Zoraptor

Finished Spellhold in BG2. Still ever so slightly imbalanced, Irenicus was ludicrously easy thanks to having all the 'helper' casters and him spending all his time ineffectually blatting them. Had a bug where Irenicus would not leave after getting 'near death' so had to play it twice, in neither attempt did any party member or any of the helpers die, which really showed up how artificial them all just dropping dead via script at the end is. OTOH, being dumped into the Gauntlet earlier with no equipment- which makes perfect sense theoretically- was rubbish in practise, as I couldn't find a single blunt weapon that could damage golems and the only one which would damage, say, a demon or lich my fighter had no proficiency in. So you're effectively incapable of damaging enemies by melee and have an AC that makes you a sitting target as well due to no armour. The only real way to progress was to cheese rests and specifically tailor spell loadouts to the encounter which you know is coming, an approach I loathe unless everyone has sorcerer style casting. Still, at least I can probably go back and off Thax now.

"Sometime prior to the Death Star plans arriving on Polis Massa, rogue Imperial Moff Kalast aided the Rebellion with information linked to the battlestation. The Bothan Spynet had acquired secret top priority Imperial codes from the Death Star and transferred them to Kalast who, in turn, delivered them to the Rebellion.[1] After learning of the combined treachery of both the Spynet and Kalast, Emperor Palpatine personally traveled to Bothawui to punish the Bothans. The Emperor, along with two of his Royal Guards, slaughtered a large number of Bothans. One Bothan, begging for his life, informed the Emperor that the plans were to be beamed to the Tantive IV in the Tatoo system. The Emperor regrouped with Vader, who had learned the same, and ordered his servant to Tatooine.[1]"

Yes, the first one in particular has a very good atmosphere and I would not have been disappointed by it actually being System Shock 3 as (supposedly) was the original intent (and it does use some stuff very similar to SS2's design docs, eg hydroponics). It's 3rd person with an emphasis on using 'tactics' rather than just volume firing as you need to dismember attackers to reduce their speed or attack efficiency, use a gravity gun to chuck stuff at them etc. Your movement is slow and it is pretty easy to die on higher difficulties, there are also some quite large difficulty spikes with regards to bosses. Having said that, DS3 is supposedly heading a bit more towards straight GoW type gameplay. Think there's a demo for consoles, if that's where you're thinking of buying.

Drog's patch- made by a Japano-Russian eunuch with a plethora of different identities and a pathological need to troll the 'codex, so you know it's quality! (Check out terra-arcanum or similar, they'll have a good listing of recommended mods)

Simple answer is that you don't design around day1, cosmetic, dlc. They're basically TF2 hats/ paid for cheat codes for people who like to enjoy games by feeling awesome as they curbstomp all and sundry in their pimped out bling. In the PC version of DS2 all the dlc items were dumped at zero cost into the stores and you actually had to be careful to avoid using them.

I'm not going to replay it to check myself, but the wiki seems to support my memory, to whit:

Last I heard it was a small squad Fallout Tactics/ JA2 sort of scale thing, inspired and partly made by some of the stalker devs. It's using a modified Men of War engine so it ought to have destructible terrain and the like as well. One to watch, but it could go either way quality wise given it's 1c.

And the maintenance 'insects' whose name escapes me were involved as they were effectively the reapers back door, the end of ME1 took them out of the equation. I kind of presumed that they Citadel could still potentially be used to turn off the relays if they got a hold of it as they could (presumably, being technologically advanced) reverse any changes made given time.

That's justifiable- they want to fight and wipe out the sentient species' forces after all. Getting them nicely gathered into one convenient location is great for them as they can wipe out the fleets then turn off the relays if they want and take their leisure on the planets. Post ME1 the Citadel is clearly less useful to them though, since Sovereign stuffed things up there so monumentally.

In the classic capital letter definitions Oligarchy and Democracy are immiscible, true, but the general definition of little letter democracy and oligarchy are a bit more flexible than those from C5 BC. That may in part be because telling everyone that Their Vote Counts is a good way of stilling dissent even if most of the time you get to vote for hand picked 'establishment' candidates from a small potential pool, but it is also because Democracy is a form of government prone to monumental stupidities based on populist rhetoric, petty rivalries, ignorance and kneejerk reactions which makes the situation in most little d democracies look positively sane and Oligarchy fundamentally ain't going to appeal as an ideal to the general populace.

Sorry, I disagree with the idea that there's both micro and macro perspectives of tyranny. I have to in large part disagree with your disagreement- fundamentally in exactly the same way as you can always find someone thinking they live in a tyranny you will also always find people who think they live in untrammelled freedom/ everything is fundamentally fine, or simply don't care about stuff that doesn't effect them- the sort of people who use "if you have nothing to hide..*" as an argument if they can be bothered to argue at all. Lots of extremely dodgy legislation gets passed with little criticism or oversight because it's For The Children! or Stopping Terrorists! People are easy to stampede and it's easy enough to find significant support for what we- or at least a significant number- might call tyrannies; Mubarak's proxy made it to the final round of the Egyptian presidential elections and an Islamist got elected, Hamas got elected, Chavez (one I certainly don't agree with on the tyrant front) got elected, some in Russia pine for the Russia Strong! soviet days and every dictator from Pinochet to Franco has had significant, maybe in some cases even majority support because they weren't tyrants, the alternatives were. People who support that don't think of themselves as "anti liberty", they think of themselves as "pro stability" or "pro [countryname]" or "pro security" in other words, and do not consider themselves to be supporting 'tyranny'. (Ultimately of course the problem is that 'tyranny' is subjective, not objective and even if you could come up with a list of criteria for a tyranny there'd be no agreement on the interpretation of those criteria. I'd consider having to carry ID papers little t tyrannical for example- it doesn't happen here, is pretty much essential for a totalitarian system yet is also used in some places which obviously aren't totalitarian) *"if you have nothing to hide then it's none of our business" is the correct completion not "..you have nothing to fear"

I think the great philosopher Kryten could find three small problems with doing that. (There is no thief available, hence Nepenthe setting all the traps off rather than a thief disarming them)

Having recently played that area what Thax (to her friends) did to me was try and drain something like 10 levels a pop with her breath. Personally, I wouldn't dream of attempting her in chapter 2 in even semi ironman conditions.

