Zoraptor

Everybody who cares enough about the games to analyse their respective plots and how they connect, I'd hope. There's something you can probably blame DA:O for. Played the Ultimate Edition and decided there wasn't a single bit of extended content I'd pay $10 for outside a bundle. Spare some blame for EA too, as I probably would buy (some of) the dlc if it was ever cheap, or bundled. But then while I did download BDtS I never even downloaded Zaeed, who was free, so who knows. Simply put, I'm just enough of a fan to talk about it on the internet but not enough to spend extra money if it isn't both cheap and convenient. Doesn't make it any less stupid if EA were putting crucial story information into dlc because the inevitable consequence of that is that the majority of people who do not play it will go huh? if it becomes important. Mind you, given that one of the big confusions about the ending of ME3 was caused by the last dlc implying that relays would take out entire star systems when exploding...

I'd agree that MS probably shouldn't shell out that much cash, but they're committed to consoles at this point- if they could build a time machine they'd probably go back to 2002 and kill the Xbox project and invest the money into tablet computers and shiny smart phones but as it stands a lot of people at MS have no option but to keep pushing the xbox until it succeeds. Best way to do that given it will almost certainly be a shrinking market is to get exclusives (kill the competition in the cradle) and diversify what the xbox offers as much as possible in preparation for TV makers starting to seriously go for internet capable TV which has the potential to eat console market share badly in the medium term.

I think MS could certainly find uses for WoW/ Blizzard- if they want to do streaming even as just an option (which they'd be fools not to at least look at) then things like WoW or Diablo become more useful to them on the console side as well. The strategic element would be to lock the games into prefering MS solutions and to use their biggest advantages by (groan) 'synergising' their product lines. There's a hint of that with the (non-Sega) Shogun game which is Win8 exclusive basically because that is what MS have told the devs to do. Putting MW/CoD onto Live would certainly give that a boost, and having a CoD as an exclusive launch title would given the nextbox a significant boost. Having said that THQ arguably would make a more likely targetas it is far far cheaper, even though MS is hardly short of cash reserves.

How many people actually played LotS though? There's nothing I can recall in either game they could be relatively sure everyone would have played. The only thing that makes sense for me foreshadowing wise is that the starchild is a VI of the reapers' creator race, since there are a fair few VIs around and the Prothean ones serve much the same purpose. I'm not keen on cutting much slack for Bioware here in particular. When they had a chance to explain and expand motivations and the like in the first game they copped out with "your tiny mind cannot comprehend our motivations", and the Prothean VI in the first game would have been an excellent point to foreshadow (or outright mention) the superweapon. That would also have given some much needed story ccontinuity between the three installments.

Apple, Google or especially MS might be interested as they have vested interests that might be served by owning a large game maker and all have a lot of usable cash. EA plain doesn't have enough money. Reckon they'd be about a year too late on unloading Actiblizz to get maximum return though.

Wrote themselves into a corner, probably, knew where they were going (in a general sense) but didn't know what to do when they arrived. The starchild- and the whole superweapon/ catalyst, for that matter- would not be anywhere near so bad if they'd done a proper job of foreshadowing it and it hadn't just popped up out of the blue part way through the last game in the trilogy. Hokey dream sequences and maudlin "OMG think of the children!!!" prologue sequences in the same game don't really cut it. It's marginally better than ending with "it was all a dream!", at least. But I'd still say that while the ending was not good the worse part was the overlong turgid gameplay slog preceding it.

Given the similarity of ending style we could probably look at Deux Ex Invisible War to get an idea of what any future ME titles may do to deal with the ending choice- pick whatever they think makes sense for the new story and continuity with the old can go hang. It's (to an extent) what they already did with ME2. If TOR had been more successful I think an MMO would have been inevitable, but now only if it could be done on the cheap.

Sounds more like a post apoc Men of War than anything else, unsurprising since it's the same companies and engine.

I ended up basically paying no tax at all (pretty much only VAT, think I even got NI contributions back) when I worked in the UK, but only because I knew someone who told me how to do it. It was actually a rather weird feeling, despite being completely legal.

I'd put money on both consoles being out next year. The market in consoleland is so shaky I cannot see how they can delay it further. It'd endanger a bunch of mid range publishers (not just THQ, if further R* titles sell like MP3 did 2k will be in very real trouble, Sega ain't in great shape either etc) and at the sales levels currently there probably ain't even generating that much in the way of tail end profits anyway. Realistically the 'home console' model looks like a dead duck medium term. As soon as streaming services become mainstream the console market will become (more) unsustainable.

SP the cartoon is designed in Maya, I would have thought that the game would be similar in approach so Max\ Maya whatever for character design. Most references to flash for PC/S360 games refer to the UI. I'd agree that the six month contract sounds very South Park related.

It's a bit late for character creation in South Park I would have thought- unless there's a tie in or mobile port being planned.

Plenty of people play the Sims as, well, sociopaths. No toilets, find the most amusing way to make your sims' lfe miserable, set their house on fire whatever. While it's certainly not as overt as putting No Russian on high replay at the same time it's hardly all wine and roses over in Simland either.

IIRC it was a generic "we'd love to do an Ultima" comment. The original source for the rumour was Desslock (presumably his is the linked qt3 post in the article).

For that matter the DAO marketing was hardly the epitome of taste and restraint- nor was the ludicrous and completely gratuitous blood splatter in game though at least that could be turned off. To an extent I think you can blame publishers for not doing what their close model industry (movies) do and not having lower budget releases with more focus on 'intrinsic worth' but only to an extent. Fear of risk is pretty prevalent in most industries and so long as an Activision can profitbaly run on about three major games a year that is what others will go for too. Having said that some of the discussion I've seen for the recent Sniper Elite game left me really wanting the ability to teleport them to Fallujah 2004, or Homs, or Stalingrad so they could get a taste of what they were really talking about.

The video is clearly faked. Anything with a bow upgrade in it that is Thief related is always fake.

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.