. Many speak of the largest country in the world as it were the Bahamas – remember they can still retarget and obliterate half-the-planet in 30 minutes and are verifiably rebuilding much to the annoyance of the West … so it’s not surprising to hear normal poppycock from the Western mediated and medicated yuppified media of the lack of freedoms enjoyed by who … The Sun of London in tabloid journalism – that era ended with Yeltsin who rightfully deserves credit as well as critics for the way he handled the dissolving of Russia’s USSR. Russian and Sviet respect from WW2 comes from the fact that the Red Army and Soviet Russia lost more than 30 million people in war caused by Nazi Germany … and liberated more than half of the European Continent as so-called Communists! That again dwarfs the Western Allies and probably even the amount of Holocaust by Hitler vs. Soviet/Russian casualties. Imagine the Germans fighting the US back to the Mississippi River – losing control of the East Coast for a year or so, having the largest tank battle in history across the entire Mid-Atlantic US, laying siege to Chicago (aka … Stalingrad … now Volgograd and perhaps New York … aka … Leningrad … again Petrograd??? for another year) … all out war in most of North America and losing 30 million people in the process as they battled their way across the Atlantic all the way to Berlin? There lies your answer – no need for Salon.com!
The sudden collapse of the USSR and subsequent opening of the region has led to an intense investment and development scramble by international oil companies. A key problem to further development in the region is the status of the Caspian Sea and the establishment of the water boundaries among the five littoral states. Also: much controversy currently exists over the proposed Trans-Caspian oil and gas pipelines. These projects would allow western markets easier access to Kazakh oil, and potentially Uzbek and Turkmen gas as well. NOTE here also: the US has given its support for the pipelines. Russia officially opposes the project on environmental grounds. Analysts note that the pipelines would bypass Russia completely (that will not happen/nor will Russia allow it – because of the giant Gazprom, Rosneft and Lukoil – who will soon overtake the Western Major Oil Cos. soon in value and size (and they are all quasi-Soviet) … denying Russia and ex-Soviet states valuable transit fees, as well as destroying current Russian monopoly on westward-bound hydrocarbon exports from the region is a `war we won’t win’ … unless we follow John McCain’s 100 Year Bush-Cheney plan of liberty – now entitled by McCain as `Rogue States Rollback’ …. it seems the New Cold War has begun?
Folks in the naive West and media, to put bluntly … the conflict between Russia and former Tsarist regions is 500 years older than the discovery of America – so we should mind our own biz, stop expanding NATO as agreed to in the 1990 CFE treaty which Russia has honored since the disintegration of the USSR and the US/NATO have not. Russian reemergence as an energy and military Superpower disturbs us in the West … so some journalists begin speculating in the West, as the West normally does in its own terms – not historically. The Medvedev, Putin … the Russian and former Soviet peoples will work out their own terms and we should let them do just that instead of wooing them to NATO. This is idiotic anyways if we say the `Cold War’ is truly over … the US wants NATO to replace the UN as the World Enforcing Body, no doubt – but is a nuclear war worth it. We need to concentrate on extracting ourselves from a trillion USD mistake in Iraq before we worry too much about integrating the Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Just remember … the Red Army and the Russians/USSR lost 31 million people in WW2 and bore the brunt of defeating Nazi Germany again – any conventional war with them will prove the same result to the West … and smart bombs will be used by both sides, but the numbers lie with the 100 plus Russian Divisions, 15 million troops, tactical nukes and 20000 tanks.
Game design is like real-estate in surprisingly few ways – and yet, in both, location is everything. In a good game it is not merely the backdrop for your adventure but a key factor to be wrestled with or otherwise used to your advantage. In the best games it provides context as integral to the experience as your character and their motivations. In BioShock it is arguably more important than that.
So when Irrational Games announced that not only would they not be involved in BioShock 2, but that their glorious return to the franchise wouldn’t even be set in Rapture… well, it seemed they had thrown the Little Sister out with the bath water. What could BioShock be outside of Rapture? What gameplay environment could they deliver that would be as compelling as a city hidden miles below sea-level? It turns out the answer was in the question.
