Zoraptor

Kaliningrad Oblast (East Prussia, as was) borders Poland directly, so it would be theoretically possible. Practically of course that is exactly the sort of thing covered by a defensive pact like NATO. I know you're exaggerating, but that's... a bit off even as an exaggeration. Losing Suffolk implies enemies a few quick and jaunty hours from downtown London. There doesn't seem much doubt that Crimea would actually prefer to be part of Russia as I've seen even people antipathetic to Russia admit that (and it was, up until Krushchev decided to do some Stalin style tinkering with the SSR boundaries). Can't say I'd be surprised if Belarus ends up being absorbed by Russia in the long term.

It's a defensive alliance, anyone who attacks one NATO member attacks all. That is about as close to insurance as you can get in international relations and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't be honoured. But that does mean there's as little obligation to support other members in elective wars as there is for Laos, Paraguay or Belize to.

Heh, I guess with the euros getting back into the colonialism game the turks are feeling a bit left out. Must re-establish Sultanate People's Democratic Republic of Rum. Ludicrous threat in any case, it's about as likely as us invading Fiji to get rid of Frank Bananarama.

Been ages since I played it but I do remember a few problems. Wasn't balefire itself an anachronism too, lore wise? Doesn't really matter, didn't bother me at the time and certainly doesn't now.

** Is there any news on any plans to release Disciples 3:Resurrection in the States? (or just in English?) Apparently yes, if you don't mind DD, and releasing today (!). Will presumably pop up on other portals eventually. If you haven't got the other 2 KB games laready they have a sale on them on at Gamersgate as well.

I presumed the 'wut' was at the 'was terrible' part, since it was a pretty decent game, at least for non die-hard fans of the books. There've been plenty of far worse adaptations.

New King's Bounty game. That makes three games I'm likely to pre-order in early 2012. If I don't end up pre-ordering BatmanAC that would be more than in this entire year.

Funny thing is that they guy/gal riding the bus to and back from a bad job, doesn't have the money, desire, skills or time to prepare a healthy meal. Costs half as much to live on decent food as fast food*, and takes about ten minutes to do as well- and that's from someone who doesn't live on bread and potato but buys choccy biccies, coffee, pork fillet and the like**. Not having a stovetop or fridge would be a good excuse certainly and no doubt living in a high rent area with low income can be a problem too, but for most people it's never having thought about cooking/ can't be bothered rather than genuinely not having the time, and especially not having the money. Anyone can cook, it's hardly rocket science, and there's plenty of stuff that'll take ten minutes or less of their time. More relevantly if they can't be bothered buying cheaper now a little tax based surcharge ain't going to change their behaviour, is it? Having it pointed out to them that they can be healthier for cheaper with minimal effort might. *Taking 2 x MaccyD's meals/day @5USD a pop, average grocery bill for two people 50-70USD excluding non foodstuffs. **And lots of vegies, since that list doesn't sound too healthy. Normally around four types of vegies per meal, since they're far cheaper than meat (or dairy) by weight.

Funny thing is, you actually can make a healthy meal as quick as and almost always cheaper than fast food, if you know how. That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Does or, alternatively I don't post rolleyes for no reason. It's not that vegetable oil produced trans fats aren't bad, of course. But what you are doing is making a blanket statement similar to "cholesterol is bad!!!" (cholesterol is actually essential to proper cell membrane function, and without it you will die) and only slightly better than "aromatic rings are bad!!!" (good luck living without 3 amino acids ++).

As an illustration of what I was saying, I'd call Al-Shabab and the like Taliban clones, not an AlQ franchise. They're primarily an armed militia that uses terrorist tactics on occasion- like the Taliban, or the (non-muslim) Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, for that matter- and whose primary aims are internal to their country.

Yeah, ban all animal fats, steak, mince, milk, butter, the lot. Everyone can get over it by popping some newly legalised tabs.

Sega's always had the trademark registration. The only real question was whether it was a System Shock type divided ownership situation or Sega owned the lot. The tweet doesn't definitively clarify that, but Sega owning the lot has always been most likely as it's pretty much industry standard for the publisher to.

