Zoraptor

Drakensang TRoT is finally getting an official English language release rather than being available only in Luxembourg- at least for North American types who don't mind the joys of downloads, and for the cheap cheap preorder price of $18. Gamersgate Impulse (Not yet listed on Steam for those wedded to the Valve) 11 Jan release date officially, the Gamersgate version also seems to be allowing random non North Americans to preorder in some cases.

THQ did not publish CoP, it was (IIRC) bitComposer primarily; outside the CIS where GSC did their own publishing. Most probable reason for the bundling is that CoP has a Loyalty Edition which is cheaper and requires one or the other Stalkers anyway, and presumably Deep Silver doesn't want CS bundled with the others for some reason.

Apparently Ubisoft's PC revenues have halved since they introduced their DRM. It was as a proportion of total revenue so there may be more factors at work (~13% revenue to ~6% could be due to fewer titles, perhaps) but I suspect not the glorious nirvana they expected when they embarked on the whole thing.

Heh. I installed Batman: AA yesterday, though retail not DD. It was a... completely painless experience with zero Live problems. Despite what it said I was not connected to the internet when installing, and haven't been any time I played it, nor did it add a firewall extension and there haven't been any interminable Live update loops while searching out which 360 site you need to find and log into to change settings. If Bethesda had stuck with Live I'd probably have gone out and bought FONV already instead of getting it second hand for console. I'm more peeved about the game's handling of graphics options (16:9 resolution on my 16:10 monitor :raeg::raeg::raeg:) than the key mapping as the control scheme is at least pretty standard.

The other question is whether the money is there for a sequel. If Obsidian want to do it and if any rights issues can be sorted out there is still the question of who will pay the x million required for development. I doubt Obsidian themselves have the required money sitting around, perhaps unless it were to be some sort of low budget in house (Onyx based) game for Live/ PSN/ PCDD.

I'll probably get TWitcher2 and Crusader Kings 2, assuming it makes 2k11. Can't think of any other games I'm likely to get without significant discounts. So far as I can remember I only bought one full price game this year.

no insult was intended, it's a complicated subject difficult to get any nuance without ending up looking like (and being the length of) a wikipedia article or using more parentheticals than is healthy. I didn't actually say all Croats supported the nazis- not even all Germans supported the nazis, after all- but that the Croat Ustache did (ie, puppet Croatia), and I did name check the most prominent anti nazi Croat which was one more anti nazi Croat than Serb. However, it is indisputable that the Croats had a puppet state which contributed significant forces to the axis, formal, volunteer and anti partisan. They certainly contributed far more than Mihailovic's lot* ever did to the German cause and it is certainly true that the Croat regime was the primary pro nazi force in Yugoslavia in WW2 by a large margin. While genuinely fascist/ pro nazi Serb forces did exist they were not comparable in size or effect to their Croat equivalents. Please take the role of all ethnicities in the partisans as acknowledged- but when it comes right down to it and for the purposes of what WoD said the simple fact is that Croatia was formally on the side of the axis. As for the Leopards, that was not to be taken seriously. So far as I am aware Croatia has no Leopard tanks now. It was a flippant reference to the rumours prevalent at the time which I found amusing as they were apparently sparked by someone painting the word 'Leopard' on the side of their ?T55? (T34, apparently, per google) tank. *Which as you noted was far more internecine anti communist/ partisan than it was ever pro German. Not that Mihailovic was a 'good guy' by any stretch and in a choice of him and his Serb nationalism or Tito then Tito was a far better result.

I'd say that Tito-> is already a long-enough chunk of time for the present discussion. If you take Tito -> kick off of Yugoslav Wars that's still only a decade or so; and relations were certainly not negative in the USSR/ Iran/ DPRK vs USA mold until well into the 90s. So long as the USSR was a threat- until 1990, basically- keeping the Yugoslavs on side (/off their side) was pretty important to the west as it deprived the soviets of ports on the Med and left their underbelly more vulnerable, while providing passive support to Greece. Relations have been 'strained' for the past fifteen years or so? No kidding, that's a consequence of bombing a country and arbitrarily chopping bits off to satisfy Tony Blair's Messiah Complex. If they wanted to intervene they should have done so early, in Bosnia, and put a lid on the whole thing as quickly as possible.