Columbia may be a city floating in the sky rather than 20,000 leagues under the sea, but it owes its creation to same origins that birthed Rapture – namely, hubris. A monument to the pinnacle of American achievement at the turn of the century, Columbia was built to be a kind of flying World’s Fair; visiting foreign nations to benevolently grace them with all the spectacle of Western accomplishment before moving on to the next. As is the way with these things, human weakness and shady motives soon erode the foundations of the city’s civilised society, bringing about a civil war between the ruling class of ‘Founders’, and the ‘Vox Populi’, an underclass of immigrants and servants looking for revolution. This is around the time our protagonist, Booker DeWitt, arrives in the city.
Booker is a Pinkerton, or more accurately, an ex-Pinkerton agent – thrown out of the notoriously unpleasant security agency for ‘unacceptable behaviour’. He has been hired by a shadowy collective to locate and return Elizabeth, a similarly mysterious young woman who has been imprisoned on the city for the last 12 years (interestingly, the game takes place in the year 1912).
Finding Elizabeth proves simple enough, but Booker soon finds himself caught between the Founders and the Vox Populi as both factions attempt to take advantage of the girl and her strange powers. There is also the small matter of dealing with ‘Songbird’ – Elizabeth’s giant clockwork guardian who acts somewhere between a Big Daddy and an abusive spouse. Songbird has helpfully been programmed with emotions like love, hate and betrayal, and will hunt you down tirelessly to reclaim Elizabeth for his own. Naturally, this wouldn’t be a Ken Levine joint if every NPC wasn’t out for your blood.KayLee goes to Legacy High School and was so much fun to meet at her model session! She’s got this genuine smile, and such a sweet personality. I can’t wait for her senior session in June! KayLee loves the east coast and races cars at Bandimere (what?! so cool.). She loves her Uggs and hoodies, and her dream job would be a pharmaceutical engineer (so smart AND so cool).
Here are KayLee’s photos from her 15-minute model session!
If you've done N'Zoth on Normal or Heroic difficulties, you will know about the importance of maintaining your Sanity on this encounter. On Mythic, avoiding Sanity damage becomes even more important because of the change to Radiancia de Azeroth.
On Mythic, this ability now is a one-time use. In addition, instead of restoring your Sanity to 100% over 4 seconds, it restores 5 sanity to all nearby allies every second for 4 seconds. This means that using Radiancia de Azeroth is now going to be used for the raid and assigned. If you get take extra Sanity damage, your Sanity will be lower than the rest of the raid permanently, unless the raid wants to commit an extra Radiancia de Azeroth charge just to you, and there's only 20 for the entire fight! But you're not going to use all 20 in this way due to the Secret Phase... More on this later.
Whenever you are in Reality on the N'Zoth encounter (not in a Mindgate or in the Heart Forge), you have the Estrago del infinito debuff applied to you. On Heroic this deals 17k damage every 5 seconds which is a base of ~3.4k DTPS. However, on Mythic, this damage jumps to ~40k damage every 2 seconds which is a base of ~20k DTPS per player which is a massive increase.
Every minute, N'Zoth also casts Tormento eterno which deals 80k damage to each player in Reality every second for 3 seconds. There's a lot of base raid damage in all phases of N'Zoth and despite predictions, this fight will probably not be 1 healed!
Phase 1 of Mythic N'Zoth is very similar to Phase 2 of Heroic N'zoth, and probably the easiest phase of Mythic N'Zoth, but it's still challenging for various reasons.
During the Mindgate phases, Psychus has a massive 102 million health. With only 10 players for the Mindgates, this means that guilds have to go higher than the standard 5 stacks for Heroic difficulty and Complexity Limit takes it up to 7 stacks before it dies. Complexity Limit also has 4 Fire Mages in on the encounter, and they destroy Psychus with their massive burst damage