Series of social-cultural things

Upon which I have comments.

1) Serial. I am rather annoyed that most people seem to either think this has a firm conclusion or are annoyed that it seems like the interviewer running the podcast seems to have a firm conclusion/bias in mind.

What is actually happening on the podcast is we are seeing what the criminal justice system can look like. We are seeing that eyeball witnesses often aren't very reliable, but people and police think they are anyway. We are seeing that resources for defense teams to investigate a case and otherwise effective defense counsel are hard to come by. We are seeing that juries tend to be very deferential to police and prosecutors. We are seeing that police don't follow every lead, but that even when they don't, that can be considered "good" police work. We are seeing that once the justice system has concluded guilt, it will be very hard to un-conclude it (usually one has to prove someone else's guilt).

None of that establishes that Adnan is innocent of the murder he was convicted of many years ago. Some of it probably could have established reasonable doubt in a jury trial, which is a different question. Whether someone should be convicted of a crime based on available evidence is distinct from whether this person is guilty or probably did it. Which may be the most important manifestation from the broadcasts is that the system we use, despite our fervent belief to the contrary, doesn't always work the way the airy words we described and imbued it with in our popular narratives of crime and its foes.

2) Shirt-gate. And gamer-gate for that matter.

Seeing what seem like fairly tepid complaints like "hey why's that scientist/engineer wearing that shirt with all the half naked women on it?" or "hey, why's every woman in an average video game look like a porn star?" These aren't that disturbing of issues taken on their own, but they're part of a general problem relating to sexism in society. Probably more disturbing than the shirt itself was the Kardashian shot heard round the world that eclipsed the news we landed a probe on a comet hundreds of millions of miles away.

The shirt is more about the general biases and prejudices experienced by women in science fields or wanting to go into them than the shirt itself. Presumably if men are comfortable enough going to work wearing shirts with erotically depicted female characters on them, then they may be comfortable enough with other sexist or misogynist forms of expression.

Games, I think we're stuck with "attractive" forms to a degree in video games and pop culture media (music, art, photography, movies/TV, print ads, etc). I can see that it can be toned down. The burning question mark is not just the physiques and physical depictions, but also the development of characters within the mediums. One of the simpler tests for film character arcs has been "are there two women as characters who manage to have a conversation not about a man in it". Video games in some sense have an advantage already simply because any female characters involved are often extremely powerful at destroying demons or zombies or Nazis or whatever else the game's foe is (not always, but this comes up enough, and enough games allow for a female protagonist or party member, etc, that one would think it would have an influence on the thinking of women as capable, independent, or something along those lines).

Each of these are themselves problematic, worthy of input as to the varieties of offenses that come up. But what's really disturbing isn't these things as cultural notes themselves. It's that people reacted to anyone bringing them up as though the act of pointing it out or taking any offense to it, requires not merely an argument, but a denigration of the women (it's usually women pointing these out) who are involved in making these points or a defense of men and the apparent demanded and inherited right to ogle or sexualize women as a variety of free speech. This actually isn't under attack that I can tell. I suppose there are people who don't want these movies, T-shirts, or video games to be made and distributed. But the initial reaction wasn't that. It's calling attention to the type of character traits one possesses when one does present as a person wishing to ogle women or sexualize them as characters or "artistic" presentations and whether these are desirable traits for men to possess. The fact that this is reacted to with an often out-sized level of scorn or annoyance then makes itself into a more clear example that it probably is not a set of desirable traits.

For men to try to understand this. Ogling women isn't going away. I find women attractive. I enjoy that about humanity that there are other persons who are attractive to me, and thus find speaking in the company of women I find attractive, spending time around such persons, and so on, engaging and energizing (such as I find spending time around almost any persons engaging and energizing). What I also find though is that women will tend to make for more interesting company when this is not the central attribute of any form of relationship with them. In the same way that if one is a heterosexual male, the attractiveness of your male co-workers, companions, and friends is generally not a major concern (at least this is my experience).

If that's the only attribute of a relationship is that one party spends a lot of time being looked at for looking good, it's going to be really boring or frustrating for one or both parties fairly quickly, and it will also quickly be learned that this is all one wants to contribute to any form of relationship is to look upon another person because they're deemed attractive. One has to spend an often considerable portion of the time recognizing and exercising those other qualities of interaction with other human beings than superficial appearances and one should find that that time is enjoyable. It can be frivolous, rude, polite, funny, intellectual, whatever. But if all anyone sees when they look at another person is a good view, and nothing else, that's more a potentially disturbing character trait about you than a suggestion that more people should provide those good views for you in the form of popular media presentations. And that if these demands as expressed through the exercise of design of games or T-Shirts marketed to people like you are offensive to others, that actually should not be surprising, shocking, or alarming to discover that other people find this a character defect. Beauty and the admiration of it as a concept seen in others isn't going away, and isn't even likely to be challenged as a human evolution. But it's a more complicated venue to navigate and appreciate properly than demanding nude photos of every woman who shows up in an online forum or multiplayer video game as it appears some men are wont to do from the reactions and abrasive attitudes that have taken up arms in the wake of these fairly modest complaints.

If one really wants to see and experience beauty, it doesn't appear by issuing forward to the world the opinion that you deserve it from others, you will have to contribute to it first at a minimum. Or more pragmatically, the idea that beauty as a commodity one appreciates and seeks to find also includes the women who one finds beautiful as a commodity that one can effectively buy or sell as well through those demands isn't a pathway to find oneself suddenly appreciated as an enlightened and kind being. It forms rather very different impressions in the minds of others instead.

I suppose it should not be surprising that people would react with vitriol to discover that other people think them pigs or sexist or even someone that actively hates women. That would be a rather unpleasant discovery to be made aware of (for most of us). The really curious part is how one intends to define away these undesirable traits by demonstrating them against anyone who points them out.

3) I've entertained some conversations with other secularists, agnostics, and atheists over the years. I find I have a set of policy disagreements or disaffection with some issue or other that aren't always shared. I don't hold that against these "fellow-travelers" and continue to argue for whatever it is I'd prefer and sometimes shrug at whatever it is they might prefer (and sometimes not, as above). I rather expect from years of holding sometimes radical views that other people don't agree with me for any number of reasons. What is not always abundantly clear is why.

What I'm finding in spending more time around or among other atheists as a group of other individuals is that they are sometimes angry. Christians sometimes think or say this is because they're angry at god. They're not. They're angry with you (Christians, since this is America and most of you are of that flock). For what you put them through or for what you still put them through. Entertaining as those diversions on policy are, there are actual people suffering for the upbringing they experienced, the isolation of it, and the lack of options presented, the lack of pragmatic experiences to draw upon. I did not experience these things because of faith or lack thereof or organized religion and my lack of interest in it (I still experienced them but for very different reasons). I did not experience the isolation from family in the way that I could never see them or wouldn't hear from them. Or did not experience a loss of friendships because I changed my belief structure (I may have from becoming somewhat more expressive of my ideas, but my underlying "beliefs" haven't changed very much in decades).

Something I've long thought about religion is that it operates principally with the need for social reinforcement. It evolved in large part as a way to keep a social unit cohesive as it became larger and more unwieldy to operate without chaos and it performs this role very well in fact. "Belief" and beliefs that people hold are largely enforced through the shared affirmation of a social unit (family, church, friends, etc) and not because there are any effective and good reasons for those beliefs to be regarded as truthful and honest interpretations of the world around us. One of the usual selling points people may use is to claim that X number or X% of others agree with them about their preferred method of deity worship. Sometimes, perhaps often, this number or percentage is erroneous anyway, but the idea that this should be persuasive is not a statement that they are holding true and correct beliefs apportioned to evidence. What it is is a statement of social conformity and social penetration. It is saying that we have a strong and cohesive social unit and wouldn't you like to be a part of it?

