Zoraptor

Again, since this always comes up about how it's poor innocent steam being brutally victimised by nasty people not obeying their diktats automatically like a good Paradox* lapdog. Still got it the wrong way around. Steam refuses to take EA titles which require Origin, not EA refusing to sell them via steam as you can buy DS3/ ME3 etc etc just about everywhere apart from Steam and EA demonstrably did not pull legacy titles. The exclusion is because Steam changed their TOS to exclude Origin and similar things like Connect. It's 100% and uniquely Steam's fault for wanting to be a special snowflake and dictate terms to all and sundry, and again Steam expects other vendors to sell stuff under exactly the same but reverse conditions, ie with their client and shop front end bundled into it. The key to keeping companies honest is not to have some monopolist sitting on a mountain shouting orders to the peons below about how they should sell their games, it's to have the spine and intestinal fortitude to tell companies to go FOADIAF and- here's the hard part- actually stick to it if they do stuff you don't like. Honestly, the free ride Valve get with their crap you'd think they were selling the cure to cancer rather than being a glorified Gamestop selling wholly voluntary luxury good with zero intrinsic value while taking a slightly smaller- but inflated, given relative costs of e vs retailing- cut which ideally ought to go to the creator of the product, not some jumped up middleman. *Who are now selling on Uplay. Still not on GOG though, eh, eh? Pathetic, supine, spineless, and liars to boot. FOADIAF. **plain text editor, she go crazy!

Not that oby isn't massively overstating things but the west's military is rather paper tigerish. They'd blat the traditional forces of any mid range organised power in a matter of days or weeks but that is not what they are being used for. They won't fight anyone whose WORDS ARE BACKED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS so performance against them is irrelevant, and they've proven themselves less than awesome against irregulars and prone to end with Vietnam style Peace With Hono(u)r solutions. Ten years on from Iraq War 2 and the crowning achievement is an Iraq that still has ongoing problems and has Iran as its best bud. Predictable, but hardly what Rummy, Blair, asterisk Cheney and co sold as the glorious future. The one thing you can guarantee is that whoever the west fights next they aren't going to 'fight fair' and go stand conveniently in a field with their AKs and RPG7s and wait to be obliterated by a drone strike just for limited cachet of being labelled 'honourable' by the press in the west. There's nothing even slightly contradictory about it. If you want an illustrative example look at Rome/ Varus at the Teutoburger Wald. Rome was indisputably the most powerful military force in the world and they were also inert and retarded, being defeated by a relatively small and definitively less well organised and armed group of germans due to tactical inflexibility and the Germans not 'fighting fair' (ie going and standing conveniently in a field to be killed off conveniently, as above). .Export model MiG21s though, that's a very significant difference. Really though, the soviets were always likely to lose at close to 1:1 odds just as they were in WW2, problem was that in most important situations the odds were not or would not be anywhere near 1:1 Comparing Beslan to an Entebbe or a Iranian Hostage Siege is facile, the scales, the skills of the hostage takers and situations aren't even remotely similar. Once the chechens had got into the school there was only one way it was going to end whether it was Russian or US or anyone else involved because you had a well armed, well motivated and well dug in group, and no prospect of surprise.

Presumably they'll just sell the games on each others services. If you bought something like EU3 on Origin you never have to play it through Origin, nor do you have to have the client running and this is true for all (?) 3rd party games sold there, it's just a storefront unless it's an EA title. In effect it would be similar to buying, say, Anno2070 or ME3 on another 3rd party vendor like Gamersgate and just about exactly like ZombieImpulse. The people getting confused by that over at RPS really show that they haven't used much other than steam, wanting the client to run full time on 3rd party titles is a behaviour just about unique to Steam and Steam alone, other clients are far less intrusive and nannying though still not as good as client free like GOG or Gamersgate.

And the ultimate enemy in TW1 was basically Adolf Hitler for that matter. Adolf Alvin and his SS chipmunks were about as much a White Male Power Trope as it is possible to get.

Yeah, that's where I got it from along with Pharaoh last year. Both good buys, I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed that type of game and they don't really get made any more.

I whacked the Twisted Rune in BG2 in an utterly anticlimactic and pretty much dairy free roflstomp. They (especially that lightweight Shandygar) seemed to get fixated on dealing with two summoned deva/ fallen deva. Got hit with the annoying BGT bug relating to having your romantic interest vampirised where you end up with the BG1 version (level 5 Viconia, awesome!) being restored rather than the level 20 BG2 version you'd been playing with, but fixed it OK. My fault really, I knew it was a potential issue but had forgotten. Now doing Watcher's Keep prior to going to save some hippy self righteous elves in their forest city of gazebos and swimming pools, and marvelling at how my Berserk with a THAC0 of -9 can't seem to kill a mind flayer to save his life having blithely slaughtered dozens of them in the underdark. Also played a bit of Zeus in follow up to playing Pharaoh.

