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Comments
You can put money from your bank account directly into a Paypal account and then use it to buy stuff.
I don't use Paypal. Matter of principle.
...what is said principle?
Paypal has a tendency to freeze vendors' assets for no particular reason. If I buy something, I want my money to get to the people who sold it to me.
I'll have to check Thief out when it goes on sale, be sure to make note of it.
I am temporarily(?) not Keiichi anymore.
@INUH: Oh, yes. That.
So, playing Medieval II and shit's getting real. It's roughly turn 50.
A fair few turns ago, I was instructed to go on holy Crusade and take Jerusalem. I did that, which fucked up my plans, but I took the damned city. I also hold Acre and another fortress in that region. Shortly after that, Poland declared war on me. They're not too bad -- I took out their armies and was in the process of taking one of their cities when the Pope declared "fuck that" and shut me down. Damnit. And then Venice took a shot at me, and I lost a city in the process. Took it back and took their capital city for good measure. But they were in cahoots with Denmark, who are now at war with me at well. Various other factions have been threatening me, too, unless I pay them off. I've been doing that.
So it looks as if I have to wipe Venice and Denmark from the map at the moment. Poland will follow shortly after. I have a decent powerbase in the Middle East, despite only holding three regions, but there's a Jihad against me to retake Jerusalem. So I can't risk taking my forces out of there, and there's a large Egyptian army holed up in a fortress just north of Acre. The other fotress I hold in that region is just west of that Egyptians, but they're right next to the Turks, who also hate me, so I can't move them out.
So pretty much I'm playing the reality of the Holy Roman Empire. Everyone hates you except for England and Spain. Funnily enough, though, I'm yet to have fought France. First things are first, though. The Eastern powers have to fall.
@Alex
>Playing Medieval 2
>Expecting reality
If you want a better way of playing the HRE, just play EU III
The big thing about RE5 is that the racist element drags what I'd find a perfectly serviceable action (but not horror) game into being completely objectionable. It's obvious there was no political statement behind darkest Africa vibe and the stereotypical 'tribal zombies' (seriously guys, what the fuck. How could you even think that was okay) In fact, I get the feeling there was supposed to be an anti-colonialist vibe to it, what with all the primary villains being white Americans out to use the African disease as a motive for making money (or in Wesker's case do a whole Raz'z Al Ghul cull the earth and be immortal thing)
But in that case, why even use that imagery? The obvious answer is because it's foreign and somewhat spooky, but that plays into why those images are racist in the first place. The imagery has no place in a game that's just supposed to be action-entertainment and the choice to use them in the year of 2009 is clear cause for concern.
Watching Carnival Phantasm.
My chest hurts from laughing so hard.
^^ I'd say "That's Japan for you" but then I'm not sure if I'm being racist myself. Surely not all Japanese folk are racist, but they're quite a homogenous people. One thing that bothered me was Afro Samurai; the creator has spoken about how he "loved African American culture" and then proceeds to use a handful of stereotypes. Perhaps I just hate revenge plots and count them against anything ever, though.
What bugs me is that the whole part with savages could have been cut out and the game would have lost nothing except play length. I was cool with the Indiana Jones-style temple you went through because you expect that sort of crazy stuff in RE and if the series is to be believed shit like that is in Spain too. So, while it would have been far from perfect, that simple act would have made it much less bad in my mind.
The really tragic part is that this one of only two games I can think of that are worth a damn where you can play as a black female.
You know, it kinda bothers me how nobody except Spaniards raised any shit about Spain being portrayed as a shithole stuck in the middle ages but everybody was bothered by how Africa was portrayed as a shithole stuck at the pre-colonization times except for the white man coming and vuilding high tech shit.
I was gonna type something up about it but this is a delicate topic so I'll just leave it at that there's a much sordid past of how Africa's been treated than how Spain has been treated. RE5 also invokes the voices of a lot literature that has been derided as racist. The Heart of Darkness influence is obvious, for example.
RE6 will have Hong Kong. I'm thinking (or maybe just hoping) there will be significantly less controversy there.
