Eedo Baba

Pretty much this. Religion kind of stays in a stasis outside of logic, because it's taught to children that don't have the mental faculty to really understand or question it yet.

Ok, for arguments sake I'll accept that you can feel a presence that I can't. My question is why that leads you to Christianity? If all you feel is a single higher power, why not believe in any other monotheistic religion, like Islam or Judaism? What makes you lean towards Christianity if you're going off of a basic feeling?

Been around a month and a half since my copy became unplayable. Bethesda is saying the update to fix it will come "some time this month". Here's hoping it comes with an official apology and some sort of compensation.

Yes, basically it allows the military to secretly kidnap and imprison anyone in the country, including citizens, if they are deemed "terrorists". They don't even have to tell anyone about where you are, and can keep you from contacting the outside when you're imprisoned. So yeah, it's kind of like something out of the Lenin era Soviet Union.

As I've said before, it's changed the community. High value hats make people feel superior and scammers just suck. It's like drinking unicorn blood, hats have kept tf2 active, but at what cost? Unicorns don't exist, and hat's didn't keep TF2 alive either. It's addicting gameplay is what kept it alive. The same can be said for any long lasting multiplayer game. Look at Counter Strike for example. That's been around for 10~ years and no one's buying hats for that game.

I just see TF2 as an exceedingly well designed multiplayer game. I don't even like multiplayer in general, but I've logged hundreds of hours in TF2. Any other gripes you have with it, like hats and such, can be legitimate, but it doesn't change the fact that TF2 plays beautifully. You might even have the argument that one class is overpowered, or the class you're playing is underpowered, but I guarantee you these opinions are entirely dependent on what class you choose. That's the magic of TF2's balance. You're always challenged in a new way for each class.

Bully. Still as much fun as it was 6 years ago.

There's also the logic that if there are really hundreds of available religions, would you really expect one of them to be true? Is it really that special?

I rate Deus Ex by today's standards, I rate Star Control 2 by today's standards, Half Life, Wolfenstein ET, Fallout 2, Daggerfall etc. I still consider them good, even great, it's age has nothing to do with it. A good game is a good game, I respect titles like Doom for being revolutionary (at least the engine was) but that doesn't mean I have to place them on top of a pedestal and announce that they are the greatest games ever made. Agreed. Games like Half Life and Super Mario Brothers are just great games. Games like Pong and Doom though, while being revolutionary, aren't worthy of high praises when taken out of context.

I agree about Mass Effect 2. I played a while and just hated it. Controlled very badly, voice acting was awful...

I'd agree. The main character in A:TDD is pretty average. And even if he wasn't a "coward", what exactly would he be doing? Fist fighting the monsters? There aren't exactly any shotguns lying around... And keep in mind that if he was a coward, he could have simply left the castle.

I know what you mean. I wouldn't say HL2 is worse or better, but it's just very different. HL1 had the interesting idea of exploring one huge place, completely cut off from the outside world. HL2 kind of replaces that idea with the exploration of a much larger outdoor area. There's also the fact that HL2 made the decision to change the game's world so much. No longer is the game based on the present day, in a "what if" scenario. It's now set in a distopian future, where things are jarringly different from the conditions of the first game. Gordon Freeman is also no longer an average scientist, but a savior figure in the eyes of the human race. So yeah, HL2 changes a lot in terms of setting and story, which makes it a very different game than HL1. I think it's totally admirable that Valve went in such a radically different direction, and I think both are built to the same level of quality, but it's really up to personal opinion which one is better.

I've read bits of the bill itself, as well as various summaries. It's an extremely destructive piece of legislation. The websites the RIAA and MPAA could legally have blocked completely under the bill's use: Youtube Google Facebook Reddit All search engines All torrenting sites All file sharing sites of any kind I'm not saying all of these will certainly go down immediately, but some will. My guess for the first day of the bill's enactment, Youtube will go down, along with popular torrenting sites. If the corporations are feeling cocky, they might even take down Google to limit people's ability to find pirated material. And who's to say they won't? We're giving them the power. Can we really expect them to use it responsibly, or even sanely?

The Zelda franchise, Infamous, Call of Duty, Bioshock... As much as people tell me Bioshock is revolutionary and beautiful, I just don't see it. All I can see in it is a somewhat bland shooter that doesn't control very well, wrapped in a pretty heavy-handed plot.

The problems I had with Back to the Future... Wayyyy too easy. Shockingly easy. Almost no challenge at all. On top of that it was just badly written. The entire story feels very contrived and embarrassingly stupid. Dialog has none of the charm of well written adventure games.

I wouldn't say that. There a lot of games even nowadays that can easily be categorized as Adventure. Games like Amnesia the Dark Descent and LA Noire. And of course some of the classic series like Myst continued past 1998. Myst 3 and 4 were both great games, released in 2002 and 2005. Amnesia the Dark Descent was a horrible game, and definitely not what I consider an adventure game. There was no dialogue for one, there was no real puzzle to it. All I remember of it was being pissed off all the time by how whimpy the protagonist was and being pissed off that I couldn't find enough tinder for the bloody light source which was so essential to keeping my protagonist from going insane. One of the worst games I've ever played. And speaking of LA Noire, I guess that can be classified as an adventure game since it relies heavily on detective work and story. The Longest Journey was a great adventure title, and TellTale's Monkey Island titles as well as Back To The Future were also good adventure games. By any reasonable definition, A:TDD is certainly an adventure game. It relies on story and puzzle solving ahead of action. As for the lack of dialog, I can think of many many adventures games like that. Myst or Scratches come to mind. Oh, and the Telltale Monkey Island games and the Back to the Future games were both pretty crappy adventure games... Telltale really can't stand on it's own unless there's good writing, like with the Sam and Max games.

