TF2 Beta Mode: Robot Destruction

Robot Destruction and its one map, Asteroid, are apparently the "solution" to 2fort. There are several problems with 2fort, but the biggest is that it can be stalemated very easily. In a public game with three (or more) Engineers, attacking players have to win a separate battle for each sentry nest. The odds a group of attackers will overtake every enemy fades away quickly when you have to get all the way to their flag and back.

What's the Solution?

Robots.

Robots in their native, untextured, natural habitat

Robot Destruction's main new feature, Robots are essentially mobile point banks. In 2fort, an invasion of the enemy's base receives no points unless you make it all the way in and out. In Asteroid, you get a few points every time you manage to do 500 damage to a robot and scoop up its bits.

Melee may be the best way to kill them

Now a team can't just set up a base at their deepest position and wait there until the end of time. Unless they can defend all of their robots, campers will eventually lose.

There is one more new mechanic, stealing points by sneaking all the way into the enemy base and taking an object back to your base.

Some wild Pyros attempt to sneak the cores through the laser field

To accumulate points, the invader must wait around in the enemy base. It makes for an interesting dynamic. Every second you scoop up points in your backpack, more enemies are descending on your position. Do you run right away for 20 points, or do you try to win the game single-handedly by grabbing 150?

Unfortunately, Robot Destruction is not intuitive at all. Right now, hardly anyone knows what's going on. We can't really judge the quality of the mode until people learn the map, but it's definitely an improvement over 2Fort.

Dark Souls II

  Dark Souls II sure is shit compared to Dark Souls I. I like the way they improved connectivity, but that's just about the only improvement. In terms of art, most the game looks worse than Dark Souls I. The Dragon area and all the bits with water look pretty cool though.



Oddly, they made it much easier to do inter-player actions, in terms of co-op and helping people doing PVP, but they made PVP items so rare that you never get the chance to do it. I spent maybe five hours in the covenant to help people in PVP, and it never triggered. I'm glad I'm not a completist: you have to help dozens of people in PVP to unlock all the rewards.

Derpy

I didn't really care when they took out Derpy's name from that one episode, but I do disapprove of them choosing to take someone that had a mild eye problem, and deciding that she must be retarded.

I'm fine with her being a screw-up. Derpy doesn't have to be a genius; I don't like the connection between Physical Difference = Mental Disability.

Yes, I'm hitting this issue well over a year after this whole controversy has been forgotten.

Dark Souls

Saints Row IV Additional Thoughts

Saints Row IV and Batman: Arkham Origins have two things in common: They litter the map with crappy collectibles, and they seem to think that adding a short voice clip to grabbing collectibles constitutes a plot and a reward.

Tons of Collectibles is not Content
Saints Row IV is particularly bad for littering the map with lame collectibles. The map is just the map for Saints Row III, and they just stuck glowing spots all over. You have to get ten shinies just to get the smallest possible upgrade. I think the pure number of shinies was part of what hurt the game for me, since I would go slightly out of the way to grab them, and that can double your travel time even if you don't go too far out of the way.

Voice Clips Non-Plot
Other games probably have you do a repetitive task over and over then give you a small voice clip as a reward, but Batman and Saints Row did it so obviously. Once you finish the missions in Batman, you get Barbara Gordon saying, "we make a good team". That's it. In Saints Row, they give you a sound clip at the beginning of each tiny challenge. By the end, the characters even concede that it's repetitive and lame in the clips.

Sexism
Saints Row IV is still sexist, but not nearly as bad as SRIII. Sometimes I forget the part of III where you literally enslave women for use in sex work. Still shocking, especially since none of the characters see it as a problem.

Little Things
It would be nice if you could bind functions in the phone menu to a button. I'd like to be able to summon allies without going through three levels of menus. Or you could have the phone be accessible while playing, like in GTA. Or, allies could automatically spawn with a particular bonus power or something. Also the music is pretty good.

How to Play
There is a way to make the game fun. Drive whenever possible, play with a friend or summon allies at all times, and only do a few side missions. The side missions that aren't loyalty quests are incredibly repetitive, as I mentioned in the voice clips section earlier.

Why don't I like Saints Row IV?

Recently Yahtzee put Saints Row IV in the top five games of last year. It made me re-think my evaluation of the game.

