Zoraptor

Yeah, the problem would be that the parts of making a game that are most important- getting the correct gameplay systems set up, graphical fidelity, organising game development efficiently- are things which do not have direct equivalents in general software development. You can bring people in for those tasks of course, but unless you're building a whole new team you'll at minimum have potential integration problems. OTOH I'd think that a specialist database software writer could be very useful, as there is a lot of database manipulation and usage in a typical game, for something like Homeworld you'd have lots of ship classes and weapons as examples.

The trial and keep management were better than anything in the NWNOC and alone would have made a better experience, and other bits were pretty good as well, like Jerro's Haven- though the overarching storyline and most of the characters were pretty cliche and there was a lot of unnecessary padding both of encounters and storyline. I certainly would not rate it as a top tier RPG experience for the OC. On the other hand I have never been able to think of a single redeeming feature of NWN1's OC. Even the 'the game was meant for multiplayer really/ the expansions were better' argument doesn't work for me as it was so bad that I never felt even a twinge of desire to try them.

You shouldn't feel ashamed about how your government handles Zimbabwe, because there isn't anything that you can do about it. I don't like my (New Zealand, we get a fair bit of SA news since there are a lot of ex pats here) government's ambulance at cliff bottom attitude towards children's health much at all for example, but since I neither voted for them nor have given them any support on the matter whatsoever I put the blame where the blame lies, with them not me. If it really were true that you could not even show dissent in Russia then there's even less reason for Russians to feel ashamed of what their government does as it is (even more) unrepresentative and they don't even get a theoretical say in what it does.

No individual should feel ashamed of what their government does, unless they support it- in which case they won't feel ashamed anyway- as there's nothing any individual can do. Do you feel ashamed of your government's wholesale and unconditional support of Mugabe, having the worst war since WW2 (that's Congo, minimum 20x the deaths of Syria and still rising) practically on your doorstep, your police shooting strikers, your cricket team losing to New Zealand of all people, because you shouldn't unless you condone them. You'd also get a very long list of all the times leaders killing their own people is perfectly fine, because the leader happens to be supported by the West and uses the dehumaniser du jour- communist, terrorist, anarchist whateverist the current boogeyman ist.

That rather depends on the contract though. Not buying FONV would have had ~zero net effect for Obsidian since they weren't paid royalties, for example. I wouldn't worry anyway, gamers as a collective tend to have zero spine when it actually comes to following through with not buying stuff.

Eh, you wouldn't have been buying it anyway since it is/was steamworks. Might end up buying it if the steamworks gets nuked since I couldn't care less about Uplay so long as it isn't the always online variety, else won't, but that's status quo ante.

NWN2 had far too many trash mobs, and playing with the party AI on at higher difficulties or with lower patch numbers/ no expansions (iirc they added the 'scaled casting' option that stopped people Abu Daziming a stray kobold later) was... not a great experience. One of the games that would have been better if it were about ten hours shorter, so long as that ten hours was chopping out all the trash mobs in the orc caves, warehouses etc. Having said that it was technically flawless for me when I played last year on Win7/64 and my specs are an order of magnitude behind those of the op, and it was overall an enjoyable experience though not a patch on MOTB in either gameplay or storyline. Obligatory, NWN2OC >>> Paint Drying >>> NWNOC, FACT!

Yeah, I don't think anyone should have concerns about the setting, those involved have shown they're very good at that part- it's mainly that the writers for this were mostly involved in the Plansescape part of PST, not the Torment part, so there's still the possibility of having a good setting but poor story execution.

They certainly do use them as political footballs and distractions from their own internal problems but it's difficult to assign too much blame to them, if they were added to the list even collectively I'd add them at the bottom, possibly after an ellipsis. None of the immediate neighbours are rich, certainly not rich enough to absorb 100ks of refugees without significant problems, they're still mostly now and historically almost always ruled by autocrats who don't care much for their actual citizens let alone refugees beyond wanting to make sure they don't revolt, Jordan's population is more than 50% Palestinian already which is historically and currently a big destabilising factor, Iran has no real obligation or reason as a distant shia persian country to accept sunni arab refugees and only really supports Hamas as an enemy of their enemy (with most of Hamas's money coming from KSA etc), and any settlement of refugees undermines the argument for repatriation/ compensation/ right of return, benefiting the one country they all regard as their enemy, Israel. Lebanon in particular is hard to blame as it was always a finely balanced ethnoreligious mix where suddenly adding 10% refugees to the population was always going to cause problems (unlike Jordan which got more proportional refugees but at least basically everyone was arab sunni) with almost no scope for flexibility and most of the really egregious anti palestinian stuff was carried out by non governmental groups like the Phalange and SLA. I guess they collectively can be blamed somewhat for fighting Israel though that was a decidedly two-to-tango situation and ultimately a response to having an artificial and fundamentally antagonistic state arbitrarily plonked down on land people were already living in.

Relic won't be shut down. They'll be bought by EA. 'Twould be a glorious whirlwind of butthurt.

