AGX-17

Yeah, Persian Shia and Zoroastrianists support ALQ Salafi Arabs. Considering there were only 25,271 Zoroastrians on record in Iran as of the 2012 census, I don't think they register as a factor.

Of course there should be various sorts of merchants with various sorts of methods. It wouldn't be believable if everyone was a huckster or snake oil salesman any more than it would if every merchant was an infallible Protestant pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. I don't think they should waste time and resources on something as ambitious as modeling a simulated mercantilist/capitalist economy. I'm not saying it wouldn't be interesting, but it strikes me as far outside the scope and budget of the game.

"outcomes"? Considering you're using it in conjunction with "income," are you using it (incorrectly, obviously,) to refer to expenditures? How is that any different from RPGs as it is? You craft, find, steal items and sell them, that generates income. You use that income to purchase things, expenditures. Basically you're asking for a game like Recettear to be recreated in P:E and Skyrim elements, i.e. chopping wood, selling chopped wood for paltry sums. And if you think a woodcutter makes anything but paltry pay you're sorely mistaken. The "job" of going out and killing people and animals and monsters and demons and such is inevitably more profitable than doing peasant labor. And buying low/selling high is an ideal anyone strives for in any RPG, they don't need to make special systems revolving around an idea you got from a Japanese porn game.

"I want to read books that are like Resident Evil 6." Huh. Never thought I'd ever see that.

But there's no experience gained from combat. Quest completion only.

I guess that's because the decision was based on arguments, not popularity. Edit: oh, and I believe that if you don't speak up, you don't get listened to. If you were passionate enough to care, argue your position and post it. I do not agree that the most 'passionate' voices should be given the most consideration. Ignoring the fact that the most "passionate" people tend to drown out reason and suppress opposing views by screaming their opinion as loudly as possible (metaphorically in this case,) backers of P:E were doing so having been informed that Obsidian would be making their own game, while taking into consideration classic experiences and the opinions of fans. They didn't say they were going to make it a mass design-by-committee democratic vote on every game mechanic and design decision. Professional game designers at a privately-held developer are under no obligation to kowtow to the wills of either the masses or the loudest opinions. The Kickstarter wasn't "pay us money and we'll let you design the game!"

Maybe he's just sick of bicycle maintenance.

Since I'm in the middle of Grand Jury duty (in Oregon, criminal indictments are issued exclusively by Grand Jury, meaning only citizens summoned for jury duty can actually indict people for crimes,) I'm hoping to get some Roman Candle assault cases before the end of the month (turnaround time between arrest and presentation of case to GJ for indictment by DA is typically about 1-2 weeks. Fingers crossed.)

It's a bunch of fight the power hipster types backing the PBR of video game consoles. And getting reams of ****ty XBLA indie game-caliber content.

So I guess the OUYA has the car parking simulation market cornered. And that's about it.

Pretty sure I missed the second installment of Ellie's jokes in Pittsburgh, starting chapter over. This game is a huge pain. Heh. I have zero interest in tie-ins. I haven't felt like the game feels like a manga or anything, but I barely know what manga is. Outside of the chrs, brighter colors, and more mech style, it graphically reminds me a wee bit of Borderlands, only slicker. "Manga" is literally the Japanese word equivalent to "comics" in the print sense (not as in comedians or comedy,) hence the obvious foolishness of someone who's not Japanese referring to their not-Japanese comic as "manga." It's an incredibly superficial marketing gimmick meant to rope in anime nerds, done without the knowledge that anime nerds are aware and highly irritable about non-Japanese productions masquerading as their preferred form of entertainment. Example: Bioware had a Mass Effect "anime" produced (from what I can tell from its Wikipedia page it was just a Canadian cartoon outsourced to a Japanese animation studio,) effectively nobody in Japan cared about Mass Effect before or after its release, Bioware's core Western fanbase was either apathetic or enraged.

If I saw someone who looked like that in reality, I'd expect them to be suffering from some new kind of developmental disability like a super fetal alcohol syndrome. I checked out the site for that game, when I looked and saw they're calling their tie-in comic book a "manga," I just said "nope. That's it. Out." And left.

TLOU. I need to hear all the jokes. I need to find all the comics. I need to hear all the optional conversations.

As always, it's already been confirmed that P:E won't have a binary morality system/sliding scale, but will have faction reputations like NV. "Playing evil" is juvenile by definition in this context, as it still boils morality down to the sort simplistic "black-evil vs white-good" dichotomy that makes the stories that utilize them bland and lacking in drama and depth. Just because you want "less extreme evil choices" doesn't make it not a request for a binary choice between "good" and "evil." If you want moral depth, you shouldn't be asking to "play evil" to start. You should be asking to play "morally complex." People can commit "evil" acts for "good" reasons, just like people can commit "good" acts for "evil" reasons.

