Azarkon
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Posts posted by Azarkon
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HIV doesn't worry me as much as the number one killer disease in America... Wait, was that obesity or cancer?
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You know, Azarkon, you went about this all wrong. You should have singled out some group to insult. How do you think you'll get any wind under this thread unless you question the members' intelligence or integrity or sincerity?
:D
To be honest, I started this thread (in a feverish impulse late at night) partially as a way of sorting out my own thoughts in the matter, not so much to initiate discussion. I realized this after waking up the next morning and feeling no particular desire to "champion" my cause, so to speak, which is the reason I have simply let the thread die.
Still, I am grateful that some people responded with more food for thought, and some of them are very good points that deserve examination in some future thread that's a bit more... Heated, shall we say?
For now, though, let me just say that while human progress is undoubtedly limited by biology, I think we've a long way to go yet before the realization of our potential. Come a day when we can not even imagine anything new under the sun, and I'll accept that we've reached the end. But as long as man dreams, so he may become
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How can we expect peace when we prepare for war? How can we blame nations for hating us when we clearly do not like them? Politics have always been a game of power where the "sincerity" of our relations come second to strategic and political self-interest. This cannot be denied. But if so, what is our true enemy: the Enemy of my Friends, or the fact that I distinguish between Friend and Foe?
These aren't meant to be insightful questions. They're meant to scratch the surface. Their answers solve nothing. But they reveal deeper issues. I bring your attention to this article:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GK10Df02.html
Ask yourself this, regardless of whether you're pro-US policy or anti-US policy: how can we ever hope to achieve peace if the very definition of Alliance/Friendship is the exclusion of the Other? Sociologists, psychologists, and writers have warned us for centuries that communities are built not only on the idea of mutual benefit but are always, rather, reinforced by the exclusion of a certain group. It may seem very practical for the US or another superpower to go out of its way to convert the entire world to its allegiance, but this cannot be: unity cannot be achieved without the presence of an Other against which to define it. Alliances are formed against the rest of the world much as cliques in high school are formed against other students. Thus is indifference born: "I care only about me and mine. You and yours can go to hell."
This mentality must be defeated in order for human civilization to make any progress towards a better, safer society. Some may argue that it's against human nature. I think it's a matter of semantics. It's true that, more or less, we can never be free from the "clique" mentality. But we don't have to be. There are two alternatives to our current state of nationalism & regional division:
1) Every man for himself, in which case the clique is individual, and "wars" become individual competitions
2) Humanity is a clique defined against an outside force.
There maybe others, but I think you get the idea. It's not so much that we need to be free of cliques. It's that we need to redefine them in ways that will not bring about a return to the Cold War because honestly, I don't think the world can survive another major war built upon nationalism and indifference.
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You can somewhat offset that effect by throwing in questions you know the answers to and gauging the prisoner's response wrt the level of torture. Still, it is ethically unsound and isn't guaranteed to produce the correct answer - at which point, you'll have to make the inhuman measure of how much longer you're going to torture said person before you know that he's not lying. A week? A month? Until he dies - after all, what if he's made up his mind to never reveal the truth? I hope these are not the questions that our interrogators ask, because it's a steep slippery slope between interrogation and sadism.
Traditional torture is useful, in the sense of political expediency, to produce guilt where it does not exist (ie witch hunts), since there the truth is what the victim is willing to confess. It is not all that useful for producing a hidden truth unless combined with certain... Psychological techniques for exploiting the unconscious.
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Too bad most of fundamentalists in the US are Protestant, not Catholic.
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Diablo II LoD ended with every one of the prime evils dead.
Warcraft III is continued in WoW.
Starcraft is continued in SC: Ghost.
So Blizzard has their bases covered... For now.
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If only I were born fifty years from now...
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It's funny, judging just by the art style, so my guess is that that's its purpose. Comedy can go hand in hand with being corny, and some of the best B-movies are sooo good because they're sooo bad.
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The worst part comes when you pair a Cute Elf Sorceress avatar with the guttural growl of a overweight male in his thirties...
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Voice-recognition is likely still a bit off.
But ventrilo & the like are starting to become standards *now*, at least in online competitive games like FPS's, Guild Wars, and WoW. The competitive edge of being able to communicate while your hands are tied makes it necessary, though oft times it does take away from the feeling of immersion (since the human voices do not match the world/characters...)
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Can someone who will play the game fill me in on it? I'm not going to buy a PS2 for it, and I know enough of Ico to know what makes that game tick. SoC, however, appears to be a rather short and combat-oriented experience. What makes it, as such, great?
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Such a tease.
I thought I was going to see actual screenshots
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I haven't read David Gaider's Revan fanfic. Where can I get a glimpse of it?
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That's fine. But I think it's useful to offer a different stance. I'd like to think that Bio's success owes alot to their earlier passion for making games, since I really enjoyed BG & BG II and can understand the mindset of many fans when they praise Bioware as a company. To this end, I hope that Dragon Age will shape up to be a great game, especially since DG promised that it's a title wherein they're actually going to depart from Bio's plot formulas.
