Drowsy Emperor

Deutsche Welle writes that support for Putin's policy regarding Ukraine is 82%. So much for the "Russians don't agree with Putin theory".

Actually: Which is why he ultimately folded. It corresponds to the events. The military was intact, the KLA+NATO invasion through Albania was destroyed, his pubic support was stable - he had no reason real reason to give in, 78 days in. So the Russians back-stabbed him and the west threatened mass murder. Tis all history now and no one cares about the truth. It was a weak man's decision. NATO had to "get results" because the bombing wasn't doing anything and alliance cohesion was faltering. There was no internal support for a ground invasion because, even though NATO would ultimately win, the casualties would be unacceptably high. The threat was a borderline bluff. Even if they went through with it, it would achieve nothing except angering the population further. If he held out more the entire NATO effort would have folded. *shrug*

Malcador, he's just showing what hides beneath his very thin veneer of politeness. Claiming something as vile as that people halfway across the world he's never seen "brought it upon themselves" to be bombed and then outright dismissing any comments from the other side merely because its "the other side" is the sort of kangaroo court thinking that is suited to the inquisition and has no place in polite discussion. In other words, don't bother. In news: fights raging around Slavyansk. The units loyal to Kiev are better equipped and are gaining ground. Russians still not really responding apart from propaganda support.

Poor Bioware, always trying to sit on two chairs at once. http://www.ausgamers.com/news/read/3432885/dragon-age-inquisition-will-feature-complex-romance-and-characters-with-one-solid-sexual-orientation-bioware Hamsters and rangers everywhere rejoice, for "characters with one solid sexual orientation" have now become a game feature that has to be pointed out. Is there anything from DAII they they haven't made an effort to distance themselves from?

I think the gist of it is that they decided the player must have something happen to them within 5 minutes of walking in any direction. It certainly works, because walking through the wilderness would be deadly dull without random encounters, but it does make for a crowded game world and logic takes a back seat to user experience. If I was making a sandbox RPG I'd go for the opposite philosophy - even larger world, perhaps partially made by procedural generation with more logical distribution of the hand placed content and easy access to transportation/mounts to solve the distance problems. And find a way to make the riding/flying/driving/whatever fun.

One of the fun things in ES games is how prone to various abusive tactics they are. My level 11 orc warrior ended up in Valthume (Evil in Waiting quest) which was obviously intended for a higher level. I ended up killing some lich or other by hitting him from hiding with my two handed sword and then running away a corridor or two until he lost interest. He made me sweat though, but now I see on the wiki he's level 50. Lol Was going to post a screen of the mask he drops but the screenshot feature in Skyrim is broken for some reason. The saved image looks garbled. I don't know why Bethesda persistently includes generic loot with a slight magical enchantment. Its so boring to fight through a dungeon only to get the same thing you already have but with a +5 fire damage. Another thing they persist with is a ton of little forts and such with random antagonists. I keep on running into Forsworn everywhere and they keep trying to kill me for no good reason. I ran into a necromancer fort. Many of these locations are withing eyeshot of a civilized town which is kinda silly - giving a sort of theme park feel to everything. No one seems to have taken a cue from the Gothic series on how to design a more organic and logical sandbox world.

Its pointless, just put him on ignore.

Get well soon

I thought we were collectively over the whole 3D TV thing and 4K was the next gimmick

I knew it when he said JNA instead of the English equivalent, I'm just waiting for him to own up as to which brand of troll he is.

Who the **** are you and how are you an authority on Serbian media or the Balkan wars?

Hm, always thought the Stingers were the problem and the real nuisance. RPGs as an anti-gunship weapon are pretty pants though, the amount the Somalis had to throw up to hit the US choppers was impresive, from what I recall. Clever theory by the Somali commander too, saw the helicopters as a weak point. Still not sure what the hell you're on with the second point, it's pretty obvious that selling girls into slavery and abducting them is bad. I guess we need to just say "______ is bad!" before any other point or comment. The real nuisance of fighting a war in Afghanistan is Afghanistan. The terrain is impossible, the resistance is dispersed and they're used to out waiting foreign powers. That said, the Soviets left Afghanistan with their man in power and it remained like that for quite a while. They "took" it, so far as it can be taken.

But they still struggle to do facial animation like the Source engine games for some reason.

