Zoraptor

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.

It did. It may have got a slightly smoother ride- from memory I think the reaction at places like TTLG was largely positive- but then it was announced quite soon after SS2, a disliked company (EA) was thought to hold the rights to System Shock and the team making Bioshock was in very large part the exact same team that made SS2. After release there was of course a lot of criticism for them relating it to SS2 when it was actually a generic fps mechanically, albeit with nice atmosphere and a good (if Levine trope) story.

Yep, what this world needs is a bunch of self satisfied bankrupt neocolonialist White Man's Burdener hypocrites running around inflicting their vision on a world in which the problems are to a large extent the result of their last bout of vision infliction and holier than thou moralising. Russia helps Assad because he's their ally. The West helps the Khalifa's because they're our ally. Russia sells arms to Syria. We sell arms to Bahrain. Russia has a naval base in Tartus, the US has a naval base in Manama. The West complains about Iranian/ Hezbollah involvement in Syria but condones 6000 Saudi soldiers rolling over the causeway to squash an inconvenient uprising because the majority there worship the wrong branch of Islam and thus don't deserve the FREEEDOM!!! that Syrians do. The UNSC resolution on Libya specifically said that the West would protect civilians and as soon as it became convenient they threw that out the window and not only ignored attacks on but helped bomb inconvenient civilian areas- in direct contravention of their own resolution. Yet somehow it's all Different, Just Because and the Russkies and Chinese not believing a word to come out of the west's collective mouths is unreasonable because the West projects rainbows and puppy dogs (from its secondary fundamental orifice, like suspicious liquid from an internet shock site. Biggest bunch of hypocrites ever, more full of asterisks than a cess pit after a curry and bran eating marathon). Short story; it's realpolitik. The west will happily ignore international law and its own principles whenever convenient while pontificating and moralising like it's pure as snow, but will throw a wobbly whenever someone baulks them like a 5 year old wanting an ice cream. Sucks if you're Syrian, sucks if you're from Bahrain or Sirte or Bani Walid every bit as much.

I'm still chugging through BG1. I'm only 10k off the xp cap so I'll be heading towards BG2 fairly soon. Strangely enough I cannot remember anything at all about Durlag's tower though I'm sure I've played it before.

Someone used some of his art in a semi official website (though not actually Bethesda's own site) to promote Fallout 3 as well, IIRC.

Not really, there are circumstances behind it. WOTC/ Hasbro is not really a computer game publisher or developer itself and has not sub licensed since Atari (excluding the Neverwinter holdover). For all we know no publisher may be interested in D&D since it's never had great penetration on consoles and the last worthwhile title monetarily using D&D was probably NWN2, six years ago, on PC only. There's also the problem of deciding what the best strategy for it is- $20 mill+ multiplatform AAA aiming for millions of sales? Low to mid budget PC title aiming for 1 million plus? Portable/ online titles? Is Hasbro going to hand over the money direct or will there be external funding? Who will distribute it? Lots of questions for non specialists, especially when it isn't exactly like the specialist computer game publishers are hitting it out of the park with all their successful projects. Add to that they have a basically defunct current edition and even if they wanted to do it their options are limited to a few RPG focussed developers capable of handling the project. They ought to do something with BG at least, but doing nothing is better than doing anything just for the sake of it, though I'd guess we might see some movement to coincide with 5e. They won't make stuff public domain for the same reason very little stuff is voluntarily made public domain by corporations, there's no money to be made from it and potentially money to be lost. They aren't charities working for the betterment of mankind, after all.

I find myself less than enthusiastic about this. It seems to me to be a rather poor match up in that most of the 'creative' principles were primarily involved in the Planescape part of PST which they don't have access to rather than the Torment part, and- to be brutally frank- seems to be specifically and primarily designed to get maximum KS exposure by obtaining a Big Name rather than standing on its own merits. It's an opinion that is subject to change as more information becomes available, but Fargo's list of stuff includes basically one thing that is PST specific (overturning RPG tropes), all the others I can think of multiple other examples off the top of my head.

6 days 17 hours and 4 minutes, actually. Better than some I've seen.

In some cases there's a very large difference between Al-J arabic and Al-J english as they cater to very different audiences with very different tastes and expectations. They're about as biased as CNN (or RT, for that matter), it's just that they tend to view certain things with a reverse bias from most western stuff. CNN/ BBC etc = The West is Awesome! RT = Russia is Awesome, Al-J = Qatar is Awesome! For Al-J specifically there is a wildly divergent attitude between how they cover their good friends and cosectarianists the Khalifas in Bahrain as opposed to Syria where they're arming and recruiting the rebels, so while one is and has been wall to wall coverage the other rates barely a mention.

The main reason is that the Jewish lobby in the US is very powerful, probably the most powerful by size. There's a lot of donations to be had, and several important electoral states, notably Florida, have significant Jewish minorities. Historically, Israel was also a bulwark against soviet friendly arab states like Syria and Egypt. Practically the US gets next to nothing from their alliance with Israel now. There'd be far too much blow back for their military use, they're a PR nightmare and likely to get worse and they cost a lot of money in support. Will be interesting to see if Obama tries to be tougher now that he doesn't need to worry about reelection, though I wouldn't hold my breath personally.

