Zoraptor

Sorry Jaesun, but if ME3 does not require Origin for at least the MP parts I will eat my hat. Man, where does this stuff come from? Steam pulled it. How can you tell, objectively? Because they definitively are not Origin exclusives- you can buy BF3/ C2/ DA2 from pretty much any other DD retailer, just not steam. The only one who ejected toys from pram on the matter was steam, ironicly since they've been getting their client bundled into products sold by other DD vendors for ages and don't expect anyone to have a problem with that. The only current origin exclusive I know of is the digital version of TOR which has been specifically stated not to actually need Origin to run.

A point in sabotage is also needed to get the option to use EMP, isn't it?

If it's TOR pre-orders then aren't they limiting the numbers who can pre-order to try and prevent any server crashing? That's the usual reason for charging extra for pre-orders, as an encouragement for people not to cancel in situations where it generates extra work and means that they have had to turn away other customers. They've had some good offers. I think they were giving away Mass Effect 2 for free at one point. I could be confused on that. It's been known to happen. There was a 'free Mass Effect 2 with a copy of Dragon Age 2!' offer, but that was vendor independent. You're probably thinking of Dead Space 2, which you could get free with a BF3 (?) pre-order for a while.

Nothing particularly weird there. Assuming what the Kurds say is true there are two explanations. 1) The incursion thing was always for domestic consumption alone. We got attacked, We're striking back, We've struck back, Everyone celebrate our great victory! 1a) The US or Iraq may have asked them not to and they may have agreed despite initially planning an attack, but still wanted it thought that They Had Done Something. 2) There was a fairly large earthquake nearby which may have changed plans either through logistical problems or from the troops being needed to help in rescue and food/ shelter distribution. Don't really know about the assassinations, chechens are extensively linked to organised crime as well so it could be a subtle "please stop selling our heroin on the side, ta muchly" situation. If it ain't, well, I had little problem with ObL getting taken out and see no reason to object to this just because it was done by russkies rather than blue-eyed corn-fed apple-pie-eating flag-waving red-white-and-blue patriots. The turks didn't necessarily have any solid prior knowledge about chechen terrorists (or 'terrorists') being on their soil since it's difficult enough to keep tabs on 50 million people.

I don't think anyone is jumping on pmp per se. He's undeniably correct on some aspects- the whole 'people of the book' aspect of Islam is basically an acknowledgement that Jews and Christians worship the same god as Muslims, but in a 'misguided' way (and yes, Jesus is an acknowledged prophet in Islam, just not The prophet), as opposed to dhimmi (if I remember the correct term) like Hindus. On the other hand a Jew would probably say that Muslims and Christians do not worship the same god as he does. As I said, the primary problem is with the semantics. Is the Jew right, or is the Muslim? No way of knowing but plenty of room for argumentation about exactly where the boundary between sect/ heresy/ religion etc are set. Short of finding out how a genuinely disinterested 3rd party (aliens, perhaps) viewed things there isn't really an objective right/ wrong answer. Personally I suspect aliens would bundle all the Abrahamics together, or think we're just weird entities looking for any excuse to kill and dominate others and nick their stuff.

Domsceit-Berg deleted a bunch of them before leaving wikileaks.

The same god/ different god thing does rather illustrate how the terminology of religion isn't really very specific, and there's no theological or practical way to tell who is 'right' with respect to whether it is the same god. There's a bunch of examples that don't really fit nicely into fixed definitions too; Mithras which was borrowed by the Romans from the Zoroastrians/ Persians. Same god, or different one? Part of the Roman pantheon (after all the Romans who worshipped him still worshipped their traditional gods too) or not? Was Atenism a wholly separate religion from traditional Egyptian polytheism, a sect or just some sort of supra Amun-Re heresy? Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? Where is the line drawn for religions- are Druze Muslim? Are Alawites? Who gets to decide? For that matter were Branch Davidians or Jim Jones' lot Christians? I'm not sure if the real world were a fantasy setting that anyone would believe it, or would find it a bit obsessive (in the why did Tolkien spend so long designing Elvish languages? sense) since in most fictional works religion is just a tool for scene setting or plot development and has very little thought put into it beyond those requirements. Even the trinity is disputed, nontrinitarianism has existed almost as long as Christianity itself- and at one point Arianism was very popular in the Roman Empire. There are very few tenets that are absolutely undisputed, pretty much just god himself and Jesus being his son/ prophet.

Russia is our (2nd) biggest market = lots of key resellers.

Are we sure that the 2d game and the 'animation franchise' game are one in the same?

