Redwall

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Posts posted by Redwall


  1. Yes, hence:

    (at least in any serious perspective, excluding the vast majority of religious, who don't understand their own theologies)

    I'm of the opinion that in order to bridge that divide divinity and worship must be entirely separated from ethics (and indeed removed entirely), but that's a sort of humanist wet dream and so instead I try to grant what I see as the pros of religion and hope they start to act with more awareness.


  2. I think how and why are getting confused. Rodi, your sense of 'why' is what the religious call 'how', i.e. the mechanics of the events. Religion is intended (at least in any serious perspective, excluding the vast majority of religious, who don't understand their own theologies) as a 'why' in the sense of humanistic meaning (which is why I prefer to term the dichotomy as one between "what does happen" [science] and "what should happen" [religion], making religion just a term for an ethical system).


  3. I really liked that in Half-Life 1, sometimes scientists would run up to you and tell you something important, but you could (intentionally or accidentally) crowbar them in the face and they'd just fall to the ground dead, leaving you to figure it out. If they ever needed a scientist to open a locked door, there was usually one on the opposite side to do it, so you could kill the guy on your side if you wanted. It was kind of a bummer to find that in the later games Valve fell so in love with every single "good guy" speaking NPC that you weren't allowed to kill them.

    Yeah, I don't the HL2 solution for plot-centric NPCs but there were times when I really wanted to be able to shoot the resistance fighters (when they got stuck in a doorway as a Strider was shooting at us, for example. :shifty: My Gordon shoots people who are in his way.)


  4. At least the last four episodes of season 3, probably (Malestrom, The Son Also Rises, Crossroads I and II).

    Razor is pretty standalone (or at least I suspect it will be) and the middle episodes of season 3 (Taking a Break..., The Woman King, A Day in the Life, Dirty Hands) are much like the middle episodes of season two in that they are mostly bad and have little impact on the overall plot. (I can summarize them: Lee and Kara stop fucking, Helo shows us all that racism is bad, Adama hallucinates his dead wife, and Tyrol reorganizes the union that we saw him leading on New Caprica for all of ten seconds.)


  5. I really liked it, but was disappointed to lose the flashbacks to Cain's past as a young girl (which supposedly explain just why she's a psycho bitch and more specifically what's up with her obsession with that knife/razor). "Buy the DVD!" they say. Eh.

    I'm not sure there was much point to revisiting Cain and co.--we didn't learn anything new, in terms of the universe or in terms of drama, I think--but it was fun anyway. Lots of nice explosions, the new actress who played Shaw stood her ground well enough, and yeah, the return of the original Centurions was great (not as good as in the web flashbacks where young Adama wrestles with one in mid-air after ejecting from his fighter, though!).

    The whole thing with Starbuck at the end also seemed a bit tagged in, but it was also fun (and that hybrid was creepy as hell) so whatever.


  6. What I wonder is is anyone actually buying this game? I assume not, and any sales that exist are primarily driven by the publicity it's gotten (and the fact that it's Rockstar). If anyone other than Rockstar had made this, I suspect no one would have given a damn, sales would have been dismal, and censorship would be unnecessary past the enforcement-of-18-limits pretty much everybody already agrees on. Ideally market forces would prevent these types of games from being made at any significant rate because they won't sell well. (And if market forces don't, then we have a problem with our culture, not the company that's taking advantage of it. I don't want to sound like I'm abdicating Rockstar/corporations in general of responsibility, because this is scum, but this is scum that only works if people enjoy the scum itself.)


  7. To be fair, censorship is usually based on the idea that there are some things that are wrong regardless of context (and they should therefore be censored). I don't agree with that, but ignoring context is sort of the point with censorship.


  8. haha, awesome and the comments are hilarious. So revealing when someone argues that the review shouldn't have a political message because the game doesn't have a political message, it's just a game about WWII... when it seems clear that the whole point of the political digression was that the game (and everything else glorifying American involvement in WWII) is making a (disgusting) political statement. :tup:


  9. But I think what he's arguing is that the presentation is what's more wowing than the gameplay itself, which is true, but I don't see why that should disqualify it from GotY. I mean, every adventure game would be shit by that reasoning, Half-Life 2 and the episodes would be worthless because they're mostly just more of the same, etc.