Turn based old school RPG is about the best summing up it can have. Something like Avadon from Vogel would probably be a good baseline comparison, 'isometric' turn and tile based, lots of character skills, decentish plot, standard quest design, fairly strong reliance on old school techniques like kiting especially with some character choices. They are (were?) on sale direct from the developers for $8 combined (3$/ 5$) for the two existing games. I already own them both and they'd get a qualified recommendation in that I enjoyed them but I'm not sure how widespread their appeal would be. I'd suspect most people who like roguelikes or the spiderweb games would like the Eschalons as well.

Android is a smartphone OS. You readily admit that the only thing smartphone about Ouya is the OS. Ergo, it's a smartphone with all the smartphone capabilities removed save gaming apps. Like I said, that does not put it in the same league as consoles or gaming PCs. It makes it a suped-up smartphone (without the smartphone capabilities) meant for playing smartphone games on a TV. I have no love for the Ouya, but that is a fundamentally flawed premise. Steambox will also run an *ix variant as its OS, and that does not make it a phone with the phone bits stripped out, similarly when the nextbox gets released with a Win8 variant it will not therefore be a PC or a phone because Win8 is a mobile/ desktop OS as well. If it has the same or similar characteristics to a console then it is one even if it is running Babbage OS v0.1 on an 8086 with 16k memory. It may (likely) be a 'bad' console, of course.

It's probably worth it at that price, especially if you have realistic expectations. It's a pretty variable experience though so enjoyment will depend on how much you can set aside the bad parts.

Humans are unique snowflakes in pretty much every single scifi universe. Star Wars? Just about everyone of any importance is human. Babylon 5? All it takes to get rid of species that have been around since the dawn of time is to have some human yell at them a bit (at least the end of ME3 did not involve the Shep telling the Reapers to "get the hell out of our galaxy" and have them leave like whipped curs). Star Trek? Wonderful, enlightened peace loving humanity brings fluffy bunnies, lentil soup, understanding and prosperity to all the peoples of the galaxy. Vulcans may say "live long and Prosper" but humans Make It So despite the past 10k years of our existence proving demonstrably that in reality We Cannae Do It. Awesome humanity saving the day for Johnny Foreigner Xenoer is a cliche that needs to die painfully, but it's a genre problem not one with any specific universe.

I did remember to make the main character a high con fighter rather than a mage so it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. The previous time I played it (2003?) I made an immensely cheesey fighter (grandmaster longsword, 18/18/18 etc), left everyone else behind and solo'ed the Nashkel Mines to minimise the annoyance factor, and I wish I'd done that this time. I think I'll rather enjoy the increased AI emphasis on casters from SCS once my casters actually get some decent defensive spells but at the moment it is just really annoying. Also the modified spawn system has gone berserk and is respawning every wilderness encounter as soon as I kill them (hopefully fixed now I've played around with the BGTweaks respawner)

I've been playing Baldur's Gate. I'd forgotten why I had a generally low opinion of it but now I remember, its low level D&D mechanics and encounter design is just about the most annoying combination in the history of gaming. Maybe my enjoyment will improve now that only one character can be chunked by a single ranged missile crit hit.

Dude, you should be fine. A game disappearing from sale does not mean that you cannot download it, just that it cannot be bought by new people any more. Same thing will happen for XIII on GOG today/ yesterday, and people who bought that will still be able to download it even though it won't be buyable until a new deal is negotiated. But if you want a proper backup for NWN2 then copy out the entire game folder from ..\program files, and the game folder from ..\My Documents to an external device. If you restore them then running the updater will restore the registry entries and you have a safe back up; or for GG once the install is starting following download/ log in go to the Gamersgate Temporary Files folder, find the installer and copy that to an external device- then you have an installer as DRM free as one from GOG would be.

Funny, it almost looks like I've bought the most games over this sales period out of anyone here. Got Inquisitor and The Real Texas off GOG; BG1&2, Colonization and Botanicula off GG and I will get Eador (albeit not on sale) plus MoM and King of Dragon Pass at least off GOG before their sale ends. Of course, none of those cost more than $5 and BG2 was free... You could have registered your key on Origin to get a digital copy, no need to rebuy.

Unsurprisingly I did end up reinstalling BG2 for the first time since 2005, even more unsurprisingly I have both lost my original BG1 CDs except TotSC and managed to stuff up the mod installs for BG2 resulting in no item descriptions but everything else working OK. Nevertheless, I will be playing through the BG series as soon as I can overcome the PEBKAM errors. And despite saying that their D&D games would not go on special GOG is selling them for ~$20 as part of a bundle today only, for anyone feeling inspired by Tigranes' LP, though the Gamersgate D&D Master Collection at $10 (all IE games + TOEE, redistributed GOG versions; main difference to the GOG version is that it is a unified download and has fewer games) is a far better deal IMO. GG is also selling the individual games at a discount, which GOG ain't doing, and has the NWN bundle which I think is the only current way to get hold of NWN2 +xps as a DD.

GOG has said they won't be on special in their current sale (I presume it's due to the EE release). At 4+ GB combined they're larger than my data cap though, which is why I haven't really considered them.