Azarkon
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Posts posted by Azarkon
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Personally speaking, the only game that I was really looking forwards to from Bioware was Dragon Age, and the fate of that game was never quite certain. So, like before, I shall wait and see.
Hope Obsidian doesn't get acquired any time soon, though.
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They could call the result 'Eurabia.'
I kid, I kid.
Or do I?
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So, assuming I want to play these oft-praised games (Final Fantasy Tactics & Tactics Ogre) where should I start? (as in, what console, what port, etc.?)
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What is the Christian take?
When it all began? The opposite (think the Beatitudes). Christianity took root under the tyranny of the Roman Empire, and many of its early leaders were martyrs. They preached messages of faith, hope, and peace - for those were the messages that the oppressed understood. Things changed, many would argue, when Christianity rose to prominence, though my impression is that the change is less that of the religion and more those who represented it. The attitudes of the oppressed are one thing; the attitudes of power are another - and once Christianity was adopted by men of power things like the Crusaders and the political authority of the Church came into being. At the apex of the Crusades and the glorification of the Christian Warrior, it's not clear to me how different Christianity was from traditional warrior culture in terms of its views on war, but presumably there has always been the separation of "for God" and "for honor," the latter being more relevant to other warrior cultures.
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everyone forgets that saddam violated almost every clause of his surrender treaty, signed after the first invasion.
Not everyone... Bush Jr., for example, always struck me as someone devoted to "taking care of family business." That his father had an old enemy in Iraq who was violating the terms of his defeat probably did not escape his notice.
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My stance on the "links" between Saddam and Al Qaeda is that they are largely irrelevant to why we went to war with Iraq, at least in the judgment of intents. That is to say, I do not think they played a large role either in the top-level decisions or in the justifications given to the American people, which at the time was focused on Saddam's WMDs. If, in retrospect, there were some connections between Saddam and the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11, it was apparently not enough for the Bush administration to claim a connection between Saddam and 9/11. Given the otherwise lax attitudes this administration has taken with regards to "twisting the truth," this for me places in heavy doubt any argument otherwise, since I doubt the Bush administration would hesitate to take advantage of even the silghtest possibility of such a link. And in fact, reading the 2002 Iraq Resolution, I find that such a connection was painstakingly avoided, as if the government knew someone would call them up on their bulll****. Instead, Saddam was linked to "general terrorism" and "general terrorism" was linked to 9/11, in the usual roundabout manner of political speak.
All in all, nothing has swayed me as to the nature of our actions in Iraq, which was fundamentally one of aggression (and perhaps vindication). With regards to Greenspan, he's not a particularly untrustworthy fellow, but I doubt he was audience to all the top-level decisions of the Bush administration. Still, that he would come out and say that it was all about the oil speaks ill for all those who laughed at the idea off as tin-foil hattery at the beginning of the war.
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There are no perfect analogies, mainly because we never did something like this before. Iraq is not VIetnam. It is not Korea. It is not WW 2. It is not the Gulf War. In all of those cases we were the defenders, if not of our own country then of someone else's country (or half-a-country). Iraq, on the other hand, is self-righteous US aggression. It is just not the same, and the best analogy I can come up with is China going into Tibet to "liberate" the Tibetans from their feudal overlords and into the joy of Communism, except instead of Communism, we're pushing democracy, and instead of absorbing Iraq as a US state, we're putting up a "government favorable to US interests."
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Nobody knows for sure what will be possible in the future. Some "breakthrough" could take place that could "revolutionize" AI and all that rot.
Certainly, but I believe a level of technological sophistication is required before breakthroughs can occur, and current research across the sciences simply hasn't reached that stage. Practical high-performance computing via nano-technology is a ways off, and quantum computing remains a fantasy. Neuroscience is not much closer to understanding how the brain works beyond primitive reactions and psychology is still a dead-end. Maybe biological computing could do something, but building a brain is not exactly the same as building AI. We could already accomplish the former (via cloning, for example, if the technology wasn't banned), but it gets us no closer to understanding intelligence, which is a prerequisite of translating it into computers.
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People outside of AI and Robotics really can't grasp just how far away science actually is from achieving their (rather unreasonable, once you think about it) expectations. That said, it's common sense that "presentation is everything." If you can get people to think that they're interacting with an intelligent being (ie like with those early chatbots), it really doesn't matter whether the being is actually intelligent or not. There's where I expect a great deal of progress in the coming years.