Obviously not. I assume you felt it more pressing to see how many comics Ellie had rather than deal with the swarms of Clickers busting through the windows.

Finished New Game+ in The Last of Us, **** bricks when I noticed Ellie's got an inventory and the contents of it at the end, especially the letter from her mother, who says essentially the same thing as Joel about surviving. About to start the new Borderlands 2 DLC. Hoping it isn't garbage like the last one.

Science yesterday still had a better success rate than religion's 0%. And science is an ongoing process. It doesn't stop. They didn't discover the atom and then quit because they decided that must be the end of the line. Theories rise and fall based on the best evidence available at the time. New evidence arises because people keep searching and theorizing and modeling mathematically. Newtonian physics was the foundation of putting men on the moon, and that guy lived a lot of yesterdays ago. Science yesterday eradicated smallpox, created vaccines for countless diseases, created antibiotics, put electricity and semiconducting materials in your house, removed the parasites and faeces from your water supply, etc. Do you really think if you'd been raised in a world where scientific inquiry didn't exist you'd be drinking clean water and living in enough comfort to complain about science on an electronic video game forum via a worldwide network of computers? The internet you're using was developed by the science of yesterday, after all.

Hey, hey, hey, stop trying to pin evangelical conservative idiocy on sane Americans.

I saw a one-armed hobo with a parrot on his shoulder on the bus home from the courthouse today (handing down indictments, don't think I'm some peasant headed for debtors' prison.) The parrot was real, and alive. I don't know why the bus driver allowed it, but it was there. I feel I did a reasonably good job of making the aforementioned bird believe I intended to eat it.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/313677/june-28-2010/doomsday-bunkers

http://goo.gl/UXAW3 NSFOFM (naughty language.)

The issue is more that combat is where all the risk is, but the traditional reward (experience,) has been removed from the equation, and loot from general combat in these sorts of games tends to be underwhelming junk that you just sell for paltry sums when you get back to town. It's also queer from an immersive character growth standpoint, as fighters become better fighters through fighting, not through delivering packages or reporting success or failure to questgivers. There's no way to make a judgement in either direction at this point, but the combat encounters are going to need to be carefully crafted lest fighting fatigue sets in due to excess battle without reward. Even a fun combat system stops being fun if you're subjected to it for a long enough duration. That's one of the best game design choices Naughty Dog made with The Last of Us: after every tense combat/survival situation, you get a respite period in which character development takes place as you safely explore, loot, solve basic geographic puzzles and enjoy the scenery on your way to the next tense encounter.

I find it interesting that you're characterizing these protests as "riots," when Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff has publicly endorsed/backed the protesters. Ignoring the now-cancelled bus fare hike (which would have been a significant financial burden on Rio's many, many poor slumdwellers,) the people involved are essentially the first generation of Brazilians raised in an environment open to freedom of expression after the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. This is a country rife with festering socio-political-economic problems which haven't been addressed. I don't care for CNN as a news source (public radio and the BBC are where I go,) but even they aren't characterizing the situation as "riots."

I'm pretty sure there are now people writing J.E. Sawyer/Tim Cain/Chris Avellone erotic fanfiction as we speak. Type. Whatever. Speaking... (you know what I mean,) of whatever, that's my reaction to fears of delays/actual delays. I never had any tentative release date in my knowledge when I contributed, I'm satisfied to play the game when it's done. Better late and finished than early and unfinished.

Having Liam Neeson in Fallout 3 didn't make it Schindler's List. Why was that comparison made around Fallout 3? I think the point is having recognized actors can only add value to the overall gaming experience but you right, Witcher 3 won't win an Oscar. Because Fallout 3's main storyline was weak, full of plot holes and "Dad" was a shallow character whose only real relevance was the fact that he was voiced by A-list actor Liam Neeson, whom I'm sure Bethesda paid a lot of money for not a lot of work. It didn't add any value to the overall gaming experience (what's with all these Irishmen in a region of post-apocalyptic America in which even the mighty BOS hasn't managed to restore motor vehicles to working order, much less a seaworthy ocean-going vessel?) That's been a longtime complaint about Bethesda's use of A-list actors in their games, it does nothing for the gameplay or narrative experience, and the money spent paying them would have been better used hiring more voice actors for the general populace of NPCs. The implication, of course, is that hiring Maisie Williams and Liam Cunningham won't make The Witcher 3 comparable in narrative quality to ASOIAF to anyone who doesn't already believe it's equal to, or better than, the aforementioned series of novels. In the meantime, I take it we've moved on from "END OF RINE," Hamburger Hepler, gigglesquee and the chemical composition of Tali's sweat to Bioware staffers' public pride in their choice of sexually deviant Japanese erogames.