1. Naughty Dog 2. Valve 3. Team Ico 4. Double Fine 5. Rockstar I'd put Cyan on the list, as Riven is one of my all time favorites, but I thought I'd limit the list to devs that are still putting out great games. I wouldn't say that. There a lot of games even nowadays that can easily be categorized as Adventure. Games like Amnesia the Dark Descent and LA Noire. And of course some of the classic series like Myst continued past 1998. Myst 3 and 4 were both great games, released in 2002 and 2005.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Much better than it's sequels. When I got the box off my shelf, I noticed a blurb on it saying: This was the same year Crysis was released.

Still playing Half Life 1. Faced with snipers and I have no grenades.

lol, if that was Einstein, I respect him a lot less now. All the "student" is doing there is using wordplay and grammatical formalities to try and prove his point. The professor is right for example in saying darkness does exist. It's the lack of light. If we're in the habit of saying that items comprised of nothing don't exist, then I suppose deep space doesn't exist? How about caves? Also, he's using some extremely dubious logic concerning evolution. Obviously none of us have witnessed directly the process of gene mutation and natural selection, but we very clearly can see these things in the fossil record, and as a result in living species. Implying there's literally no physical proof for evolution is just wrong. The "student" is once again not acting like a scientist. He's disregarding the scientific method of repeatable proof. Another example of this in the article would be inferring that the professor has no brain. Repeatable proof shows that humans have brains, and the professor is a human. Once again, the "Student" is just using wordplay as a replacement for an actual argument. Einstein was only using the professor's argument against him. Well, the professor's argument makes actual sense. You can't see physical proof of god. The student named several things that either exist as the lack of another object or you can see physical proof of. Either way, the whole exchange seems very fabricated regardless. For example, who would have been transcribing this conversation? And why are there prose-ish embellishments like "pin drop silence"?

Not trying to pick a fight with Einstein. He was mathematically brilliant, but I had to state how ridiculous the logic in that image was. And on the subject of brilliant scientists being theists, I'd say that brainwashing our most brilliant thinkers is a mistake we're starting to correct. Anyway, you refer to how the universe is surprisingly stable for something existing out of chance. This is a good point on it's own, but given some thought, it has it's weaknesses. For example, let me bring forward the Anthropic Principle The basic idea in the Anthropic Principle hinges on a concept of many universes, which the scientific community started theorizing on long ago. It states that if there are many many universes (perhaps infinite) with different laws of physics, then we, as conscious living beings, logically need to exist in a universe capable of creating and supporting such life. It's a hard idea to wrap your head around, but it makes sense in a way. A conscious being can't exist in a universe incapable of creating one, so the event of conscious observance (life) would be limited to stable, organized universes. The same can be said for your watch example. The watch exists in this world because there are humans around to create it, just as life exists in this universe because the laws of physics conform to it's needs. (There's also the fact that the universe isn't perfectly stable either. There are millions of things ready to kill us in this universe. Earthquakes, sunspots, galaxies colliding, flooding, tornadoes, asteroids... I'd say that's an argument that supports a natural system more susceptible to an imperfect-yet-stable universe, like the Anthropic Principle.) PS: Once again, not trying to start a fight, I just like a good debate, and this thread is young enough that it hasn't devolved into a screaming match.

lol, if that was Einstein, I respect him a lot less now. All the "student" is doing there is using wordplay and grammatical formalities to try and prove his point. The professor is right for example in saying darkness does exist. It's the lack of light. If we're in the habit of saying that items comprised of nothing don't exist, then I suppose deep space doesn't exist? How about caves? Also, he's using some extremely dubious logic concerning evolution. Obviously none of us have witnessed directly the process of gene mutation and natural selection, but we very clearly can see these things in the fossil record, and as a result in living species. Implying there's literally no physical proof for evolution is just wrong. The "student" is once again not acting like a scientist. He's disregarding the scientific method of repeatable proof. Another example of this in the article would be inferring that the professor has no brain. Repeatable proof shows that humans have brains, and the professor is a human. Once again, the "Student" is just using wordplay as a replacement for an actual argument.

I'd say that's the part of religious morality I disagree with. Selfish morality. Doing good deeds and being nice to others simply for your own personal gain in the afterlife. I don't believe in god/gods, but I try to follow the Golden Rule. "Do to others as you would prefer they do to you." I don't do it to avoid personal punishment in hell, I do it because it makes my friends and family's lives better, and that makes me happy. EDIT: There's actually a good Albert Einstein quote about this very subject. Was reminded of it by the lower posts.

Half Life 1. Just got to Residue Processing, and I completely forgot that the Freeman's Mind intro is from a song in the game. Totally caught me off guard when I heard this, exiting a vent duct... ssCYAaniyQk

Played Modern Warfare 3 for the first time with some friends. We were playing on a 9 foot projector screen with a surround sound system. The game itself was literally indistinguishable from Modern Warfare 2. (okay, not completely indistinguishable. There was a 3 on the box instead of a 2.) What stuck with me was the ridiculous bass on the surround sound, when a weapon was being fired. Had a headache for an hour or two after that.