Drowsy Emperor

It doesn't matter, but it is supremely ironic.

Feminism is literally the shallowest, dumbest political ideology ever devised and was ethically compromised and dead before the 21st century. It can pride itself with the most dubious achievement ever - helping support capitalist exploitation of women as a work force. In post WWII US you could raise a family of a single wage, which allowed women to actually raise their children. With feminism and post Reagan capitalism, both parents have to work to meet basic needs of a family and children are raised by hired help or their grandparents. A civilizational milestone indeed. All supposedly, in the name of allowing women to have "a career". Losing track of the fact that if everyone wants to be independent (financially and otherwise) and "the boss", then you get a society of lonesome individuals and fractured families. That's feminism as it relates to the real world. This gaming related bull is both irrelevant and ridiculous. The supposed "feminism" here is nothing but an ideological tag used to smear the supposed other "mysoginist" for some sort of private gain, usually to keep public funding and their "ism" a thing. Many women and some men have now jumped on this bandwagon and abuse this as much as they can. That's a sure sign that the "ism" is on its last legs, because they have to resort to increasingly more violent measures to elicit a response.

Storm in a teacup really I take it as a good sign regarding my mental health that I don't understand half of these ridiculous discussions

Its going to be a twitch thing with the ability to pause and issue commands and judging from the fancy spell effects and high production values the skills and abilities will be limited in number. Its certainly not going to be tactical in the old sense of the word. With Bioware every aspect of the gameplay takes a back seat to achieving movie like presentation. They started down that road with Mass Effect and it will bury them because its both very expensive and easy to botch (cue ME3 ending). Memorable storylines and characters are hard to marry with making a game that's supposed to be "all things to all people" and sell millions from Boston to Bangalore. The only way to make them fresh and interesting is to change things around and the only way to sell your multi-million dollar product to the same audience is not to change things around because that's unnecessary risk from a business perspective. When you make a good gameplay model, like Bethesda or Blizzard do its easy to replicate it, tack on a serviceable plot and make millions. No one cares, or seems to care that the actual stories are pos and the characters are non existent. Oblivion's plot seems to be fine in Oblivion (and we all know what utter soulless trash that game was) but in DAI its suddenly an offense and a bore. Rarely does anyone mention how unstable and bug ridden Elder Scrolls games are, how horrible the animations and how poor the combat is. But they'll keep cranking them out as long as gaming is a thing because they've trained their fans to appreciate those elements that are easy to improve. In ES games, that's essentially graphics and little else. Bioware has been training people to value stories and characters more than other aspects - good luck getting consistent successes with those.

I have trouble even remembering what Dragon Age: Origins was about. The good will it garnered was more due to tactical gameplay than the storyline.

I'm going to start thinking you're doctoring these screenshots

Porcavian indeed.

You can tell they're reasonable by the way they target a random sailor rather than their government which allows the sailor to be there. Its mob mentality. But they are representative of the prevailing (and probably deserved, but that's besides the point) attitude towards the US in the region. All the while the US is antagonizing Russia with Ukraine even though respecting Russian interests would lead to a better relationship than the US can ever have with any Islamic state, particularly now when fundamentalism has all but replaced secularism in muslim states. And yet, the US is hell bent on destroying one of the last, if not the last, secular state in the region - Syria. 'tis madness

The air strikes don't do squat. They're just PR. Using a 100000$ missile to whack a 10000$ truck every other day isn't going to do anything except pull more money out of american taxpayer pockets when a new batch of missiles is ordered. It is literally throwing away a country's wealth for show, to give the appearance of doing something. Its impossible to win a war with airpower alone anyway, which I'm sure everyone here is well aware of. Any remotely competent army in the world would exterminate ISIS in a ground campaign in three months. Vast swaths of the territory they control is nothing more than desert, and bottom line is that they're just a bunch of bandits regardless of the gear they've pilfered. The fact that the badly armed, untrained and poorly supported Kurds could give them a run for their money tells you everything you need to know about ISIS.

I love 'em I just don't have to love all of them

That was my 10 minute impression of Asscreed II. At that point I realized its a game for when you're about thirteen and admire pimped up heroes staring moodily into space from whatever highest vantage point is available. If I could roll my eyes any further at the parkour gameplay they'd fall out of my sockets and roll across the floor. Basically everything in the environment is programmed to be a ledge, so no matter how inept at platforming you are, you'll catch on something and look as if you know what you're doing.

