Zoraptor

Nah, it would probably have to be "go and get it on Origin (or gamersgate/d2d/impulse/gmg and whatever other outlets have no problems with EA)" since Steam is such a special snowflake.

Yes, but that is true of all (well, can't think of any exceptions) large, successful, long lived tech companies. Certainly it's true for Apple and MS as well as Google. That is their greatest strength relative to FB, they can rely on successful products to provide revenue and to cross fertilise while knowing that failures will not bring down their company, while FB is- basically- a single product company. Should it fail, then they fail, and they would find it very difficult to arrest, let alone reverse, a slump.

They will presumably seek to get the momentum from leveraging their multitude of other products. In that respect it's far more of a marathon, momentum wise, than a sprint.

Yep, there are far worse things he could have done apart from EM. I have a fair bit of sympathy for Spector not going the 'indie' route as he has had his own company, and had it fail despite the titles he was primarily responsible for being successful. It's rather like the primary Troika guys going to Turbine, Blizzard and Real Estate once their company went under- I'm sure that in a perfect world pretty much everyone would like to be making the game(s) of their dreams in their own studio, free from corporate interference, and dream games almost always sound great. But sometimes one has to accept that reality trumps dreams and the prospect of working effectively for nothing for an unspecified time with an uncertain return is going to appeal to a very limited number of people, almost always those trying to make a name rather than those who have already made one. Good on them when they try, and certainly good luck, but I wouldn't criticise them for something I almost certainly wouldn't do myself.

I have to agree with Krez. Facebook is a brilliant candidate for a bubble enterprise and google doesn't need to be its needle, it just needs to be there when it bursts.

It's not really, Spector has just run into the inevitable fact* that if you want to make games with a decent budget then you will have to do what the people with that money want. In any case there's a fair bit of difference between Purkake Memory Spector and Real Spector: "So I signed on with Looking Glass, worked briefly on Thief: The Dark Project (though my impact on that title was, at best, minimal)" and he always gave primary credit on SS to Doug Church (and the rest of the team) from Blue Sky/ LGS. Deus Ex though, is a given. *Happened best part of a decade ago really, given DXIW.

per Torygraph, may be the same incident. There's a good reason a lot of the refugees fleeing the fighting are african, some of the rebels have been summarily executing all africans as mercs right from the start. It doesn't really get reported much as it interferes with The Narrative.

"5.9 is a pretty decent size, especially when it's so shallow. The February quake in Christchurch was only 6.3 but had around 3 times the ground acceleration (~ practical effect; barring tsunami of course) of the far larger magnitude Sendai one in Japan[sic; later corrected without prompting to Chile] because it was closer and shallower. " ..each of the bolded parts is a factor apart from Richter that influences effects, found both in the selective part and the rest. I selected the quote I did because it was 100% unequivocal in stating that Richter was not the only factor, and that there were separate measures for practical effects. You were the one fixated on Richter strengths and using it as a sole measure. You're being- at best- disingenuous in trying to say anything different. Still you got another response which I guess was the intent. No, I actually did exactly the opposite and implied that there is not necessarily any direct correlation between deaths and 'severity' and, in a rather small logical step, that it is to a very large extent circumstance (sciencey things like... depth, location and ground acceleration; but also whether the bits of church that break off hit people as in Lorca or miss them as in Washington) that determines 'severity'. It seems I should have put it bluntly. Something like "You should refrain from commenting further as continuing to argue over something about which you are ignorant will make you look both foolish and, given your treatment of those arguing with you in similar circumstances, hypocritical". See, I have no need to prove expertise only your ignorance, and that has already been done. That was the point of the Scalia comment, I don't know or care if you're really a lawyer or not as it is irrelevant and the level of authority granted by any professional qualification is wholly unneeded. The only relevant points are that (1) you were right in that case but demonstrably wrong in this and (2) my expertise in this exceeded yours by the required margin when I was aged ten.

