Zoraptor

The press and others generally don't cover 'indie' level stuff for the same general reason they don't cover the local store but will cover Walmart or McDs or Ford, there's tons of info and interest about large entities and a lot less about smaller ones. That's especially true for E3 which is unashamably a AAA event, and the big gaming news sites which are big game focused. The recent past has not been particularly kind to the smaller "1999" type publishers either though. Paradox and 1C seem to be doing OK, but Jowood and dtp have folded for example. I have no doubt that a lot of indies fold too, it's just that you hear mainly about successful ones rather than the ones which sink without trace or where two years work results in a few hundred sales.

It's all publishers know, the blockbuster model has been drummed into them repeatedly by MBA types for the past decade or so. To an extent it's fair too, if you want to run a highly profitable large company you can do it with ongoing WoW, a CoD Iteration + perhaps a Blizzard title; or maybe 100 successful indies, a year. Being publicly listed companies means that most publishers have limited scope for long term thinking and planning because there's always the push to make money now and in the 'safest' (almost always actually means the most conservative) way possible. It's extremely difficult to say that your business model is out of date because that will almost always mean a precipitous drop in share value and 'you' carrying the can for it, and people will inevitably point at CoD/ GoW/ Halo/ GTA and ask why you can't shift those numbers when others can. Basically, if you're a Paradox sized publisher running mid tier projects with maybe 30 odd employees you can do fine on six releases a year selling into the 100ks. If you're an EA or Activision size with multiple thousands of employees you have to sell blockbuster because it's the only way to maintain yourself so their options are limited.

I hope boobies can make it through, else I fear any highbrow and cultured discussion of ornithology may be severely curtailed. To be fair, Daenerys' sections in book 2 were mostly set up, reaction and aftermath from the events of Book 1. I cannot think of any real way to accelerate her arc, as written it tends quite strongly towards binary pacing, it's either sprinting ahead quickly or dawdling along doing set up and reaction, with very little in between.

Vicky II is good, it's a fair bit more streamlined than R/Vicky though that is certainly not a drawback for a game that was as complicated (and unnecessarily so, really) as the original. I'll be picking up the expansion from Gamersgate as they have a matching sale to the Steam one and getting blue coins plus avoiding The Great Satan are extra bonuses.

I probably prefer vanilla EU2 (and certainly EU2-AGCEEP/ FTG since it modifies/ provides plausible alternatives to a lot of the 'this happens now because it happened now!!!!' type determinism) to any vanilla EU3 as well, but going from EU3 to EU2 is potentially quite a significant change in philosophy for someone who likes EU3.

In some ways Feast and Dance ought to work better on TV than as books due to the rather artificial way they're consrtucted, but there certainly is an awful lot of exposition/ set up in both, almost to Robert Jordan levels, and neither really has a 'natural break' in them. From what I understand the 3rd book and the 3rd series are likely to desync in any case though. Don't know what would have happened if Martin had stuck with having a five year break in the narrative as originally planned, that would certainly have made a potential mess for a TV series.

I've mentioned that mod twice at least, including three posts ago. You won't have any luck saving Ned, it's set during the Robellion. On EU2 it would be important to go into it with the foreknowledge that it is very deterministic in some aspects (eg Moscow will get sacked by the Poles in the C17th because that is what happened historically) and has a fundamentally different way of dealing with army reinforcement that will completely throw an EU3 style approach.

EU3DW is just too 'cartoony' for me. It's a massive improvement from original release EU3 to be sure, but i just get rather sick of its negatives- things like Bohemia conquering its way to the Urals just about every game as it squashes the GH. The horde mechanics were a nice idea but the implementation showcases the worst of Paradox's patented 'stampede' gameplay. Without MM I'd never have bought any of the expansions for EU3, given the ludicrous state of EU3 at release I was about a day away from uninstalling it and using the install CD as a coaster despite loving EU2, but I installed the mod and suddenly Ming wasn't a gigantic blob invading France/ France wasn't a gigantic blob invading Ming/ the premier colonial power was not the Papal States and the other stuff vanilla original EU3 came up with. On the other hand the mod tends towards clunkiness and heavy handedness (partly due to engine limitations and other uncontrollable aspects), and has more determinism than I like. That doesn't bother me personally because I've tweaked a lot of stuff to be more to my liking but it would certainly be a potential concern. I don't hate it in much the same way I don't hate Halo, it's just a game and game style I'd never consider buying and fundamentally have zero interest whatsoever in. It's a convenient label for a type of game where the base game is clearly intended for cheap bulk selling to nondiscerning plebs as wide an audience as possible and as a hook for future dlc purchases. But yeah, grain of salt, Jilted Bioware Fan Syndrome. The other three are paradox developed and two are older titles from before Paradox became nuParadox. Persoanlly I prefer CKDV to CK2 in its current state though CK2 still has all the potential in the world and (potentially) an absolute killer mod for GOT.