That's... fairly accurate, arguably. It's only really post Tito and more especially post cold war that there were any problems. The Serbs were allies in WW2 and almost exclusively anti-German (in sharp contrast to the Croat Ustache, well remembered by the Germans as the Croats mysteriously ended up with a bunch of Leopard tanks despite the supposed arms embargo in the 90s war; and one Josip Broz notwithstanding), plus Tito was relatively friendly despite both being communist and the historical religious and cultural bonds with the Russians. I wouldn't quite go so far as WoD but it certainly ain't indefensible. Neither's labeling the KLA as muslim terrorists- it certainly was a muslim terrorist organisation as much as, say, the IRA was a catholic terrorist one.

The Georgians were pretty nasty (~100k Ossetian refugees in the conflict of the early 90s per HRW, SOs current population ~70k), neither Abkhazia nor SO were integral parts of Georgia (added to the GSSR by Stalin in yet another of his rational acts designed to promote fluffy bunnies and happy puppy dogs) and Saakashvili is... not very democratic at the best of times. Probably a bit better than Mugabe, to be fair, but not much. In short, the only way either is going to be reintegrated is at the point of the bayonet, as Misha tried (and failed) to do a couple of years ago, and had done with another breakaway region (Adjaria) a few years previous.

No issues with the UI here. I would however like to suggest that Bioware consider including the ground breaking new graphical technique of "anti-aliasing" in DA2 as I fear further exposure to screenshots may cause severe lacerations to the eyeballs from all the jaggies. You don't want to cause blindness in your target audience, do you Bioware? ... Or is that the real reason for the switch to all voiced dialogue, hmm?

Depends- if everyone who has ever bought anything premium on Farmville/ 2nd Life and their ilk is counted as a digital purchaser (as they should be) then the ratio would potentially be even more extreme.

Most of their surveys involve ~30k respondents, which is plenty (all other things being equal) statistically speaking. More likely to be a significant question is how likely it is that if only 15% of PC people buy anything from online sources the online and retail sectors on PC are roughly equal as per one of their other surveys. Every single online purchaser would have to buy nearly 7 times the amount as an offline purchaser for both to be true (and that assumes they buy zero stuff offline too); plus there's the status of facebook games like farmville and how they relate.

You can't tell that much, partly because there have apparently been several revisions with seemingly mutually exclusive stuff included and it's unclear which bits belong to which revision, and there just isn't that much stuff there- it only covers most of Saudi and Rome and even including the synth stuff is only ~350MB of sound. The main things seem to be: (1) Westridge is your partner originally. He dies at the end of the Saudi Missions after the hostage rescue/ skydiving (?), you are blamed and go off after one of the hostages (Parker) invoking Alpha Protocol along the way (2) Mina is not your handler though she does seem to be mentioned as a sort of secretary, one of Westridge's old contacts Uli Boo(l)i (she is voiced by Grey DeLisle; Boo(l)i spelled with and without the 'l' in various file names) is. (3) After catching Parker (he dies? disappears? after) you have to get something (a statue with files hidden in it?) off Madison in the museum. It all culminates in a hostage situation at Pompeii with Madison vs tourists stuck in a bus. D'Arcy tries to arrest you in Rome with some pretty amusing dialogue "which one of your daddies was mummy? Maverick or Iceman?" (4) The main bad guy for Rome is still Marburg. Leland is mentioned but appears to not be the CEO of Halbech- the original CEO's name is mentioned in a still used news clip at the end of the game (though the captions read Leland). There are a few other minor bits and pieces: the G22 base in Taiwan was a Vodka factory for ?someone? but there's basically nothing much there for Taiwan or Moskva. Almost all the mission maps seem to have been retasked rather than redone

Which figures are these? http://www.gamespot.com/news/6279895.html?...mp;subj=6279895 Short: 75% of people did not download any digital content whatsoever, 15% downloaded via PC and 6% via a console (rest via other means eg cellphone). Probably US only being based on NPD though there's no strong reason to think other areas would be significantly different except less in areas with bad internet.

