213374U

You brought it upon yourself, tbh. Don't post live executions stuff and other tripe and you'll be fine. I've butted heads with moderation here more times than I care to remember and it was always for doing stupid **** like circumventing the language filter or creating alts to avoid moderated posting, never for the actual content of my posts. Don't try to be clever. Also, I imagine there's a wealth of news items and different perspectives in Russian language sources, but as far as Spanish language sources go... heh.

It's longer than Dead Man's Switch. It has *some* actual C&C, slightly better gameplay, squadmates now have personalities—it's just better all around. The engine was patched to feature a "save anywhere" function that applies to DMS as well. It's standalone in the sense that both campaigns are unrelated (one takes place in Seattle, the other in Berlin), but you need the base game to run the expansion. I bought it for full price (~11€, and being the cheap bastard that I am, I never do that) and I'd say it was worth every penny eurocent. The only thing I'm disappointed with is that HBS are unlikely to release further expansions. edited for localization

I was going to write something... but I doubt I can put it better and more succintly.

Well, that's just great. Another chain of major foreign policy blunders that ends up playing right into Putin's hands. If Russia does indeed intervene, federalization (one of the proposed solutions by the Donetsk People's Republic) will basically be out of the question, and probably independence too. I wonder if this is actually the outcome Biden was hoping for? Disintegration of Ukraine and annexation of parts of it by Russia so it effectively ceases to exist as a buffer zone? Remember: if it's not on Wikipedia or the BBC, they are "random links on the internet", and they can be safely disregarded.

I'm sorry, you shouldn't read my posts under the assumption that all of them are crafted to fit in with my overarching anti-EU, pinko leftard, conspiracy theorist master plan. Only a vast majority. It seems to be a long-standing point of contention between you and me, and it's somewhat tangential to this thread. It goes back to other discussion where you argued that some international justice is better than no international justice, and that an actually impartial international justice system is unrealistic because the enforcer will never be impartial. My position was that "some" international justice is in fact no justice at all if some parties are both apparently immune and running the show while others seem to be consistently targeted, regardless. As a result of the perceived unfairness and the fundamental injustice that this represents, it's not surprising that some feel disenfranchised and rise to challenge the legitimacy of the system as a whole, often violently. Universality and consistency are two of the pillars of justice. But justice matters little when you can get away with whatever, because force, applied or threatened, and not reason, is the ultimate problem solver in human affairs throughout history. "International law" is little more than a way to play the Great Game while paying lip service to Enlightened ideas. But what goes around comes around.

So the logic here is, it's OK to use heavy weapons against insurgents if they are backed by Russia. If not, the government has no legitimacy to quell riots, it must fold to the insurgents' every demand, and the President must be dismissed and tried for treason. And if you think I'm being overly sarcastic, think again. It's actually how things work once you realize that laws aren't worth the paper they're printed on, that reasons can always be cooked up after the fact for the history books to help the masses sleep easy and that, indeed, might makes right. "Stop quoting laws, we carry weapons!"

^ You got it backwards. It is the government waging regular war against the separatists to retake parts of the country they had lost control over without any actual fighting. This is after going back on internationally brokered deals that were backed by Russia twice. I guess the separatists should just stand down and go home, right? Because that's what people at the Maidan square should have done once the fighting broke out? lel consistency

'PC games have surpassed console games globally' :smug: :masterrace:

I think it's fair to say that Ukrainian alignment with the EU and likely IMF bailouts would be like a root canal or some other medical surgery performed without anesthesia: a process that's long and painful, but the patient would eventually emerge better for it. And I've talked with some actual Ukrainians and they universally understand even if they were to magically join the EU tomorrow night it wouldn't fix things right then and there and that things would stay bad (if not get worse) before they got better. The EU may be undergoing one of its greatest trials and tribulations yet, but its future is brighter than Russia if it stays its current course. I asked this in previous iterations of this thread, and have yet to receive a concrete answer that is supported by the data we have. How exactly would Ukraine and the average Ukrainian benefit from a closer alignment to the EU? Why is this "long and painful" process necessary, and precisely what does "better" mean in this context? Better compared to what, at any rate? Can we see some actual figures instead of simply rehashing the same neoliberal articles of faith?

What? But... why? Another developer to scratch off my list, then. Bah. Thanks for the heads up.

^ I just checked. The Gamersgate version has Steamworks listed as its DRM. What the hell? Why bother setting up your own digital distribution service if you are going to force your customers to use the competition's anyway? The CK franchise didn't interest me all that much (I'm more a Vicky/HoI kind of guy) but the fact that it requires Steam is basically a deal killer. I hope it's not a trend.

So I got TW1+2 for like 5€ the other day in a GOG sale. Have downloaded TW1 but... can't be arsed to fire it up. Help me, Obsidianites. You are my only hope!

To be fair, that's simply a result of min-maxing becoming the norm and devs being forced to account for it. But min-maxing has its roots in P&P and uber munchkins far predate MMOs. Hell, it's not even restricted to gaming. Once something, anything, becomes competitive, there is only one path of least resistance and if you don't take it, your performance will be, by definition, suboptimal. The only difference is that, unlike with real world activities, rules that govern MMO worlds are easy to write down and then it's just about number crunching. It's a "problem" with gamers' mentality as much as it is a lack of imagination on the part of developers. Why must MMO design philosophy seep through to single player games where there is no competition element is a very pertinent question, however.

