Zoraptor

Heh, somewhat amusing seeing the Inscrutable Oriental line coming from a Serb, given that the WASPs it was particularly popular with happily lumped slavs into exactly the same category. There's as much chance of Britain reverting from 'democracy' as Japan or India. But for all the problems in places like Thailand, Pakistan and Malaysia there are also places where democracy has happened more or less spontaneously and with very few problems at all in asia- Indonesia, for example, while not perfect is a lot better than anyone would have thought a decade or so ago.

Don't know how hands on Sid Meier is with anything any more, only thing I've heard him being directly involved in was the recent mobile game whose name escapes me. Certainly other names have been primarily associated with the design of Firaxis's recent games, even if he is 'Creative Director' on all of them.

Couldn't have that, not after the outcry about Ned giving Lady the chop in S1- apparently more people complained about that than Ned himself... Though in the above case it was probably because it'd be difficult to do well more than anything.

That article ignores that Vader wanted Luke captured, perhaps in preference to every other circumstance. If it had been Curtis LeMay or Arthur Harris or Cpl Hicks in charge they might have levelled the base from orbit as the only way to be sure, but Vader always wanted Luke leading to 'mistakes' like his personal presence. If a real world comparison were to be used it would be to Saddam Hussein and how the US got tunnel vision about him being the solution to their problems in Iraq. Not directly equivalent though as in that case the focus was on an irrelevance while in the SW case Luke was a key to the rebels' final victory so focus on him was appropriate, even if ultimately cutting losses and just flattening the joint would have been the better result. Still, in fantasy as in reality hindsight is 20/20.

GNNNNNNNNHHHHHHHHHH. OK, so there's no chance of the unspeakable actually happening, but it makes a Jar Jar Binks SW spin off seem positively sane in comparison.

If the state did execute an innocent man then it would be absolutely implicit in harm to victims, because the person they executed would be a victim. It's fundamentally opposing views, really. Rather like parole or bail too- some will say that x percent of people reoffend on licence, thus no licence should be granted to prevent this. Others would say that 100-x precent of people on licence do not reoffend, and in the case of bail y% are found innocent, so these people would be unnecessarily and in some cases wrongly locked up in a more punitive system. The whole notion of justice is predicated on an impartial viewing of evidence, measured judgement, and appropriate punishment, when appropriate. While it should be sympathetic to victims in good systems it is designed to be agnostic towards their feelings for a very good reason- it's meant to be objective and truth seeking, and feelings aren't objective.

I don't have the revised ending though, as I couldn't be bothered managing the bandwidth for it- though I guess they may have split the 'patch' part and the 'content' parts. One of the things I actually like about Origin and how ME3 was handled was that I never had to download the new ending, nor any MP content which I wasn't going to use.

EA does rather make a rod for its own back with regards to multiplayer/ online stuff. It's partly because of the dissonance between talking to investors (we'll make (you) lots of moolah with our online features!!!) and what the people interested in the games hear (we'll make lots of moolah with our online features, mwahahah!!!), but part of what the people hear is due to some very real mis-steps by EA- shutting down servers, the 'best'* ending threshold for ME3 being set too high and requiring MP, the problems with SimCity. That and project $10 type stuff doesn't speak to what the people making the games want themselves but it does explain why online features/ MP is viewed with a certain amount of scepticism. Really though, I haven't seen anything that suggests that Bioware doesn't care, quite the opposite. Then again I've been- generally- happy with their recent games, don't really care about Origin nor online stuff if it's voluntary**. In any case though, the only person I've heard describe games making as deliberately and methodically being reduced to a soulless exploitative experience of bean counting and endless crushing dreariness doesn't work for EA but the competition- one Robert Kotick, who gets paid $65 mill a year for that policy and whose company makes a lot of money from it. *Which I'm about 90% sure I got despite no MP, but it may have been after a patch **I did manage to accidentally upload all my DAO 'achievements' somewhere for all to see. How will I live down people knowing that I romanced Alistair? By not caring, probably.

In the nazi version of Mass Effect, Dr Chakwas was not pleased when you forgot her Space Brandy?

Given the response to dlc on GOG it's probably safer for them to ask. Doesn't cost them much and if they can say that XX% of their are OK with something it takes the wind out of the sails of 'speak for the silent majority' ragers if it's something wholly voluntary and optional.

Hmm. Have his ex lover kill his wife, execute his boss, get hooked on durgs, rob a petrol gas station, have his daughter go into a cult, blow up his place or work etc etc. Not necessarily in that order. I blame Hannibal Lector for the spate of cannibals and wannabe cannibals, personally. Guy made cannibalism cool, now everyone wants to try it, gay Germans, Russians, even cops in New York. And all for a product placement for Italian wine and a variety of legume.

The Chinese government can't do anything to me. My own government can. I can avoid the Chinese government easily. I can't avoid my own government. If the Chinese government has organ farms and forced labour and political repression it- ultimately- has no effect on me whatsoever. My own government's responses to their illegal spying is to make it retroactively legal, and to extend their powers to an almost Patriot Act level with deliberately imprecise wording that would allow spying on people based on any government official or department's say so. And if you've bought stuff online or surfed midget trannie pr0n or whatever then your government will definitely know about it thanks to their black boxes scheme, let alone all the other stuff they can gather from the saturation CCTV and the like.