The flip side to this conformity is rarely appreciated by someone like me though. Because I never had to leave it behind. I've always been a bit of a non-conformist or non-conventional thinker. In part I've developed an instinctive discomfort with people who let me fit in too easily and without disagreements, so belonging to a "strong" group doesn't appeal to me anyway. The flip side for others is that when one rejects those beliefs, and the associated community and its rituals and practices, that community often rejects you for doing so. It does not neatly help people transition to a new set of beliefs or a new worldview in ease and comfort with former relations and associates. Not only does it not assist (which one assumes it shouldn't have to), it often kicks such people to the curb and announces they are horrible people to everyone involved as a means of speeding along that departure. For someone like me, being rejected by people I don't agree with on a fundamental question of worldview and any associated practices isn't inherently annoying or isolating. But I didn't have to agree with them or pretend to for some portion of my lifetime. One assumes this method of penalty is primarily there as a means of discouragement. People inside the bubble may see that the exit is an anguishing affliction of suffering and despair by being deliberately separated from the social networks of support one builds up through a lifetime of shared associations and they decide that their doubts can be a little quieter. Because the US offers easy access to a smorgasbord of religious devotions and their assorted beliefs however (even for those wishing to stay within the rubric of "Christendom"), this method is of diminishing return and effectiveness upon the litany of people who might wish to transition out. What it does not do and not offer in that transition is an easy way out. The exit strategy still sucks. It still inflicts damage for many.

I have some sympathy for that. I'm not sure how one gets from there to "religions should all be abolished", and then operating as though that is a plausible social goal. But I am sure why many people of a variety of atheist thought might be angry at the religions, other adherents, and their institutions.

A disconnected series of thoughts

1) I'm not sure what NSA supporters are expecting from their critics. But here's what I'd summarize as the most plausible cases for criticism:

NSA has lied or deceived Congress/FISA in the past and on a somewhat ongoing basis throughout the series of revelations of its activities. This should lend more credence to critics who are skeptical of claims defending what it is doing on the grounds that what it is doing... is not what it says it is doing in the first place. This position does not require that it is doing whatever it is that critics are afraid it might do, only that it is not transparent to the means of oversight appointed to make sure it behaves such that it is possible to imagine it going more rogue than critics already believed and know it to be doing.

It also lends some credence to allowing private but ostensibly "American" technology companies to disclose the type and number of requests they receive and perhaps to more deeply encrypt their international communities in response to NSA hacking. And in effect defeating the purpose of those efforts in order to protect their customers here and abroad.

The NSA had been running a massive and expanding intelligence programme for almost a decade but hadn't compartmentalized information considered of a crucial nature such that a hired contractor with limited job experience could walk off with huge amounts of data and program information. Had Snowden's interest actually been espionage/treason of the variety many of his most fervent detractors imagine it to be, the damage done could be far, far worse than disclosing this to friendly governments and their people via the press. This suggests the people running the system either don't know what's going on perhaps because they don't care and don't need to, or that they can't know because it's too big to be run efficiently. Or that too much is classified (the argument critics make). There are millions of people with some level of classified access in government or engaged in work related to the government and some hundreds of thousands with access on a level similar to that of Mr Snowden. This is only possible if too much is being classified in the first place and it leaves open the question of how accessible this information actually is when it may be of greatest use given that we have had fairly normal police work style leads on the various attacks that actually occurred under this counter-terrorism regime that were apparently not followed up on within this vast architecture.

It's very possible they built something because they could out of the considerable available resources, and not because they had any particular use for it.

NSA critics maintain that if these programmes are in anyway necessary, there should be something to show for it. Critics of the programme in a position to evaluate it (eg, Ron Wyden or Mark Udall) are not satisfied by the claims being advanced that dragnet surveillance of citizen's metadata and other massive filtering and algorithmic data searches of internet and cellular communication were in any significant way essential to stop attacks, in the past, now, or in the future. Unless these well-placed critics on the intelligence committees, as well as related critics like Sensenbrenner (Patriot Act author), are assuaged and assured that there are significant safeguards of American privacy rights in place, and that these are even necessary utilities to find and identify threats via terrorism (or related forms of disruption perhaps), less informed critics should likewise be skeptical of the "necessary for national security" claims that prevent further disclosures of successes, or failures, of these programmes for a fuller Congressional and public oversight. The "if you knew what I know" argument can only go so far.

A note: events stopped in other countries are not sensible defences of spying on potentially millions of Americans, or for that matter, millions of citizens in other countries. Both seem like enormous wastes of energy and money and time. A second note, spying on foreign leaders, allied or not, I don't care. I don't imagine most critics do. It's not gentlemanly or sporting of us, but that's the game. More to the problem here, it also doesn't seem to have greatly advantaged us in diplomatic pressures within the game of nations and the trade and alliances spawned of it.

Maybe we have incompetent diplomats along with incompetent spymasters.

2) Path of Exile is basically what I might have wanted Diablo 3 to be like. I think I'd to like to see the kickstarter/pay for frills method of game development used more often. It's essentially a mix of all 3 Diablo games but not anywhere near as dumbed down as D3 was. I particularly like: can use skills with any character provided you have the requirements to equip it, which is a throwback to D1 (with a twist), and that the economy isn't gold related. Also, removing the level only requirements from D3 on equipment, with a need to build up stats to use a better weapon or armor. And that it then matters, sometimes a lot, what weapons or armor is used. D3's silly "I'm going to use a spear or a sword or an axe or a wand... to perform the exact same attacks" was just ridiculous.

3) The next Spider Man movie looks awful. Between the trailer, the graphics, and that Orci's involved, I'm skipping it as it looks quite shoddy and messy. Between Lindelof and Orci, there's some seriously horrible writers out there getting major jobs in Hollywood, combined they may have single-handedly destroyed both Star Trek and the Alien series of films for a while by reducing both to incomprehensible nonsense. In a related comic book film note, I've no idea why Wonder Woman doesn't get her own film to start off in and instead is just eye candy for the next Superman movie.

Quick thoughts on D3

I've played enough now to know what I like and what I don't here. So a good, bad, ugly routine suffices
1) Good.

It runs very smoothly even with a below spec cpu and looks quite good. The environment is much more interactive and 3D tactics are useful. Items also offer more visual changes. On weapons especially this can be quite informative (blood dripping means life steal, fire means added fire damage, and so on).

I like the emphasis on co-op games and the ability to jump in and help out at will. With friends who are actually playing the game, this is very good. With random people who are doing different things, it is less so (as it just makes everything harder to kill). The banner teleport system from town is especially useful. No shared loot is also useful, as it then presumes a reaction of "what did you get?" from a powerful enemy or a series of quests. Smaller games is nice, though I rarely joined D2 on battlenet and mostly played in network/VPN type games instead, especially once they introduced a single player method of increasing the player count (which didn't make nightmare or normal any harder with well-equipped players, but did buff the experience you received for what were usually cakewalks).

The skill/rune system is decent. In general with any build in D2, it was more or less two or three skills being used constantly anyway. Here you can use up to 6 at any one time and if you really need some specialised killing, you can swap out reasonably fast (depending on the difficulty) to use something powerful rather than randomly available points that were often dumped into a spell in D2 that just offer some (slow) killing ability of some special enemy rarely encountered. Its also fairly customisable to use a lot of offensive/defensive skills (once you dump the game's default line). I suspect this and random item use is necessary for replay ability.

The quest/checkpoint structure is nice. The maps also are a little more predictable (it seems like) for finding your way to the next linear point. This was among the more annoying D2 aspects of having to find waypoints or finish a quest before ending a game. That you can backtrack in a quest through the menu is also nice. Overall this retains D2's routine of jumping in for 15 minutes or so and jumping back out into doing other things in life, or burning an hour or so here or there with observable progress being made. 