To be fair, any order given by an armed law enforcement officer is, ultimately, a threat, in the sense that cops are the embodiment of the state monopoly on the use of violence ("public force"). It's just that we have learned to live under this threat and accept it as part of the social contract. But try and resist, see how that ends. This scenario may seem absurd because under normal circumstances people usually aren't militant anarchists. But then, when social order has broken down, "normal circumstances" no longer apply, and riot police become indeed "balaclava-clad gunmen", at least to those who refuse to acknowledge their authority. In the end, people rely on balaclava-clad gunmen to protect them from balaclava-clad gunmen. As Orwell put it: "men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them".

Agreed. I couldn't get over the idea that the big lunk in front of the party was essentially exercising a limited type of mind control over every enemy we faced, regardless of their intelligence and training, their leadership and discipline, or their ability to comprehend human speech. I couldn't help but imagine how much more interesting and fun the game would be if tactical positioning were a more realistically effective way to manage which party members faced the brunt of enemy attacks. Of course, such an approach would've forced everybody to play the game the way I played it-- zoomed all the way out in the overhead tactical view and pausing every 4 seconds on average. You play like a Man, and I approve of this post. To continue my rambling, I am now vividly reminded how especially infuriating I found all this, because the game clearly had the potential to be the kind of tactical combat experience I really wanted. The whole "tactics" system could easily be set up to do things like "Form a line of battle" or "Have these 2 characters guard each others' backs." Flank attacks would be made extra dangerous for everybody-- not just Rogues-- in my Dream-DAO. (Rogues would still have advantages in getting into and out of Flanking position.) In place of threat-based mechanics, Fighter types would get abilities limiting opponent battlefield movement, pushing opponents around, and projecting defensive bonuses to other nearby characters. Ideally combat would play like this, if anyone bothered to build an AI that took positioning, roles, equipment and specific vulnerabilities into account while forcing enemies to act in character ("hmm... if I try to break the line to get to that wizard, I can *maybe* get one shot in before they cut me down. Sounds good, let's do it!"). I have yet to see one "tactical" game that does this and frankly I don't think it's easy at all: if you are familiar with SCS, you know that the mod follows this design—to accomplish it some AI scripts that govern complex enemy behavior are several thousand lines long, whereas the original BW AI was a few hundred lines at best. And due to engine limitations, it still cannot very well take stuff like formations and LOS into account. It's kinda sad because graphics have evolved incredibly in the last decade, but we're stuck with, at best, the same barebones AI.

Maybe, but they sure as **** aren't convincing me to sign up again with images of pickelhaube-clad mandrills. I mean, WTF? (and the award for weirdest thread goes to...)

^ I don't know if I qualify as an average gamer in the sense you mean, but I know that indeed, failed backstabs were some of the most frustrating occurrences in the IE games (until I discovered they had found a way to enable facestabbing for the player, anyway). I don't know, that and the extremely user-unfriendly way traps were implemented made me feel that somebody in the design team had a beef with thieves. After a few tweaks I found especially thief hybrids to be pure awesomeness, but I think the skills a rogue brings to the table are systematically underplayed, when compared to a P&P environment.

What is this travesty? A thread dedicated to pix of hot women, without any pix of hot women. Shame on you! Fortunately, my emergency stash is always well supplied:

Well, the lack of warnings or moderation may have something to do with the fact that your inbox is full.

Now that's disappointing. I'd actually would have loved for some internal moral struggles, in relation to blood magic, to happen in the game. Origins had something like that going but it was ultimately cut, bah. Yeah, cutting out actual consequences for your choices. Can't have that or somebody over at the 'dex could have a stroke. Cutting the specialization means it's probably just too much work to have the plot recognize and react to the fact that the Inquisitor could be a puppet of the demons of the Fade. While I personally feel like elements being randomly assigned the descriptor: Evil is lazy and silly, I can understand how this can generate a plot thread the writers don't want to explore or is outside of what is feasible with the resources they have. But as others have mentioned this is a consistency problem, caused by the writers' determination to remake Blood Magic into something inherently evil and portray those who practice it as raving madmen, when in previous games this was not necessarily the case. At this point, nobody should be surprised that a Bio game is not an exploration of Hannah Arendt's ideas on the nature of evil. Not sure it needs to be, either.