First of all, Yahtzee ranks games based on what they mean as a symbol, not on their actual worth. We have to view his high rank as an endorsement of its light-hearted attitude, not as an endorsement of the game as a product.

But why don't I like the game? After all, I really liked SR III. Part of it is probably the high expectations generated from the previous game; I was coming into this with a positive attitude.

Introduction Whiplash
I think something else was the main source of my high expectations: the introduction. Saints Row IV has such a great intro. It blew me away. It switches rapid-fire from stealth ops to presidential shenanigans to alien invasion. I would love to play any of those scenarios.* The problem is that after all those changes, you get dumped back into Saints Row III. They change everything, then immediately reset everything. Not only is the setting unchanged, but it's at even lower stakes, since it's all in the Matrix. The majority of the "missions" are just missions from Saints Row III, but with aliens attacking instead of police. Win over all the shops in this city? I already did that! Buy outfits and guns from the shops you open up? They're all the same!**

New Content
Lots of the new content is a complete write-off. The new weapons have nice visual and audio effects, but aren't particularly interesting. The music of the dubstep gun gets repetitive very quickly. Don't like the music? They added some additional options for other music! All you have to do is pay them real world money to have a weapon play different sound effects from the public domain!

DLC
"DLC" and "Saints Row IV" are synonymous. The game itself is re-purposed DLC, and their business model clearly relies on having a ton of pointless DLC that adds little to nothing to the game. We've already seen the Dubstep gun music changes, and the additional costumes are incredibly lame for something that costs real world dollars.

Super Movement
The super movement is mostly a negative for me. The super jump and super speed seem like a good idea, but they make the game really boring. Yes, you can get from place to place faster, but that travel time is just holding forward until you arrive. I fell into the trap of exclusively using super running to get around in my first play through the game, and I think that's the source of a lot of my bad feeling. Driving would require enough input that you don't get too bored as you get around. I would prefer some variety of super driving, and have any super running be incredibly brief.***

Super Weapons
The superpowered attacks are largely pointless. Once you get the first power, you don't really need any of the other ones. The initial Blast mode freezes all enemies and lets you easily headshot anyone. If you're lazy or a bad shot, you just have to wait until you get the fireball, then you can just throw that a few times. Either way, the powers you unlock later are almost purely worse than your Blast.

The Positives
Of course there are some good things. The voice acting is good. The first female voice in particular is fantastic. When they actually bother to give you some new content, like the "loyalty missions", you can see they still have the ability to make some novel content.

*A Saints Row 3.5 where you run for President would be rich with opportunity.
** There's still that stupid "Anime Kitty" backpack that functions mainly to trick me into checking the "backpack" slot every time I go to a shop.
***Maybe they could have just made running more interactive: if you could still collide with cars or enemies, that could be more interesting. The real problem with the super running is that the game and the map simply aren't designed to interact with those powers.

(I wonder how much my opinion is affected by the way the game is stuck in perpetual darkness?)

Batman, Arkham Origins Planning Session

Scene: A few dozen management types sit in front of a speaker.

"Now, in the previous Batman game, the Joker died, and the voice actor said he won't do this game. Given all that, do we have any ideas for the main villain of our next game?"

All hands go up

"Do we have any ideas that aren't the Joker?"

All but one hand goes down

 "Yes, you have an idea that isn't the Joker?"

"Well, sort of. I was thinking we could do the Joker?"

Ten hours later...

"So, anyone that isn't the Joker?"

Silence

Bechdel Test

The Bechdel Test is a good tool, and it reveals a level of sexism more profound and more prevalent than most of us would have guessed. But it's like BMI, it's not to be used as a judgment on a specific subject, it's a judgment on the whole culture in which it exists.

In other words, we shouldn't critique individual shows based on their ability to pass the Bechdel test, there are lots of reasons why it might not. Instead, we should look at the larger world of media as a whole and condemn it for having so few products that pass.

Has anyone compiled numbers on the male version? It must be nearly universal.

RPG Concept: Scrambled Supers

I like the idea of characters not being entirely created to be the optimal solution to a problem, but a more complex figure. One idea to make things less optimized and more like actual super stories, where a hero has to figure out how to use their powers, is to have people design their character before super-powers, maybe 100 points, then have their super powers as another 200 point "package". Then you have everyone swap super-powers with the person next to them.