OK, I really sounded like a prick there. Sorry Zor. No worries, I wasn't in the least bit offended anyway. I don't think I'll add anything further at this point since this is a fairly well trod argument other than to say that the main bone of contention is probably where the line is drawn at what constitutes AlQ as opposed to regional players like the Taliban. I have read plenty on AlQ though, but have little interest in a citation war.

Leading animation franchise and rumours of another KOTOR game? Must be KOTQRSLJYR based on the Clone Wars cartoon. Which would actually be quite a good idea, if done right.

They hate our freedom!!1!! was simplistic at best when GWB said it and it's still, at best, simplistic. AlQ was never an existential threat to the west. Never had the capacity. The only thing they've ever been capable of was, well, getting us to hit ourselves in the head with a frying pan while trying to swat the AlQ fly. Deciding to spend the last decade living on credit has done far more to erode the west's power than AlQ could ever dream of achieving. Fact is that there are rather a lot of people who don't hate us 'for out freedoms' but because one day Uncle Muhammad got blown up by a drone for being tall and having a beard. Generally such people aren't big on exporting the global jihad- which tends to be an embarrassingly middle class trend and from embarrassingly friendly areas- but they sure are keen on making a mess for 'our' interests and friends. And that's the primary reason why we've been months away from beating the Taliban, for the past decade.

I'm with you on that boat. Also the support for Settlers is abysmal, it's still plagued with the same bug it had from the start which makes the game unplayable on some hardware (textures flickering blue which leads to either app crash or driver crash within 5 minutes of playing, happens with both NVIDIA and AMD hw). Consider that they also delay the PC versions of their multiplatform releases and it does make you wonder exactly why their PC business has declined 90% while the PC is growing overall. Unfortunately given how poor Ubi are at communicating their DRM honestly (see: From Dust, where they ended up deleting their own forum posts detailing its DRM as they'd flagrantly lied about it) it's a matter of faith even on the odd occasion when their schemes are relatively sane.

Yes, and you could make similar arguments for a host of other things too. Depends on how you measure it as almost all studies are done by lobby groups one way or another. However, if wikipedia is to be believed smoking reduces life expectancy by ~14 years on average. Given the average life expectancy of, say, New Zealand (80.3 years) every single smoker smoker saves the tax payer around $140,000 in superannuation alone, which amounts to ~8 years tax for someone on the median wage, by my rough maths, and will have paid multiple 10ks in excise tax (it's now around $6.50 tax per pack, +17.5% GST on top, iirc). That's taking financial rationalism to the "best if everyone dies the day after retirement" extreme level though.

I think I've managed to find the point that I'm obviously not getting across at all (based on your post here and WUE's blatant strawman above). I'm NOT ****ING SAYING THEY ARE BAD! It's not a binary choice between God's Angels and, well, "bad". All I'm saying is that I don't think this "support" to be so wonderful, a golden standard for gaming companies to achieve given the circumstances. Now I understand that stances other than this game/studio/publisher sucks/is the best ever are uncommon on the Internet, they do still exist! OK, I'm happy to accept that's what you meant (and I always think I come across more aggressively than I intend anyway). To elucidate a bit better though, the problem is not so much whether you are antagonistic or neutral to their approach, it's more a question of what they realistically can do differently and whether it could even theoretically be done better. Seems to me that they have the three basic options I listed: only bug fix the PC version with zero additional content, charge for any improvements from xbox development or combine the two without the charge- assuming they wouldn't just abandon the PC version wholesale, of course. Given those options I think that it is clear that the best one for their customers is the one they have picked. And you really cannot ask for much more short of them... converting themselves to neutrinos and going back to May? So it's not just a question of whether any option is good in an absolute sense, just a question of which is best in the circumstances The PR thing is completely true, of course, they are in general very good with it and know how to massage opinion rather well. They're going to have all PC dlc free, awesome, but it just means that anything significant will be classed as an expansion pack (look PC gamers! we do proper old school expansions rather than nickel and dime you, aren't we awesome!) and charged for, of course. I expect that sort of thing from everyone though, it's just that CDPR generally has enough good will and has not mucked people around enough for most people to not object to it.