Unlikely, certainly, at this stage though everything is by default unlikely as there's so little info- there's a better than even chance that it isn't anything that has been suggested. To be honest I'd suspect that WB is looking to a similar system to the alternating Treyarch/ IW CoD releases aimed at annualising the Batman games, so I'd also suspect anything coming out will follow the safe and profitable formula, not take a detour into RPG land. I could of course be wrong, and it would be potentially very good news for Obs if I am.

Most of the speculation on him being murdered was based on him being in the highest of high security cells (designed for Yigal Amir) so he should have been 'safe' from suicide, at least in theory. There ain't enough information to suggest why he was imprisoned in the first place except that it was probably related to his job and must be reasonably serious or with the potential to get very serious.

Sarcasm bro, do you want to be Bourne, Bauer or Bond? stylee. As for Batters, why they'd order blueprints for a game famously set in a fictionalised city is a pretty big question. Hey, maybe it's Deus Ex: New Vegas, they've worked with Squeenix, the people who made DXHR are (theoretically, for all that has been seen and said) making Thi4f though on the very limited information given Beta Protocol/ Omega Methodology or even Mass Effect -4 are about as likely as anything.

Yeah, replying to myself. The GOG version of SS2 does use newdark/2.4 Remember this from the RPS interview though: Which was complete, unmitigated bollocks. They took the 'imperfect' fan compatibility mods and applied an (out of date even) version of the most prominent of them, and that is the sum total of their work apart from the GOG branded installer. It's not an opinion, either, it's verifiable fact right down to readmes, and the deprecated file structure. I doubt anyone involved would actually object to it being used as it's a free and freely available utility, but it is spectacularly bad form to run down someone else's work when in fact you've plagiarised it utterly. So, cash in with zero actual work done on the code by Night Dive, GOG PR dude spouts rubbish, in other words.

They also have subs that can apparently sink modern western asw frigates on active manoeuvres without being detected and metric asterisktons of chemical weapons let alone potential bioweapons. They're basically the guy with a deadman switch, a bomb and some hostages; demanding a chopper while hoping for some KFC.

Nothing weird about that, the great thing about GoG is that they make sure that these games will run smoothly on most modern systems. Disc copies of older games often take a bit more work to get running. SS2 takes basically no effort to get running nowadays off disk. The only really outstanding issue is having to use the -LGNTFORCE switch when installing, all the affinity setting and codec fiddling was taken care of with the newdark patch. [edit]Checked SSO and the GOG version is only basic SS2 with fan patches pre-applied, down to and including an old version of the patching utility SSTool. Expert tech ninjas? My oversized right buttock.

You aren't aware of that because it isn't accurate- and to be fair, isn't what he said. Some games can be run without the client by double clicking the exe directly, some require it and will start the client before launching the game. I'm not a fan of steam in the slightest, but if you're going to have a steam version you might as well actually use its features, and by and large that requires that the client runs as well. Doesn't matter, so long as there's a genuinely DRM free alternative available, which there will be.

SHTUP. Also Rebirth, potentially. It wasn't a great looker in 1999 though and nothing will make it look great (in a bloomtastic __maps out the wazoo pixel shader VMaximum sense, its graphics have always done its primary job well) in 2013 Biggest question is what if anything the bundled enhancements to it are. Probably not the Newdark/ 2.4 patch given previous experience, but whether it's more than fixing the installer for 4GB and setting it to use one core only is an open question.

The US has a history of considering outlaws as heroes (or 'heroes' at least)- Billy the Kid, Jesse James, John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde- even someone theoretically a good guy like Wyatt Earp is pretty much accepted to have outright murdered people after his brother (?) got killed. That's a historic and cultural factor. Really though, people just tend to excuse a lot of stuff done by people if they happen to agree with at least part of what they say, it's hardly a phenomenon limited to the US. And as Malcador says, the LAPD do not have a great reputation. Even during this manhunt they managed to riddle a car with bullets, fortunately not actually managing to kill the occupants, thinking the car was Dorner's. Kind of understandable in theory, but in practice it was the wrong colour, the wrong make, and driven by a little old asian lady with her little middle aged daughter rather than a rather large black guy.

You'd be surprised. A lot of people spend a lot of time both then and now justifying events like My Lai (eg the Lt in command was consistently cheered by some) or IranAir655 (big celebrations on return, medals awarded for what was basically disobeying orders and being monumentally moronic) or that family who got murdered in Iraq to cover up their daughter getting raped; and there are plenty of people who think the people involved were heroes who have been unfairly persecuted or try and shift the blame in any way possible. For some the colours being worn are far more important than what the person wearing them does, whether it be something trivial like sport ("my team never cheats, only their opponents do!") or something more serious. As always people don't like bad stuff being associated with themselves nor being wrong so will tend to believe anything that shows a positive rather than negative slant, it's just a part of human nature.

Much as with the apocryphal person who smokes but lives to 95 it's an anecdote and argument by exception only, not a statistical counter argument. Feed most people on soda and fast food and they'll get fat, FACT! even if some can eat whatever they like and not put on a pound. Not everyone has your iron constitution and perfectly balanced metabolism, volo, some are fallible mortals.

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.