Forgotten Themes

It seems like lots of recent dumb shows have themes or "morals" that the character is supposed to deal with, or learn about, but that never come to fruition. It's as though the staff has heard of things like "growing old", or "learning about responsibility", but don't know what they are, so they just mention it.

In Star Trek (This One Has Khan Too), Kirk is told he has to learn about the responsibilities of command, he has to learn to make tough decisions, and follow the rules. It's mentioned several times, but he never once has to deal with the consequence of anything. He repeatedly and dramatically violates the Prime Directive, and is "penalized" by losing control of Enterprise while it's in port. There's no time when the ship is flying that Kirk has lost any authority. Kirk even dies and is immediately resurrected. I'd say that's a spoiler, but his resurrection is so obviously telegraphed, you can't miss it. (As others have pointed out, apparently Tribbles have human blood?)

In Batman (This One Has Mumbly Bane) and Skyfall, the protagonist is told he has to deal with the fact that he's not as young and able as he once was. He has to learn how to act in a new way, admit his weaknesses and find new strengths. This is done to perfection in The Dark Knight Returns. Batman can't fight like a young quick man; he has to slow the fight down and use his wisdom and more sophisticated fighting style to tear down the enemy boss. In the less sophisticated movies, Bond and Batman learn NOTHING. Instead of developing and changing, the characters simply return to their old level of ability at the climax. Batman is actually better at fighting at the end of the movie than at the beginning, despite having a broken back. Bond's inaccurate shooting is a symbol of his fading ability; at the end of the movie he can shoot perfectly again. Why? No reason.

In Superman, (This One Has Zod Too), Superman is repeatedly told that he can't let the world know that aliens exist because everyone would go crazy. By the end of the movie, an alien has commandeered all media on Earth to tell them that he was planning on killing everyone on the planet, and there's never a real panic. People don't even seem to concerned when fight between Superman and Zod destroys dozens of skyscrapers. I think that if a death ray was annihilating the city and two aliens were killing hundreds of thousands of people, there would be a general evacuation. Instead, we see that people are just hanging out. (This was true in Star Trek, too. If these shows were made before 9/11, I'd understand this unrealistic reaction, but we know what happens with massive destruction on this scale. People run away, they don't just hang out. It's surreal to see people walking calmly within eyeshot of massive skyscrapers collapsing.)

DS9 Season 1

I've been watching the first season of DS9. I'm really impressed at how strong that show starts. By the end of the first season, you have enough material to work a successful series, and we haven't seen much of anything from across the wormhole.

Only two ridiculously stupid episodes out of twenty. That's really strong for a first season.

New RPG Name

I've been working on an RPG setting. I'm thinking of calling it A Space Based RPG, limited to our Solar System, and inspired by Star Trek, The Original Series, but more based on Horatio Hornblower and the Napoleonic Wars than TOS's Cold War feeling. I'm still working out the details, but I think the name part is taken care of at least.

The Responsibilities of Economics

There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch where they discuss the value of the local water safety measures taken by the city. One is proud that the city has done so much work to keep children safe from drowning, but the other points out that every dollar spent on water safety is money taken away from direly needed police, fire prevention, road safety, and so on. So the city should only spend exactly enough to prevent anyone from drowning? No, you can't know that you've spent just enough to prevent any deaths, so the optimal solution is to prevent most drownings every year. Yes, some people will die, and it's preventable, but there's a finite amount of money for the city, and other uses would save more lives.

It's played as comedy, but the point is entirely valid. The state has an immense power to determine who lives and who dies.

I think that's why Libertarians don't like the power of the state. Even though the state saves lives, the fact that it gets to choose which lives to save gives us a lot of cognitive dissonance. How can we conscience spending money on a stadium when that money could have meant a child is fed? Libertarians choose to reject the whole idea instead of thinking about that issue. Unfortunately, it's actually the worst solution to do nothing at all.

It just makes them feel better to blame the victims.

AwesomeThoughts

Awesomenauts is a fun game. Some thoughts:

Investment

If you're going to ever get Solar Tree, you should get it early on. I always do, and it pays for itself pretty quickly. In fact, I get just about any item that gives you a chance to make more money. I love Voltar's and Raelynn's money boosting items in particular.

Gender

There are currently 13 Awesomenatus in the game. Two of them are female. The rest are all male. You could argue that there are some whose gender is ambiguous, but that would make two categories of gender that outnumber the ladies significantly. Usually, women are second class in games, this time they're third.

