Laiv162560asse

I'd go for Baldur's Gate. Planescape is one of my favourite games of all time and I think Baldur's Gate 2 is a more compelling story experience than BG1 by modern standards, but since you're asking this question it appears that you're interested in the D&D setting and rules as much as you are interested in the games themselves. With that in mind, I think Baldur's Gate (fully enhanced with BG Tutu mod, some fixpacks and a widescreen mod) is the best out of any of these games for introducing you to the fundamentals of the world, without compromising on depth and non-linearity.

Planescape's combat is inferior to BG and its class system is only a really simplified version of what you usually find in D&D. Baldur's Gate (the first) gives you a breadth of free choice over who to be, where to go and what to use. While playing it you can look forward to the greater polish of the sequel, with its superior storytelling and dialogue, although Baldur's Gate 2 compromises on some of the non-linear world exploration aspects in comparison to its predecessor.

Icewind Dale would be a bad choice. I can't speak for the second game, but I've tried to get into IWD1 time and time again and failed to make much progress. It's just an unforgiving combat slog, minus many of the more interesting overarching story elements. In all probability any one of BG1, 2 or PS:T will kick your arse at low levels since they don't make allowances that modern gamers are used to. IWD assumes you're cool with this and does it harder.

I haven't played ToEE or NWN, but I hear parts of NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer are up there with Planescape in terms of writing.

Golden Axe and Toejam & Earl have been mentioned so it has to be Road Rash 1 & 2 for me:

@wuddel said:

The timing and difficulty changed a lot in one of the patches. I've played through it twice and it was night and day. It's possible these changes haven't made it to the Mac version...?

@brodehouse: Well I would have closed this tab in despair long ago had I not seen what you were saying in regards to feminism and egalitarianism, so back at you :P

@hungry: A thoughtful post. Some of your questions invite more philosophising and rumination than I feel like I want to commit to, so I figure I'll just do you the unfortunate discourtesy of zeroing in on one part.

You ask: 'If one feels that they should have their gender and sex coincide, is it more right to change their mentality, or change their physicality?' There are two things I take issue with here. The first is the notion of doing what is 'right' with regards to your gender identity. I don't think it's healthy or productive to bring morals into a debate like this, and while I doubt this is what you were doing, from experience I have come to believe that many people do make a moral judgement which says that others shouldn't change their gender physicality. Perhaps out of libidinal discomfort with the idea of gender uncertainty, I have seen people treat the idea of transgenderism as disgusting, repulsive and reprehensible. I'm not entirely innocent of this; as a man myself, I would not want to sleep with a trans-woman (and I apologise if that upsets any trans-women reading this, but I promise you're not missing anything). However, that does not mean I see them as inferior people or having made the 'wrong' change to themselves. Talking about it in terms of moral 'rightness' only encourages marginalisation of a group who are evidently already struggling with difficult choices.

You may of course not have meant moral rectitude but instead been talking of scientific 'rightness' - as in, taking the course that medicinal science would most likely prescribe in order to produce a healthy outcome. This leads me on to my second problem with the question, which is with the word 'mentality'. To my layman's understanding, there is little scientific doubt any more that male and female brains have marked differences. Exactly what differences, how much they account for gender identity, and the question of when does a male brain become a female one or vice versa, are all, I understand, still unclear. Every year some babies will be born with genital defects or no genitals at all. These babies are often reassigned gender at birth as part of surgery to help their excretory systems. Despite being raised as a certain sex, they frequently (8 out of 14 subjects in one study) come to identify as the opposite. There's also the famous case of David Reimer, a man who in his childhood had been raised as a girl after a botched circumcision. His case was presented as an example of the theory of 'gender neutrality', until he came to re-identify himself as male in his adolescence, then later killed himself after years of depression.

These cases suggest to me that the mental aspect of gender falls more into the category of unchangeable 'neurology', rather than 'mentality', which has the connotation of being something much more easily changed. Studies seem to agree, to the degree that neurological sex sometimes appears to match a person's professed gender identity while not matching their genetic sex. 'Physicality' - at least in terms of the genitalia alone - actually becomes one of the more minor parts of the gender puzzle when considering things in this light.

While I agree that berating the opposition is not the best way to win anybody around, it does seem clear to me that in this particular debate there is one stance which has the potential to upset and hurt members of a minority community and another stance which supports them, the latter in turn being supported by a solid body of research data. (I'm also linking in @rangers517 since he asked a related question).

@brodehouse said:

I think what you've said here bears repeating. I've been uncomfortable with the tendency of people in this thread to conflate feminism with the notion of support for transgender issues, even if only by mentioning those things in close proximity to eachother in the context of Krahulik's backlash. Feminism has no track record of being friendly to transgender people. Quite the opposite.