Fewer Pindle type runs are out there. No Iron Maiden instant deaths also a plus. (Inferno is however pretty instant if you're ill-equipped).

No keys are required for any of the chests and some (good) chests will trigger ambushes.

It's far easier to craft useful weapons or armor than the random rolls from the cube or various item quest rewards in D2, while still retaining the random roll factor. Higher level gems I assume is a compromise for no longer having socketable runes.

The stash is shared across all characters, making it easier to transfer items to other characters. And it is also larger.

The combat mechanics overall seems a lot better and makes things like high armor or dodge chances or blocking more useful to pay attention to than in D2 (where dodge was a Zon skill and only Paladins used enough melee combat with shields to actually be blocking anything consistently and only Pikers, Barbs and Paladins bothered with very high armor. For everyone else, there was running away or teleporting). 

Things that aren't so good
It seems like only the first (normal) kill of anything drops rares/uniques/etc. This should be changed so that on nightmare/hell/inferno you still get the credit the first time for a first kill and can get a decent drop. You do get a lot of experience and some gold, but this is not very rewarding and satisfying when you expend a couple minutes trying to kill the Skeleton King or Azmodan and get a couple of random magical items that probably aren't very good.

Legendary (unique) items aren't much better or unique than the random items available. They should offer more unique advantages or be buffed some relative to their rarity and status. Given the auction house item setup being used, I'm guessing this is why these aren't uber-powerful like in D2 (where entire character builds sometimes were based around X item), but they do need some help because they're usually just status symbols that sometimes look cool rather than things you actually use in game. To the extent that this makes rare or magical items more useful, I'm fine with that, but these uniques should at least retain useful status of their own accord.

Boss/champion/elite packs are routinely more difficult than any of the main quest bosses; which mostly are difficult because they take a while to kill and have some unique attacks. The packs however can be extremely painful on higher difficulties and offer a lot of killing combination options for any chance at hardcore.

Fewer chokepoints are available. For instance shutting and opening doors or tanking in a doorway used to be a viable strategy against powerful hordes. There are some skills that make up for this (disintegrate is really fun against a narrow path), but there's less of a tactical feel at times and more of just button mashing.

Mercs are more durable and free to use, but deal much less damage and are locked out of cooperative games.

Ugly
Stat points are automatically distributed. All of them now offer greater potential benefits for any character (for example, dexterity was almost useless for casters in D2, as was strength beyond what was necessary for a piece of armor or shield), and this is fine. Such that it offers a lot less potential customisation for things like armor or weapon selection versus defensive use of attributes (like a ton of hit points or dodge), it is less so. It is probable that the auto distribute is about where you might end up, but you can't create an imbalance for strategic design purposes with your actual character and have to use items to achieve this effect. 

There's often no particular reason to use a wand over a sword as a caster type, or fist/claw weapons as a monk versus axes or maces. Most skills are based off of the weapon damage (with a few exceptions like arrow skills for the demon hunter which require a bow or crossbow), which means you may as well take the better damage sword than a wand or dagger, etc. This is like playing a spreadsheet character rather than the role playing aspect. To be fair, class-specific type weapons do offer particular advantages at times, like extra resources or resource regeneration. But these are only trivial concerns at most points versus being able to deal out an extra set of damage. There are also limitations on what you can or cannot use (eg, monks can't use bows). I suppose I can live with those but they are a little against the cause of being able to customise freely.

I'm not entirely sure what the 10 characters limit is for other than that all characters are stored on their servers rather than being singleplayer modes at home use and they don't have unlimited server space. Given that there's less customisation, 10 seems almost excessive.

I'm not sure what purpose gold serves in the game other than to buy items on the auction house. Repairing items is relatively cheap compared to D2, mercs are free (and don't die as quite as easily when soloing, plus are more customised), most items available for sale are mediocre or below your level when you probably want items which are at or above level, and crafting items or gems is mostly expensive in terms of generating resources for it rather than prices. On the plus side, gold is shared across characters so now new low level characters can quickly equip and the game does not provide ready supplies of more money in the form of selling regular or magical items for 30k a pop such that you are drowning in cash.

Comments on the ME3

So the endings. (here be major spoilers).
There appear to be basically 3 endings. There's really 4, but if you get the fourth, you didn't really play the game.
1) Shepard merges with the Reapers and controls them, war ends, relays are destroyed. (Shepard dies)
2) Shepard destroys the Reapers (and other synthetics), war ends, relays are destroyed (Shepard can live)
3) Shepard merges life forms, both organic and synthetic, war ends, relays are destroyed. (Shepard dies)

So far as I'm concerned, the third ending is actually pretty good and in line with the rest of the series/game. It plays on the value of self-sacrifices. Mordin and Legion and Thane all provide examples for this, using their lives, and deaths, to help and advantage others, sometimes even others who they have fought or struggled with during their lives. There are other examples throughout the game (Anderson, Samara, Quarian pilgrimages, the Primarch's son, etc). Along with lesser examples of cooperation and altruistic motivations (Wrex, Miranda, Jacob, Liara). And all of this is opposed by the examples of the Reapers and Cerberus working solely for domination or destruction. So it's not like it should have been a surprise. The trick with that ending is that you have to have really worked for it (its not the most challenging ending to get, but it's up there). So people feel disappointed that all their work ends up in a dead guy, or at least a transcendental and legendary character whose place in the story has ended. I guess I can understand that feeling hollow, but it's much better than the other alternatives.

In ending two, for example, if you've saved and advanced the Geth and freed them from Reaper control, they die. And this is especially sour if you saved the Geth at the expense of the Quarians. Most biotics are essentially cybernetic, and it's not explained well how they could survive (that includes yourself). Other advanced artificial intelligences are likely gone (EDI), and so on. That really feels like a cheap out and its the only one where Sheperd can live. Yes, he lives (or can if you really worked for it that is), but trillions of beings are destroyed or diminished by this choice. It's better than trillions more being dead too, but it's not the optimal choice in any utilitarian sense. 

As far as I'm concerned, really the worst part of the ending(s) is that all the relays are destroyed. It would seem like ships could still travel through space with available FTL technology, but it would take decades rather than seconds to go all the way across the galaxy, along with absorbing a tremendously larger amount of energy to do it. I cannot imagine that has good implications for the galactic economy, the opportunities of colonies and settlements dependent on trade and resources from far flung empires and alliances, etc. I suppose they could always rebuild them, possibly over many thousands of years. That would be item one on my agenda after rebuilding from Reaper devastation/war on any given planet. Indeed, rebuilding would be substantially easier with access to the global economy than by relying on each planet's easily accessible technology and resources and engineering skills. If the trade-off is that otherwise most everyone is dead, that's fine. But it's still not a fun ending.

I suppose what I would say there is that this is a very strong environmentalist/locavore message underpinning it all. And I find those messages annoying on some level (eg, that trade of resources and commodities somehow destroys the environment or risks global annihilation? A highly dubious contention. Consumption of certain resources does, but that's a different prospect than outright techno-aversions). It also has an explicit technology and humanity cannot co-exist message, a Luddite perspective that runs throughout science fiction as it regards artificial intelligences (other than in Star Trek). I find playing a game in a Terminator+zombies+space epic fun of course, but Terminator I think is technically wrong about the behavior of most prospective AIs and thus overplays the actual probability of fear and warfare and conflict between AIs and organic life, or at least that conflict between varieties of sentient organic life has a high enough probability of destructive and apocalyptic end points that worrying about robot overlords making war on us is not a significantly increased risk to that. Indeed, it was largely the point of the Matrix series too, that machines and humanity have a useful coexistence for creativity and life, even if humans have a propensity to use machinery to empower their destructive potential. Maybe this point isn't very attractive to people.