Time is certainly a big factor, though it is possible to cook healthily and quickly too everyone loves convenience. I would add education as well though, lots of people simply do not know much about what food is healthy, and many do not know how to cook much at all. I'd dispute the other part though, at least here I could buy healthy food more cheaply than something like McDonalds even once a day. I'd reckon I could feed four people reasonably healthily for roughly what it would cost one person to eat at Maccas- they wouldn't be getting wine with the meal but I don't think you get that at the golden arches anyway. If it were something like a noodle based vegetable stir fry I reckon I could do it as quickly, too.

For obesity vs 'natural' height and weight growth there's the Body Mass Index and the like as normalisers, it isn't just that people are getting taller and hence heavier, they're getting taller but their weights are increasing disproportionately, ie they're getting taller and fatter. Glycemic index can be used to illustrate the overall problem with a lot of western food in that all too often it is very rich in energy but disproportionately poor in terms of making you feel 'full' after eating. Drinking a litre of coke gives you a huge amount of energy, but won't make you feel full for very long, as an extreme example. If you are doing lots of exercise drinking coke won't make you put on fat, but most people aren't doing that much exercise.

Practically, Hasbro. Else, NA Atari by the look of things- but the BG3 stuff mentioned recently wrt to Obsidian were with Euro Atari, so who knows. "© 2011 Hasbro, Inc. All Rights Reserved. © 2011 Atari Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Marketed and distributed by Atari, Inc., New York, NY.."

No really big recent successes, no guarantee of them getting royalties from continuing sales and I'd guess a fair bit was spent shopping Kings.. around to publishers as well. If the discontinuation of support for AOEO came as a surprise and at the wrong time it's easy to see how they could get caught short.

Everyone uses the news outlets that agree with them to prove their points, a logical dictat given that you can hardly use outlets that don't agree with you to prove your points. RT is a funny one as it is mainly designed to troll the western political elite, hence you have Max Keiser (more infotainment/ opiniotainment than anything on Fox, possibly even when Glen **** was still on air) ranting about metaphorically (more or less) dragging bankers out and shooting them en masse which is broadly left wing and lots of stuff on UKIP which is broadly right wing- the common factor being that it will cause delicious butthurt amongst top tier politicos who are antipathetic to Russia. The real problem from the 'mainstream' perspective about RT is that all it has to do is knock holes in their narrative to get credibility- they don't actually have to establish a proven alternative, just a plausible one. Ultimately the causes of obesity come down to too much energy in processed food and not enough exercise in compensation. The ubiquitous fructose corn starch/ corporate welfare subsidy is partly to blame in the US, but it doesn't adequately explain why weights are increasing throughout most of the west as well.

It's damn addictive!!! [/grammar troll, and not at all an excuse to play around with the new reply editor] Clocked FTL a couple of times. My playstyle must be fubared though as I still only have the three inevitable ships unlocked. Also very slowly playing through BG2, finding SCS to be a lot more enjoyable now I actually have spells like Breach. I'm finding that I'd really like to nuke Melf's Minute Meteors entirely though (ludicrously overuseful for a lvl 2 spell even with the nerf applied) and change Chaos/ Confusion to single character effect. Too many fights coming down to who gets chaos off first, whether I remember to berserk Korgan and the main character and given that you can guarantee a remove/ dispel magic is going to get cast using chaotic commands or similar prior is pretty pointless. So far my historic ranking of BG2 as excellent and BG1 as merely decent but a good springboard for its successor has only been reinforced.

Oh no, live action 3Dawg video leaked! What is that crazy dj laughing at? Steel be with you? Harold is a tree? Little Lamplight? Tune in to find out! (And sadly, gif animation >>> Bethesda animation for serious)

Yeah. Basically the Salafis hate Sufis because their interpretations of Islam are almost diametrically opposed in terms of philosophy- albeit the Salafi/ Wahhabi doctrine is dogmatically opposed to pretty much anything that isn't Salafi. They'll cheerfully enforce rules (as always,their cherry picked subset of specifically and specially interpreted rules) from the seventh century on everyone else whatever religion or sect because they believe it's what god wants. Practically though I rather doubt their problem is with 'idolatry' per se with regard to the Timbuktu mausoleum but with something that is identifiable with an alternative and more tolerant sect which reminds people that there were early alternatives to radicalism and that were extremely successful in peaceful conversion.

Gave Faster Than Light a quick go. Very quick, as I cannot in good conscience play as the Federation unless I change my avatar.

There's a generic 'reputation' stat now, which is the white bar thingy (paragon/ renegade are still blue/red). It's a decent enough change in theory, though a bit belated.