I don't think AP has many outright bugs either, and I'd agree that it really depends on what your threshold is between clunkiness/ glitchiness and bugs. I like AP a lot but I'd certainly have sympathy with anyone describing aspects of it (eg the floaty PC hacking controls) as at least clunky. The general perception however is that it's a buggy mess. In any case the illustration was of the silliness of bug fixing as a metric. I can't imagine anyone would argue that K2 or AP could not have been improved significantly by the kind of treatment TW2 has and is receiving, were it available to them.

Your 'argument' is a case study in self defined victory, because whatever they do you can claim they're wrong to. Charge for any xbox improvements? Bad! Don't make them available? Bad! Make them available for free? Badbadbad! Pay attention to feedback? Bad! Don't pay attention to feedback? Bad! I have no idea what is it about CDPR that attracts this sort of rubbish but with TW1 there was a lot of 'oh noes, an enhanced edition, it'll take me days on my 9600 baud modem to download the free patch and how dare you publicise it CDPR you ripoff merchants badbadbad' so I can't say it's surprising. Using patch notes as a metric for bugginess is particularly bad too, as by that metric the two least buggy Obsidian games are... Alpha Protocol and Kotor 2.

The character of Vima Sunrider was part owned by the author of the (original, not the recent, and specifically IIRC 'Redemption') KOTOR comics, that's why she wasn't used. That's partly why the licencing for SW products is so restrictive now, to avoid situations where 3rd parties 'own' characters and would have to be paid if they were used. IIRC book canon always triumphs game canon so Bioware is free to rewrite the whole of KOTOR2 to their liking. Books and games are on the same level- check out the Wookieepedia entry for canon. That's why having direct contradictions is an extremely bad idea and is supposed to not happen as there's no mandated way to determine which is 'right'. The only thing a book trumps is gameplay stuff- you cannot, for example, argue that the Exile is more powerful than Revan based on R being capped at lvl 20 and having around 2/3 of them being Jedi levels while E has 30+ Jedi/ Prestige Class levels if a book says R is more powerful.

I'm sceptical too, unless they want to use Onyx. On the other hand LA is and has been such an absolute disaster for the last half decade with its volte faces on just about everything (we're doing internal development; no we have a new CEO and have fired everyone; nonono we're rehiring and have yet another CEO; we've just laid everyone off again etc etc) that just about anything is possible at this point. As for the retconning I'm not sure anyone knows exactly how it will work, theoretically you are not supposed to retcon by outright contradiction in SW and everything is meant to be canon so long as it doesn't contradict George mandated stuff but this is at least the second time DrewK has done it, his first Bane novel liberally altered its Jedi vs Sith source material. It's a shame, they really go out of their way to make SW as bland and unchallenging an experience as possible to the extent of retconning pretty much every character with more than half a dimension.

It should be possible to do that sort of stuff because textures must be loaded dynamically. I'm pretty sure that a lot of the stat based things like equipment (but not the ini based properties) is built into/ integrated into the exe, as that would explain the inability to change costs and the like by altering the base files.

[pre pmp10] Clarke's 1st Law of the Internet: "Any sufficiently advanced trolling is indistinguishable from stupidity" Clarke's 2nd Law: "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from trolling" Paradox has been doing the mid tier thing successfully for years. It's just not really worth the while of any big publisher who wants to make their money in multi-hundred-million dollar chunks via GTA/ CoD/ Sims and the like. If there's one thing DD is very good for it's allowing people to get their stuff out there for relatively little cost and with relatively little reference to 'publishers'.

That is largely Internet Determinism at work- most people who post on forums are both more committed gamers on average and have better internet, on average. Thus you tend to end up with lots of people on internet forums saying things like "I've not bought retail in x years and download as much as I like on my 600MB/s connection" with the impression that that is the norm. The reality is that retail is often cheaper and lots of people do not have brilliant internet. Both DXHR and TW2 are very large games which will take time and potentially some bandwidth management for a lot of people. As a comparison, Paradox have said that something like 90% of their revenue came from DD rather than retail, which is almost the diametric opposite of those CDP figures. That may well be a combination of being smaller in size and more 'niche' in appeal, as well as a lot of their expansions being DD only until they get bundled up later.