That kind of over-analysis makes playing games less fun and tends to not happen as a result. I don't think that's why people are pissed about the endings. I think it has more to do with "Shepard dies". Which to me is missing the point of the game and its arc of the story.

Update: There are elements of the ending that make no sense. The fate of the Normandy and your squad is troubling (mostly because that makes absolutely no sense that the Normandy is, well, going anywhere). And, naturally given the fate of the mass relays, the impact that this decision has on the galaxy that you've just fought to preserve is left as a blank slate. We have no idea what happens with the Krogan and their cured status, any love interests that we left behind, or the Geth-Quarian peace, or, to put a fine point on it... Earth. As a comparison, in Dragon Age, the game gives a text summary of what happens to the Elves and Dwarves and Mages that you just united to fight a terrible enemy. We don't get sort of summary or closure to these elements of the story. This is frustrating. The actual endings are fine, it's more that we don't get to see the outcome of those endings.

Prelimary thoughts on ME3

I haven't finished the game yet. Presumably the endings annoyed people, so perhaps I too will share in that frustration (based on what I know of it, I can think of several problems with it logically at the very least). Or perhaps not. I usually don't care that much about the endings of games.

Some spoilers below, though when playing the game, one is obvious enough that it occurs to a Krogan to do. Meaning: it ought to have occurred to anyone.

This is where I am, so your mileage may vary. Killed the reaper on Rannoch (which was more of a repetitive puzzle than a shooter). About to try multiplayer, but haven't yet. I'm playing on hardcore, not insanity, at least as a first run-through. The second reaper has been, so far, the hardest part and even that became very easy once I figured out what I was doing, if tedious. (The first on Tuchanka was more straightforward).

1) Seems more or less like ME2 as far as game play but with a few less characters to entangle yourself with. Which is fine. Other than the final mission in ME2, most of those guys were useless. Thane/Garrus/Miranda/Grunt... and everybody else? not so much except for initial and loyalty missions. Legion and Goto were fun, but that's about it. I completely ignored Zaeed and Jacob and Jack. Samara and Mordin were just there to perform one or two essential tasks to the plot but not as combat allies (Mordin was at least thought-provoking to talk to). And Tali was pretty mission specific (not fighting Geth, not important).

2) I do like the cameos by the old crew from 2 (especially Legion or Thane's so far), but it's mostly a ME1 crew. Which is fine I suppose. I might have more use for Kaiden/Ashley if I didn't have a Sentinel character, but it seems best to ship them off as a new Spectre and be used as a "war asset" rather than be bothered with an extraneous crew member that you don't bother taking on missions. The Prothean Javik is more fun to have around. Vega is a tank in the Grunt sense, so useful. But not nearly as interesting as Grunt or Wrex was. And thus boring and I usually ignored him. The main premise of the RPG element of a space epic like this is to see the use, and occasionally the interaction, of the different characters. So aliens and the integration of their distinct cultures are more interesting than that of humans. It is doubtful this wouldn't be true in real life too, as I'm far more intrigued by humanity's vast set of distinctiveness. Essentially a team of Garrus and either Javik or Liara is sufficient for my purposes on most missions (Tali/EDI are mostly useless, but have situational advantages, like EDI's decoy or Tali's drones).

3) There's a huge amount of cutscenes. Long ones that is (ME2 had plenty of shorter ones). With fewer of the interrupts that appeared in 2. Hard to say what this was for but it gives too much of a cinematic feel with not enough of the snazzy CGI and snappy writing of an actual movie. Some of them are plot impressive, but not much else really. The thresher maw killing a reaper was fun, I admit that much. The reapers themselves are quite impressive too (if essentially rip-offs of the War of the Worlds tripods made many times bigger). This to me seems like the one legit complaint people have had, but ME2 had a lot of cutscenes too. Perhaps they were just better.

4) The interaction of the first two games is nice on how it impacts things (especially with the Geth-Quarian issue). Though, so far things one thinks to have been a decent move, turn out... not so well all the time. The genophage played out well and in a satisfying way, as did Wrex, and saving the council has a war asset advantage (fleets can be repaired, but that big-ass ship from ME1 cannot be). But the Geth and Rachni solutions, less so (the Geth one required a lot of work to sort out, and I'm not sure what the percentages in the Rachni were). I now expect the collector base decision from ME2 to be annoying too.

5)  Multiplayer. Much appreciated as an option. Haven't tried it yet, but soon. Not sure how the graphics will interact (if I have to tone it down or not) and I'd assume I have to get used to playing ME as a shooter with special attacks and tactics instead of as a tactical combat game with squadmates and special attacks.

6) Game is still buggy. I've had my level reset to 1 a couple of times and had to restart missions or reload old saves a lot. Also crashed a couple times and I got some flaky gameplay when there are many enemies to fight at once (most notably on the Geth ship). ME2 was very much more polished in this respect. Very.

7) No mining. And no standing around elevators disguised as loading screens. And no easy but tedious puzzles on doors and so on. I suppose that last one means that the game has broader appeal to morons who cannot play a simple memory game. But it also means I just have to wait at a disguised loading screen once in a while, whilst a door is opened for me, instead of solving the puzzle myself. As a result, the space exploring feature now is fun. Though I'd like to find a trick to quick launch at a relay when reaper fleets are chasing me. Clicking doesn't always work out so well for me.

8) I like the combat system now. Being able to roll and dive from place to place, and grenades and swarms of enemies means you need to do so, helps. Statically sitting behind cover, recharging powers and occasionally sniping at a hulking enemy is less satisfying in a tactical sense than running and gunning more on the fly. The greater interaction of biotics is also good. Possibly I only partially understood this before, but warp+throw+the warp detonating is fairly sweet. Liara's singularity and Javik's dark channel are also huge against large groups (less useful against powerful opponents, especially with armor or barriers involved). Those two in combo basically pick apart Cerberus assault teams and Husks.

Generally speaking, combat is much improved over ME1. In fact, I found ME1 almost unplayable from the stupid elevators to the heat system versus reloading guns, even as it was a very rich environment for a quasi-sandbox type game in space. ME2 was more intuitive as a combat RPG and that system seems to have been mostly preserved in ME3, along with the not-quite linear method of advancement through the game. Still seems mostly fun.

So far as I can tell, most of the furor surrounding this game at the non-critic level has come from the day-one DLC. First: that DLC adds Javik to the entire game, and adds one mission with some payoff in war assets. So it's sort of fun and has very minor use to the game (entertainment value mostly). I did it right away. Previous ME DLC's have usually been somewhat lame. Adding Goto was nice, but it happened months after I'd already beaten the game two or three times so that didn't add much for me. Adding Liara's quest with the Shadow Broker was much better, similar to Witch Hunt in Dragon Age. Overlord was too vehicle oriented for me to care, and I didn't even bother with Arrival. This one doesn't have a difficult mission associated with it, but it is still fun to have. Having said that: Blizzard didn't just release a DLC/expansion. They're releasing Starcraft 2 as 3 separate full priced games. Paying an extra 10 bucks may seem like a rip-off, but it's pretty cheap in the long-run compared to that, and you're allowed to ignore it as non-essential (whereas Starcraft more or less requires each game to complete the entire game). It enriches rather than requires. In other words, I don't understand the fury. It signifies nothing to me. Maybe the fury is that people don't like paying for things but if that were the case, one would avoid the concept of buying a 50-60 dollar game. Perhaps the problem is the day-one aspect, but it's de rigour in gaming to have a day one patch anymore. As a result I don't get it.