No, you should give deference to basic science learnt in the equivalent of fifth grade. You were ignorant, you got schooled, deal with it or don't, no skin off my back.

That's the Desert Rats shoulder patch from, you know, way back when Brits actually fought fascism. I think the reference is in kinda poor taste... Apart from the more general Desert Rats there were some that might be accurately called Kangaroo Rats The Rats of Tobruk. And clearly Gaddafi missed a trick by not hunting his desert rats with a desert fox...

I didn't, I made the point that Richter was not the be all and end all straight away, to whit: "..only 6.3 but had around 3 times the ground acceleration (~ practical effect.." I've known about Mercalli since I was around 10 (belated thanks due to HS and his social studies lessons, see, I did learn something) and, frankly, that was all the knowledge needed, the rest is just looking up the relevant numbers and basic observation. Personally, I'm happy to concede that there is a fair probability that someone who lives in the US knows more about their law than I do, whether your last name happens to be Scalia or not.

That quake killed nine. Rather a lot of poorly secured Elvises in Spain, it appears. I'll make a deal with you, I won't try and correct you on matters of US law, you don't try and correct me on matters of science natural. And this is why. What measures the 'impression of what a quake is like' is the Mercalli Scale, not the Richter scale. Mercalli exists precisely because earthquakes of the same energy/ Richter magnitude can have significantly different effects depending on circumstance and location. 'lol, exponential' is a great example of the old adage of having just enough knowledge- Chile earthquake 2010, 8.8 Richter, IX Mercalli, 0.7g acceleration; Christchurch earthquake 2010 (since it was a similar distance from Chch as the Chile one was from Concepcion) 7.1 Richter, IX Mercalli, 1.2g. That's for two quakes exponential different to the tune of a factor of 125. The difference between 5.9 and 6.3? The comparatively puny factor of 4. There's plenty of scope for a 5.9 to be nasty under the right (or wrong) circumstances. Yes, quite. I'm from Christchurch originally, lived there until I was 19. I should really correct myself on one thing though, it was the 8.8 Chile quake which had 1/3 the acceleration of the 6.3 at Christchurch, not the Sendai one which was roughly equivalent. [grr smilies. An 8.8 magnitude quake is not cool]

And there's an even larger difference between the 5.1 earthquake in Spain earlier this year and 5.8. And the Spanish one was a deadly quake.

5.9 is a pretty decent size, especially when it's so shallow. The February quake in Christchurch was only 6.3 but had around 3 times the ground acceleration (~ practical effect; barring tsunami of course) of the far larger magnitude Sendai one in Japan because it was closer and shallower.

That EULA is pretty standard, see below. It's just written in legalese rather than english. Rather like the "Origin will delete your games after two years!!!" (newsflash, any online service has clauses for terminating your games immediately, up to and including GoG) FUD it's primarily legal arse covering. "By using ---'s online sites and products, users agree that --- may collect aggregate information, individual information, and personally identifiable information.." "--- may share aggregate information and individual information with other parties." "Personally identifiable information protected under this privacy policy and collected from users may be done in conjunction with associates under agreement with ---." "--- may allow third parties performing services under contract with --- to access stored information" [--] "We may share customer information that we collect with third parties. Usually, this information will be shared with a third party that has relationship with us as a business partner or marketing partner... Also, we may use the information that you provide us, or that we collect about you, in connection with the promotion of our products and services and those of our affiliates." "We may send you offers on behalf of our company or other businesses, or permit other businesses that we are working with to send you offers" That's from two separate cliented systems, can't imagine it's hard to guess which. I've used the second one which is pretty much identical to Origin in its current form- you don't need the client for anything other than installing. I won't have a problem with Origin until it goes the always on constant monitoring route of the first one. Overall the Origin FUD has been a great source of lulz. Watching certain steam fans get up in arms about stuff steam has been doing for years/ creating horror scenarios that could as easily apply to steam and then getting all passive-aggressive when called on it will never get old.

