I think it's safe to say it has happened. I doubt it's all that common though, the majority of reviewers seem quite happy to do it for free copies. And given the state of game journalism in general, I'm not sure that paid reviews would be any less reliable or meaningful. Mind you, I don't think -any- of this is anything new...it dates back at least as far as the 80s, when dead-tree reviewers were pretty much assumed to be biased by the advertising dollars paid to the mag in question.

As always with reviews, the best approach is to play a demo when possible, and when it's not available, find a reviewer with similar taste to your own and take the rest with a big grain of salt.

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

Stereotypes go best with a grain of salt.
Jokes require a lack of seriousness.

And feeling a necessity to apologise after being referenced as "polite" is Canadian.

PS: this Aussie liked the concept presented as humor, regardless of accuracy and northern comforts

Lol, thanks for the history lesson. Don't know why you'd think I'd lie, but whatever.

You're pretty much confirming exactly my point, in the past his games require massive hardware. When you see a nice fluid video, take it with a grain of salt.

I'm glad that you know how he operates as well, but my original comment was for people who don't know that and for whom it probably won't be 'expected' as most developers these days like to target good performance on average hardware.

Having worked with Chris Roberts in the past, I would take everything sold with a grain of salt until you actually see it in the final product. If you ever do.

He is a fantastic salesman though, I'll give him that. Nice guy too.

I love Elder Scrolls (back to Morrowind), and thought Fallout 3 was very good but not great, but I just cannot get into Fallout 4 at all.

Some of my reasons coincide with Yahtzee here, but a lot are different. It's clunky, the dog does a great job of heroically jumping in my line of fire to take bullets / melee blows for enemies that I am trying to fight, pathfinding is significantly worse than Skyrim (and it was rather poor there), the crafting seems WAY too obsessed with needing 1 or 2 "rare" bits like the screws mentioned in the video that should be in *everything*, etc. etc.

The city building as an upgrade to Hearthfires in Skyrim is pretty cool, but should be a back-burner *optional* thing that encourages you to check it out because it gives cool rewards rather than because the very first set of hobos that you run into want you to do everything for them.

...Take all of that with a grain or three of salt, because I only played for a few days before I got thoroughly annoyed with it and haven't been back since. Skyrim gets new mods that add fun content or make it look *way* better than Fallout 4 does all the time. And I like the setting and lore better, but that is a personal preference. But basically, even after playing through the main story and all of the factions many multiple times each, I still periodically find myself getting interested in another run through Skyrim with a new set of mods. Fallout 4 might get good once the community gets hold of the creation kit for it, but for now I have zero interest in even giving it a more thorough shot to catch my attention.

To address your points:

>> Bush: Disaster. Remember, remember the Patriot Act?
GW is not up for re-election and to the best of my knowledge Jeb had nothing to do with writing the Patriot Act. He supports it, but almost all the candidates do. I'm not a huge fan of Jeb, but he actually seems like the smart one in his family. Would still prefer him not to be president.

>> Clinton: Lying, manipulative, currently under Federal investigation by America's FBI department. Really?
@newtboy already addressed the so-called "email-gate" or whatever. As for "lying, manipulative"? You're kidding, right? She's a politician. They're all lying and manipulative. Ultimately, I think Hillary will probably get the democratic nomination and while I'm not a huge fan, she's an order of magnitude better than any of the republicans.

>> Bernie Sanders: Self-purported Socialist. Lovely.
So what? "Socialist" is not a bad word. Many of the highest ranked countries for citizen health and happiness are socialist. America needs to grow the fuck up and get over it's childish clinging to McCarthyism. A bit of socialism would do it the world of good.

>> Ben Carson: I have no particular qualms, by all means intelligent, however, doesn't say anything beyond the bloated party line.
Ben Carson, "intelligent"? Are you fucking kidding me? The guy's borderline insane. How he ever got to be a surgeon baffles me.
This is a guy who thinks that "Joseph built the pyramids to store grain", that doesn't understand fucking magnets, er, gravity and believes evolution was ‘encouraged by’ Satan. He's a fucking moron.

>> That brings us full circle back to Trump... He has a real, tangible plan...
to fuck everything up? Seriously, Trump is an idiot and would be the worst thing to happen to the USA (and by extension the world) in decades. His ignorance is matched only by his ineptitude.

>> As for Obama, and I include him because many seem to think he is great for some reason..
a) I don't think he's great, he's been a huge disappointment and
b) he's irrelevant to this debate
but anyway...

>> His healthcare plan failed(look it up)
I did and it hasn't.

>> America is now over $18 Trillion in debt.
I wonder if the previous president starting two wars has anything to do with that?

>> And he insists on throwing pebbles at ISIS while the EU does all the fighting
Way too big a topic to address here. Post on another video if you want to discuss it further.

>> I am not necessarily saying that Trump is a good person, or would make a good President, but he would me loads better than the other shrimps for candidates...
He's not, he wouldn't and better than an invertebrate with a brain only barely recognisable as such is not a sufficient bar for the presidency.

Wow. I just found out that he also believes the pyramids were made by the biblical Joseph as grain storage buildings!


EDIT: And now his claim of having been offered and turning down a full scholarship to West Point has been contradicted by West Point, who said he never even applied and they don't offer full scholarships, and he's admitted he made it up...and other personal claims are also in question. It's looking more and more daily like he might just be a pathological liar.

I wonder if it would be good for a 3D printed material, plastic or steel. Where grain doesn't really factor in.

OK, his studies beat my anecdotal bias.

...That being said, I will continue to eat breakfast cereal with milk pretty much every day (as I have since I was very very young), and be strongly tempted to attribute my own lack of having ever broken a bone to that.