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There's a difference between difficult combat and enjoyable combat, IMO. Combat can be difficult and yet be boring - I tend to call them frustrating. Combat can also be easy and yet surprisingly enjoyable - BG 2 falls into this category, as does Bioshock. It might be best to have both, but if I had to choose, I'd choose easy, enjoyable combat over difficult, frustrating combat.
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samm: precisely - where would you move? All of Europe, and perhaps even the world, is mobilizing around these nativist trends, and it makes the future uncertain - and scary.
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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070901/D8RCI31O0.html
My personal impression is that there is currently a massive nativist movement in Europe and the US in response to the forces of globalization, which obviously isn't just a one-way penetration of other countries by the West, but also applies vice versa. There's practical reasons for this movement, but it's not difficult to see how it could easily transform into something much worse. Already we have people predicting the death of multi-culturalism, which might seem like a good thing until you consider what the alternative would be... A return to mono-culturalism and, thus, the ethnic centrism and ultra-nationalism of the WW eras?
Discuss.
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Reviewers, presumably, serve a useful function in that they play and are exposed to more games than the rest of us, and having made it their living, should be more knowledgeable about games in general. Unfortunately, this is often not the case in the game industry - or rather, it maybe the case for individual reviewers but the establishments for which they work are driven by all the wrong things so as to render those facts irrelevant. Look, I'm not necessarily asking for objectivism; a subjective opinion is just as good - when placed in the right context. That is to say, if I can find a reviewer with whom I mostly agree, and he has time to play ten times the amount of games that I do, then perhaps I can depend on him to point me out to all the great, under-appreciated games that I don't know about and all the popular, over-hyped games that I might not like. That's the reviewer's, and the critic's, economic value, put in part eloquently by Anton Ego in Ratatouille (though there he really only cites the "discovering new diamonds" function of critics). But when reviews are driven by marketing, when they do nothing but reiterate what the rest of us already receive from each company's hype machine, and when they make no attempt whatsoever to go beyond the bandwagon for fear of being different, then they lose their value, and become worthless. That is my problem with the current state of game reviews.
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Move away is a matter of perspective, considering that a large segment (majority?) of the RTS community still plays Warcraft 3 as their primary game - which might explain why other companies are not so keen on simply cloning, since they'd be hard pressed to compete with Blizzard. I'd observe what Blizzard does with SC 2.
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Right, and the Iraqs themselves have the final say in that. Don't get me wrong: the US has definite interests in keeping Iraq "whole" and "stable," not the least of which is to prove that we don't just cause nations to split apart but can, in fact, build them into strong, prosperous democracies (which we won't prove, quite to the contrary, if the result is three separate states in constant border conflicts with each other). But we don't have the final say in this matter and it was arrogant to presume that we did. It is similarly arrogant to presume that national sovereignty doesn't matter in the face of international humanism - yes, people do deserve to have the same rights to life that we take for granted, but that doesn't mean they're willing to give up tribal, national, and ethnic loyalties in order to achieve them. You can't ignore that factor in the name of "interventionism," or you're going to end up making things worse. That's not to say there are no circumstances under which military intervention is justified, but it is to say that you had better hold a deep respect for national borders and ethnic identifies in making that choice, or you're going to end up pissing off more people than you help.
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It's not that Sand is a despicable human being (for this, anyway): it's just that for him, the nation is such a powerful unit of categorisation that he divvies up many things in the world by laws of national sovereignty and integrity. But the nation is an artificial conception to begin with...
Artificial, yes; arbitrary, no. What we're seeing in present day Iraq is precisely the fallout from a semi-arbitrary assignment of different ethnic groups into a single nation in which they do not belong. As much as the modern West might hate to admit it, tribalism runs deep in the human instinct, and the world does not operate by the simple laws of a moral commonwealth. In fact, nation, tribe, and family play a huge factor in the direction of people's actions, so much so that many are fully willing to and capable of doing so-called "universal" evil in pursuit of "local" good - that is, acts that would be considered wrong if taken in a general context, but which can be construed as good when defined with respect to the interests of a group.
This is why sovereignty and national integrity are important things to consider when deciding whether to engage in "foreign humanitarian missions." You simply can't treat people as if national borders and ethnic divides did not exist - because people's moral compasses are defined along those lines. Trying to force the Iraqis into one nation, to get along with each other, might seem a good thing to do - but it ignores the fact that in many of their eyes, what you're actually doing is violating their ethnic solidarity, and that's why they resort to sectarian violence.
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A potentially wise move, if Bush plans to strike Iran.