Greer, one of the most well known feminists around, has had a fair few anti-trans scuffles as you mention, including referring to them as "pantomime dames" in a chapter denouncing them from one of her books. Janice Raymond, another notable second-wave feminist, laid claim to the lovely quote that "all transsexuals rape women's bodies". The Guardian regularly publishes articles from several feminist columnists who take a dim view of transgender people, although that paper might be slower to do so now after crossing the line this year by publishing Julie Burchill's piece, where she prompted a massive backlash by calling trans-women "dicks in chicks' clothing", "screaming mimis" and "bedwetters in bad wigs" - all while saying that trans-women are to women what the black & white minstrels were to black people. I've also been a witness to a lot of generalised feminist tumblr hate towards the trans- community, relayed to me by a female friend who masquerades as a feminist because she fears ostracism from the right-on fandom communities she's a part of.

The tendency is to dismiss these as examples of 'radical' feminism, but that's a cop out. These people are simply making the logical extrapolation from the prevalent, mainstream feminist doctrine that says that gender is an entirely social construct. If you accept that A level Sociology tabula rasa guff as fact, then it starts to make sense that people who aspire to be accepted as a member of the opposite sex are either rapist infiltrators (MtF) or self-loathing traitors (FtM). Why would a member of the patriarchy want to join the ranks of the unfairly oppressed, and vice versa? And why should it be accepted, if we're trying to eradicate the idea of gender roles completely? There are clear ideological principles in place which lead to feminists saying these things. Phil Fish can fuck off with his uneducated 'bigot' claptrap (as if he has the moral authority to use that term in the first place).

Just wanted to stick my oar in and draw a clear line between the two issues where Krahulik has inflamed debate. The PAX panel thing and wider feminism-in-gaming debate should not be lumped in with his comments on transgenderism, for which I'm glad he's apologised. It's the only instance from their list of controversies to date where I think an apology has actually been warranted.

@toowalrus: Deciding to learn another language without having any pressing need to do so is admirable. I strongly believe that learning other languages is important, that it broadens your mind, and to that end I dug up a post I made elsewhere a few years ago on the subject. Maybe it will interest you.

With that said, I have to say that learning other languages didn't work out too great for me. Despite my high-falootin' words in that post, I didn't actually add that I've never really practised what I preached there. To unlock the potential of a second or third language, to an extent you have to immerse yourself in the country or culture of origin. However, overseas study was a weirdly alienating experience for me and so cultural immersion was something I never committed to properly. A couple of people I graduated with went on to have professions vaguely related to Japan or the Japanese language, but it never worked out that way for me. Most of my language ability has faded due to lack of use (and I should add that includes a year long Mandarin module which I took and aced, but forgot to mention in the post I linked). Another person I know now lives and works in Japan, nearly 8 years since we graduated, but she hates it - she's just scared of leaving in case she can't find a job back home.

So with that in mind I would add the warning that language learning will not necessarily translate into jobs and prospects. You need to feel a passion for many parts of the language or culture in question, which will tide you over whenever you feel frustrated or disillusioned with what you're doing. A further warning, since you've expressed interest in Japan, is that it isn't the exotic wonderland it's often romanticised as being. To visit for a short time and just trawl the eye candy and tourist traps, it can be exactly that. To stay there long enough to absorb something significant of the culture and language, you'll probably find that it shares many of the problems of wherever you're from, maybe even with a trifle more insularity, alienation and horrible urban architecture.

@zeik: Not sure why you think this is significant. The hole you've picked benefits my perspective more than it does yours. The more you divorce the made-up term 'ICO' from the character 'iko', the less reason there is to pronounce the title in line with some imagined Japanese standard.

EDIT: wait I see why you picked that out, because I said they 'changed the title of the game'. Replace that statement with 'change the name of the character', from which the game gets its name. It's the same argument.

@zeik: It says ICO on the Japanese cover but the horned kid is referred to in Japanese discussion as イコ ('iko'), as far as I'm aware, which is presumably where the title and the wordplay comes from.

@grantheaslip said:

I fundamentally disagree with the notion that vowel sounds are the only, or most important, mistake you can make when it comes to approximating another language, and to me that's the message that gets propagated when people say 'it's ee-co'. Psychological attachments to language conventions fascinate me and I think this is a hangup of English, where there are a ton of different vowel sounds and getting them right seems intuitively important to the speaker. When we transliterate vowels and get the sounds more or less in the right ball park we tell ourselves we've done OK. However that is not necessarily the rule across languages. Due to stretching the 'i', 'ee-co' literally means 'good child', which is just as nonsensical as 'eye-co' in terms of getting the pronunciation 'right'. Who are we trying to impress with our pronunciation of entertainment products? It seems to me that stipulating the best way to mispronounce something is just an egotistical game.

Also, 'Eye-co' shouldn't necessarily be the standard - I'm saying there should be no standard in a case such as this. I don't think there is a 'right' pronunciation of a fantasy word when it represents a product appearing in a separate market, as opposed to the original market where the word might have carried certain nuances. ICO was not transliterated incorrectly, rather it was how the marketing division decided to pitch the name of the game at Western audiences. From there, however people instinctively pronounce it is how it's pronounced. If it really was Team Ico's call that they wanted Western audiences to conform to a word play they didn't understand, which was weird even in the original Japanese, then fair enough, yet I would still consider that bad marketing. I haven't seen that said, however.