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But really, interesting as it looks, are they already mostly funded or something? €8k? Is this a Codex in-joke or just a plain old scam?

Yeah, that actually happened to me while typing the post above. Don't know if you're aware of this, but the forum does save the stuff you write periodically. To recover it you need to go into full post mode, and under the post window you should have something along the lines of "view saved content", from which you can restore it. The save function could stand to work more often, though. I think it's once every 5 minutes or something.

Actually, during the 18th century, Spain was undergoing something of a recovery from the disastrous previous century. It was mostly post-French Revolution events (especially the Peninsular War) that broke the back of the empire, this time for good. Without a French Revolution, it's possible that the empire might have lasted longer due to strong rule from metropolitan Spain preventing criollo subversives from successfully mounting independence movements. That would have probably been bad, btw. Consider that the Spanish Inquisition wasn't dissolved until 1834... and Bourbon monarchs weren't known for their liberal tendencies. One of the most defining cultural currents of our history also arose chiefly in response to the defeat in the Spanish-American War which, without the US, wouldn't have happened. It's also possible that if Spain hadn't been such a non-factor in the early 20th century, we might have been involved in WWI, which is also bad no matter how you look at it. So yeah, go rebels.

What game has good combat according to you? Games in general or just RPGs? For instance, for games in which the action revolves around swordplay and footwork, CDPR could take some notes from PlatinumGames, especially where responsiveness is concerned. I couldn't get into Dark Souls for other reasons, but the combat is excellent -- again, because it's so consistent and responsive. Any modern fighting game is going to have good combat because, uh, that's all there is to it. I guess what I'm saying is... the Japanese can really program fun and engaging combat? But I suspect you are asking more about Western Action RPGs. In that case, I haven't played one in which combat truly stood out. Can you recommend any? From what I've gathered they really wanted to move from a QTE and stat-based combat to more or less pure action, between Twitcher and Twitcher2. It's not a bad idea but the execution is lacking in W2 because attack animations are decided by the game as opposed to the player, camera focus is all over the place and hitboxes are unreliable, not to mention the hallmark of all mediocre combat design: stun/stagger and i-frames abuse. This means quen-roll-roll-backstab is the best tactic for any encounter. Boring.

Twitcher3. After hating the vanilla gameplay of 2 (and the FCR2 mod which turns it into a left click-fest), I decided to go with an overhaul mod for 3 right off the bat. Having tried Ghost Mode and W3EE, I settled for School of the Roach. It's not perfect, but at least it does away with the MMO-inspired idiocy and combat and talents seem improved. So far so good, but the tendency worries me for Cyberpunk.

Low level gameplay is crap anyway. A gibberling rolling a 20 against your 6-hp mage? Bye-bye. I always found the first few hours of both IWD and BG to be the weakest parts of otherwise great games, and that's in large part through no fault of the devs themselves -- it's because playing D&D at level 1 ****ing sucks. D&D designers knew this, and thus the DM screen was born. Silke is a bad bitch (high level Bard IIRC), but she should still not have access to Contingency. I had the same issue in my playthrough, and turns out it's a mod conflict, in my case it was BG2Tweaks, in yours, it's likely Tweaks Anthology. I would have thought it's fixed by now, though. Regardless, I think I just insta-backstabbed her as soon as she turned red. I did that a lot in both BG1 and BG2 to deal with caster bull**** when my patience ran out. Montaron is your friend, just throw Xzar to the wolves (literally). The Ogre Mage at Firewine ruins is an asshоle, but he's supposed to be an ancient curse kind of guy IIRC, not a pushover like the rest of his kind that you encounter. He's not meant to be taken on by a bunch of level 3s. Sleep is insane in BG1, that's not SCS, it's vanilla shenanigans because at low levels your saves are garbage and you get a penalty from the spell on top of it. DavidW simply assumes that enemies aren't total morons and they will use the most effective tools at their disposal. Arrows, poison, backstabbing and Sleep pave the path to greatness in Stratagems-BG1. Stratagems is a curious thing. After getting used to it, I don't think I could play the game again without it, because I would find the comparatively dumb vanilla AI immersion-breaking. On the other hand, it is sometimes a source of hair-pulling frustration, especially when it does something it clearly should not. It's certainly not for everyone.

So you want to be able to buy crack, meth, speed, heroin etc. in any store? Anything else is government nannyism?