Games, evil and heartless version

ideological communicators?. I'm kind of amused that Assassin's Creed decided that the worst thing in the world was some evil corporation and the Citizen's United decision, but the sort of "evil libertarian" theme from things like Bioshock and some others was also getting a little tedious. So far as I know, we're not all heartless immoral beings and most libertarian philosophy draws from things like Hayek or Adam Smith's theories on the underlying moral order and fabric of a society and that tampering with it too much through government heavy-handedness doesn't quite produce ideal results.

More interesting is this question

I've definitely found that the most interesting games, the ones that I will tend to replay often, will use aspects of presenting you with real game choices with real consequences in the game. Dragon Age and Mass Effect, and to some extent the Fallout series, all allowed you to make decisions between helping or ignoring, or even actively harming, characters in the game. Generally the game gave you greater rewards, along with long-term advantages, if you helped, cooperated, and aided where you could, and often made the game more challenging if you took the "dark side" path of indiscriminate slaughter and mayhem. Few games do this well. The Civilization series tends to do this pretty well, offering different avenues to victory, and complex choices over what sort of government policies to use to pursue that victory. With advantages and disadvantages to each, sometimes merely being that you locked out other choices, as with actual life, there's a scarcity problem (in terms of time) that locks out the use of resources for all possible avenues of advancement and gain.

Maybe this appeals to me because it very much mirrors a sort of utilitarian calculus, with choices having tangible, often measured and weighted benefits and costs, and that sort of economic brain is what I've already been using to examine social policies in the real world, and often seeing substantial costs that are ignored because they exist only in unfavored political minorities (the drug war or campaigns against access to birth control are among these), or are so widely distributed in cost that they become virtually invisible costs offering substantial benefits only to small subgroups (farm subsidies are the most classic of these, but there are many such interest politics chasing economic rents in the same way).

One of the appeals of a game like Fallout was that being "good" often meant being tolerant, and indeed, engaging willingly and freely with ugly and despised in game groups. The game is partly designed to give the player an us-vs-them feel, and to thus easily side against ghouls and mutants and other hideous post-apocalyptic beings. But they're also recognizably human in their wants, and their objectives, and the advantages in game of cooperation with these hideous deformed beings are realized in trade, in experience, and so on. Mass Effect has the same elements with various aliens.

In real life, sympathizing with out-group peoples, and tolerating their experiences and choices, provided they present you and others with no real harm, leads to a more interesting and diverse set of experiences for yourself. The food is better, the music, the art, and the conversations often richer. Indeed, one of the reasons I occasionally engage with social conservatives on their often odious political views is to try to understand the underpinnings and motivations. The people involved made these active choices. I am curious to understand why. It is of course rare that such people can speak to some factual basis for their fears of homosexuals, of Muslims or immigrants generally, and so on, but it is at least diverting to have to engage the arguments that are raised and slap them aside with doses of reality rather than to exist solely in the echo chamber (as they often have). Perhaps the play style of such people in games like these would be very different. Or perhaps they would not find such diversions of complex game mechanics very interesting in the first place. But it's an interesting question why many games are designed with heartless and evil actions bearing no game consequences.

For instance... I find it odd that Left 4 Dead makes it so that killing the weak members of the squad allows them to come back to the game with more health. It's an odd game mechanic that gets exploited all the time on the highest difficulty settings. It probably wouldn't be very much fun to be dragging around a near corpse in game of course either, but it's still an odd counter-morality that gets spawned. Since I usually find it hard to be heartless and cruel for malicious and useless purposes in these games, or to do things which have a distinct evil feel or at least don't present as cost-effective benefits (drug use in Fallout usually comes down this way), I kind of wonder why people are worried so much about morality being warped by children playing GTA or WoW or some other immersive game, or just plain shooting people in Doom. (I really wonder that when looking at charts of violent crime since the 80s, and seeing a huge drop off since GTA came out).

Oldie but a goodie

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I'm really amused that gold is going back up in its bubblicious economic state again (or still). Supposedly this is because of inflation fears... except we don't have inflation at the moment, so it's kind of silly.

The logic of gold is much like that of real estate: "It never goes down, except when it does". The difference being that real estate is a tad more useful and is far more price supported by government policies (inefficient and silly as they may be). Both suffer from supply and demand shocks and it's not that hard to crash the price of either by watching monetary policy.

Really, these are better investments: guns, medicine, food. If you're really worried about some sort of inflationary disaster like the Weimar Republic that is. I'm not. We have lots of tools to squelch inflation at the moment available to us just as we had during the early 80s under Volcker's iron fisted rule over double digit inflation. We don't seem to be using the tools that actually create it. Certainly not to even those heady days of the Carter malaise much less the heady days of the Germans papering their walls with money and carrying wheelbarrows of it to buy their bread. Hence I'm not that concerned.

If I were, I wouldn't be buying gold. I'd be planning for a Fallout-style universe of blood thirsty raiders banded against the fractured remnants of society.

Update: Apparently the High Priestess Palin has decreed that there was significant inflation over the last year. Nevermind that we've had some of the lowest inflation on, to use her example food prices, in recent history. Nope, damn the inconvenient facts. It is decreed, therefore it must be so. I should go take all my money and buy gold instead starting to horde guns and food stocks also against the barbarian scum who will attempt to raid my little cave and campfires, according to her decrees.

So as I was saying...

The law bumps online poker in Washington from a misdemeanor to a Class C felony. This is the same category as child molestation, arson, and kidnapping.

Since we all know that gambling online is just like burning houses down and accosting children.

This would be part of that "great big problem" for me to vote for a Republican/conservative, but in all fairness, their overzealous moralizing written into law is backed by sterner stuff. Namely...

Keep in mind, gambling is legal in Washington State. They have casinos and a lottery. The lottery serves the state's interests, as usual, for throwing schools (and teacher's unions) a little extra cash. And the casinos, well they have their own interests. And those interests are connected with a percentage take by the state... so well. If they say they'll lose business to all this unregulated internet traffic, so much for that.

In other news. Apples are like oranges. That analogy should now assume a very different character.

CivV

Some thoughts.

The good.

I like the fact there's no slider for money and science (or anything else). If you run out of money, you start running out of units or eat into your tech (which is basically all the slider did before).

Building maintenance is far more appropriate than city maintenance based on size (or distance from capital).

Happiness from buildings or luxuries/wonders gives golden ages, and provides combat penalties if it gets down far enough and removes the micromanagement of unhappy citizens in a city and "war weariness" by abstracting it to the civilization level.

Combat without the stack of doom methods seems improved (if the AI was up to the challenge at least). Feels more like army groups moving around the continent and a little less city centered, but only a little less. Could do with being able to stack two units in a square, but otherwise, fine.

Abstracted research agreements rather than simply trading techs seems better. Diplomacy over all is a little more interesting conceptually than in Civ4.

Bombardment from ships and cities onto enemy units.

Civic tree is a lot more interesting than in 4. More choices as the game progresses than simple Free Speech, Representation, Emancipation, Free Markets, Free Religion/Organised Religion (depending on wonders you got).

Also receiving these choices mostly through culture based on empire size is an interesting twist. You can accumulate culture faster with a bigger empire, but you need more of it to win the game that way. Kind of points the way toward blasting everyone else to dust or the tech victories once the empire gets big. The changes might be too permanent between the 5 different trees to choose from for long enough game play, but in general there's a good enough advantage to one over another to stick with it. I'm not sure I'd have effectively excluded a bigger empire from using a culture victory, but there it is.

Cities tend to be more required to specialize, both through tile specific buildings (mints, stables, etc) and the general lack of production forcing you to economize on which cities are factories and which are banks or scientific.

The meh.

Not having to build and escort transports seems a little too abstracted, but manageable.

