirc, but I will check... ex wikipedia