The Eurogamer review is utterly crushing. The end grade is good, but if you actually read the text its mostly negative

I played approx 20 hours of Skyrim, which is about my limit before I notice that the Elder Scroll's emperor has no pants and move off to something else. At its best it can be wonderfully atmospheric, at its worst, its a norse theme park slog where all you do is watch your avatar's ass as he/she runs from one landmark to another.

Well it is tedious but they wanted to be the emperor of a globe spanning empire... it can't be whores and eating until you puke all of the time I do wonder what they'll do with Civ VI. Civ V is already so simplified, if they wanted to make it even more so they'd kill the game. And a return to more complexity isn't likely either.

Hearing that the story isn't terribly good from the people who gave Skyrim 90+ and called it one of the best games of all time (lololololo) gives me an ulcer. And what of Mass Effect's basic plot and terrible twists? I'm not defending Bioware, but if they're going to slam them for unoriginal storytelling I wonder what BW games they've been playing for the past decade. Maybe the Bioware shiny is wearing off for the critics after all these years and the Inquisiton is just the game where they start to "notice" it. Makes me want to try it just to see what the real deal is

Of course you know, if the US wanted ISIS gone they could have told their financiers and supporters a.k.a Saudi Arabia & Qatar to back off. The whole media thing is a charade, oil from ISIS controlled refineries is still flowing through Turkey (a NATO country) and Israel, undercutting the price of oil in the world market (most damaging to Russia incidentally due to heavy economic dependence on oil prices). Armies out of "thin air" indeed. Both Turkey and the US want ISIS to keep doing what its doing in a bid to topple Assad. Turkey's prime minister even said so openly, as if Turkish inaction on the border conflict at Kobane isn't telling enough (and that Turkish airports and intentionally lax border controls made it THE place for international jihadists to go to join ISIS). So chopping off the heads of western journalists, mass destruction of holy sites (both muslim and christian), extermination of christian and minority populations of Iraq - its all tolerable so as not to offend the Saudis and keep Assad under pressure. Really short-sighted.

With allies like these, how could you lose? The man even speaks in passable English, just in case you don't get the message. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLtwdaB6EMs

Something fishy is going on here, the critic reviews are in the 80-90 segment. Even the utterly compromised IGN gave the game "only" 88. And yet, none of them point out anything significant to drag the game down, barring some crashing and texture issues.

Um that's exactly the sort of conformism driving everything BW does. But, at least they know their customers.

Yes, there is zero flexibility in Civ V. Same research order in every game, same policy trees, warfare is utterly suboptimal with the large hapiness penalties and with the post BNW science penalty per every city after the fourth one the only way to play the game is a 4 city empire going for science with a skeleton army for defence (exploiting the inept AI)/ I've seen some high level MP games and it looks depressing. Everyone sticking with their 4 city empire, vast parts of the map unsettled, no interaction between players. They manage to make a 4x game where eXpand and eXterminate aren't viable strategies.

"Best game ever. The romances were so well done I even kissed my monitor ?" -BruceVC "Too much romance and not enough fighting in tunnels" - Monte Carlo "Better than Twitcher3" - Hoon Ding ... "kissed my mother's brother" would be more appropriate, it is Bioware after all

I should add : Legend of Grimrock II 8/10 BUT - its certainly better than the first game, about as good as a dungeon romp gets, but like the first game, I tired of the gameplay quickly and stopped around half way. So it could be a 7/10 game on account of not even bothering to finish it but I feel they put too much effort into it for me to dump it in the "barely above average" category

I'm a bit lazy to follow the template so I'll just give /10 scores. Alien Isolation 8/10 (decent, but flawed) Wasteland 3/10 (first impression, there'll be no final score) Divinity Original Sin 8/10 (first impression, game in progress) Civilization beyond Earth (6/10, mediocre) South Park SoT 7/10 (nice, but runs dry towards the end) Endless Legend 7/10 nice flavor and graphics, but the gameplay is boring Shadowrun Dragonfall 9/10 (realistically, its an 8/10 game, but it was too good a nostalgia ride to lower the score)

Now that was a game I thought had potential. A bit more money and finesse with the combat design (and the design in general) and it would have been one of the best games in the last decade.

That's because it is. I liked it up until the ending though.