The other anecdote I have in my favor is coming from a farm family that raised chickens. I grew up in a prairie grassland area (converted to irrigated farmland thanks to aquifer access), while my cousins lived a couple hours away in limestone hills ranchland. Both of our families raised free range chickens.

Our chickens produced very thin-shelled eggs, and displayed behavior to suggest they were calcium-deprived. For example, our chickens wouldn't cannibalize their own viable eggs, but if we threw empty shells to them they would fight to eat the shells. Same but to a lesser extent for leftover bones, etc. (I assume they fought less over these because bones are harder to near impossible to break down with a beak). On the other side of the table, we sometimes exchanged eggs with my cousins, and their chicken's eggs were always extremely thick-shelled and hard to crack open.

When I asked about that, my folks told me (and later my Biology teacher confirmed) that was because the sod/soil around my home and flora and fauna growing from it contained very little natural calcium. Chickens raised in our area would often be supplemented with commercial feed that contained extra calcium, but we let ours range for food and eat table scraps; almost never supplementing their food with any commercial stuff. But the limestone (aka calcium carbonate) around my cousin's house contained very high amounts of natural calcium, which was naturally infused into the plants / grains / insects that their chickens ate, giving them incredibly thick shells.

So, I guess that while calcium intake apparently doesn't have a very statistically significant impact on human bone growth, I think that it must have a much more significant role to play in egg thickness if you happen to be a chicken... At least if you compare extremes of low natural calcium diet versus extremely high natural calcium diet.

@Asmo

On your comment:

The CIA's role in the 1953 Iran ouster is generally exaggerated. Several things - (1) by 1953, the Islamic clergy supported Mossadeq's ouster, something they have been suppressing ever since in inflating their anti-US stance (2) by the time of his ouster he also lacked the support of either his parliament or the people, (3) prior to it that year, he deposed his disapproving parliament with a clearly fraudulent 99% of the vote in a national referendum, (4) strictly speaking Iran was still a monarchy and the shah deposed his PM legally under the constitution, something that Mossadeq refused to abide by.

Did the UK put economic pressure on Iran when it threatened to nationalize its oil and usurp its remnants of imperialism? Sure. Did the UK then convince Eisenhower to mount a political and propaganda campaign against Mossadeq? Sure. Was that instrumental in fomenting a popular uprising of the parliament, the clergy and large portions of the 20m general population against him? Probably not.

Also I listened to it. Really, it's a meandering, probably scripted (the parts where he feigns surprise at the questioning is particularly humorous) that tries to generalize US actions, some of which were obviously harmful and support his argument. Putting Stalin in a positive light relative to the willingness of the US to use the bomb is, amusing? I'm not sure what to call it.

That the US needs a common threat to unite against holds some grains of truth in the present day but is really part of a wider narrative by Putin to construct the US as imperalist and domineering when by all accounts since the end of the Cold War, excluding GWB's term, it has been pulling back. It hardly needed to invent Iran's covert nuclear ambitions in the early 2000s, NK's saber rattling or China's stakes on the South China Sea islands.

Modern US foreign policy largely relies on reciprocation. The US provides a military alliance and counterweight to China's military for small SE Asian nations at a hefty cost to itself, and presumably gets various trade concession and voting support in various international agencies. The key word being reciprocation, something that Russia could learn a fair bit from in its own foreign policy.

Holy yeah, that was a horrific impact. Seems like a lot of people miss that he actually picked up sand and threw it in the bull's face. Looks like that was the grain of sand that broke the bull's patience.

Greece accumulated debt in a foreign currency (Euro). Had they been using a free-floating currency with Greece as the sovereign issuer, it would have been much less of a problem. But that's a different discussion.

You brought up retirement benefits. These benefits have been a major talking point over here in mercantilistic Germany. Unfortunatly, a lot of inaccuracies crept into the debate over time. A closer look reveals that it's not as black and white as it is made out to be. One point at a time...

The effective retirement age, if we look at OECD stats, is basically the same for men in Greece and Germany. The age of 56 is often thrown around as the expected average retirement age for workers in Greece, but that's only for the totally messed up public sector. The average for the private sector is significantly higher, as the OECD numbers indicate.

Yet the size of retirement benefits is even more controversial. There are, in fact, some very dubious practices going on in Greece, which result in rediculous retirement benefits for a select group of people, even at very young ages. Decades of nepotism, that's what it produces. But even so, pension expenditure as a % of GDP was not significantly higher in Greece before the GFC than in Germany. When Greek GDP collapsed, expenditures as a % increased, naturally. Some have gotten absurd benefits, but the majority got a pittance. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Greece doesn't have a social safety net, unlike Germany. There is no welfare. Many people have to take early retirement at reduced benefits to have any income at all.
So I'll say it's bad in Germany. Last decade's changes to our retirement system have a metric fuckton of people (~40% of workers) heading straight into poverty when they retire. It's social security for them, and nothing else. Still, it's bliss compared to what the plebs in Greece now ended up with.

However, even all those beautiful OECD stats have to be taken with a grain of salt. Germany has a working bureaucracy. Everything is documented. Greece is a mess. Therefore, all comparisons are guesstimates at best.

Finally, as long as the Greek economy produces enough goods and services, it is for them to decide how to distribute their wealth. If they want a lavish retirement system, so be it. Our governments opted to create a true underclass of the working poor, and gutted a retirement system that made it through two world wars unscathed. If German retirees want to bitch about their benefits, it should be aimed squarely at our governments and their intentional deconstruction of our social welfare state.

Am I way wrong here, or is it not possible to setup industrial processes to yield NaCl at very, very, very high purity? Is that somehow far inferior or noticeably different to 'normal' table salt and noticeably different from the salts produced in video?

I certainly noticed a difference between coarse Kosher and regular salt when cooking, but I always attributed it to grain size and possible desirable extra minerals in one or the other...