Got rid of religions and corporations? Corporations I could see (they could be a bit overpowered). But religion? Interesting...

Hexes instead of the old tiles is a change. But it's kind of a boring one.

Units per strategic resource limitation should decrease the mass cavalry/tank stacks and mass air forces.

City-states could have been executed better. Trade routes with them or some such. Maritime city-states are way overpowered I think and military ones seem relatively useless (with the possible exception that it was by design there be no production so you'd have to rely on free units).

Graphics are meh. Trading posts and rivers seem to draw the most ire. Hard to tell which tiles are being worked. An animation for Civ4 may be too much CPU, but a hut on the farm or some other object to indicate which is active and which is not would be useful.

Roads and railroads cost maintenance. This can be annoying if you want to have a network of roads and causes some of the micromanagement problems for moving "stacks" of units around.

Civilizations do not have unique leader traits, but instead have civ specific bonuses and a couple units or a building and a unit. These bonuses are often unbalanced completely. While the Civ4 traits were sometimes unbalanced, they were at least all useful.

Strategic view is pretty undetailed graphically. What exactly am I looking at here? Does have more filtering options, though, plus versus minus.

AI is generally pretty lame to terrible. This was only addressed in Civ4 for me with a mod however rather than with the original game, so it's pretty hard to complain about it. As an example, the AI has always had issues doing an intercontinental war. In Civ4 with the mod, I did occasionally see them drop a hammer down with carriers and stacks of transports and boats on me or others and back it up with follow up invasions or pick up dozens of stranded units that captured some puny island and move them to the mainland. As of right now, this AI seems pretty tame and unable to win the game.

The Argh.
Flanking enemy units bonus is too easy to get. Should have to attack from the rear rather than the side front.

Game feels unpolished (aka, not like a Civ release). Lots of minor features unrelated to game play are unimplemented (no autonamed save games, civilopaedia errors are plentiful and annoying) and some ingame play features appeared broken (no rush buying things in progress versus buying it straight up, some wonders did not match their descriptions in actual impacts).

Very little information on some game concepts (railroads/roads speed, unit bombard range, etc)

Can be hard to get some of the mid-to-late national wonders within normal game play (ie, conquests). The old system of needing to build a set number seemed adequate, especially with the production issues this game has. Either decrease their bonuses and make them easier to build or make other things easier to build so the national wonders are worth getting.

Diplomacy agreements when they expire should open the menu to renew them.

Culture warfare doesn't exist. Tiles once taken over, don't get switched back until you use a culture bomb. Being able to pick which tile you want to expand to next would be nice also.

I can't tell very easily if a city has a wonder in it when you capture it before razing it to the ground to build one of your own (or not). Given that I more or less burn them all to the ground with the happiness penalties that are imposed, I'd at least like to keep something useful around. Also, how strong is the city's HP value so I can tell if I can capture it with an attack?

Buildings are not balanced. Some are largely useless.

Units do not move through very well with stack limitations, wastes micromanagement moving them around if all a unit is doing is passing through to another hex. If not this, add a "wait" command or a "formation move".

Production seems for most of the game to be very slow, and then by the late game, to be faster (by contrast) relative to technologies. Units and buildings can be rendered obsolete by the time they are completed. Adding an additional resource to hills/mines or pastures (or to specials from either) could be useful to keep the game well paced. Or alternatively, decrease the cost to produce some less useful buildings significantly, or to production increasing buildings.

Most bonus resource tiles (non-luxury/non-strategic) are basically useless, they should add some more significant food, production, culture, scientific, or money bonus to make them worth having in a city radius or techs that should make them more productive squares if not automatically. Luxuries and strategic resources are only useful for the civilization bonuses in most cases (gold/silver can be okay, with a mint in the city).

Happiness could probably scale with map size with only a fixed number of luxury resources available in the game and larger empires in play, or happiness penalties for numbers of citizens or especially numbers of cities should alternatively scale downward with larger maps.


Great people are pretty lame strategically, not because they are underpowered but because they do not offer choices as they did in Civ4 that are meaningful. There's no reason to create an academy or a citadel instead of spam a tech or follow around the army and offer a combat bonus, etc.

No espionage? Sun Tzu is not amused.

Tells

Don't look like a stone

Look like a person who has what you represent you have. Seems to work for things other than poker to appear (or try being) sincere rather than robotic.

A ton of poker though is calculation on the fly, which is more like a robot move than a person. Real life has either more or less game theory to it.

Hard to tell sometimes whether that stuff is a hammer in search of a nail or the nail in need of a hammer.

And speaking of poker... This is a good trend back away from the brink of silly laws and prohibitions. I seem to remember that passing that law in the first place cost a 30 year House member in Iowa his seat. From millions that poured in from other states to run against him on THAT issue (online gambling) alone for introducing a little clause as a rider on a "more important" security bill.

a few hours to kill

Aliens.

Starcraft II doesn't seem that different from the first one yet (haven't tried MP yet). Units die fast, like I remember from the first one. There's a little bit of rock-paper-scissors on the units, but that was there before because of the shields on one side and the swarm strategy on the other. The campaign is different because of the way upgrades are handled (and more of them) and having mercs to draw on, but I don't see much difference yet other than graphics that should have taken over a decade to make sequel for the original...much less that they'll need to release the 3 campaigns as 3 separate games.

Back to the grind though. Play with it some more when there's less on the plate.

Zombie staff

Very attentive.

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Ahhhh apocalyptic worries and the people who make money off of them.

Forgot about the Left 4 Dead clip on that one. Good stuff.

It's better when it's a video game. At least when there are not 12 year old kids shooting you in the back and singing with an open microphone.

Fallout would have been a better reference (what with all the vaults), but mindless enraged zombies are more fun to shoot at than radiated ghouls with melting skin.

Speaking of video games, this looks like it will waste many hours, much like its predecessors.

gamesmanship

You lose, I lose

I wondered why people don't do this. In Soviet Russia, the lifeline uses you!

Better gaming theories were on penalty kicks for soccer. People should, if the goal is to score, kick the ball straight down the middle because that's more or less the best move-move strategy is to expect the goalie to dive one way or the other and thus politely get out of the way as you score. They don't do this. Because the goal is not to score but not to look like a chump and kicking it straight at the goalie in the rare event he decides to stand there instead of do a calculated guess dive in hopes of making a spectacular play, well it looks pretty bad. Other incentives do need to be properly factored into the game in order to understand it.

L4D2

I've been playing this since I got it on sale last week. So far I've beaten two campaigns on expert and only expect one campaign to pose any threats. That Parish finale crossing the bridge is insane, a continuous running battle while climbing through and over an endless stream of cars. That's the only hard part in that campaign though.

The Carnival level is hard, but only the part getting into the stadium (ie, before the finale) is really hard where you're running through a continuous gauntlet of zombies. The coaster can be skipped, and its not that hard anyway (just keep running and shoot anything in front of you). The finale is generally easy, you hold up in the corners with massive and clear lines of fire, light up the tanks and go get ammo while they burn, and come back to the corner.

The mall level is a cake walk by comparison (as long as you horde pipes or bile bombs for the ending and the alarm in the mall in the level prior). Split into pairs and you can finish it before the tank even shows up. The fact that you're guaranteed to have a laser sight on an AK or sniper rifle makes it even worse.

The Swamp is a joke. You can skip the airplane wing event fight entirely and the only hard part from there is that they send two tanks at you at once in the finale. Again, light them up and run around works pretty well because of all the holes in the floors that you can jump over and the tank will have to stop and climb back up or will try to throw things at you instead of chasing you. (the one note is that I like the change to the fire damage tank formula, it does damage over time, but you can now shoot the thing to kill it faster too. It's still usually smarter to run like hell if its lit, though maybe if you have explosive rounds it works out. To compensate, the tank chases other people who aren't incapped instead of trying to smash someone to death, which is generally useless if the other 3 aren't incapped since they now have chest paddles to revive people who are dead).