Alternate Builds

I really like playing Attack Voltar. People keep saying that Voltar has to be a dedicated healer, but his drones can do massive damage. They can do bursts of 40 damage pretty rapidly; that's almost as much as a "burst damage" attack from a more aggressive hero.

I also like Kitten Derpl. I'm not sure it's any good, but it's fun to shoot ridiculous waves of kittens at people.

Genji is Broken

It seems like everyone agrees that Genji, and particularly his lightning attack, is overpowered. I agree. He can clear out a lane of enemy drones so fast.

Why Mass Effect 3 Is a Bad Game

Mass Effect 3 isn't a horrible game. I don't think I particularly regret playing it. But it's not very good, and it could have been so much better. I generally don't like the idea of reviewing a game on the idea of what it could have been, that's one of Yahtzee's more annoying traits, but it can't be ignored.

In the interest of fairness, let's start with:

The Good Stuff

Actors

Bioware has some great writers, and the actors absolutely nail the dialogue. Female Shepherd in particular does a great job. Anyone who has finished ME3 as FemShep knows the beautiful delivery of some lines near the end. The confrontation with Mordin is fantastic.

Graphics

ME3 is a pretty game.


Gameplay

The combat is fun, but isn't too substantial. A Hide-Behind-The-Barriers game like Gears of War or ME requires some work to be interesting, or it becomes a shooting gallery, only testing the player's patience. Unless you're doing some work to play the game in a more fun manner, it's easy to fall into the shooting gallery feel.

All the good gameplay is just Mass Effect 2, but with different geometry. ME3 is more of a DLC pack for ME2 than its own game.

The Bad Stuff

Kai Leng

Kai Leng may be the lamest character in video game history.  I know he's not a super-important part of the game, but he's so annoying that he deserves top billing in this list. He's the sort of character where the writer is so pleased with the "coolness" that they lose all perspective. Like his fellow "cool" douchebag, Deus Ex's Adam Jensen, he has cybernetic sunglasses and delivers his lines in a stupidly "cool" way. He is a samurai because that's "cool". He ends up being a "cool" guy that has no personal agenda or personality.

Also, Kai Leng is Bioware's Achilles heel: The Boss Fight. Every boss fight in Mass Effect is pretty dumb, I think it's because science fiction doesn't lend itself to shooting a guy a billion times while their health slowly goes down. It just doesn't seem right to fire a sniper rifle into a guy's face, and he doesn't react except to jump to his invincibility spot and a helicopter shoots you.

Overall

I think the main source of ME3's problems is cheapness. Most of the elements are copied from 2. The graphics, most the characters, and the combat system are recycled.

Gameplay

The problem with the gameplay in ME3 is repetition. Where Mass Effect 2 occasionally made you do different things, ME3 is unashamedly a series of killboxes. The biggest variation in a level is whether you have to find a computer and press a button, or just kill everyone to finish the room. Without any locations leading to the killboxes, I got the feeling that I was on a series of islands, separated from any other place or context.

Everything outside of the killboxes is completely underdeveloped. Piloting the ship is a waste of time. You can get resources that you never see, and you can give them to people you can't otherwise interact with. By completing that exciting adventure, you increase an integer that has a marginal effect on the stupid ending.

(Ex. You overhear that a person needs some DNA from a planet. You go to the correct system and randomly scan until you find it. Then you return to the person and give it to them. There is a text message saying that there are now heroes riding dinosaurs fighting against the bad guys. There is no point at which you interact with an enemy, or see any of the results of your actions. Riding a dinosaur into combat is a cool idea, but you'll never see it because it doesn't fit into Mass Effect 2's combat system.)

I think the weakness of the gameplay is best shown by the post-ending experience. Once you've beaten the game, you're kicked back into the game to the point before the final mission. Once you're there, there's nothing to do except do the final mission again. You can fly around in space, scanning for resources, but that's less interesting than minesweeper.

I think the fact that there's nothing to do after the ending is part of the reason people hate the ending so much. They unconsciously associate the disappointment of there being nothing left to do with the disappointment of the lame ending.

 "Choices"

Mass Effect 3 is full of false choices and quick time events that don't do anything. There's a QTE to save Tali, and it doesn't work either way. At the end of many missions, you make a "choice" that just changes your military score by 5 points more or less, and generates a text message later on.

