@Animasta: Can sex mean anything to you beyond you 'just having sex'?
I realise that's reductive to the absurd, but how can you ask if sex can mean anything in games if you believe it means something in life.
Edit: So much can be expressed through sex, and you see it used throughout art as a way to convey countless aspects of a relationship/person. It's also not just for intimacy or as a way to look at a relationship. A game could very well turn sex into an absurd, patently ridiculous act if they wanted. It's very easy, our experience of sex in the moment is completely abstracted, remove yourself from it and observe it and it becomes an especially awkward thing.
The one I always point to (and have done so on these boards before) is Indigo Prophecy. In that game, the sex scene represents an intimate moment of escape from an outside world that believes you to be a murderer. It uses a relationship it has shown to have a history as an emotional shelter for both characters.
Mechanically, it does what sex scenes should do: it does not apply a win/fail dynamic. It maps the act of sex to vaguely corresponding movements and just allows the player to sit within a moment that is entirely separate from the rest of the game.
Not that this example is perfect. Like almost all games, the character models make things a touch awkward and no-where near as convincing as the sentiment.
@BisonHero: Although I agree on their treatment of their female protagonists, I don't see Fahrenheit's sex scene as pointless.
@EpicSteve: I think the suggestion at the time was that the Somalis were left as one-dimensional caricatures of a misrepresented culture. The film also shied away from addressing anything but the rote, American narrative of the conflict (not that it is the film's prerogative to explore the Somalian one necessarily but it helps ..).
Edit: And this was a really interesting read. Although I have a lot of problems with the way most games depict war, I've never really worried about them being disrespectful to soldiers. If it is, they (you) will likely call it out.
@Laivasse: The phrase 'it's just a game' has become a weird way of defending things. Similarly, simply expecting a game to be fun and nothing more is genuinely sad to me. Yeah, plenty of games should just be fun but not every movie or book you consume is going to be purely fun .. so why should every game be?
Leaving certain stations unmanned is pretty situational. In an asteroid field, obviously don't abandon shield. In a nebula it's a trickier trade-off.
As for boarding in general, it's a great tactic but you have to be smart about it. I find it's most useful as a sort of hit and run sort of thing; send in your two guys, blast away at O2 or something else vital, maybe kill a guy and then beam back as soon as it looks like it's getting dangerous. Heal up, repeat. This can go on whilst you bombard their weapons (or anything vital, again) when you're on-board and the room you've just damaged when you beam away.
You also benefit greatly from having a strong boarding party for the boss. The weapon rooms are separate so beam in two guys, kill the weapon and repeat. Second wave can go way easier if you take out the weapons and drone room with boarding.
The belief that the only wrong Fox committed was in the last 5 seconds is mind-boggling to me. Following a car chase through its entirety, seemingly hoping for something horrific, whilst commentating on it is a truly dark form of "news". What do news channels expect to happen? A nice, safe ending to everything? It's a disturbing form of entertainment that just creeps me out. I'm not trying to be one of those idiots who attack the US as a country ad hominem, but I've never seen other media so absorbed by potential death. A man steals a car at gunpoint, man drives car away from police, chase ensues, he kills himself. Report on it, don't become perverse voyeurs of a single man's impending death.
To respond to a point I saw earlier: the difference between this and showing footage of an atrocity like 9/11 or other new stories is that the chase itself is insignificant and the violent footage almost pre-meditated, anticipated. There is value in addressing a horrible thing head on, it is important to do so. When that thing is important enough to warrant it and it is unavoidable as a part of covering it. The image is usually also abstracted, not as direct as the on-air suicide.
What value is there in filling your news cycle with this?
Shields and Engine first, with the aim (for me) to get to a point where I have an all lasers, full teleport, full cloak and 3/4 shield ship for the boss.
Boarding is insanely useful for the boss fight and a volley of 6 - 10 laser bursts at once is pretty much the only way I go with regards to weapons.
I'm a huge fan of RPS and have followed the writers for ages so take this as you will.
I don't think RPS has any obligation to write nice things about Diablo 3, especially since RPS, more than pretty much every other site, is based entirely around the tastes of just the current writers (something they're open about). I also think John Walker's specific arguments against the game are perfectly valid. That said, he did a 'first three hours' piece a little while ago that was fairly positive/optimistic about the game. His subsequent experience has apparently lowered his opinion.
I don't understand how you got to snobbishness really.
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