Probably depends a lot on whether the people have read the books or not plus tolerance for (s)extraneous (s)exposition and relatively complex plots for those who haven't. For those (like me) who've read the books there is a certain amount of inevitable "why did they change that?" "[charname] isn't done well compared to the books" "where's [charname] have they been cut?" and the like, though I'd rate it as a pretty decent adaptation overall.

Looks pretty likely Paradox is going to can Magna Mundi the Game though. Not particularly surprising as it's miles out of step with nuParadox's publishing philosophy of "reimagining" other people's classics and making Magickaesque MP oreintated DLC delivery vehicles. They've gone from having my interest in just about every title they were making to me having even above slight interest in only two of them, inside a year. If considering playing Magna Mundi the mod note that the Chronicles version of EU3 (base game with all expansions) won't play it at all, and it's problematic to get running if you get a steam version of eu3 as you have to take special measures andor not buy the final expansion due to steam's special snowflake behaviour wrt Paradox games' expansions. EU3 is a bit more 'realistic' than Civ- everybody has their proper religions, there are specific ethnoreligious units and government types etc- but it's still a fairly 'cartoon' version of history.

Civs are like Star Trek movies, even good, odd bad. Of the three generally available Civ games IV is the best and is regularly on sale all over the place. SM's Alpha Centauri (ex GOG) is probably even better, though it is not technically a Civ game. As above though, none of them are particularly gentle on novices.

The Infinity Engine was mentioned, wasn't it? And Alex>Nikita.

Given it's Epic Baltimore it's as likely to be Bulletstorm: Life on the Killing Streets or Gears of The Wire And given 38s apparent business acumen I'd suggest 'Unreal Reckoning' would be more appropriate.

It's not in any way similar to a HB or kickstarter title, it's a self proclaimed traditional AAA high (well, relative to kickstarter class) budget game on an engine that runs on PC360- not even PS3- and almost certainly with system requirements far beyond a kickstarter class game. It'd be nice if they made a Linux version (hell, make a PS3 one too for that matter) but I wouldn't get any hope up for it. The only real positive is they have done some work with OpenGL before via Witcher 1 though that was an entirely different engine.

Ultimas and Wing Commanders for $3? Yes please. I think I'll hang off getting Privateer and the earlier WCs until their expansions arrive though since I've still got their CDs somewhere. And I'll soon have expunged the stain of never having played a mainline Ultima.

Given the structure of the indie bundles it's entirely plausible that the publishers don't get any money anyway; but Bastion isn't an indie either for that matter (Ubisoft = publisher), and I'm pretty sure Limbo was published by MS (via XBLA) first as well.