There are some publicly available NPD figures for DXHR, 244K for August, 180K+ (as Resistance 3 sold 180K and was one place below it; grabbed both figures off the QT3 NPD thread) for September. Even if it sold significantly more than R3's 180K that's still not much more than one million worldwide. For What It's Worth (not much, r00fles) VGChartz has it at ~1.4 million SE has also released the shipped figure. Should really clarify that that isn't tanking by any stretch, but I'd imagine it would be well below their expectations.

It didn't sell well though. It would fit it perfectly. If you look at success WB has had with Batman: Arkham Asylum and the upcoming Arkham City, it really wouldn't surprise me that they wanted to launch somewhat similar title with some other superhero of theirs. But while it would fit the clues, it's more than likely WB has one of their own internal teams working on such project. I tend to agree on the likelihood, but they have worked with independents before iirc- I'm pretty sure they only bought out Rocksteady after BatmanAA's release.

At present, Origin works similarly to Impulse, ie you can download/ install via Origin then actually uninstall Origin without breaking the games. The strong suspicion is that all future EA titles will use it and that it will need to be running at least for MP, as I would presume that Origin will be used pretty much exclusively for things like matchmaking/ achievement handling as it gives a unified framework to work towards and should cut down on costs. Having said that, BF3 at least of their upcoming titles does use an external browser for servers. Randomly spew "You must be online to go offline" errors and the like? I'd certainly prefer a GfWL (!) style offline profile system where you don't necessarily even have to go online. The SWTOR clarification was on the download vs retail issue, iirc. The download version is exclusive to Origin but it isn't bundled with retail (I would expect some 'encouragement' to drive installs though). And it's just about exactly equivalent to the Valve/ Steam /HL2 situation, really, sans Origin needing to be running at all times when playing (at present). Bundle with popular game: instant market share plus more $$$ in future- also the reason for steamworks being used as loss-leader.

Hobbit RPG? DC Superhero RPG? All this speculation drives me crazy. In the end, Obsidian is probably not involved in any of these anyways.... While I agree that it isn't likely, 'superhero from Warner's DC Comics' would potentially fit with a number of 'leading animation franchise' s quite well.

One use code tied to an account- like a serial number for a PC game, basically. If you then want to reuse/ resell the code you have to sell the entire account along with it which is not really practical in most cases. EA does have a webpage describing it, this is the description for the PS3 version of Dead Space 2 which ought to be generally equivalent by the looks of things.

Look, I didn't make the comparison originally and it was never presented as being a comparison as anything other than sex (and more specifically, what GL's statement on jedi sex implied). You can take that or leave it, no skin off my nose and I'm certainly not going to treat a discussion of the sexual activities of jedi with any degree of deadly seriousness just for the nebulous award of 'winning' on the internet.

If they can get $10 off each 2nd hand sale it is most definitely worth doing. To pluck figures from the sky, if there were 1 million second hand sales (probably conservative) over its lifetime and you could get everyone to buy an online pass (hopelessly optimistic) that's an extra $10 million straight to EA which is almost certainly far more than the MP would cost to develop and probably about half the game's entire budget. Given that there will almost certainly be few if any non-code assets unique to MP (ie its art, sounds, VO etc will almost entirely come from the 'base' game) and UE3's inherent MP friendliness it should be at worst revenue neutral just on that basis. As mentioned previous, there is also the possibility of driving Origin on PC (to encourage cutting of the DD/ retail middleman) and MP DLC packs too I'd also put money on them really wanting a 'friendly' DRM for PC which will put a bit of a dent in this* and encourage people to buy. Basic alterations and bonuses like DLC packs do not accomplish that as they just get pirated as well, and at least good-MP-as-DRM gives some 'benefits'. *Probably about as accurate as a set of VGChartz sales figures, but very likely something EA has to take seriously.

Objection your honour: strawman argument. Sex, dude. The whole Bond thing was related to how the jedi (or how GL considers the jedi to) see sex. Nothing to do with field work except as it pertained to sex and the sillier Bond's propensity for having it as often, and as casual, as possible. That's the whole point of me agreeing with Raithe's analogy so long as it was the 'sillier' ones, since the most recent Bond movie, in a fit of equally un-Bond like continuity, had him trying to avenge the squeeze who died at the end of the last one which by jedi dictates is bad bad bad. In terms of sex Yoda most definitely appears (semi-official poster art notwithstanding) to fit the M mould of not having it, perhaps never having had it and possibly never even having thought about it except in the context of wanting Bond to stop flirting with Moneypenny. But hey, feel free to draw as long a bow as you like from the comparison, you'll just continue to prove Jaesun right.