That was very annoying, I had to replay that scene at least 15 times. I ultimately gave up on the game when it became a full on shooter somewhere in the second half. The new Tomb Raider is very much a case of an amusement park ride - you will stick to the pre-defined experience or some piece of machinery will cut your head off. Its got many good things going for it in the technical department but the gameplay is too shooter oriented and linear. I wonder why QTE's are necessary in the minds of developers. I'd much rather watch a well choreographed cinematic than be stressed out because I might miss a key and then have to watch the damn thing again. Even when I hit the key I feel the game is treating me like an idiot. Its so lose-lose on the user experience end, there's no explaining why they bother with them in the first place.

Ah, the counter-intuitive symbols that mean absolutely nothing. I think you have to mash F, supposedly the animation doesn't correspond with the input but there is no penalty for mashing the button, but I'd google the shape if I were you.

Funny I thought that Bethesda did release hotfixes and patches for all there games in an attempt to fix issues? More importantly than the bugs, I was reffering to some of the "systemic" weak points of ES games that are never addressed. Bugs just go on top o ****ing fantastic. So you're basically saying Crysis has better graphics than Pong because they're definitely comparable. Your observational skills are off the charts. Well since you brought up Crysis, I might as well mention that Far Cry 3 looks much better than Skyrim. And its a very large sandbox game. It doesn't have as much unique content, I'd guesstimate but its still substantial in size.

Endless Space seems nice but I just can't seem to get around to playing it for long enough to actualy learn anything

I play with everything on max and my PC is brand new. The game isn't running sluggishly, its the combat that's the same shallow mess of slow, tanky controls and poorly matching animations Oblivion was (and Morrowind before that). There's 0 player agency in it, it just boils down to getting in the face of the opponent and spamming right and left click until they die. I don't care if its open world or not, the graphics are about as good as Oblivion and nowhere near Witcher 2 levels. Textures and faces are better than in Oblivion but that's about it. The game was obviously made with XB360 hardware limitations in mind rest of the world be damned. I won't even go into the story and characters because I suspect there are none as per the Behtesda usual (I ignored the main quest and wandered off). The point of my rant is this. The graphics don't grate me. Nothing about the game really does. The point is that this game received practically universal acclaim from critics with 90+ scores thrown left and right. Yet its still the same bug ridden half broken gameplay of all Elder Scroll games. Bethesda never, ever, fixes anything - in some respects Morrowind is flat out better than Skyrim. Its bloody annoying at this point for every ES game to be regarded as the second coming when they're in fact riddled with bad design. Unmodded and without fan patches they're 8/10 games max. The animations, the bugs, the weak stories, the questionable combat, the lazy UI design persists in every game and no one ever calls Bethesda out on it, they just flat out ignore it all. Hell people slam Bioware on these boards constantly, even I do, but they at least polish their games up and generally try to improve their flaws. CD Projekt Red supports their games longer than anyone else. Bethesda just can't be bothered, like Creative Assembly and their Total War series. They just keep making the same game over and over with the same ****ty flaws and never bother to improve because as long as the suckers are buying it all is good.

Playing Skyrim, I can conclude that Bethesda's quality testing is still ****. One dungeon was half glowing purple and the game crashes regularly about an hour in. The combat is still as sluggish as Oblivion, the graphics are nothing to write home about, the animations are exactly like in Oblivion and the inventory/journal/skill tree is absolute console horror. Its so painfully obvious they made it for the TV screens with no effort to adapt it for the PC players. Also, everyone is trying to kill me for some reason. I killed two trolls and a hagraven at level 4. I have a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't supposed to happen.

The idea that tens of thousands of people could spontaneously organize the logistics of food,shelter and anti-riot gear in under a week (but lasting for months) can only be believed by a complete idiot.

Can't find the same article again, but the gist of it is this: most of you remember that Sony bought Gaikai, the streaming service. Supposedly the Playstation catalog will soon be available on a new Sony streaming service. Sony plans to make most games of the PSX-PS3 generation playable cross platform on just about anything that can stream video. Good news. There are a few PS3 games I'd like to play.

Serbian press says RT claims Russia is going to intervene in the next 48 hours. I can't find the original source on RT although I doubt they'd invent it.

Wow, why is the PS4 version so ugly? With optimization it should look close to the PC version. But honestly, even the E3 trailers don't show "next gen". What I see is an incremental improvement over GTAIV or GTAV (comparing them as sandbox games). Which is okay, but nothing really representative of a generational move from the PS3/XB360 generation.

You really haven't got the first idea about what happens in Russia do you?