Zoraptor

Yep. Jason Anderson was doing preliminary design work on it when he was at InXile, iirc.

Please don't give him ideas, there's enough robots asplode == awesome already.

Me too. Seems to be way harder than the first one, given I completed that on the hardest difficulty (and not even via new game+ either) yet I'm dying fairly consistently in DS2 despite only being on survivalist. Maybe they're expecting me to use all those 0 cost DLC items the store is full with to give myself an advantage.

Finished it. One of the oddest gaming experiences I've had is probably the fairest description. I usually have some idea whether I actually liked the game or not at least once finishing it but for ME3... not a clue. I did manage to avoid most spoilers which at the moment seems more of an achievement than finishing the game. Haven't read far back in the thread, but in some attempt to organise my thoughts: I liked a lot of the early stuff, and I even liked most of the shoehorned MP maps. Against standard enemies being a biotic (never played one before) gave a good feeling of awsum. The dialogue was wildly inconsistent quality wise. So was the story. I loathed the consistent use of maudlin and very quickly came to dread the 'sentimental' music starting up. Whoever thought Kai Leng was a good idea needs an urgent taste transplant, even one from a coprophage would be an improvement. Some of the enemies were grossly overpowered relative to baseline mooks Guns were far too plink plink I have absolutely no opinion whatsoever about the ending. That may be because the way the gameplay had imploded from the Cerberus Base onwards (got so bored I dropped the difficulty to narrative) was far more important than some Matrix type mystic addendum. Overall the game felt almost completely like a 'gestalt'- a succession of ideas, philosophies and vignettes bolted together from various people and external sources because they were 'cool' or 'awsum' even if they did not gel together well as a whole. And yes, squadmate distribution was not great either. Or to sum up, mostly OK, some good but with some truly dreadful garbage- primarily anything related to Kai Leng and just about everything post and including Cerberus Base. Bioware also desperately needs some decent Producers and Project Managers able to draw together disparate groups to form a cohesive experience. By my count that's the third consecutive Bioware project with a significantly 'bolted together' feeling and the second with wildly variable quality as a result.

Achievement unlocked: double post five minutes apart

'Distributor' rather than 'publisher', iirc. ie THQ will fabricate and distribute the physical media and the like, but the funding itself is THQ independent and if they folded it would not (necessarily) take the project down with it.

Created by Japanese/Russian self made eunuch and man of a thousand alts Drog, no less. Obtainable from various sources (eg terra-arcanum.com) Didn't stop it being a game that I know I ought to like in theory, but don't in practice.

I'm with numberman on this. If he'd got himself shot he would potentially have put someone else into danger as they rescued him. Doesn't stop him being brave of course, but it's the 'running into a burning house' type of bravery. Great if it works, slightly less so if you end up getting yourself killed, put others at risk and remove the children from a generally safe position (behind a wall) via a dangerous run. Waiting for the insurgents to break off would almost certainly have been a far better- if less 'heroic' and 'inspiring'- way of doing things.

I don't get a sore back much unless I'm sitting still for more than a few hours, bad leg cramps is my main problem as I get them often within an hour. For a sore back wandering around for a bit is the best solution I've found, if it ain't practical kneeling on the floor works pretty well as it straightens the back out and changes your position a bit (as would standing, but I've found that just makes my neck sore instead). You can actually do a fair number of back exercises while sitting or kneeling too. Gets some funny looks on occasion, but I've never felt the need to care about that.

My remailed copy of ME3 has turned up so I will be playing it, difficult avoiding all the spoilers though I've managed it. Will be interesting to see how Bioware ties all the threads together and what if anything all the C&C add up to.

Plenty of activities are inherently good- a mastectomy may not be, out of context, but a breast screening program would be. I don't think 'hacktivism' falls into the inherent good category, it is a context dependant good. But beyond basic auditing most corporate oversight is limited- entirely reactive- and they simply will not self report most of the time on the Turkey's Don't Vote For Early Christmas principle. The key thing is that a corporation or government would not be embarassed if they weren't doing stuff wrong, and indeed Anon/WL would get no traction at all if they were exposing essentially nothing. If Shell distributes HIV drugs to orphan children free of charge throughout Africa, if Goldman Sachs returns money it even suspects of being dodgy and refuses to do any market manipulation those revelations are not going to embarass them at all and won't get Anon/ WL anywhere.

Turn based would be likely. It could also be a WEGO system such as used in the Combat Mission games where 'turns' are resolved simultaneously in real time, once both players have set up their moves.

I take embarassing corps or governments as an end to itself, certainly. Can't say I've ever been embarassed by something I should be doing. Wikileaks did filter a lot of their stuff through the papers (Grauniad, NYT and Der Spiegel, iirc) for all the good it did them.

Bradley Manning :smug: Julian Assange :smugger: Both corporates and governments hate stuff which is embarassing or out of their control which whistleblowers are by definition. I struggle to think of a single instance in which it was someone other than the whistleblower who suffered from the whistleblowing and there are persistent attempts (see for example the current one in the US) to make any sort of uncontrolled release of info constructively illegal. You aren't actually going to get governments/ corps acting on leaked stuff if they can possibly avoid it just out of principle.

There were unofficial patches released, but that's all I'm aware of. I believe they have already been integrated into the GOG version.