What makes this factually worse is that, even in those times, Spain fast grew to wealth and welcomed the Renaissance with open arms. Spain then went on to be a superpower in the colonial period, falling from that position only after England and France (but mostly England) pulled out their colonial A game.
In fact, the territories that are today Spain may have been the single wealthiest and most progressive early medieval European kingdom before internal pressure cracked their security and the Franks disposed of its armies and leadership. Thus leading to a short era of shithole before Spain became wealthy again.
Also
> Germany is all Nazis.
> If not, it is made of engineers.
> Austria is mountains.
> Swiss people dress funny and eat lots of chocolate.
Germanic Central Europe is kinda sidelined too. Not in context of RE, mind, but just generally.
Well, yeah, I understand why is this. Spain wasn't exactly a victim of racism. I can get behind that and I agree that the whole thing with Africa is pretty much dumb. But it still bothers me, mostly because it's still racism, it's still seeing Spaniards as racists backwards fucks, and it's still treating them as such. It's just that they don't have a history and thus nobody except for a few are bothered.
And that, in itself bothers me. There can be no equality when biases like that show, I think.
Imperfect people dealing with a decidedly imperfect history. =|
Moving away from the juicy racism bits, I felt aside from that the game was decent but lackluster especially compared to 4. The ending battle with Wesker was pretty awesome but the middle was something of drudge and the interim villains were lame, especially since none of them reached Zombie-Napoleon-with-a-giant-statue-that-chases-you levels of insanity. There are some memorable moments like the dash across the Serenghetti plains with zombie motorcyclists but even those points raised my biggest problem with the game series.
It's not even trying to be horror any more. There are some token jump scares but even RE4 had a decidedly morbid tone and the opening is pretty darn creepy, owing a lot to The Shadow Over Innsmouth I think. It escalates near the end, but the game still has a spooky framework of alienation that RE5 lacks because it's focused on actionizing the game more and more, which is problematic since RE5 is working off a now eight-year-old system to perform in the league of things like Gears of War. (Not a prime example of the action-shooter genre, mind, but still)
RE6 looks like it will have the system evolve to be more action friendly but that creates the big worry to me that any pretense of horror, even camp-horror or action-horror, will be gone.
^^ If I could catch you on a technicality:
> discrimination against a people who are Germanic, Italic, Arabic and North African by blood in mixed portions
> racism
I mean, I do get that RE4 should not have pulled that shit but I guess I'm just wondering who they're being racist against, exactly, since Spain is historically Europe's most ridiculously multiethnic country/kingdom/whatever.
It's certainly discriminatory, but I'm not sure if "racist" is the best call based on Spain's uniquely eclectic history.
^ Also, no hilarious sidekick/friend who always makes the best calls.
Until they die.
Seriously, waste of a good character.
IJBM: People saying England when they mean Great Britain or the United Kingdom. The 3 are not the same thing.
Spain started losing their position because the Dutch fought a long and bloody war for independence which forced the Spanish King to mortgage all of the silver mined in the Andes
I guess racism wasn't the best term. Call it discrimination and call it a day, I guess.
One of those lovely nights where I go to bed at 2, then can't get to sleep until 5.
^I find blindfolds effective in that situation.
Part of it was that at 3:30, my dad got up, turned on the light and started looking around and making noise downstairs because he'd dreamed he heard the doorbell -_-
hey, at least your dad doesn't come into your room at 4 AM looking for some book that is in his room.
No, but I did once get out of bed at 2 AM to go use the bathroom, and come back to find mom making my bed.
That's actually kind of d'aaw.
It was really more annoying.
reminds me of a bit of a gross story.
>Wake up at 6 AM
>"I need to go to the bathroom"
>It's the morning and I'm like completely and utterly out of it
>Enter the bathroom without knocking
>Dad's reading the paper, you can guess what he was doing
>"brrrrr. Gonna go use the other bathroom, then"
>Go to the other bathroom and forget to knock the door again
>Mom's reading the paper, you can guess what she was doing
>