Last figures I saw had the vast majority of gamers not purchasing DLC, so it can't be too popular. Nice high margin for company beancounters though.

A lot of the old VO stuff- almost all of it from Saudi and Rome, less from other places- is still on the DVD and can be extracted via oggextract; eg ap01_b01 is a lot of VO for the hostage rescue mission (changed into the Saudi mission where you get into the helicopter at the end); rp05_d01_darcy has a bunch of D'Arcy interaction from him trying to apprehend Mike in Rome. There's a lot of synth voiced stuff too. No transcripts though. Presumably the reason for the change was that they thought a serious business Syriana style game would not sell and that changing to a more traditionally video game friendly genre would.

Being a grand standing contrarian with an agenda (a description I largely agree with) and being a hero are not mutually exclusive- that's a fair description of Churchill in 1938, for example. Most of Assange's really strong supporters are liberals (non-US meaning) which is in theory neither left nor right wing and includes, at least theoretically, Anarchists (left wing) and Libertarians (right wing). Ron Paul* can hardly be described as left wing yet he is one of the few US politicians to offer support (or, at least, 'support') to WL. *I like Ron Paul, he's one of the very few politicians anywhere who gives a good simulation of having actual principles instead of a shifting set of sound bites designed to get votes.

Informants get killed, it's an occupational hazard. It's happened before WL, it'll happen long long after. If there were any compelling evidence that WL was causing them then the PR people would be all over it. As I pointed out the previous time this came up the NATO losses have actually dropped significantly by monthly year to year comparison, despite the supposed treasure trove of the WL releases, so they cannot be that bad. Afghanistan is a country in the throes of a significant insurgency, has a government and armed forces/ law enforcement riddled with both corruption and active Taleban collaborators/ agents and the Taleban has an enormous number of connections into communities. Evidence suggests strongly that the majority of Taleban fighters are effectively mercenaries rather than ideologues- if you're going to accept a few dollars to get shot up by NATO you're... very likely going to accept a few dollars to say that you saw Ahmad talking to the Americans just before they raided that safe house in Kandahar, let alone the various Afghan military and police people or translators who will be in the know. That's primarily how they get their information, by leveraging their local knowledge and contacts. Not by taking their netbook to the local wifi hotspot in Kabul to trawl through x0,000 internet documents that are almost entirely irrelevant.

Assange not wanting his whereabouts published is ironic. The danger to him apparently being sufficient to be a factor in refusing bail but not enough to warrant suppressing his address is ironic. People who were up in arms about poor baby informants being put in danger being smug about Assange being put in danger is also ironic- if you really believed your positions you would condemn both as being dangerous and not change positions based on personal animus towards an individual. I don't have any great problem with either as I don't think Assange is in greater danger by it being published- there is basically zero chance of it not becoming public knowledge whether suppressed or not. I do have a problem with the judge being inconsistent as it suggests bias, and poor and inconsistent judgement (ohoho). I do have a problem with the prosecution because if even half the stuff written is true then there should be no chance of conviction, as the original prosecutor basically admitted by dropping the original charges. As for the rest- you cannot run around saying wikileaks is both a horrible breach of security that will bring about the downfall of western civilisation/ kill countless innocent informants and say that none of the stuff is new/ significant and that nobody has died. They're mutually exclusive positions. Alternating the positions and expecting people to believe both simultaneously is also ironic. Probably the person to come best out of the whole thing is Gates who has been almost completely consistent that while some stuff has not been helpful it really isn't as big a deal as Lieberman and the rest of the World Is Ending brigade are making out. Oh dear, embarrassed on the internet. How ever does one survive?

Very Icewind Dale-ish looking style, which is a good thing. Can't really tell much from concept art though.

. Ah irony, it's more infectious than 'flu.

I'd say that the top level minigames are barely feasible. If you aren't good at them to start with they'd be nigh impossible even with sabotage and the time increasing implants. Taiwan's do seem to be more difficult for some reason. Save games can be hacked (there may be a proper editor somewhere, don't know) to change stats/ AP. I think that there is also a config file determining AP gain too, though I'm not 100% on that.