I think the reason your decisions can't have any effect is because of the way the game is structured. There are so many potential combination of results, there would be millions of potential interactions if they could affect each other. Instead, all the decisions are totally insulated and modular. No matter what you decide on mission #1, mission #2 will unfold the exact same way.

Even the last decision of the game is a non-decision.

DLC

There are two kinds of DLC: Missions, and Equipment. The Equipment packs are horrible. You have to pay real money for a trivial change to combat statistics. The Missions are just new killboxes.

Sexism

EDI's design is completely ridiculous. I guess they insisted that she look "sexy" so that she could be a potential mate for Joker in one of the dumb potential endings of the game. That argument would be more defensible if EA/Bioware had a single female main character that wasn't sexual. Even Dr. Chakwas has the body of a teenybopper with the head of an adult.

Having Tali's face be a photo of a human woman with a tiny amount of photoshop sure was a terrible idea. (Not a big deal, but there's no way a Quarian face would be mysterious. They fight and die in battles, and it would be trivial for someone to take of their mask. Not to mention Wikipedia and medical scans)

What the hell was Diana Allers' deal? She's a reporter, but she wears a tank top thing? For a game with interesting characters, she's the worst. Except Kai Leng, of course.

What's the point of having all these sexy characters if they're going to have sex wearing underwear? I know the previous Mass Effects got criticized for their sexual content, but that was from idiots who don't play games anyway. I'm not asking for an AO game, but sex is traditionally performed in the nude.

Minor Complaints

Javik is lame. You spend all this time and effort dreaming of encountering the Protheans, and when you find one, he's just another guy that crouches behind cover between shooting guns.

Background characters have great dialogue, but when it repeats all the time, the illusion is destroyed.

No one has any ability to make a decision. Shepherd has to make every choice, and can't even ask what people think before they do. I tried to make decisions to please people, and half the time I ended up angering them because they secretly didn't want me to do that. Once the decision was made, I couldn't change my mind without reloading a save.

Once you sleep with someone, everyone knows about it instantly. Why can't Shep have some casual sex?

Cerberus turned from an ambiguously evil group to cartoonish supervillainy. It's more interesting to have them have good goals, but bad methods and priorities.

Legion's mission is terribly boring and has negative replay value. Please, Please, Please, let us skip things where the character cannot make any decisions.

Mass Effect seems to think that there is an inherent difference between Artificial Intelligence and Biological Intelligence. There's no reason to think that this is the case. Maybe they saw Battlestar Galactica? Come to think of it, that Robot Vs Human dynamic feels like it was lifted from BSG.

Bugs

I got stuck several times, requiring me to reboot from a previous save. You can walk off the edge of the platform at the final decision of the game.

The Ending

We all know that Mass Effect's ending is terrible. I wouldn't agree about the reasons that most people cite, but it's not worth getting into.

Putting the ending on Earth was another lazy decision. Surely people understand that the destruction of all intelligent life in the galaxy would also affect Earth? It reminds me of the time in Captain America where the entire East Coast was going to be attacked with WMDs, and the Cap only really cared when he saw that New York was one of the targets. Are audiences really so stupid?

Fine, You Do Better

Why don't I make a better game? I'm not a multi-million dollar corporation. But I can generate some better ideas. My version of the game would have a level of decisions that involved the entire galaxy as a stage of action.

It's supposed to be a massive war that leverages all the resources of all intelligent species. Why not actually have Shepherd interact with some of those resources? You could assign troops to different regions of space, or hold them back for the final confrontation. Your alliance could spend more ships on a particular region, making it easier to fly and scan in that sector.

You could try to convince a faction to join you, or choose to let them defend themselves against the Reapers on their own. If you really needed something from a group, you could spend ships and resources to conquer them. It would create a tension where you hope to get more resources from the conquest than you spent on conquering them. Different characters would react different ways to those decisions.

Instead of having Shepherd do every trivial stupid mission, you could assign allies to do stuff.

MVM: Medic

I saw another guide for playing Medic on MVM recently, and it got me so mad that I had to write one:

1. Kritz People
2. Kritz more people

Seriously, a medic is good for keeping people alive, so the healing is useful, but the best way for the medic to keep people alive is to kritz someone who then kills all the robots attacking you.

There are two divergent strategies to getting a lot of kritz.

