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Go ahead

lo_res, here's something bigger than oneself: The public. That satisfy you? Humans are all we've got. So morality will have to be a useful mediation between the desires, longterm and shorterm, conflucting and parallel, of the individuals making up the whole.

Yak: excellent couple of last posts, I agree very much.

oh I forgot about this. Photobucket doesn't show, Haddas. Do we lock this or let it rot?

I don't see the problem with the player understanding the german but the player character not. Would even give room for amusing stuff. An adventure game can work without relying on meta-knowledge so much. If it's engrossing and fun to play, it's not a big deal.

that's just how caring works.

yes. Not saying we shouldn't use the world, but just discussing how many layers of bullshit one can strip from it and have it still retain functional use.

Ah yes, correct.

cool spot had bad graphics? Great pixel art if you ask me.

And also, Zool and Zool 2 were affiliated with some brand of candy and the point collectibles in the game were shaped thusly.

Alright. I guess biothlebop covered most bases (that I know of) but here's a second retelling. I agree that altruism really doesn't exist. The theoretical caring for the world can be attributed instead, to one's need for security and control. You see, as animals, we foremost care about understanding and controlling our immediate surroundings, but unlike animals, we also have the mental capacity to grasp the theoretical bigger picture of what goes on generally, outside our sensory perception. And that picture is a scary one, and we are scared because we cannot control these dangerous conditions. I believe that when we see a picture of dead babies in a third world country, ridden with famine, disease and war, first of all we feel threatened. Then we knee-jerk into 'but this isn't happening to me' but the fear lingers on. Now, according to our disposition, we might rationalize this emotional response by dressing it up in altruistic terms where 'such a thing should never happen in this world!' or we might rationalize it as 'they deserved it!' or whatever shade in between. Just as long as we explain things, just as long as we make them safe, put them in their place. We will therefore, stand and empower an administration that seems to control the world, we will want our country ( our team, our family, ourselves ) to be the winning one. Because this is a game, and the stake is survival.

That is your altruism. That is your caring for the rest of the world. It's about control, loss of control, fear, repression and resistance. We will mold this world into a shape that cannot threaten us, so help us god, help us people, help us anyone. The left is lying when it's saying it cares about the world out of it's bleeding heart. I tell you this while I'm supposedly some kind of leftist. The left is simply rationalizing from a different proposition of what makes the world a safe place for themselves. It's a proposition I find more agreeable, but I will not attribute it to some altruistic desire for rainbow sunshine happiness for the worker wee mentality.

About you caring for your family or friends, about me caring for my family and friends. Although I don't address them as such, they are assets that we care for, directly linked with our self-worth and precieved success. Animalistic egoism drives personal interaction, coupled with the effects of self-awareness, the existential fear or being misunderstood and alone. And all this dressed up in infinitely complex interfacing effects... Would I say this is altruistic? I believe the word is meaningless.

That being said, I'm not one for moralizing, but if somebody helps people and makes people happy I enjoy that and try to underline that this is good (for my own benefit of course) and I don't see the reason to explain to people how they are being 'good' because they are making the world safer for themselves. It's just bad manners I think, but not untrue.

Although I can deal with confrontational-omg-this-is-the-internet-lol tone just fine, I'm going to pass in this case because I don't owe you anything to have to bear with that kind of attitude. If you're really burning for debate, address me again, this time with good manners, making an effort to outline a clear position about your trouble, not preemptively telling me what argument I can and cannot present in return, and then I'll play.

Period.

that's not very useful, or fun, is it?

Whereas I'm pretty certain what the world needs is exactly more freeware adventure games of variable quality, I'm pretty certain also that what the world doesn't need is a tintin game that isn't extremely amazing to the x-treme.

So yes, unless you have reason to believe you can pull it off, I suggest working on an original game of your own instead. You don't even have to modify the deal much, just give the character a different name and haircut. Why use the franchise? The 'oh guess what would make a good adventure game! my favourite comic/band/cereal' type of thing usually doesn't pan out, no offense. You're just setting yourself up against unrealistic expectations.

scotch, Caverider!

