Zoraptor

Yeah, that's it. I wasn't too happy linking it though as while a lot of places have mentioned the story that site is still the only real source. No point getting hopes up too far until GOG/ Meadowbrook/ EA or someone who should know for certain confirms/ denies.

The change in date was official enough that the E3 LA press release mentioned February rather than November. If you've got the extra time you have to plan to use it or there's no point to having it at all, you might as well decline and shoot for the November date in the first place.

The red dragon 3 way fight in NWN2 was pretty epic, in a good way. The other dragon fight in NWN2 not so much. I bet Thax in BG2 with no cheese at all, far easier with a chapter 6 party. Jan got chunked after a 20 (!!!!1!) level drain breath attack- he had a negative plane protection but it must have got dispelled without me noticing so I did it again with no losses. Also whacked Firk and Kangaxx for good measure, the latter was long and boring and a bit cheesy since I did it with the main character only having got sick of having all my other guys being feebs. His imprisonment ability meant they hardly got to fire off any spells of consequence anyway before disappearing into the aether/ getting level drained; main guy wearing every status protection item under the sun + berserking, then it was pretty much just waiting for the demilich form to run out of protective spells. Haven't tried the Twisted Rune yet, not sure if I want to, while I've got used to most of the requirements for doing well with SCS that may just be a bit of overkill.

Hmm. System Shock 2 is allegedly coming to GOG. Rumour and claim only at the moment, but there is a new trademark registration (from the insurance company that got the rights after LGS closed down).

Yeah, you'd have to have separate bitmaps for each rotation for PE (ie render out facing north, then facing east etc) so it could be possible but would not be practical since bitmaps will take up a huge amount of memory as it is. You can do rotations for tile based systems with 2d backgrounds such as a non 3d city builder type games (Zeus/ Pharaoh/ Caesar/ earlish Simcities etc) and 'pseudo 3d' games fairly easily, but that certainly doesn't describe PE.

LucasArts is more than capable of doing the stupid themselves without any encouragement from Disney, they've done it before, frequently. Combining them with Disney is pretty much the perfect storm for the 'change direction randomly every 18 months' school of game publishing as both have oscillated wildly in their approaches as different executives are appointed/ fired, each with diametrically opposed viewpoints to the previous guy and no time to actually implement their vision before a higher up decides that they've Failed Them For The Last Time.

My brief yet thorough examination reveals cyrillic characters and a Russian flag on her uniform. Probably Russian. And my recent exposure to RPS compels me to object strenuously to the overt sexism of giving the woman a little gun while the man in the background clearly has a far larger gun.

Pft. Man in posing pouch on MiG has dirty imperialist chromed assault rifle rather than reliable classic Russian Kalashnikov.

It's probably too explicit to retcon, unless Disney changes the policy on canon. The book Revan in particular (I'm told, haven't read it) basically locks in the canon on near everything you'd want to use in K3 even excluding the stuff in TOR itself.

My first RPG was either Wizardry or a less known game called Dragon's Eye which doesn't even show up on google(!) though I have the box on my bookshelf. No idea on the year, but I was a very little fellow when I played them since we sold our Apple ][ when I was like six or something. Next RPG I can remember playing was probably Fallout, or one of the mid 90s D&D games (Stone Prophet/ Menzoberranzan) which would have been played in the late 90s.

It ain't binary success or failure. KoA:R should have made money for example given its sales. but its studio folded soon after because its success wasn't enough to finance loans and a delayed mmo. Similar for System Shock 2, the game did fine by itself but earlier decisions doomed LGS. Both games are usually seen as financial failures when in fact they did better than most games do. TOR's big problem appears to have been incorrect market expectations, if they sold 3 million copies they ought to have made most of their money back if they'd had proper cost control. 1 billion dollars!!!!! was pretty clearly hyperbole based on the massive cost inflation seen from 'analysts'. That was a marketing message of TOR. That TOR is KOTOR 3. If people got that impression, it seemed to be the intended one. Yeah, something along the lines of TOR = KOTOR3-8, suck it h8rs!!1! (the last bit may have been personal impression of the comment and not actually said). It was an understandable position as the success of TOR was to an extent predicated on getting all KOTOR fans to stump up money for an MMO so dashing any hope of a successor standard game was necessary.

Day -1 Purchase?

It's Expanded Universe so there's no reason why you or anyone else should remember it, I only did because someone pointed it out to me as an example of how convoluted the EU had got. From what I remember there are about half a dozen different bits of the EU that deal with how the rebels got the plans for DS1 and they're pretty much mutually incompatible without some pretty silly retcons, Bothans Did It is just one of them. Wouldn't be surprised at all if they meant the DS2 plans since that is from a movie but yeah, saying that Bothans died to get the DS1 plans is technically accurate.

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)