The Sugar Mill is hard only in the second part where you have to cross through a field of sugar cane without being able to see...much of anything. Which the "much of anything" includes several specials and possibly a few wandering witches (instant death if they hit you) plus randomly distributed zombies. If you try to pick off some of that stuff from the ledge next to the elevator it seems a little easier. You have all day to snipe as they climb up.

Overall the game seems harder than the first one, but only because it lacks the same predictability so far. Once you get a formula down for dealing with the least predictable events, it seems like a cakewalk compared to the first one.

The real problem is finding players who don't shoot you in the back and start screaming like 12 year olds in glee as they are kick-banned.

gaming

Been playing Dragon Age enough to have a few opinions. There will be spoilers if by some chance, people who wanted to play it and haven't pop by.

1) Morrigan is probably the single coolest video game character I've seen. If it were possible to interact more with Andrew Ryan in BioShock, he might win this competition. But his entrance as a talking head looking gangster-ish through a broken TV screen does not compare to a witch-like causal stroll of a mage staring you down as a lesser mortal. So he loses. She's anti-social (she hates townspeople, anything in the game having to do with religion, children, and your dog) and almost completely self-confident and totally aware of it. In your camp, she's the only one off by herself, which is a pretty clear signal to be "left alone". Pretty much every situation where in the game you can "help" someone, she gets pissed if you do it. Thus far she has been pleased with the following types of events: condemning dwarfs to be enslaved as stone golems, allowing a merchant to "price gouge" refugees, saving an illegal blood mage from death, allowing a tower of mages to be overrun and slaughtered by templars, etc. To top that off, she requests that you kill her mother (when she finds out her mother will try to kill her at some later point, but it's not like it comes out of the blue though). She got annoyed when I saved a village of innocent civilians from a horde of undead that sort of thing. Ryan has the line where he burns a forest he owns to the ground when the people wanted to turn it into a national park. So I can see where this sort of attitude is coming from.

It's not so much that these are necessarily great people and role models in most ways, but they're far more thought-out allies or plot devices than the other "good" characters often are. By simply playing the game in a "people get what they deserve" attitude, you would imagine you could get along great with either character. And you naturally annoy people who believe there's more to justice than that. Like that noble idea that innocents should be protected from harm (another mage got really annoyed when I killed the "wrong" dwarf with the assumption being that dwarfs would again be forced to be enslaved rather than volunteer to be turned into magical monsters as they once did, and the main male NPC got extremely pissed when I let a woman sacrifice herself to save her son from a demon). One consequence of this seems to be that it's really hard to keep everyone you could recruit as allies happy. A couple seem genuinely evil. Morrigan is only anti-social in my opinion, she does not (usually) wish for people to be harmed, but if it is "getting what's coming to them", she's not lifting a finger to stop it either. Sten seems more or less evil. Considering you recruit him by saving him from execution for a senseless murder of an entire family, this isn't terribly surprising.

2) This sort of dark cynical world also carries over into the non-allied characters you can interact with. When you save a town from a bunch of predatory bandits killing or robbing refugees outside of it, some of the townsfolk are annoyed because they're being overrun by those same "worthless" refugees. Almost every major authority figure in the game is only concerned with one thing: power. They willingly allow people who they have nominally supported to be killed because it advances or secures their own position. Very Machiavellian. At the same time some of the dialogues you can have with the "good" storyline folks demonstrate theories on responsibilities of power and the consequential duty to use that power to protect or help others. Considering that there are no examples of this in the game (even the Wardens are basically a secretive cult that doesn't seem too concerned when people have to die to advance their essential cause), it's hard to see where they got the notion however. I haven't played as an elf yet, but one of the introductory story arcs is basically the beginning part of Braveheart. Some human noble comes by to claim his right to sleep with your new bride, you kill him. It's not a pretty world.

3) Game wasn't too hard on hard. Morrigan, in addition to being an interesting character is probably the most crucial addition to the team. It's like playing as Rome in Civilization 4; she's like a full difficulty level adjustment down. She does require in my opinion the most micromanagement to get the most out of the spells though. The other mage you can get, Wynne, can handle healing by scripting it on autopilot and the one good kill spell combo she has, petrify/shatter, available can also be scripted easily enough. Hardest part was early on, pre-Morrigan, fighting a boss ogre where I died about a dozen times before figuring it out. Later engagements get progressively easier. A few longer quests are reasonably hard but manageable if there aren't running battles with dozens of enemies over a wide area. Those sorts of fights will drain out all your abilities and you'll be left using regular attacks more often. Which sucks. There's a fair amount of dying if you're not careful but it's also not essential for every battle that every character "survive" the battle throughout either. As long as one of you makes it, the dead just get back up with some injury penalties to their stats and abilities. It's mostly like a combination of an RPG and an RTS in most battles, sort of like playing Warcraft 3 with just heroes as your army rather than random units. The "perpetual gore" feature also wasn't well thought out. It's good for combat to give you an idea of just how messy things are getting and some of the killing blows are visually impressive, Alistair leaping up on falling ogres and repeatedly stabbing their chests for example, but it does get extremely silly if you then have a conversation right after a battle. A mop would be necessary. The game was rather unstable at first. I had two hard crashes where the computer completely shut down (heat related I assume). But once I patched my video card, parts of the game (usually the ability to loot corpses and quest updates) simply start to run slower after a while instead of crashing the system. I find this an agreeable arrangement, since with Fallout 3 I was getting a fair amount of CTD appearances for the same sort of game. Borderlands was more stable than both.

4) For whatever the controversy was over the ability to have homosexual relationships, aside from the usual RPG tendencies to use specific body types for humans (both male and female) as heroes, it's extremely tame on the "sexual". Fallout 2 had the same prostitution angles as this game did (almost 15 years ago) and only marginally less graphically. That is, sex is in this game only a representation that there is sex going on or about to be going on, it's not pornographic, and Fallout had a casino bell ringing as the screen faded out and returned to normal instead of a brief cutscene of characters in their underwear. I should also note from what I've seen online that Morrigan is arguably more clothed in the game's sex scene for her than in the rest of the game (at least on top). And as far as actual nudity, there are a few basically topless purple demons. Woo-hoo.

If this was supposed to be controversial, I'd say some of the decisions that the game gives you to do as options or which others have done previously which you are correcting (or helping) that amount to slavery (city elves) or genocide (the mage and werewolf story arcs) are far more troublesome than anything sexually related in the game. It's already rated M, and given that an M rating for a video game is supposed to be like an R rating, you'll see a lot "worse" in a movie theatre as far as nudity and sex are concerned. The only difference is that it is not as interactive a storyline. But here again, "sex" is a cutscene. The interactive part would be how you ended up there I guess, but it's generally over a long period of time. The supposedly offensive gay scene(s, there's both gay and lesbian relationships, plus at least one other non-party related character who may be persuaded to join you in the back room of the brothel) would have to be something you would positively chosen to pursue. Considering there is actual pornography which is far more accessible online than an interactive RPG game with the main focus being killing things and doing quests, I'm not that concerned. GTA's "coffee" that you had to unlock manually apparently shocked some consciences as well, though since it wasn't gay males obviously fewer than this. The lesbian angle in the game is pretty much at this point an accepted norm, which I guess is progress of a sort. Really the puritanical attitudes toward sexuality in our society need to do some serious explaining for me to take such shock and scandal as this at face value. You as the player would have to choose to pursue this as an optional aspect and it's in a rated game already with the idea that it will have particularly adult themes in it which ought to be more offensive than sex to our sensitive sensibilities (ie, mass slaughter and the complex and cynical political maneuvers which then result in mass slaughter and war). Get over it says I.