Yeah, I'm not sure that what America needs is another overt Rothschild ****ing stooge. I mean, it may superficially look appealing in the sense that En Marche! has managed to "heal" the rift between left and right... only it really hasn't, and the current popularity it does enjoy stems from a) the French left being a complete joke and b) both the traditional and populist flavors of right currently not being very well liked even by many of their own core voters. I'd rather look at what was happening in the streets in Paris in the lead-up to the election to better take the pulse of French society than put much stock in Macron's parliamentary strength. An American Macron could perhaps fool voters to win a Presidency or two like Obama did, thus in appearance addressing the issue of increasing polarization, but he or she would do jack **** about the problems causing that polarization to begin with, assuming they didn't actually make them worse. A band-aid at best.

Clunky third person shooter woman instead of clunky third person shooter man? Would be nice if there was a first person option so I don't have to see their sloppy character animations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKsav3_gKXs "Enjoy". Hope your tolerance for motion sickness is higher than your tolerance for bad animations, though.

You do know that you can respec for like 10 credits in the Tempest's medbay, right?

The Witcher 2. Combat in this game is downright terrible. Spam roll, cast a sign/use a trap or bomb, backstab. Repeat every ****ing fight. much design, such improved, wow

So you're basically saying that any invisibility-based spell combo was unmanageable until the duration expired... unless you made your own mod to deal with it. I didn't have your mod, so yeah, 100% unmanageable. Mislead + SI: Divination and SI: Abjuration + Spell Shield are both staples of the mod, which are used simply as a basis for defenses and never on their own. Throw regular combat and spell protections on top of it, and it's check-mate because liches and rakshasa are naturally immune to level 5 spells and below, including protection removal spells. A specific exception was made for Breach, because otherwise the Stoneskin spam made all non-caster classes that weren't Carsomyr-toting vanilla Inquisitors obsolete. Ruby Ray is a level 7 spell, which you'd only have by the very late game, unless you were willing to cast from scrolls, of which there was a rather limited supply. Spell Shield was likely bugged or affected by the wonky event tracking inherent to the engine, because while it's supposed to be dispelled by the first attack that strikes it, in practice often it wasn't, giving enemies absolute immunity against spell protection removal for the duration. Again, battles against casters above level 16 or so boiled down to stripping their defenses in the round or three they needed to decimate your party. Pre-buff shenanigans just made this harder because their contingencies and triggers were not used at the beginning of the encounter and this made enemy casters unreasonably difficult to manage. Yes, it was doable with extensive meta-gaming afforded by prior knowledge of the game, absolutely optimal item and ability usage and frequent reloading. Yes, liches are mostly a cakewalk if you used Daystar and cast Sunray while under ProDead or ProMagic. Rakshasa were a joke if you spammed (undead) summons at them while staying out of sight. Kangaxx could be OHK'd with the improved Mace of Disruption. And so on. I wouldn't say that's exactly an enjoyable way to play the game, however, which is why I don't recommend that one component unless you intimately enjoy pain. Bottom line is the magic system of BG2 was incredibly broken. SCS exploits this to the fullest extent, which is why caster fights are on a whole another league compared to any other type of encounter in the game, including dragons, demons, vampires, etc. The only reason why this isn't more evident is because it usually takes until ToB for the player to reach the power level of the high level mages encountered throughout SoA. At that point, you can make use of the exact same bull**** strategies and laugh at whatever the game throws at you. Broken.

Perhaps -- I was only rigorous about stacking potions and buffs for the SCS Sarevok fight. However I do remember that with some relatively high-level casters starting from level 16 or so, SCS used some really cheap check-mate tricks that you could do literally diddly **** about until their durations expired, because the only valid counter was area-based Spell Revisions Spellstrike, which is a level 9 spell. And considering that for most of BG2, enemy casters need about 1-3 rounds to ruin your day regardless of your own prebuffs, that component was more a source of constant aggravation than anything. I also remember that the mod was really ****ing stubborn about allowing me to completely deactivate prebuffs, going so far as forcing me to manually delete the pre-cast versions of the buffs from the game folder. FFS.

