Zoraptor

Romney strikes me as the Republican equivalent to John Kerry. A candidate who almost nobody has any real enthusiasm for, except for the belief that he's "electable" while the other candidates aren't- and that he isn't the much loathed incumbent.

Ubi didn't make their own DRM prior to Uplay (and even then they tended to bung Tages on for good measure). They used Safedisc then Starforce then SecuROM then Tages (pretty sure it's an old gen1/ 32bit Tages on BG&E), then Tages and Uplay. And at various times, no DRM at all, not even a disc check. I've said it before, but I will never ever understand what Ubisoft intends with their DRM schemes. It's a perfect storm of alternating obnoxious heavyhandedness and poorly explained and dreadfully underpublicised lighthandedness. And their record for fixing old broken DRM is utterly abysmal.

The combo of Bioware, 360 and UE3 made Yvonne StraHOTski look a bit peculiar. What hope for a mere mortal?

There definitely was a mod to disable it. Never understood the complaints about it myself. Worked well to stop rest spamming and introduced some interesting mechanics. Probably best not to discuss it further though I guess, as there would be inevitable spoilers.

That seems to be primarily shlock space opera staple- Earth is in Danger, Stay Tuned For More!!! though if I play ME2 again some time I may pay a bit more attention to who is talking about Earth being hit and what they say exactly, and whether it comes from TIM directly or indirectly. Otherwise, the Collector's plan seemed to be the far more sensible kill off all the aliens on Omega and hit there next, rather than Earth. That would certainly make more sense given the Collector's apparent weakness at direct confrontation.

Neither are plot holes, the second is pure opinion. I'd say there's actually plenty of in game evidence that the Collector ship is not that great- it runs away from the few fixed guns necessary to defend a small colony like Horizon, for example. It had zero chance of hitting a well defended target even on in game evidence, thus things like the plague on Omega to kill off the non humans and get lots of vorcha there. The circumstances under which you fight it are almost polar opposite from the first time, you're in a larger and better armed ship even by default, and they're the ones surprised. If it were a plot hole it would be pretty much identical to the working for Cerberus one- you're basically just believing what TIM says about the collectors being OMTG teh big threat!!one!1!! even despite knowing that he's utterly amoral and completely untrustworthy, and later knowing that he set Horizon up in the first place. I'm slightly reticent to speculate given that the game has leaked, but I'd go so far as to suggest it may have been a case of one reaper servant using you to eliminate another reaper servant.

Only one of those (working with Cerberus) is a genuine plothole, the rest is just stuff you didn't like. That's just the direction they chose to take, much as Obsidian developed K2 around having to have Kreia until the plot demanded she go, even if you didn't trust her. Your only knowledge that Kreia is no longer a sith comes from Kreia herself, your only knowledge that TIM has humanity's best interests at heart comes from him etc. I'm no fan of how they chose to accomplish their plot as it is at best clunky, but then again lots of game plots have decidedly clunky aspects precisely because without them the story would not exist. It is more clunky than K2 because it is a direct sequel using Shephard, but I think I can safely say that everyone has seen people who absolutely loathe the idea that Kreia cannot be spaced in K2 as soon as you leave Peragus- not all called Volourn, either- and that that complaint is fundamentally the same as that applied to working for Cerberus; that it's a plot contrivance in order to tell the story. My big list of criticisms for ME2 would be: Cerberus (plothole), too many loyalty missions (personal preference), gob smackingly awful final boss (fundamental and absolute irrefutable truth), gameplay which was too frequently overly popamole (personal preference).

I have to disagree at least partly and that's despite also finding the overreliance on character related side plots irritating. The loyalty mechanic worked fine, some of them certainly could have been better handled in terms of how the loyalty or lack thereof paid off but most had a reasonable reason for the increased performance. Have to agree with Nepenthe, there aren't really gaping plot holes in ME2. The oversupply of loyalty missions results in a rather poorly integrated (or perhaps poorly paced might be better) and rather underdeveloped plot, but it makes reasonably coherent internal sense despite that. The only plot holes are introduced in the context of it being part of a series and your likely antipathy to Cerberus from ME1. Even then I'm willing to cut it some slack with the proviso that they should really have found a better way, given that I don't get upset at Kreia being a forced companion in K2 when you can find out almost immediately that she's a sith.

It is fixed. It works fine on modern hardware out of the box, er, so to speak, which is all they ever do. As I said, there's good reason for not bundling third party fixes for things like widescreen (copyright, security issues, support) and it's well outside their scope to do it themselves. They've fixed the installer borking itself on any NT based OS if you didn't know switch-fu and the game dying on any processor with HT enabled (plus the codec issues with movies, albeit belatedly) and that's all they needed to for it to work.