Libertarians are fine. As with anything the problem is when they get detached from reality, but that is something that can happen to anyone espousing any philosophy, not just libertarians. Personally I would say that most people are 'brainwashed' into saying that what exists at the moment is anything resembling free trade, and I pretty much come out as an anarchist in all the political compass type tests. Free trade is a very good idea, in theory, it just doesn't really exist and everyone is happy to ignore it when convenient- CAP in the EU, similar agricultural subsidies in the US, China using dump/choke tactics to bankrupt competitors etc. Of course, describing as 'true free trade' an utterly subjective set of tariff criteria based on things such as OMG socialised education!!! is also about as far from free trade as it's possible to get. If a country has socialised education then that costs more and taxes are higher- all other things being equal- and there is thus no net advantage. Tariffs are fine to prevent genuinely anticompetitive practices like deliberately selling below cost to bankrupt competitors (a favourite of the Chinese) because those practices are themselves contra free trade and are deliberate attempts to distort the market.

I have no real interest in MMOs personally, but I've seen a lot of people wary of the combo of Cryptic and Perfect World quality wise.

You aren't going to pay full price for it because you feel entitled to a better experience than the console users? Bro', that is most indubitably entitlement. Nothing in particular wrong with that, buy what you want and what you feel is worth it is always the rule, just as they'll add the features they think are worth it. But it's not like they're hiding what they're doing, everyone will be able to make an informed choice which is better than something like the Bioshocks, where the advanced PC features included chopping the edges off the screen if using the wrong resolutions while insisting everything was tickety-boo. Dead Space 2 barely made it to PC, we're an utterly peripheral market. There is LA Noire and MP3, even Bully going back a bit further and iirc none of them were R* North. Not really disputing anything though, there were issues with the quality of the porting in 2/3 of those which would not speak well for the prospects of an RDR port even were the code in better shape.

Pft. Microtransaction based dialogue choices are the future, mere dlc is the past. Renegade/ paragon options at 0.50$ a pop, want to punch the Salarian/ Turian/ Asari councillors, $2 a pop. Far more potential for a paradigm shift in the market and symbiotically leveraging sales units whilst maximising returns.

RDR's code is meant to be in a shambles, and would take significant reorganising/ rewriting to work on PC. Rockstar have had a pretty good recent record with PC ports even if they're sometimes delayed, I'd tend to believe they'd do a port if it's viable. Have to say expecting lots of extra bells and whistles on PC for any multiplatform game is just a wee bit entitled, given that there's a prevalent attitude of "[anything even slightly negative] so will buy when it hits $5", better cost $10 less than the console version etc. PC Gaming Master Race vs unwashed consoler plebean masses doesn't exist for companies, they'll sell to who's convenient and will pay. Whole issue did give me a bit of a giggle with RPS's periodic search for extra page views by slagging off EA and the typical pavlovian barking. OMG Simcity can ban you for not reporting bugs! when any digital vendor can ban you for whatever reason they want whenever they want and they all have that written into their TOS. Ho hum.

A privateer/ ME hybrid game would potentially be pretty cool. I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd have opted for something similar as an MMO if TOR had done better. I'm not too keen on a straight TPS 'ME4' in the same vein as ME3. It'd need a more unique hook than just more pew pew and alien sexoring.

It's probably because archetypes are very prevalent in RPGs. Mainly thanks to Bioware ("Korgarous Wrexwind" "Anoarth Skyden") but Obsidian has done it previous since there are very notable similarities between- as below- the cast of PST and K2, and to a lesser extent MOTB. I cannot even begin to explain how much I disagree with this. I actually agree with it as substance, just not as criticism. The point does rather seem to have been missed though that the companions in K2 like those in PST are meant to be reflections of and bound to the PC as a fundamental part of their design and purpose. They aren't as much deconstructions as the companions in PST (might have got close if you had the intended option of Hanharr as a dark jedi) but their thematic purpose is almost identical.

That was allegedly the plan, but ToEE sold poorly. Personally, I really disliked its engine for some reason, same with Arcanum. No real idea why.

Played a bit more BG2. Did some stuff in Athkatla without much problem, tried Umar Hills with SCS2 and the (re)designer could troll for gold with the Shade Lord's infinite immunity buffs/ finger of death/ instadeath chromatic orbs/ moveable blade barriers and the level drain field (which, of course, strips the magic users of the means to counter the infinite buff spawn). OK, so the dude was a bit of a pushover in vanilla but that's just a slight overcorrection and while adding just about every annoyance possible in BG2 combat. Might come back and give it another try after defeating Melissan.

Henry Blake (God Rest His Soul) was a Lieutenant Colonel, not a Lt. Commander? Coming from a generally brit background it's always a bit weird seeing 'army' ranks used on board ships, was for BSG as well.