![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothSo, on the spur of the moment (or, well, the couple hours) I went and saw Saw III last night, and I wasn't disappointed. It was a pretty clever, fairly gory horror movie. I also liked how it relied a lot on... er... what did my English teacher call it? 'Dramatic irony'? The one where the audience knows exactly what's going on but the characters are clueless, but did it in a way that didn't make me want to gnaw my limbs off like most sitcoms do.
There was an article... somewhere... Slate maybe? That had an analysis of the effect of gory horror movies and violent action movies on crime. Apparently, the crime rate spikes *downwards* every time a new horror movie is released, particularly during the prime moviegoing hours. Rapists and murderers would rather watch movies about violence than actually hurt people, but hurting people helps pass the time...
It's pretty easy to generalize that -- if you think something is really horrible in real life, you should encourage people to fantasize about it. }:P Censors may as well be committing the crimes themselves.
Semi-final verdict on Space Empires V:
And, when I was at the mall to see Saw, I picked up FFXII, and played a little bit of it after getting home. It's... definately in Ivalice. In fact, one of the main characters from FFTA (Montblanc) is in it fairly early on. You get to join his clan of hunters. }:P I get the impression that the whole clan thing is a sidequest in this game, though.
I don't have a party yet, so I can't really say how well the combat system works. Since it pauses when you open the menu, and it doesn't look like facing or positioning matter (the enemies lunge across half the screen to hit you), it might as well be turn-based for a single character.
There was an article... somewhere... Slate maybe? That had an analysis of the effect of gory horror movies and violent action movies on crime. Apparently, the crime rate spikes *downwards* every time a new horror movie is released, particularly during the prime moviegoing hours. Rapists and murderers would rather watch movies about violence than actually hurt people, but hurting people helps pass the time...
It's pretty easy to generalize that -- if you think something is really horrible in real life, you should encourage people to fantasize about it. }:P Censors may as well be committing the crimes themselves.
Semi-final verdict on Space Empires V:
- They didn't really fix the balance problems.
- They didn't do anything to improve the ai.
- Sattelites are broken. Sattelites no longer get initially placed within weapons range of the things you want them to protect, and they aren't stacked on top of each other, so they can be easily defeated in detail.
- Troops don't work -- they don't capture the planet, instead they leave it under the enemy's control but make all your ships ignore it. There's no way to win a game in which you've ever used troops.
- The messageboard says fighters are also broken, sort of for the same reason as sattelites. They're not stacked anymore, and point-defense all targets the closest fighter, horribly overkilling it and letting the rest annihilate your fleet undefended.
- All in all, it's the same game as SEIV, only buggier and 3d.
And, when I was at the mall to see Saw, I picked up FFXII, and played a little bit of it after getting home. It's... definately in Ivalice. In fact, one of the main characters from FFTA (Montblanc) is in it fairly early on. You get to join his clan of hunters. }:P I get the impression that the whole clan thing is a sidequest in this game, though.
I don't have a party yet, so I can't really say how well the combat system works. Since it pauses when you open the menu, and it doesn't look like facing or positioning matter (the enemies lunge across half the screen to hit you), it might as well be turn-based for a single character.