... 'cause when we think o' yoda, we immediate recollect roger moore as bond in octopussy... crashing the khan's palace with a menagerie o' circus side-show supermodels. Yeah, or Yoda might be equivalent to some sort of leader, I don't know, M? Or maybe not...

Stereotypical Bond (from the Moore/ Brosnan eras, and the more silly the movie the better) is probably a good comparison to what Lucas had in mind- that or maybe Buddhist warrior monks/ tantrics. I've heard more than a few people describe Bond- and especially Book Bond- as sociopathic. I'm pretty confident that we've already thought about it far more than Lucas has.

Looks like the tutorial level from Kotor.

This is incorrect, odd as it may seem. For Jedi sex is fine- outside the context of a healthy adult relationship. "Jedi Knights aren't celibate - the thing that is forbidden is attachments - and possessive relationships." So yeah, canonically a jedi PC* ought to be free to boff all the Ishi Tib/ Gamorreans/ Selonians they like, so long as they don't care about them. ... To whoever made the observation; yes, the perfect jedi is pretty much the perfect sociopath. *[edit: at the time of TOR there was a theoretical ban on 'relationships', which can be interpreted as no sex. Seems pretty clear that it in that sense at least it was flaunted, given Bastilla's progeny]

And to reiterate, that is a constructed difference where two largely unrelated properties ('healthiness' and 'energy richness') are being conflated together artificially. A calorie is a measure of energy produced, nothing more. 'Healthiness' ('goodness') is how healthy something is. You can have healthy high energy foods and unhealthy low energy foods, they're not directly related concepts. I provided the direct quote from you, there was no nuance just a blanket statement. It's a worthwhile point because all too often it is precisely what politicians do, make sweeping statements like "Ban all X!!!!" without sufficient knowledge of what they're actually banning. It's good to see you acknowledging that there are natural trans fats and such now though, some progress is being made. If you'd done so at the time instead of propagating a bunch of rubbish like saying all trans fats are artifical and similar to heavy metals there would not have been any problem. No, it isn't. It's appropriate to say that they are 'bad' foods. No it isn't, hydrocarbon has a very specific definition, "In organic chemistry, a hydrocarbon is an organic compound consisting entirely of hydrogen and carbon" to quote Wiki's perfectly serviceable one- if you described a protein/ fat/ sugar as a hydrocarbon in a chemistry exam you would get a big red X through the answer. The most technically correct term for what you want is probably the nice catch all "organic molecules" though 'digestible organics' or 'biological energy sources' or similar term would probably be more descriptive. It's actually quite amusing/ unfortunate in a way, as hydrocarbon is just about the only family of organic molecules I can think of without a single significant use as a foodstuff whatsoever, outside of oddities like petrol eating bacteria.

It may well be so. If that's the case it should not detract from SP though, the more separate they are the less effect they should have. And as Gorth notes, UE3 is fundamentally MP friendly out of the box. I'm not particularly expecting large amounts of awesome from the MP in any case, just that it won't really effect the awesomeness (or not) of the SP experience. At this point it's probably a combo DLC purchasing driver and further encouragement to tie copies to Origin accounts as much as anything.

Protip: There's no such thing as a "good calorie" and a "bad calorie." Energy is energy. Protip: You're wrong. Protip: He's right. A calorie is just another name for (~ 4.2) joules which is just another name for energy. In the nutritional sense it is the digestible energy portion of foods, but it's still energy. The 'objective' measures for 'goodness' of calories are things like Glycaemic Index. I'll only deal with the more egregious errors in the rest of your post. No. I pointed out that your "ban all trans fats!!!!!" idea was stupid and unworkable; that you didn't know that there were natural trans fats; you didn't know that some are (apparently) beneficial; and that you didn't know some could be metabolised. Your attempt to wriggle out of the evidence of your own ignorance is noted, sadly without so much as a hint of surprise. To whit, from you: And, from me: Glad you read the link on vaccenic acid though (even if you missed that it was two separate links to two natural trans FAs), 'tis ever a pleasure to lift somewhat the dark shadows of ignorance with the bright light of knowledge, even if it is unappreciated and unrewarded. No, there is clearly 'good' food and 'bad' food. How the food is metabolised is far more relevant as 'good' food and 'bad' food can have exactly the same energy production value (calorie) yet be widely differing in apparent health effects. Hydrocarbons usually produce death in the body, what with them being poisonous and all. Fortunately most people don't ingest benzene/ butane et alia. :1440x900 smugface:

It means it shouldn't (yeah, theoretically) detract from the SP experience even if it sucks?