SMAC is one of the games where I don't think the IP itself really matters as you don't have to call it Alpha Centauri or have Sid Meier involved. Call it Tau Ceti* or Epsilon Eridani or whatever, a rose by any other name smells as sweet. Given what happened with Wasteland there is the possibility of someone buying it from EA, but unless that someone is 2k/ Firaxis the Sid Meier part has to go in any case. *Hmm, have the Many instead of mindworms... He's currently unattached so far as I am aware. He was at Zynga (or some other FB type dev) but left recently.

Budget cuts and terrorism/ world police fatigue from the public means there has to be an enemy to point the guns you want funding for at. Also NSA devices with active 24/7 monitoring at every ISP- for your protection! etc etc. A lot of the China hacking stuff is pretty questionable really, not because it doesn't happen but in the impact. Your awesome new product will inevitably be manufactured or sold in China and as soon as that happens all secrecy goes out the window anyway. It's also perfectly fair when Echelon was monitoring them due to technological advantage, or giving Boeing details of Airbus's tender bids for that matter, so overall the US is just going to have to Deal With It as others have been dealing with it for a long time. Or start an ewar which will do them a lot more damage than the Chinese.

Are EA actually publishing games any more in the 'go out and find an external studio to make game x for $$$ y' sense? I thought pretty much everything (exc EA Partners stuff, which may be defunct anyway) was developed by internal studios now.

Personally I'd find Bioware with the Warhammer licence absolutely hilarious, and if my idea for a dynamo powered by refined butthurt comes to fruition, quite profitable too. It's not like there ain't connections, the WH MMO was done by EA and I hear that a Bioware employee was recently seen getting stuff signed by a prominent space marine. Unfortunately it's an unsourced "trust me guys, I got the good oil" post from a blog, so meh. Internet being the internet I won't have to wait long to try out my dynamo idea though.

I'm sure in that sense it has a purpose, and it's not like discussing it is pointless anyway except in as much as discussing anything on the internet is pointless- there just cannot be any sort of 'unified theory' to come out of it and the ultimate conclusion will always be a general trend rather than something definitive.

ctrl+F5 in firefox should do a hard refresh for a specific page.

Doing a mouseover of those links gives me r00fles, wonder if it was deliberate. And no one seems to have noticed either.

Why are all the rhymes that stick in my mind in terrible taste?

I don't think there's any real benefit to be had by trying to reduce 'how to win a war' to a simple formula- as whatever that formula is there will always be multiple counter examples. Application of successive superior force? Vietnam, where the ARVN/US won pretty much every battle. Better resources? Same really, but with more counterexamples. Will to win? Too often trumped by sheer weight of numbers, I doubt Poland had any less will to fight than Germany in WW2 and the Zulu had far better will to fight than the British, weight of numbers and technology told though. Preparation? Japan was far better prepared than the US for WW2. They're all contributing factors of course, but ultimately what decides who wins is either the two sides agreeing on who won/ lost or one side being incapable of fighting on, and that's all that can be said with any certainty. You could probably make some sort of algebra for it like a Paradox game- a = battle results, b = provinces held, c = 'war exhaustion', d = physical resources; if a/b/c/d are less than critical thresholds combined or individually then war continues- but it will never correctly fit every situation, and arguably not by a large amount too. Because there's also variable e for, er, entangibles, which by definition cannot be measured accurately. Because the primary role of any army is to defend their country rather than to be International Policemen, which is an optional extra. If you had a list of existential risks for Britain that the army needs to be prepared for I'd bet that the top one would still be Russia.

Asymmetric warfare (which I hate as a term only slightly less than collateral damage) is perfectly sensible when the alternative is taking your AK out into the field to be obliterated by some bloke in Nevada with a PS3 controller like a good 'honourable'- or let's be honest, really stupid- soldier would. The goal is to win, not accumulate karma. On the original question, it's far too simplistic a proposition. Defying expectations certainly influences winning battles or wars but it's not the be all and end all- Cannae defied expectations massively, but didn't win the war. Ulundi won the Zulu War but went exactly as expected; while Isandlwana, which defied expectations, had no long term effect at all.

I've been meaning to rewatch those, I know I enjoyed them as a little guy but about the only thing I can remember about them now is 'Paint it Black' and that Sergeant Zeke was in St Elsewhere (because my mum mentioned it every single episode). Might be time to see if I can find them, and Homicide: LotS for that matter.

On a related note, Gearbox and Sega are getting sued over the A: CM gameplay video/ demo fiasco. I normally don't like litigiousness of this nature very much (the attempt to sue over the ME3 ending was cringe inducing) but I'm a lot less down on it in this case. It's understandable when gameplay changes over the course of a game's development but this was pretty on the nose and clearly- from a non legal/ layman perspective- intended to give a misleading impression rather than just to accentuate the positive/ eliminate the negative/ latch on to the affirmative and not mess with Mr Inbetween as you'd expect from any advertising. And if it will stop resources being- in an end consumer sense- wasted on peripheral manipulations and Thief like diversions it may even have a direct benefit.

Should do, as the GOG version has it and apart from the unified download the GG versions are identical. I installed the CD version of IWD a month or so ago and had to redownload TotL and it is still readily available anyway.