Zoraptor

Ice is black!!! Hitman is using Just For Men!!! Meltdown is a ginger!!! Game is ruined!!! Hope they keep Ira's voice actor, at least!!! I hear Steroid is now German (and/or Russian)!!! I'm so glad it's real time, turn based was only used in the past because old computers suck!!! Looks good for a Wii exclusive!!! Kinect waggle action in JA, awesome!!! One of those is serious.

There was also (presuming the specialist teams wear different gear from default police) the issue of having a bunch of uniformed police running around chasing someone who was also wearing a police uniform. The potential for friendly fire either from other police or from the specialists when they turned up would be very high under those circumstances. And I'd guess that if someone in a police uniform had been shooting at me (and apparently gathering groups around him under the pretense of protecting them) I'd not be quick to trust anyone wearing that uniform in the immediate aftermath.

Ever heard of Ernst Rohm? Hermann Goring was hardly 'conventional' either, though I've never actually checked* whether the cross dressing and such was allied propaganda. But most will take the view that Hitler espoused the 'canon' nazi line on gays which was pretty much the same view he had on everything he found distasteful. *Actually, for all I know Rohm may not have been gay either and it all may have been Hitlerian anti SA slander.

I dunno, codex GD has pretty much convinced me that behind every vocal nazi on the internet there's a tender, repressed and misunderstood soul who just needs to find the right man/ woman to let their real self show.

You defititely should get System Shock Portable then, it's very marginally more complicated then the straight DOSbox versions of MoO and XCOM I have from GG but that's because it's more flexible. Couple of clicks and you're in and I've had no problems on either xp/32 or win7/64.

Is that some kind of wrapper that allows the game to run on modern systems? Or is that a new (modded) version of the actual game? Wrapper basically along with some utilities for sound and the like, similar to the MoO/ XCOM DOSBox versions (all of which work fine on Windows 7/64 for me). There are also resolution increasing and key binding mods- not sure if they're integrated with it now or just compatible with it- to further enhance the experience, the version I have is around three years old. Its legality is a bit unclear, LGS allowed downloads of the SS1 iso prior to their closure (I got it from TTLG back in 2000, before it melted their bandwidth) so it's probably OK until whoever the rights holder is sends a cease and desist, which would probably be a precursor to it being put on GOG anyway.

You can get Xcom off steam, so it's likely legality that's stopping that. You can get it anywhere that isn't GOG, which is why GOG not having it is pretty stupid. And for System Shock there's System Shock Portable.

Whoah, Francis Urquhart. Verily you are a poster of impeccable taste.

Yeah volo, and when Greg and Ray talk about 10 million sales for Bioware titles they mean in the first month too. Wow, at best estimate DA2 was a failure by a factor of 5! At best estimate (your figures) DS3 was a failure by a factor of 2.5!! DS3 is thus twice as successful as DA2!!! FACT!!!! :honourblade: Haven't played any DS game personally and have zero intention of doing so. Open to the possibility that DS sold millions too, shame you don't have a single actual bit of evidence to support it (deferred kudos to whoever dug up the sales charts, shame they don't have numbers).

I'd like some proof that DS sold 'millions'. Yeah, f(v)olorn hope on anything other than roofles on that one. Alpha Protocol is still owned by Sega so far as I know.

Hey, Squeenix at lkeast gets credit for not saying that if Beethoven were alive today he'd be Britney Spears which puts them a bit ahead of 2k on the irrelevant IP resurrection stakes.

The Daily Mail (AKA, Daily Fail) is a garbage tabloid, though it is better than the Sun. I think it's still owned by the same family who gave it a pro-fascist slant prior to WW2, but I'm not 100% sure on that. It's certainly not Murdoch owned.

I thought the reason many PS3 games perform relatively poorly is because very few programmers have really taken advantage of Cell with it being relatively easy to do an OK job but far more difficult (especially for a multi platform release) to do a well optimised one. I don't think it's an accident that you cited Killzone 3 which is a PS3 exclusive and hence will have been built more or less ground up for cell. ARM's great, but I couldn't see anyone going that route for a mainline console, yet. And given that both Nintendo and Sony use ARM in their portables going for them might not be good for 'variation'.

Apparently the UK does have 'public good' exceptions for some crimes- that's how they justified blagging Gordon Brown's bank details. I don't think (well, hope that) good journalism won't be effected. Especially since this whole kerfuffle kicking off is largely the result of some good investigative work by a Grauniad journalist and as otherwise Mr PI's diary probably would have sat gathering dust in the Met archives forever.

Yeah, and germans impaled Belgian babies on their helmet spikes in WW1, Iraqis turfed babies out of incubators in Kuwait etc etc. There's no evidence for the accusation, and that's pretty much a direct quote of the actual UN official on the ground investigating, Cherif Bassiouni. The main problem with citing Gaddafi being a nasty guy as a reason for intervention is that most of the Transitional Council guys (all except two, iirc) had been senior members of Gaddafi's government. Hardly a good indication that they'll lead a glorious pluralist democracy. Plus they've done some fairly unpleasant things themselves (murdering black africans, for example) Part of the Libyan people. Whatever the west may say (and fairly obviously thought) he enjoys a great deal of popular support in many areas of Libya, or he wouldn't still be in power. Not really. It ain't similar militarily but tribe vs tribe in Libya ain't fundamentally much different from Tajikh/ Hezara/ Persian/ Pashtun in Afghanistan or Kurd/ Shiite/ Sunni in Iraq. Taking sides in such things makes a mess in even the best of circumstances.