Democracy? I don't think the US has a democratic goverment... not when you have a two-party system that is essentially the exact same thing as far as foreign policy goes, and anyway, a dictatorship and a democratic country have been proven to go about securing their geopolitical interests in much the same way anyway. So Bush in office or some other puppet in office, it makes no difference

hillbilly: check out how human beings operate, try to deduct what natural causes drive them, you won't exhaust the complex motivations (I don't think anyone can), but you'll get what biothlebop was talking about in his 'not very well thought out' thing you quoted

Biothlebop, yes I understand what you're saying more or less. I see america as the current big bully too, but I don't fault the country as much as I fault europe for not providing a counterweight in the geopolitical power struggle. You cannot expect a country to not persue what it feels are it's best interests (what the US is currently doing, unchecked) and although I do agree that what constitutes the best for america is not a series of greedy wars, that sort of internal reevaluation would occur if a series of wars were in fact, contested by the rest of the world, not just neutrally-to-somewhat-discontently suffered by the EU as is the case.

Most of the Japanese ones are RPGs. Or heavily text based.
I have no trouble playing, or indeed completing, any of them.

Truly a testament to the fine jrpg tradition of fully integrated and involved storytelling where every bit of information presented to the player affects gameplay, where characters are never formulaic and where the overall storyline is never derivative in any way.

This is not really an argument but I do think it's worth a mention. It's interesting how only in America is there any talk about creationism and 'disproving' evolution and whatnot. Christians in the rest of the civilized world, orthodox or potestant or catholic or whatever, don't raise a big fuss about this. I wonder what makes american christians so bent on teaching me how the world started back 5,000 or so in school.

If your game is otherwise going to behave like a snes jrpg then I think doing it in full 3d is going to be overkill and not much use. If you won't use the third dimension in some gameplay central way, maybe you'd want to avoid this switch.

As far as I know there are no user-friendly engines. There's libraries and languages and whatnot, like Darkbasic 3d, Ogre,  I think but they all require some more adept programming knowledge, math, and rudimentary understanding of 3d art at least.

dude, Alucard!

"Science and religion aren't mutually exclusive!"

Whereas a religion can say one thing about the beginning of the world, mankind and the apocryphal doctorine governing all that, and as the case IS, that religion's followers will reap the benefits of thousands of years' worth of continued scientific research, this doesn't mean the followers aknowledge any enduring, lasting truth about the nature of things can be found via analytical research and evidence-gathering, the tools of science. In fact, the analytical mode of thought is counter-intuitive for a religious person, who, regardless of specific creed, more-or-less agrees that 'reason' is not the way to approach the truth about mankind, life and the universe. Religion is doctorine, science is tool. The two do not operate on the same level.

A religious person says about science: "if you want a machine that can shave you faster, you go to science. If you want to save your immortal soul, you turn to religion." And I don't really disagree that much. Remember, I am completely agnostic and have absolutely no faith in gods. My modification is "if you want a machine that can shave you faster, you go to science. If you wish to understand the inner workings of the human, you're fucked." Science is able to map out large bodies of information about the thing it's researching, let's say the human brain, right? Eventually, we're going to gather very rounded information about neurological workings, and science will say 'we understand how everything works now' but my problem is this. If you show me a map of the world, I have not been in every place (even scarier, I have not been to every place AT ONCE, my sight cannot cover everything). I see lines on a piece of paper, I see symbols and meaning, but it's foreign to what amounts to gazing at the WHOLE OF THE WORLD, right? It's just a communicational impression. Likewise, if you show me a map to the brain, or indeed a map to a man's soul, this does not tell me what it is to be human, it tells me nothing about myself. What I see is... a communicational impression. Information is not the same as knowledge, and knowledge is not the same as experience. Science will never teach us experience via knowledge. It will always give space for new experience of course, but it will not illustrate, to the puny conscious self, the workings of the whole mechanism that is a human, that is humans in relation, that is the whole world in relation. It will draw us fancy maps, and with the information there will arise many practical uses that will make our lives safer, more fun, faster and more efficient, but it will not make us understand ourselves.

Ah, I see. Maybe she should sign up, then. Maybe not.