speaking of random acts of violence

Disturbing part is the commenters more than the video

Had to look this up after I heard it discussed as the most disturbing part of a game the other day. Even GTA didn't ever bother people by having realistic wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians. The first couple games were so cartoon-ish by comparison to this that it's not even a close contest on the "disturbing" level of consideration. Most of the "disturbing" first person shooters I've played rely more on an immersion in the game atmosphere and story than your actions (Bioshock, Fallout 3). They don't therefore come off as "distasteful" to play, and if they do, it's usually by choice that you decide to murder people or children for no apparent reason. "Reasons" in a game to do so:
1) a requirement to kill someone or something for a quest or mission, which in Fallout often meant you could choose to kill the person offering the mission to kill someone else once in a while instead.
2) someone who was an annoying and unnecessary game character. Generally after acquiring some new weapon to see how well it could work against some more challenging and important target. There are usually penalties and advantages for these sorts of choices in games like these because the game allows and indeed requires you to make choices about whether you'll be some sort of hired gun avenger or just the angel of death sort killing everything and everyone (and it usually makes the latter much harder to sort out and succeed by doing, simply because gameplay wise, it's usually the easiest choice to kill people instead of resolve their problems).

So it's not like I'm one to shy away from violence in a video game. But this was something else entirely. Several thoughts:
1) I'm not sure how this was supposed to be a fun part of the game. Killing unarmed civilians with automatic weapons seems rather like playing a game with all the cheats on and enemies that run away instead of fight back. Not much of an exciting gameplay/plot twist. Could have been handled as a cut scene in my opinion. Haven't played the game of course to make that determination myself. But it's still a rather strange choice.
2) The shootout with the cops/military/FSB afterward was sort of like Heat but with grenades. That is one of my favorite sequences in a movie for the sudden and abrupt shock it delivers (going from nominally cheering for the bad guys to suddenly realizing how bad ass they are that even a shootout in a crowded street with the police using automatic rifles is not beneath them)
3) Guy playing reloads a ton. With a weapon that reloads slow, not so sure how smart that is. This has been your random unemotional critique of an indiscriminate choice to slaughter people for no apparent reason.
4) Not really explained why they have to shoot up an airport full of civilians for this mission. Other than that you're being setup. Doesn't really fly as an explanation for me that we would have some sort of war over some random American dumbasses shooting up a Russian airport. I don't think it likely that we'd have the same problem if there was a random Russian guy in America with the same M.O. I realize Russia is not America and there's more of an institution of paranoia in their leadership historically (although we have no shortage of that here lately). But it would seem more likely that we'd simply disavow any knowledge of the guy's actions (reasonable considering what he'd just done, even if it was supposed to be his mission so to speak) and tell the Russians to fry him if it would keep us out of a war.


Updated: Apparently you can skip this mission entirely. And obviously you can play it and not shoot the civilians yourself. Which is sort of like using an unethical medical procedure where the unethical part was done by somebody else, like say, a kidney transplant where the kidney was removed without consent. And you know that as the doctor. Both of those considerations really make it sort of odd to wonder WHY it is in the game.

wide range of things

From health care to video games

You could easily skip the "DC sucks" section, but the story impacts of video games in the future (along with the continuing debunking of violence being caused by them) is a nice touch. Bioshock (their example) was a fascinating back story which helped create the game's occasionally creepy atmosphere (one may never look at a vending machine the same way for example). And of course I've been ranting about health care being paid for in the most illogical manner (through insurance) for a while. These sorts of folks are part of the reason why.

I don't of course have much to say about the new ghost author and her fanbase. But I do think the comparisons to an empty vessel (madlibs works in either direction for her) or a reality TV star I've seen for Palin are apt.

The website itself has been rather productive lately. Ezra's discussion on food was fairly useful as well. For example admitting there are problems with the sort of liberal paternalism arguments with food and junk food for adults will make that reform for public health and externality costs difficult. But I'm pretty sure that critique (that it's hard) doesn't apply to school lunches and vending machines in schools. Also, I'd like to see the study that he cited where men eat more vegetables or fruits if they're stored on the same shelf of the fridge (rather than if they're subsidized).

Naturally that's less helpful for someone like me, but by choice I'd rather have some fruit as a snack already.

Football? yep

football economically

I watched my annual football game. Indianapolis vs New England. Pretty much I only enjoy watching excellent football like some sort of sports snob.

The interesting part post-game was that I've been a big fan of the "don't punt" theory (this may be because I never punted in console football games growing up as well and it seemed to work out more often than not there). So when Belichick sent back out the offense on 4th and short with 2 minutes left with the ball in his own territory, I was quite happy. This was good football and good coaching. It turned out as poor execution; the Pats failed to convert and naturally didn't stop the Colts from scoring to win the game. The reality was that a punt wasn't worth much there, netting about 40 yards with 2 minutes left wasn't really going to stop the Colts anymore than failing on 4th down did. Getting a first down basically wins the game and the odds of converting on 4th and short are extremely good. From watching them carve up the Colts on third down all game with quick out passes to Welker, it was probably better odds for the Pats to convert than a normal team, even against a good Colts defense.

I then was subjected to a rash of analysts saying "you have to punt there". They are being highly paid to be wrong. You don't "have to". I even saw Rodney Harrison saying that not punting says "I don't trust my defense..." ignoring that it also means: "I trust my offense to get me two measly yards". I found it amusing that ESPN put up the percentages for the Pats making a 4th and 2 conversion successfully. It was over 70%. On the play, the guy had the yards and just got hit backward to prevent the first down. And yet everybody still says that this was a bad call?

Things to think about

That Dilbert guy is occasionally clever

1. Does this situation follow a pattern I've seen in scams?
2. Is someone giving answers that seem intentionally vague?
3. Is information conspicuously missing?
4. Is someone trying to rush me?
5. Could someone unscrupulous easily take advantage of me?
6. Have I regretted this sort of decision before?
7. How do I imagine other people will react to this decision?
8. If the expert is so smart, why isn't he rich?

The last one in particular is really fun. I don't have as much to think of #7. But then there aren't that many people who would even be able to react.

I might add one more. "Why is this person shouting at me?" or inversely, "why is this person talking so fast and low?" - In reference to virtually every TV commercial. Except for this one maybe. Not a whole lot of talking.

Tape Delay

I haven't posted all week. For explanations

1) Bought Borderlands. Haven't played it much yet (got it in the mail yesterday). I expect to lose a few hours later.
2) Finishing Bill Simmons' tome on basketball. A few thoughts that I doubt most people will care about will be coming I'm sure. I tend to look at ranking lists for some reason.
3) World Series and updating my stat-head all-time league. That's tedious as it involves making and re-ordering ranking lists and picking averaged seasons to replace and to normalize the new data from park factors and league averages. Easier than it sounds.
4) NBA started. Some time lost to early season moves with fantasy basketball. As per usual, I skip fantasy football and baseball because they are less predictable or less fun than my alternative reality league, respectively. Basketball I haven't seen very many good statistical simulation games that would allow an alternate reality game (in part because the NBA didn't keep good statistics until the 70s and didn't have a three point line for a while either. Way to ignore blocks, steals and turnovers for the better part of two decades). So playing games with the modern players is quite good enough. So far I'm in 3-4th but one of the guys ahead is burning out the games played.
5) I have now a backlog of about 10-12 blog posts or news blurbs that I wanted to comment on but hadn't come up with a coherent statement of opinion or factual rebuttals that required a blog posting. Yet. Probably tomorrow.