Gave the Game of Thrones mod for CK2 a try. It really really illustrates how much the base game needs the old rivalry and friendship mechanics back since it ended up with some literally impossible circumstances happening (Ned Stark as Aerys' Hand, hmm...) as well as some rather unlikely things- Tyrion Lannister, Hand of the King to Robert Baratheon, married to 'Anya' Stark while well known Machiavellian sociopath Catelyn Tully-Stark has murdered her way to the Kingship of the Riverlands and her son to the prince consortship of the Vale. Her grandson would be king of Vale/ North/ Riverlands in a few years. There are also a few continuity/ mechanics issues like Robert and Lyanna popping out babies while the war is still raging and she is canonically off with Poetic Dragon Boy having been 'kidnapped'. The war of the Usurper/ Robellion works very well mechanically though, got one Rob victory and one Aerys one when Rob got captured in battle, and there is a huge amount of detail and accuracy in the character set ups- played as the Manderlys and got a persistent relationship gain with the Starks, the Brackens and Blackwoods hate each other, pretty much all the characters are in even if some choices are a bit questionable (like Ashara Dayne being depressed no doubt due to her supposedly killing herself) etc etc. The main problem at the moment is that as soon as the Robellion finishes nothing much seemed to happen in either of the run throughs I tried, as without friendships/ rivalries, specific events, much in the way of achievable claims, no White Walkers and without the stuff that drives a lot of issues in the base game either (religion/ crusades etc) there's a huge amount of inertia. Whereas in baseline CK2 you'll regularly have pages of current wars going on for most of the time post Robellion there were one or two minor ducal wars and that was that. I'll say this though, it has literally the most potential for awesome I have seen in any mod ever.

Volourn's subconscious comes up with great ideas.

I'm sure the "creature of meat and bone" will be able to "pant and sweat" while "running through her corridors".

CDP have bought the rights to System Shock, as that was the only way to get the games onto GOG. That promo pic is from their System Shock prequel. Either that or it's a Young Ones licenced game that they've relocated fifty years in the future.

Hmm. There could be motivation for Cedric to do something based on what happens with Roche's path in Flotsam- iirc the pregnant girl in the Commander's house is actually the lost love he mentions in passing and that could be used as motivation. Of course that would require a rewrite, and would probably end up with Cedric just becoming Iorveth Mk II anyway.

Oddly enough the 'West' didn't give a rat's secondary fundamental orifice about mass rape, murder and torture on a far greater scale in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Rwanda, Somalia etc etc. How many dead in Congo and hardly a peep for the whole time, let alone any action? Countries talk morality when it's in their best interests and to get their populations to go along with whatever their geopolitical aims are. That's true for China, Russia, the US and its proxies, everyone; the Chinese and Russians just dress it up in a different form of morality, that of the doctrine of non-intervention. Which isn't appealing to westerners who've been conditioned to respond to a different set of stimuli- but only in selected cases and situations of course. The why was asked for, and got the answer. Don't like it? The only solution is to go back to 6372 BC, get yourself appointed God and redesign human nature so we're capable as a collective (or even as an individual in most cases) of putting moral considerations above economic, political or practical ones, that's the only thing that'll 'fix' it.

The Russians and Chinese don't want another US proxy in the area, Russia doesn't want to lose its military base, and the west utterly asterisked the pooch for intervention by its treatment of Libya where it turned a theoretically even handed protect civilians mandate into "Regime change here we go- we'll protect civilians on one side, other side please feel free to level Sirte while we help you out because those civilians don't count!". Might as well ask why the west doesn't knock over the government in Bahrain despite it being a despotic dictatorship that likes to imprison and torture doctors for treating injured protesters and relies on foreign mercenaries (Saudi army) to prop itself up- it's against their national interests, would likely result in a more pro Iran country right on SA's doorstep and bye bye large US naval base in Manama; human rights/ freeeeeeedom considerations are secondary, end of story.

Dunno really, there's usually blame on both sides but I don't know about the balance. Activision belatedly paying out bonuses suggests they were being withheld and later realised their position was untenable, and the treatment of the general IW staff around the time was dreadful and probably would have been criminal if done by an individual rather than a multi-billion dollar company. Then again I'm pretty much always going to back a developer over a publisher on this sort of thing since it is clear that IW were delivering a good product (even if I don't personally like it it sold like hotcakes) that should have been rewarded commensurately. As a casual observer I'd laugh, loudly, if Activision actually lost Modern Warfare to W&Z since it's the flagship Activision Yearly Iteration Franchise game but I suspect that claim is just leverage.

Tried going back to CKII and try out Wiz's mod. Got bored very quickly, same old issues. Somewhat baffled as to why I like the original so much and now find the sequel to be quite so tepid and unremarkable. Have been slowly going through StalkerSOC over the past couple of weeks, just completed X18. I think the game goes up in my estimation every time I play it which considering how much I liked it originally is really saying something. It's got more sheer atmosphere than a year's worth of standard titles.