1. Standard
2. Ubersaw/Resistances

The standard build is all about upgrading your Kritzkrieg. Focus on Kritz duration and build speed. If you have trouble with people dying, increasing the heal rate is OK. This strategy is functional, but boring.

The Ubersaw plan is way more fun. Basically all your money goes into resistances and swing speed for the Ubersaw. You use your Kritzkrieg aggressively, and recharge it by sawing enemies. This scheme requires more teamwork than usual. If you can get your teammates to leave stragglers alone for you to kill, you can get a new kritz basically every wave. Another great target for the saw is the Sentry Buster. If your team has slow effects, (jarate, milk, etc.) and they should, slowing that Sentry Buster makes for an easy new kritz.

With two or three upgrades to explosive damage resistance, you can just run up to a solitary demo or soldier and melee them to death. Bullet resistance is good too, but heavies are still dangerous even with less damage. Once you've fully upgraded your resistances, move speed is nice to chase down stragglers/Sentry Busters.

With giant demos, you can just circle around them as your team shoots them. The demo will shoot at you and mostly miss, and the shots that hit will do little damage. This way, the demo isn't firing at any of your allies either.

Fire resistance is OK. You can charge up your uber off of pyros like any other robot, but pyros just aren't that important or frequent to waste money on.

Obamacare ruling question

So Congress decided to expand Medicare coverage. As part of that bill, they required states to pay for a (small) fraction of the cost of covering the newly insured people. This doesn't mean that the states were being forced to do anything; they could always opt out of Medicare altogether.

Oddly, the Supreme Court ruled this idea as unconstitutional, and allowed the states to "opt-out" of this expansion of coverage, under the idea that the option of losing Medicare entirely was too large a penalty, making the bill "coercive". I can't wrap my head around this entire idea. Does this ruling mean that the Federal Government is now required to give this level of Medicare to the states without any modifications for the rest of time? Common sense says no, but wouldn't any changes in the policy be just as "coercive" as this one?

Typically, with these rulings, we hear only the super-simplified versions of rulings, so maybe I'm just hearing a stupid version of the argument. As it is, I just can't understand why the states are entitled to Medicare now, and the Federal Government is no longer capable of regulating the rules under which it spends money if the states don't feel like it.

Society in a Post-Apocolypse World (BSG)

Theoretically, Battlestar Galactica tells us what would happen after an apocalypse. After all, most everyone is dead, everyone's "home" is destroyed, and the survivors must live as vagabonds with no safe haven. Unfortunately, the show spends almost all of its attention on the only people whose lives aren't significantly different: the members of the military.

It's true, the lives of the soldiers on BSG aren't what they would have been without the apocalypse and exodus. Some would have retired, or been assigned to another ship, etc, but these are people who were living on a battlestar both before and after the attack. Their lives were put into stasis, not a new post-apocalyptic series of crises. It's true, their lives are more strenuous and stressful than before, but this could have been the result of traditional space war. By focusing on the military life, BSG looks at people whose only change is a lack of any possibilities for advancement.

So what would be different for the society and civilians in BSG? Property, trade, industry, and money would be shattered. There is no traditional police force, and the military doesn't have the time, ability, or interest to resolve contests of ownership between civilians on another ship. Once people realized that the state as they had known it was extinct, all property would be up for grabs, and control of ships would be a literally a matter of life or death. The passengers of a transport may not have been concerned about the ship's commander for their two-day trip, but once they realize that this ship is going to be their home for a long time, a new form of ship's governance would be almost inevitable.

Unless the "federal" government run by the President managed to install a police force loyal only to it on each ship, each ship would essentially turn into its own government. The ships would be forced to follow the fleet, as following the Galactica is the only safe path, but the internal functioning of each ship would necessarily fall to the impromptu governments that would have to take shape on each ship*.

Industry is a point that BSG has never even addressed, at least as far as I am in the show. Everyone just has new stuff all the time, even though all the factories in the universe got blown up over two years ago. I sincerely doubt that the few ships in the fleet carried the facilities necessary to create and process plastics, forge new metals, armaments, and ammunition, and so on. This would mean that manufacturing would have to be improvised, and scarcity of everything would be the norm. Even simple things like clothing would wear out and need to be replaced, and even if that pleasure ship had some cotton bearing plants, it wouldn't be nearly enough to clothe hundreds of thousands of people. Trying to make a new industrial economy in a space fleet would be terribly interesting.