That's true, it's just not the whole story. Bethesda originally secured rights for 3 Fallout games, but when Interplay crumbled for good, they actually bought the IP from them. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Bethesda_Softworks_LLC_v._Interplay_Entertainment_Corporation

@kirottu That's more or less my mod lineup when I'm playing. I also tried Spell Revisions and liked it a lot, but it departs quite a bit from the PnP rules in some cases so not for everyone. As for Stratagems, I really recommend you stick to the option that has casters not spawning with short duration buffs pre-cast, at least for BG2. Much as I like the mod, that **** is cheap as hell and casters really don't need to be any more broken than they are. In BG1 it's not so bad because the highest spell level is 5, but high level casters already have 2-3 protection layers out of their contingencies and triggers, and are untouchable until you deal with them, you don't want to be adding to that. edit: you are playing the EEs, right? Have you checked the spellcasting failure options they added? https://s3.amazonaws.com/beamdog.com/release_notes/ReleaseNotes080616.pdf

Par for the course with EA. They are all about marketing and metrics, actual substance comes a (very) distant second place. Consumer trends prove time and again that spending a ton of effort and money on marketing weak products is a very sound business strategy, so do as I do -- don't hate EA, hate people.

But that's not how it went down at all. He's neither insulting nor condemning anyone by himself, "because he can". He was simply restating what's a pretty central tenet of Christianity: you don't believe in JC, you are ****ed. I mean, it's right there in the name. By definition, any theology that acknowledges the One God but not the Trinity and JC is deficient, from the point of view of Christianity. I think it pays to read the original piece the guy wrote to understand what's he really talking about: http://theresurgent.com/wheaton-college-and-the-preservation-of-theological-clarity/ He was making those statements in the context of a theological discussion, in response to *someone else's* re-interpretation of Christian dogma. In a broader sense, he was supporting a private, Christian school's motion to fire her over her statements and heterodox views. "Islamophobia" was only introduced in the matter by Sanders' contextomy.

Maybe if he had allowed the guy to finish answering the question instead of constantly cutting him off, he would have received some much-needed context. I don't see anything wrong with stating that non-participants in your religion are in for bad stuff after they die, from the perspective of said religion, in the context of a religious discussion. I don't usually agree with you but this is a bit too close to ideological policing for comfort. I'm not a huge fan of Sanders, but I wanted to throttle him after watching that. Behead all those who aggressively ask questions but prevent the other party from answering. That being said, homeboy was a pushover. He could have explained himself much better than he did, when he was finally allowed to talk. "Do you consider this statement Islamophobic?" It is, if Christianity, like every other Abrahamic religion, in considering the others false and heretical is construed as "Islamophobic". Them's the breaks, Senator...

^ Considering that it's more a Destiny/The Division knockoff than an actual RPG, I took that more as a comment on their design vision regarding build viability and the meta in general...

As I understand it, the studio (as in, Bioware Montreal), was downsized back to a "support" role -- as it was before work on Andromeda started in earnest. It's just that apparently there were no layoffs, with people being sent to work elsewhere within EA. Other than letting contractors go at project completion, I don't know how standard this practice is.

They may be Bioware's core franchises, but as far as I know, EA makes most of their money off sports games. The Sims, assorted Battlefields and especially the "additional content" scam are all bigger chunks of their business than DA or ME. The recent studio downsizing doesn't sound like the game was doing so well at release, but I guess that the amount of DLC the game receives will be the best indicator. So far, at least in the MP department, the comparison to ME3 suggests it's a flop.

I'm basically done with this game, and while this is a Kotaku piece, it's well worth the read (I know, I'm not quite over the shock myself, yet): http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428 In other news, patch 1.08 is now live. The takeaway: we can finally bugger Jaal.

Not the first instance I've seen, either. I wonder why the rest of the competitors would go along with that -- it's the same as running against someone that is an open PED user. Is there some sort of obligation on HS athletes that forces them to compete? Do they forfeit sponsor pay or something if they withdraw in protest? Regardless, beyond the race itself, I thought the father's comments were disturbing. Basically "IDGAF about anyone else, all I care about is my son/daughter's happiness". I wonder if he realizes that if everyone operated on that premise, it would be back to the law of the jungle overnight. Saudi being **** again? I'm shocked. Again, walk out. Refuse to participate in a competition with these ****heads. That would have made headlines. Of course, that does mean forfeiting possible performance bonuses, so we'll just feign righteous outrage and go on with our day, business as usual. Heh.

“I’d had four or five pints — nothing major.” And there you have it. Stop investing in carrier strike groups, bomber wings and mass surveillance programs. The solution to terrorism? More pubs.

I'm playing The Witcher. It's been in my backlog for, uh... years now. Tried it before but couldn't get into it and gave up shortly after the prologue. I guess my expectations and tolerance for drudgery have really been affected by Mass Defect. Joking aside, it's fun enough, so far. Just finished Act I. I'm actually not even minding the combat, simplistic as it is.