I was going to say that the Kanye West/ Ray Charles analogy was one of the most vapid things I've ever read but on reflection it's not 100% rubbish. RC will probably still be well known and respected in ten years while Kanye will likely be a footnote in the great morass of disposable stars so there may actually be something valid in the comparison since that's exactly what it looks like will happen to X-COM vs XCOM. More likely they'll just make the NextBox a fixed/ closed hardware PC running a cut down win8 variant. Give them a chance to leverage the bits of the xbox which actually make money (licensing, Live, streaming) while largely avoiding the parts that have lost money hugely (hardware research, production, development) and may significantly reduce the horrendous reliability issues the 360's custom hardware has had.

Primay skills can be changed, IIRC, though you are still limited to the default number of skills (ie you can't make every skill a primary one, only three at a time). You can find the files with the armour stats etc and change them with a hex editor, but I never got the changes to work in game.

Nope, this is primarily a French mess. Nick the Hungarian backed his good buddy ben Ali in Tunisia and the Libyan mess is the result of him scrambling to get on the Right Side of History after ben Ali got his marching orders, and in what was supposed to be a quick and easy win with the road strewn with flowers. The US was always pretty reluctant and has had very little direct military involvement outside the first couple of weeks. On the positive side it has really exposed the bias and impotence of the UN and World Court (censure for the French breaking the arms embargo? ohoho, tres amusant, rules are for the little people) and with any luck made any more imperial adventures less likely. Sadly only NATO's credibility will be a casualty- it's one thing to fail against a relatively crafty and prepared foe in good defensive terrain like the serbs but quite another level of embarassment when 90%+ of the action takes place on a nice, flat desert with a few million people stretched over millions of square kilometers, but there's no prospect of NATO actually losing outright which would be the only thing that would cause it to break up short of someone deciding to nuke Tripoli. Also, what is it with half the population of the internet calling it Lybia? The BBC news sections have been absolutely woeful over Libya, parroting the party line as much as ITAR-TASS in soviet times. They must be really worried about more funding cuts. In contrast their opinion shows have actually on occasion pointed out things like the Rebels Council consisting almost entirely of people who were so shocked and appalled at Gaddafi's government that they were high ranking members of it for years- no doubt working to bring it down from within [/spindoctor].

The Russians are pretty much dependant on US and other international funding so it's at least reciprocal dependancy. Soyuz is also cheap, reliable and safe which can't really be said for the shuttles. Strategically there's very little need for the ability to get humans into space, only satellites where there are multiple alternatives to the russians.

It used to be Fosters (an execrable Australian 'beer' brewed under licence in England presumably as some sort of revenge for slights real or imagined), at least by volume. If there's one thing England does absolutely right it's the pub lunch and ale combo- nice crusty game pie or a proper ploughmans washed down with a real ale. Heaven.

Heh, I probably came across a little more aggressive than the intention was. The reason for wanting direct links to the developers is twofold; first, if you buy that way near 100% of the price goes to them. In this case I'd have complained if the links were to Impulse/ Gamersgate/ D2D/ Amazon download or whatever. Developer links also make them less reliant on vendor specific, time limited, special offers for those specifically bargain hunting. For a Grand Indie Megathread type thing links to specific offers are better made in subsequent posts, as and when the offers occur, in my most humble opinion.

Lazy lazy, though typical, links to Steam for non-steam exclusive titles (Amnesia, Torchlight immediately obvious). At least they aren't referrer links, I guess.

More likely hype via false shortage as with lots of new release electronic fripperies; SO MUCH DEMAND WE HAVE LITERALLY RUN OUT OF INTERNETS!!!1!!! HOPE YOU AREN'T MISSING OUT!!! BE IN QUICK ETC ETC. The demand would have to be more insane than the love child of Caligula and George III to trouble Google.

RPGCodex is my no 1 source for news on RPGs* and on current events in european countries like Georgia. Did you know that some B list hollywood types visited there last month and that its main exports include scrap metal and fruit and nuts? Fascinating. *actually RPGWatch is.

The South Island already produces a surplus of power from hydroelectric projects, but a large proprtion of this is lost in transmission to the north island, and since the SI gets absolutely no benefit* yet all the problems the idea of sticking wind farms there for the benefit of foreign companies or Auckland is deeply unpopular, especially as one of the main tourist attractions in the south is precisely that you don't turn a corner and run into a forest of turbines. It is more efficient to produce the energy near where it is to be used, so more geothermal plants in the central NI would be far more sensible and efficient than turbines in the south, but politicians know they'll have far more problems sticking turbines or other generation in 'sensible places' (Hunuas, Waitakeres, One Tree Hill and other places around Auckland) due to the NIMBY effect from the higher population density that makes generation there sensible in the first place. *There did use to be. Basically, the power companies love running the cheap hydroelectric power into the ground and if there isn't much rain or snow the dams run dry- they then say that they need to stick more power generation in the SI when someone attaching 2lbs of C4 to the Cook Strait Cable would solve the SI's power problems on a permanent basis. During one of the two times in which the NI was sending power south (for about six weeks) the government decided to abolish the price differential as it was a 'reciprocal arrangement'.