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Eh, I don't think that's true. DG has actually crafted some very good characters for BG II and HOTU, and arguably KOTOR though KOTOR is not my sort of game. Simply compare games he's majorly involved in (HOTU, BG II/TOB, KOTOR) versus games he's not (SoU, Jade Empire, possibly NWN OC though I've no idea who exactly was involved in making that POS, though I do know Aribeth was not DG's character) and you see that his influence tends to be a good one, even if it's not as revolutionary as something MCA might do.
But all that aside his honesty is what I like about him. Yes, he's a tad arrogant at times, but this is the guy who cared so much about Baldur's Gate II that he released - on his own time - the entire Ascension mod in order to tell the story he couldn't do in ToB. This is the guy who wrote Revan fanfics in order to extend the endings he couldn't do in KOTOR, and who posts more messages in a day than even Volourn sometimes. You can argue other things, even that he does what he does because he's full of himself, but ultimately you can't argue that DG is not passionate about what he does or that he's not willing to go beyond what's necessary to accomplish his vision.
That's what makes a great game developer, even if you don't always like what he develops.
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The one thing that redeems the Bio boards is the fact that Dave G. posts so damn much on it. I like to see that kind of dialogue between devs and players, especially since he doesn't pull any PR punches when it comes to identifying stupidity, even in his own company.
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Well, I'll agree that the Taliban is probably alot more openly opaque in their dealings, but then they have alot less influence than either the US or Chinese government, for example. That's not to say that we should dismiss the difference, only that the nature of the US government requires that it be more responsible, since its power and influence is world-spanning. With great power comes great responsibility. The reason people criticize the US is exactly for this reason - because we conceive ourselves to be the best humanity has to offer, and yet sets a horrid example by our foreign policy of what that "best" means.
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The big deal is that the government is not honest to the people, therefore the process is far from transparent and we are, therefore, very much in the thrall of propaganda and a non-democratic government. Metal implied that the next administration, presumably elected democratically, can change things and I'm arguing that this is not the case. We won't become a more honest or meddle less in other country's affairs just because Bush goes out of power. Our policy of AGGESSIVE foreign intervention has gone on for decades and it's the reason so many nations and organizations hate the US - because we're hypocrites. We proclaim our dedication to freedom and justice on one hand and then go in and stir up hatred in another country on the other. The ends in this case does not justify the means, even if the means were for the sake of freedom (which is hardly the case; the real goal is to isolate Chinese influence in the region so that we can accrue allies in Asia), and from this respect it's fully understandable that extremist organizations would target the US specifically.
We, like all meddlesome superpowes, inevitably invite the ire of those we meddle against. The entire idea of moral superiority fails completely once we adopt your notion of "every nation for themselves." If that were the case, you can no longer argue that the US is justified in anything that it does, and that in the end it's just all a power play, in which case no one is right and no one is wrong.
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Personally I think you need FMV for the following.
Intro - Pull the player into the world. Pretty much every game has an FMV intro anyway.
Points of high drama - anything where you want maximum drama and or emotional impact is best done with FMV.
Endings, again this is you rewarding the player for their time, it should be the highest quality possible.
Actually most JRPGs follow what I outlined, they are not that FMV heavy in quantity, but rather in quality (as in the scenes will last a long time). Four or 5 good size FMVs will fill a DVD though.
In terms of FMV-driven JRPG narratives (and putting aside my bias against their underlying principle of linear cinematic storytelling), I'd probably agree that Intros & Endings are the moments in which you'd want a FMV if at all possible. However, I'm not sure I like FMV interruptions in the middle of the game. This works sometimes, but because of its subjective nature (ie what I'd consider a high moment may *not* correspond to the developers' impression), it can work or it can backfire really badly and take me out of the immersive experience. Moreover, it also makes the emotional manipulation a tad too transparent, almost as if the game's telling you: "Hey! Look here! Yohoo! Great moment of drama INC!" I prefer a bit more subtlety than that.
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But that is what an "oversight committee" is for: the ability to perform a Root Cause Analysis function, to ascertain the why and then prevent future transgressions with legislation.
But in all cases the mechanism needs to be transparent: justice must be seen to be done, otherwise humans tend to become proportionally corrupt to their relative power in the organisational structure.
Oversight committees tend to examine and convict a regime (and usually that attempt is itself political in goal), not the underlying moral issues. It certainly does not question the meaning of terrorism as Bush might have used it, nor the judgments of the moral majority and its relationship to reality. Only history can do that and only after the facts. By then, it's often too late.
That said, the structure of the USA, for example, is in the order of a logarithmic multiple of the transparency of al Qa'ida; I can say with absolute certainty that "dubya" won't be pulling the strings in four years' time, and that means a new administration and their tacit ability, right and resposibility to investigate any abuses of power in the preceding term(s).I know which system is the least flawed.
I think the US government is far more opaque than you would like to believe. Just recently I was made aware of a long string of CIA operatives in Mongolia and Tibet attempting to stir up hatred towards China and to allow for the entrance of American propaganda. This about sums up the nature of what US foreign policy has been for the last sixty years, and about explains why other countries distrust us so. It's also frankly not going to change with a mere administration switch.