At one point, Tom Zerik points out that their money is now just paper, a meaningless symbol from their previous lives. It's true that money from before the exodus would have to be re-evaluated, but it could easily become the new currency of the fleet. Money is necessary in most any society that cannot operate between a few hundred people with resources whose value is fairly well understood. After the exodus though, a lot of people that thought of themselves as "rich" or "poor" would find a new reality. Suddenly, all those credits they had in a bank that no longer exist mean nothing, and possession of a firearm can make you king of a small ship without organization. The "sorting out" of a new fleet society could have been a great plot. For a brief time, each person could remake themselves, before the inevitable calcifying of a society in a small population.

Early in the show, the president points out that people "have to start having babies". This is true. Of course people do that naturally, so she doesn't have to make anyone do it, but I think she should have gone further to encourage breeding.

1. It would be bad for the show, but any reasonable person in BSG wouldn't allow women to be involved in dangerous tasks, and especially be exposed to radiation, unless there is some form of artificial womb in BSG**. Women are the bottleneck in increasing the human population, and should be encouraged to have as many as possible with as large a variety of people as possible.
2. Why a variety of people? Genetic diversity. If only one or two people carry a gene in BSG, it would be very easy for that gene to go extinct. A reasonable society would at least harvest a "DNA sample" from every human being in the fleet.
3. Remember that episode where the president banned abortion, but allowed the girl in question to do it anyway? That was a weird series of decisions. Anyway, under the same logic of "humans need to breed, ergo we can't allow abortion," she would be a hypocrite to not bar contraception.
4. There's an interesting sociological question embedded in all this: would people be more or less eager to have children in this post-exodus world? There are factors that point in both directions. After a crisis, people like to have kids. When there are fewer people, there is a natural instinct to make more of them. But reasoning people would have to look around the crowded halls of their ships, the bare cots that constitute their homes, and wonder if it was a good idea to bring a new soul in to this bleak new world.

Well, this isn't all I had to say, but it's long enough.


*This would have made for a more interesting show, I think. Imagine the federal government trying to force one of the ships to follow some law that they weren't interested in. What sort of negotiations might occur? What forms of government might each ship take? Could a democracy somehow form on a ship with only a couple hundred people, and survive despite all the stresses and tough choices that such a government would have to make? How could a democratic ship negotiate with another ship with a charismatic captain/dictator like Admiral Adama?

** Unlikely, given their level of technology throughout. I love the show's decision to have technology inferior to our modern technology. The show can never be made obsolete! Great idea.

Pyromania Thoughts

Meet the Pyro is a pretty good video, but not as great as Meet the Medic or Meet the Spy. It lacks a narrative.

Pyrovision is silly, but you don't have to use it, so everybody wins.

SD_Doomsday is tons of fun. Short games that would be good for competitive competitions. I've never seen a single game become a camp-fest. Every class has a role, but none are too powerful. (Heavy is very good when he gets on the lift.)

The new weapons are a big miss for me.

The Baby Face Blaster is OK, but starting out slow and being unable to jump are too harsh. Once you get going, it's pretty cool going at such crazy speed.

The new pistol is boring. I do approve of things that give fire vulnerability, though. Inch by inch, the Pyro becomes less terrible.

The new Sniper Rifle isn't much of anything. If you get some kills, you get a mild boost to your snipe speed. Less bodyshot damage. Not very interesting.

Cleaner's Carbine seems better than it is. I imagined being able to chain kills, or at least being able to get a kill with the crits, but it's very difficult to do much with the new SMG even when you're critting. If you get up close, the other classes are better than you. If you're far away, the Carbine will just miss.

The Beggar's Bazooka is actually quite fun. You really have to plan ahead to be effective. The major downside is the initial delay. When you press the button to fire a single rocket, you have to wait through the loading animation to fire anything at all. Despite this, the damage potential is huge if you time your attacks right. Being able to fire three rockets nearly at once can wipe out most classes.

The Scorch Shot seems incredibly weak. It does much less damage than the flare gun, and can't get the crit bonus on flaming targets. The knockback is nice, but doesn't justify a huge loss of damage. The taunt makes up for it though. It's amazing.

"News" Still Sucks

I liked when the news was obsessed with the fact that there were now more minority babies than "white" babies. Apparently they are just trying to encourage whatever members of the Ku Klux Klan are still around?