No amount of vapid sarcasm, la-la land solutions and irrelevant trivia is going to hide the fact that you, once more, missed the point. Trivia that is, for that matter, incomplete. I suggest you read up on the "right of revolution" and what it meant in the context of the common law interpretation of the Rights of Englishmen, that was used as a justification ad- and most importantly post-hoc in the case of the American Revolution (regardless of its actual merit...). But you are also clearly confused: the Declaration of Independence officially announced an overt revolution that rejected the authority of Britain over formerly British territories—the analogy only remotely works if you intend to draw a parallel between American colonists and East Ukrainians. Or are you suggesting that Yatsenyuk is a rebel and has proclaimed the independence of Ukraine... from Ukraine? Because up until now, the narrative here is that he's the legitimate President of Ukraine. You cannot simultaneously be the lawfully appointed Head of State and a rebel against the same state. This is the biggest problem; the Kiev government insists that it's legitimate while eastern pro-Russian separatists refuse to acknowledge it because of how Yanukovych's ouster was handled. A referendum in East Ukraine would be viewed as illegal by Kiev (as with Crimea) if organized by pro-Russians, and it would be impossible for Kiev to carry out because their authority is challenged there and it would be viewed as a betrayal by their pro-West power base, further increasing instability. Sure, the Rada and the President can try to do whatever, but if what they do isn't perfectly lawful and they don't bother amending the present or drafting a new Constitution with sufficient political and popular consensus, chances are it'll be declared illegal and void down the line, and they will have have solved nothing. You know, exactly how the Ukrainian Constitution has been modified the last two times, resulting in a rollback to the 2004 version, which is one of the main factors of the present crisis. The rule of law rests on one thing alone: the willingness of people at large to abide by the law of the land. If you rule arbitrarily, people are going to lose faith in the rule of law and at some point any such rulings, the very stuff the state is made of, won't be worth the paper they are printed on. This is why even totalitarian regimes attempt to wrap themselves in a mantle of lawfulness and the reason why absolute monarchies fell in Europe. An illusion of order grounded on law must be maintained. Legal exceptions enacted without broad consensus may be a way to "fix" problems by sweeping them under the rug, but the issues are going to resurface twenty years later because you never bothered to address the underlying causes. Attempts to change reality by lawmaking have a tendency to fail, as the current situation illustrates. But hey, all involved are clearly idiots when something with such a simple solution hasn't been fixed yet. I pity them for having to stumble blindly without the light of Rostere's wisdom to mark the way. It's also pretty cute that you feel confident enough to decide who is "sensible" on the basis of agreement with your POWERFUL THINKING theses. What a cozy little endogamous intellectual haven you have built for yourself.

Oh? When Iraqi Freedom was over, after combing the country for stuff that hadn't existed since 1991 and finding diddly squat, they finally concluded that "we may have been operating on faulty intel". The whole affair was such a cluster**** that they tried to pin the blame on the Brits, to make it seem like the rationale for the war had been an honest mistake. This wasn't a media mea culpa—it was, once again, simply reporting on the official government line and the conclusions of the IIC, without one bit of independent review or critique. A tacit admission that they had, and still were basically parroting the latest story the ministry of truth had come up with. Not exactly what I'd call "exposing". Accountability has all but disappeared as neither the gov't spokespeople that go on record with fabricated stories nor their media collaborators ever have to answer personally for their dishonesty. The moment journalism became about echoing unsourced (as the sources must remain secret to protect "national security") and unverified statements, was the moment the long history of independence you cited was betrayed. Can't live off the old glory days forever.

Have you played Chrome? It's sci-fi and IIRC maps were large enough that there were some vehicles, but I played it so long ago that I forgot just about everything else about the game. Might be up your alley. Of course, there's also the excellent Riddick games, but those are more stealth than shooter.

Ostrovsky's first piece since his release: "I had it pretty easy, because I was let go" So they nabbed him, roughed him up a bit, gave him the whole dank cellar treatment and then released him without explanation. Huh. In other news, Slovakia to provide gas to Ukraine. A token gesture, from the looks of it. Nowhere near enough to guarantee Ukraine's supply for next winter if Russia decides to cut them off, and Slovakia doesn't want to risk breaking their agreement with Gazprom.

1) I drink strength potions vs. Demogorgon. Tactics. 2) I have 3 strenth potions. I can't get more. I have to kill Demogorgon, Bahomet and Monte Carlo. I allocate my limited resources between the three battles. Strategy. While this is relevant from a theoretical standpoint, in my experience, in practice it's not. In all party-based games I've played since the IE came out, after a short, unforgiving and frustrating start, I was consistently swimming in potions, scrolls, wands etc, rendering the strategic element of resource allocation meaningless. This is partly due to the fact that most of the cookie-cutter encounters (filler, to tie in with my previous post) don't require that you expend any of your non-renewable resources and the instances where the difference would be noticeable are few and far between. And even then, it's not a requirement, but simply something that will increase your chances of avoiding a reload. Last time I went to grab the Ring of Gaxx, I didn't even have to use my valuable Protection from Magic scrolls because I got lucky with the Mace of Disruption. So much facepalm. Pre-buffing is bad design because it's gamey and grounded on trial-and-error and metagaming. The best buffs are usually short-duration so you absolutely must delay applying them until you really need them, but in CRPGs you never know when that is until you have died and reloaded. There is no way to gather clues about what type of protections you are going to need to beat certain boss, and you cannot research likely enemy tactics and force composition in advance. A first-time no-reload BG2 challenge would be next to impossible to complete—not necessarily because it's difficult but because it's very unforgiving and eventually you are going to fail a save for an effect you hadn't accounted and buffed for. Some people don't have a problem with trial-and-error gameplay but I find it hard to incorporate into my roleplaying.