Multicore is fixed (heh, all it needs is something like "imagecfg thief.exe 0 0" from a DOSprompt iirc) but just about nothing else is, no widescreen/ddfix etc. I understand why as bundling what are effectively mods opens a can of worms on the support and licencing side but there are a lot of complaints about it.

Was this deliberate? Rand Paul = Ron Paul's son, so I expect he was named deliberately. He's currently a senator new entrant from 2010, iirc.

Preorders? More planned than the whole of last year. CK2. Magna Mundi ME3 Not absolutely 100% on a pre-order for ME3 but it's very likely. They've had multithreading since at least the Heir to the Throne beta patch phase.

Well, the original intent was to pick a verbal fight, but then I changed my mind... So, at the time I wrote it, wouldn't it be considered trolling? Interesting question, I guess if trolling were a crime it might at least be Conspiracy to Troll or something similar. If we wanted to be a bit more philosophical we could view saying that it was meant as a troll as a type of meta-troll, where the troll is achieved by saying that something else was meant as a troll?

It's meant to be Supernatural, the TV show. Which I presume is on the CW network in the land of stars and stripes.

If you're actually happy you didn't get a response then it cannot really be trolling. The classic troll is saying something controversial because you want a(n intemperate) response, after all. There certainly is a point to be made about the US having tools to control the internet that make the Great Firewall look like a 3 year old's lego castle, even without the added context of SOPA/ PIPA.

Yep. Hope is a precious commodity, don't waste it on Back In Action unless a real time, fog of war free, JA2 'reimagining' appeals.

Yep, my computer is more than 5 years old, and was only mid range when new. Amount I've spent keeping it able to play new games? 130USD if you count the replacement graphics card for when my old one went to Silicon Heavan and a wholly discretionary 2->4GB RAM upgrade. Thats... 3 new games in the US, or less than 2 new games here. And if I were selling it 2nd hand I could barely give it away (in fact I almost certainly would give it away if anyone wanted it, as it isn't worth anything for resale).

Given the Mitsoda comment I thought you were referencing Ferret Baudoin and NWN2.

Magnets work exactly as they should.

Some do try and do metriced reviews, scores out of ten for a range of different categories like sound graphics etc. It doesn't really work all that well though, not least because the problems with game reviews goes a lot deeper than just the scoring system, extending to short deadlines, being beholden almost entirely to the people you are reviewing and, frankly, a lot of reviewers being simply dreadful at reviewing. It's also fundamentally subjective in everything except narrow technical aspects.

SR3 didn't do well enough though. U-draw is the catalyst for their current problem but their primary problem is that while every other large publisher has one or more cash cow WOW/ COD/ BF/ Sims/ GTA/ AssCreed/ Madden that will reliably supply them with periodic Large Wodges of Dosh THQ's successes aren't large enough to recover from problems or build up margin for error. 2k and Ubisoft would be in the same boat (even more really, neither of them are in great shape as it is) if they didn't have GTA or AssCreed. Some of THQ's ideas have been a bit... harebrained too. They planned a Red Faction TV show, iirc.

Even the forum software thinks this is cool news! The Origin requirement has actually been on the EA website since ~ October, they've got all their back-of-box disclaimers on there.

It is more than just semantics. Science and the scientific method requires 3 basic things: 1) A testable hypothesis 2) Objective measurement 3) Ability to replicate and repeat, to show that results are consistent [--> Revision, rejection or lack of rejection of hypothesis] To use one of those horribly over/mis used internet catchalls "lack of evidence is not evidence of lack". Science works increasingly poorly as you move towards the abstract/ subjective since that is by definition unmeasureable/ not objectively measureable and increasingly well as you move towards stuff that can be described by absolute means. That's simply a limitation of science.

The actual quote you get from Centeol is this: The name is slightly different, Icarus vs Irenicus, but the powerful wizard part is accurate. Tanova was one of the named vampires in Bodhi's lair. He probably would not have been called Irenicus at that point anyway, since that was the name he was given when he went bad ("Shattered One" or similar, iirc). I thought that his old name was mentioned in BG2 but that may just have been Bastilla Femshep whatshername calling him "Joneleth" instead of Jon.

Nah, it's not a strawman. It's more that the subjective and objective are related but immiscible concepts. Objectivity requires, at its base, an ability to independently measure and quantify and is absolutely essential to a scientific approach. There is objective proof* that objects attract each other dependant on mass, that if you combine excess oxygen and carbon via an ignition source you end up with carbon dioxide, that chimps and humans are closely realted genetically etc. The question of whether god exists is entirely immiscible with scientifc observation- he could not be measured or quantified in anything other than a wholly subjective sense. Same as with the metaphysical question of whether any of us really exist. Basically you cannot use science to prove/ disprove the abstract. You could probably say much the same thing about "honour" (cannot be objectively measured) as god, but that does not mean that honour doesn't exist. *technically consistent failure to disprove