The Tuaregs got a lot of their weapons from Gaddafi, but they're also (generally) moderate and separatist- hence them trying to set up the Republic of Azawadd in the north and not continue on to Bamoko/ the rest of the country. The extremists were a significant element of the anti Gaddafi groups, recruited from and previously active in the greater Sahal region, and did end up getting a lot of weapons from Libya post collapse as well as the usual source for weapons and funding for sunni islamic extremists, the KSA/ Qatar etc. Shame for the Tuaregs as like a lot of minorities they have been the victims of Arbitrary Colonial Line Drawing that lumped them in to (a) country(ies) that is not their choice, and the one time they get a realistic chance at self determination their revolt gets co-opted by a bunch of largely foreign extremists who not only start trashing the locale but end up drawing in western intervention. Blaming the tuaregs is basically just trying to blame Gaddafi for the problem, when the problem actually comes from completely the other side.

It is a good read and one of the best suggestions for an epic campaign I've seen. Would kickstart. And hurray for being able to use the word epic without irony for once.

I'd suspect that the average poster here is better educated and is above average on the pay or prospects scale than most people though, and that is a big factor. Almost everyone I know lives a reasonably healthy lifestyle (maybe too much alcohol for some), is reasonably fit, eats well and is reasonably well off financially. Yet the average weight of NZers continues to increase and their fitness decrease, there's more (little p) poverty (frankly the level of preventable child disease here is an utter scandal and the lack of action, which would almost certainly save large amounts of money in the mid to long term as well as not sentence people to a life of underachievement and sickness, is utterly disgusting) etc. It may well be different in Denmark which is an extraordinarily fortunate country in just about every measurable way, but it's certainly a problem in other Euro countries like the UK, France, Spain etc, and the US. And as much as there have been anti-fascist/ corruption protests they haven't exactly achieved much while there's been a corresponding increase in the reverse as well- New Dawn, lots of populist nationalism even amongst mainstream parties especially from places most effected by the financial crises and looking for convenient distractions and convenient people to blame, which is alarmingly like what happened during/ after the Depression in the 30s though it will hopefully not have the same results. I cannot help the feeling that in a century people will look back at this era as one which had almost limitless potential but ended up squandering pretty every single bit of it. Too many short term non fixes, pushing any reckoning into the future in the hope that some sort of miracle will turn up to fix everything, too much selfishness and too little self control.

NKVD records are around a million for people directly killed by Stalin's orders. There isn't any doubt he was a spectacularly unpleasant guy with or without western or Krushchev era soviet revisionism, and with or without things like the 30s famines. Having said that he was better than Hitler- for the very little that is worth- he/ the USSR was by far the most important in the defeat of Hitler and he does tend to get the blame for any and everything from the west, including attempts to make him worse than Hitler by blaming him for all the soviet war dead; as if the stuff he did do wasn't bad enough. But there probably is a certain amount of westerners 'wanting' him to be the worst as that makes it easier when a bunch of eminently western institutions- Germany, the Catholic Church etc- were responsible for or complicit in the 'worst' stuff. Most people don't really care about the millions in US jails because they're criminals- rather than political prisoners or similar- who have gone through the justice system and for most people that means that they broke the law and deserve punishment, though things like legalising cannabis suggests that at least one of the main contributors to the prison population ("War on Drugs") doesn't quite hold the cachet it once did. Excepting those incarcerated for direct guncrime it's a peripheral issue to gun control anyway.

Finished BG1. The latter parts are solid if unspectacular for the most part, I've never really understood what they were thinking for the first part with the hordes of kobolds, especially the ones with bows which were borderline trolling. The story was actually a fair bit better than I remembered, though I'd generally say that Bioware's ability to tell stories has improved since then and BG2 was a marked improvement in itself. Had lots of minor scripting bugs, the chessboard in Durlag's Tower had to fired manually and the cutscene having killed the dopplegangers in the ducal palace never triggered either as examples. I used a 3/3 party with a human berserker, dwarf cleric of talos and elf wild mage plus Imoen (cheated her to M/T, dualing her wouldn't work as I couldn't select any spells thus couldn't complete it), Coran (GM longbow, THAC0 of 1) and Dynaheir in the end, though I actually used just about everyone at one point or another. I cannot say I'm enamoured of SCS for BG1 though, it's rather like being in a P&P session run by an autistic 12 year old who really doesn't want you killing 'his' monsters. The net effect is that you can guarantee that all the really annoying spells that you cannot defend against effectively are going to be cast on you and every mage will not only know chaos/ confusion/ stoneskin/ proitection from magical weapons/ missiles etc but have them multiple times so that overall the AI produces more cheese than a billion tons of milk. Probably a bit of a clash of styles though as I don't furiously min max (Coran had a magnificent 19 hp at the end despite being something like 7/9 level wise), don't rest after fighting a single goblin and I don't really smother my own gameplay in processed dairy products. I never found a single stoneskin scroll myself so I'm probably just bitter, but something seems a bit off when you have 3 mages in a party and they have almost no offensive abilities because every spell slot is dedicated to counteracting other mages and protecting them from invisibility potion abusing thieves and the like without having to rest after every encounter. The return to Ulgoth's Beard after Durlag's Tower was particularly egregious for combining multiple mages and multiple thieves immediately after a map transition with no possibility of pre buffing. Still, going to keep SCS2 for the BG2 playthrough as I think it ought to play more nice with a game that is a bit better designed around mage battles than BG1 was.