MS is wildly variable in its reputation. On one hand Bungie was all Halo, all the time which a lot of people there did not like much at all, on the other they were able to buy themselves out of ownership by MS, something you wouldn't see from pretty muich any other publisher. There are practicality aspects though. A standard Obsidian project would have a budget significantly larger than Double Fine raised. At a million dollars a month overall having even a third of Obsidian's previous staff level and you'd be looking at ~8 million needed for a 2 year project. Obsidian ought to get more than DF (depending on how kickstarter holds up and if fatigue sets in) but you'd still be looking at a lot of people losing their jobs. I'm pretty happy with kickstarter as a model- just about anything is an improvement over the current video game business model, and kickstarter is far from the worst replacement- but it cannot fix all ills.

24 Stewardship* is excellent even for a player tutored mid game ruler. That's 9 holdings with no penalty- I was beating the Seljuks without even raising realm levies and still in the black cash wise. It isn't even just the high stewardship as his traits are perfect for stopping civil wars and rebellions, I had ambitious heretic Armenians who still loved him. *That's Basileus Alex, I guess Doux Alex could have lower stats or BGA could differ stats wise from CK2+.

If we're going to wish for something like a genuinely free press (not wealthy individuals' mouthpieces nor, I'd add, governmental ones, like the Beeb, Al-J or RT, though at least their biases are fairly obvious) we might as well go the whole unobtainable hog and wish for governments to be more transparent in the first place. Reality is that power will aggregate, and entities with power at any given time will seek to maintain their power, one way or the other. So long as Anon and similar are kicking over governmental and corporate anthills I don't have any real problem with them, most governments and corporates deserve a good anthill kicking every once in a while, on principle. The 'Anonymous' label is nice for corps/ governments to have a ready-to-use boogeyman for the horrors of freedom and the benefits of the warm embrace of Total Control Society, and nice for hackers who want a bit of attention to be able to self-identify to a group with an existing reputation.

CK2 as Alex Komnenus is pretty close to cheating- he's far and away the best statted historical character I've seen in the game. Not playing CK2 any more though, just got too annoyed at all the minor stuff and it's become apparent there really isn't much gameplay depth beyond makework stuff at the moment. While waiting for my UK remailer to send over ME3 (+Dead Space 2 and Stalker COP, for the same price as getting ME3 alone locally) I've been replaying GTA: SA. Still good fun, but I'll always wish there was a bit more scope for flexibility in the series- having to fight Tubbs in Vice City when the whole situation could and should have been avoided has always annoyed me.

If it's like the PC release it will most likely be 'glitchy' rather than genuinely buggy. As noted previously, it is their first game for console though certification ought to catch major potential issues. Might be a good idea to wait if you'd have problems patching. Hmm. Relative to something like traditional D&D there isn't a whole lot of character differentiation based on 'class'- you can develop as a fighter, a thief/ alchemist or a fighter/ mage, in effect, or a combination of those, with specialisation ultimately being rewarded. In terms of in game Choices and Consequences it's a bout as good as it is possible to get with a fixed storyline. It's also nowhere near as linear as Gorth makes it out to be, though nowhere near as free form as something like Chapter 2-3 in the original game either- more KOTOR as opposed to BG1, I guess. It's what we'd call 'consoley'. Not a button masher though, in fact that's probably why a lot of people had trouble with it as button mashing is a recipe for disaster- I'd compare it to something like Batman: AA mechanistically. It certainly does have some obnoxious QTEs, though this is perhaps because the PCGMR aren't used to them.

Their "one rogue coder" excuse for the state of the engine is about as credible as "one rogue trader" excuses from banks. It just might be technically accurate, but the monumentally borked lack of supervision that allows that to happen is in itself a very significant problem and that can be laid entirely at the feet of management, including Smith and, frankly, everyone right up to and including Spector.

They won't hand him over to the Afghans- that'd mean him getting the long drop, short rope treatment and there isn't a military anywhere that would let that be dished out by foreigners, if it can be avoided. Plus it would almost certainly damage morale, in a situation where the Afghans are well regarded it might not but there's clearly a large section of the US military personnel who do not regard Afghans well, understandably given the nature of the fighting there and the background. Given Haditha, the ability of the US military to deal with such events in a timely and reasonable manner is... questionable, to say the least, but when even a friendly country like Italy cannot get US personnel put on trial for something relatively minor like killing a bunch of people (accidentally) while hotdogging gondola cables in their A-10s there is no prospect of Afghanistan getting that sort of satisfaction and no real point even entertaining thoughts of what would happen if they did.

'Pure' Asari have Asari as both parents, that is mentioned multiple times. Thus they're probably something like snails on the sex front when it comes to homospecial relationships as opposed to the more sexually conventional (to our homocentric worldview, at least) heterospecial relationships. Technically, I should probably look up whether there is a term distinct from hermaphrodite to describe that sort of behaviour but since it's a sci-fi only situation and real world hermaphroditics like snails don't actually boff beetles in reality there almost certainly isn't without resorting to a made up term like paragyny. {additional, since I actually went looking to see if something like heterogyny existed as a term} They speak english. Of course they'll refer to themselves as female there, as that is what they resemble and every human who sees them will use the female pronoun and descrriptors. Just more homocentrism. They clearly reproduce sexually- it is also mentioned that traits of the father are picked up in heterospecial relationships and they clearly are not clones- Liara and Benezia, Samara and Morinth are not identical.

I cant believe they felt compelled to include a transvestite NPC. Seriously, I had no idea the transvestite community had such numbers! I guess hermaphrodites will have to wait until ME4. There's already a hermaphrodite. It's made explicit (hoho) that Asari can be both male or female depending on the circumstance, hence Liara (ME1 romance option) is a hermaphrodite.