Defence people probably have nightmares about getting Stuxnet'ed as it stands. The presumption has to be made that you aren't always going to be fighting insurgents and 3rd tier tinpots but may at some point have to fight someone with decent resources and a reasonable plan to counter your advantages. It's all well and good taking the limitations of meatbags into consideration but you also have to take the limitations of technology into account too. And for anyone thinking that hacking is impossible or unlikely, check out Hezbollah's counter to the charges it was behind Rafik Hariri's assassination. They'd hacked Israeli drones' video feeds, and they have a minute fraction of the resources of, say, China.

I very much doubt it. Unmanned may be fine for the drone's current role of cheap and cheerful ground attack but the idea of some sort of centralised control for air to air combat fighters? Too prone to ECM, too little situational awareness/ more ephemeral 'feel' and instinct aspects, too much latency. Not to mention that the idea of having aircraft basically stop working if their control centre is destroyed strikes me as a terrible idea- damage a carrier and all its aircraft drop out of the sky/ go into some sort of holding pattern/ nuke a chunk of the Nevada desert and suddenly a third of the airforce is unusable/ take out the satellites and effectively ground the entire airforce. And there's no realistic prospect of wholly independent combat robots in the near future (or pretty much ever, imo) as you simply cannot program for all the vagaries of combat.

That's the Jewish spelling/ transliteration, I think- I've certainly seen {R}Ebekah used as a more, er, literal biblical transliteration of Rebecca. I bet that bracketed R is going to be the registration mark once I post. Right, we'll try curly brackets then...

Some say that Putin picked Medvedev specifically because he wanted someone shorter than him as his successor. Obama is pretty tall though. And that is one depressed looking horse.

The only thing 'ranty' there is the length, else it's just informing the emperor that he is, in fact, wearing no clothes*. *

Nah, the Russians got their revenge for that in 1939 and especially 1945. Now the big butthurt is about the Kurils.

I can't see Bioware going back to D&D for their main line games. They didn't like the nannying from hasbro and don't have to pay any licencing fees on their own IPs; and D&D is no longer the sort of money printing machine Star Wars still manages to be. It's also not worked well on console and is unlikely to have the sort of crossover appeal to the CoD crowd they've been looking for. Could get something from the 2d studio that's now been made part of 'Bioware' in the restructuring after they've finished the Mass Effect equivalent of the Dragon Age facebook game, but I won't be holding my breath.

No potions in combat is fine, imo- your enemies ought to skewer you pdq if you pull one out while fighting. Forcing meditation for potion drinking is a rather poor solution though. Maybe they ran out of buttons on the 360 controller but why they didn't just have a 'belt' system as in tw1 with quaffing allowed out of combat baffles me a bit as the meditation requirement is just make-work as it stands.

G3 actually had about the best use of bloom/ hdr I've seen so the transition to the industry standard several dozen nuclear devices were recently let off nearby/ your eyes are covered in vaseline type in Risen was a disappointment. Shame G3 gives me the worst case of z-fighting I've ever seen at the moment.

Most of the chapter 1 quests do have alternative approaches, though as with pretty much every title it would certainly benefit from some more meaningfully alternative ways of doing a lot of those quests and some time between replays. Some thief skills or similar would add to the variety (not sure if that would fit with the fiction). I'd say that combat is closest to something like Gothic 2 or Risen. It had much the same 'first time I went down the hill I got pwned by a wolf foetus, now I'm one shotting dudes' feeling except you run into proper 'wolves' pretty much from the start (though supposedly the starting difficulty is far easier now), and just as with Gothic you will get stomped in two seconds flat if you get surrounded. I have to say I find entrerix's description a bit... baffling. Much like Gothic (and totally unlike Diablo), button mashing means you're Doing It Wrong as well as Making It Hard On Yourself. And of course you cannot drink potions in combat in TW2.