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I thought the last twist you mentioned there was particularly cunning, as it plays off of the condition that we're all too used to in gaming.
I actually had someone mention - and was in agreement with him at the time - that it made no sense that you would just blindly follow Atlas's instructions given that you had no real grudge against Ryan and no way to know whether Atlas was really interested in getting you out (this became especially apparent after a particular point in the game). Turns out the developers thought so, too, and what I had brushed off as standard FPS railroading became one of the most clever twists put in games
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Finished the game, got the good ending (which actually brought some wetness to my eyes, though it may just have been from staring at the screen for too long
). Story and writing were both better than I expected; gameplay was slightly deeper than your average FPS; "role-playing," given how much they hyped it up, was worse than I expected. There is essentially one decision point in the entire game (that matters): whether you avoid, Harvest, or Rescue the Little Sisters - but there is practically little benefit to choosing the former two options except out of cruelty, because the last option actually provides equivalent/better benefits. So being "good" is basically a no-brainer - no real trade-off is involved. Heck, avoidance isn't even "safe" - if you don't fight them, you don't get Adam, which means you don't get cool powers, which means the game becomes very difficult later on... So again, even a self-preservationist would be masochistic to avoid confrontation.As far as graphics, sound, etc. goes the game is top-notch. I've little to complain about in these areas and would probably recommend the game to anyone who isn't too put off by what I mentioned above - it's an excellent one-time experience, particularly if you value production values and presentation.
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*shrug*
Morals, laws, self-interest. The ideal order of priorities
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The only time I am ever inclined to believe the whole hocus pocus about the defence industry calling shots is when I look at teh huge cost of our military presence versus the miniscule quantity of civil aid. Counter-insurgency has to include hearts and minds.
Really? The thought has never crossed your mind when considering what it must require - logistically, economically, and politically - to support our seven hundred-something foreign military bases? The US presidency is not a vocation someone simply "steps into." It comes with tremendous "bureaucratic" obligations to maintain and - if possible - expand the Pax Americana.
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Some more sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7081401662.html
"Sanctions can serve as a prod, but they have very rarely forced a country to capitulate or collapse," [Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear proliferation expert at the Center for American Progress] said. "All of us want to back Iran into a corner, but we want to give them a way out, too. [The designation] will convince many in Iran's elite that there's no point in talking with us and that the only thing that will satisfy us is regime change."http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/i...420309820070815
The designation would be the first time the United States has placed the armed forces of any sovereign government on its list of terrorist organizations and enables Washington to target the Iranian group's finances.http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293285,00.html
"What we have to understand here is the Revolutionary Guards are 'Murder Incorporated,'" former Ambassador Mark Ginsberg told FOX News. He said that the Guard, which serves directly under and reports to the Iranian president, is "an army within an army" that runs the other branches of the armed services as well as building construction contracting within the country and international arms deals, among other industries.The Revolutionary Guard boasts such veterans as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and many Iranian business leaders.
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Of course, there's also the alternative view to consider - ie that this is political "theatric" designed to intimidate Iran into submitting to the US's designs in the latest round of talks or to undermine the presidency of Ahmadinejad (support him, and you support WAR!) But I can't imagine the obvious threat-based diplomacy being received very well over there, or that it'd lead to long-term stability in US-Iranian relations.
On another note, one can't miss the ironic parallel with 300. Madness? THIS IS BUSH!
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In my opinion, the US going to war with Iran would be akin to the US going to war with China - not the same scale of confrontation, no, but about the same level of incentives (minus Israel) exist. One must therefore wonder how sane the Bush administration is in labeling the IRGC a terrorist organization - imagine it had done that to the PLA or RGF (the military forces of China and Russia, respectively). Is there really justification for war and, if not, this kind of saber rattling?
We live in dangerous times...
). Story and writing were both better than I expected; gameplay was slightly deeper than your average FPS; "role-playing," given how much they hyped it up, was worse than I expected. There is essentially one decision point in the entire game (that matters): whether you avoid, Harvest, or Rescue the Little Sisters - but there is practically little benefit to choosing the former two options except out of cruelty, because the last option actually provides equivalent/better benefits. So being "good" is basically a no-brainer - no real trade-off is involved. Heck, avoidance isn't even "safe" - if you don't fight them, you don't get Adam, which means you don't get cool powers, which means the game becomes very difficult later on... So again, even a self-preservationist would be masochistic to avoid confrontation.
EA buys Bioware
in Computer and Console
Posted
It's no surprise that Morgoth, Lord of Darkness, would champion EA