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The popularity of KOTOR is based on Star Wars , to believe anything I think would naive.
Oh I'm not arguing that, I'm arguing your implication that there's some inherent advantage to having FMVs solely because movies tend to be what makes games popular. If you're not implying that, then forget what I said.
Both Yu Gi Oh and Duel Masters have an animated spin off which is similiar.Actually, they're quite dissimilar in the sense that it's the game that inspired the show and not the other way around (well, YGO anyhow, I don't know much about duel masters), so an argument that tries to relate a game's popularity to its relationship with cinematics fails.
Well 60-70% isnt as good so I think you answered your own question there.Not really. There are MANY advantages to using in-game cutscenes over FMVs, and taken as a whole I think they justify using in-game over FMVs. Yes, FMVs give off the feeling that they're inherently special, but they also heavily limit how much story you can tell if your vehicle of storytelling is primarily FMVs since you'd be heavily limited by budget concerns. Thus, smart use of FMVs where it really counts and in-game cutscenes everywhere else is probably the best expenditure of "zots". I'm sure certain Japanese companies disagree judging on the number of hours of FMVs they produce, but there's a reason why FF7 remains one of the most popular FF-series games in terms of storyline & character despite telling the vast majority of its story without FMVs.
A simple comparison of the character development that occurs between FF7 and FF: Advent Children will prove my point. If FF: Advent Children occured without the context of FF7 none of its characters would be memorable whatsoever. It's because of FF7 that AC's eye candy actually has weight, and FF7 did not depend (nor did FF6 or 4, the two other beloved FF games) on FMVs to tell its story whatsoever.
I cant actually remember any of the TES characters, with the exception of the Ghost King because there just isnt much character there.Indeed TES NPCs suck, but that has more to do with their crappy design than the lack of FMVs. There are tons of people out there who are infatuated with BG/BGII/KOTOR characters, and none of those characters were exposed through FMVs, so that there is a testament to why FMVs are not vital to the creation of great stories and characters.
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Thats making less and less difference since RPGs have started to use such restrained backgrounds and storylines anyway. I'd agree about the names however thats a pretty recent thing which came along with full voicing(even in FFX you dont ever hear Tidus refered to by name). And given the choice between being called "The Exile" or "The chosen one" the whole game or having people address you by a name the latter feels much less artificial.
This is an annoying trend, to be sure, but it's one that technology can address, and I'd really like to see some research into the area of procedural speech synthesis based on phonemes. See, it maybe very difficult for a computer to synthesize speech based on just text sentences because that'd require sophisticated natural language processing way beyond our current techniques. Yet, if the PLAYER were given the CHOICE of what phonemes to use for his/her name and how to inflect them, then it'd be pretty realistic to have a way of synthesizing the name from voice actor's pronouncation of phonemes. Course, there'd still be the problem of inflection with respect to the actual word of the name in sentences (ie if I say: Azarkon in an irritated manner it's very different from saying it in a neutral or happy context), but that maybe dealt with with some smart scripting and approximation.
I hope some company considers it, at least, in the future, instead of just following the general trend of making games more and more like choose-your-own-weapon movies.
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Something else just occured to me concerning the KOTOR games. It's the fact that there are movies which make them so popular. People transpose the movies to the games. Of course not every game can have it's own series, but cutscenes and good FMV perform the same function albeit less effectively than 9 hours of movie could :D
As opposed to something like Magic: the Gathering or D&D? Surely you're not suggesting that the popularity of a brand is based on the presence of cinematics. If anything, such a transposition is an imposition on the developers. If you make a D&D game, no one's going to blame you if you don't have FMV's - they are far more concerned about the rules. But if you make a Star Wars game and it doesn't have any familiar cinematic scenes, you may very well be chastised, since that's what people enjoy about that brand.
As far as FMVs vs. in-game cutscenes go, I think the trend is to go for the latter. FMVs are expensive and they are inflexible because the rendering time of a FMV can take weeks and is not something that you can change later down the line or add alot of. Thus most companies opt for a few FMVs and attempt to tell the rest of the story via cutscenes. This is only going to become more the case as time goes on and more advances are made in graphics technology. Hell, Oblivion is a perfect example of this: why would you opt for FMVs when you can do something 60-70% as good with the in-game engine?
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RPG:Japan::FPS:US. It's about gaming demographics and the principle of mass entertainment, so even though Halo 2 might've been simply Halo 1 with a few more features, it will be touted as the next coming. The same is true for the Japanese and their RPGs.
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U.S. Universal Healthcare
in Way Off-Topic
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Don't worry, with the gap between rich and poor widening in the US, sooner or later we'll have some major riots to wake the goverment up about these issues. Society is never as simple as work hard & reap the benefits. There will always be winners, there will always be losers, and when the losers outnumber the winners and realize it, society will change.
I won't claim that socialism is the next step, but I will say that free market capitalism is about to bite the first world in the ass and hard. For proof of this, simply witness the motions in Washington in the coming years towards outsourcing and competition from countries like India and China.