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Feo Takahari

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Posts posted by Feo Takahari

  1. Originally Posted By: Delicious Vlish
    I would have liked the G2 kill everything that moves, slithers, flies, or crawls option.

    Kill all the shaper council members, kill the rebel leaders, and then release the purity agent to destroy and purge creations that have clearly gone out of control and have gone against nature.

    At that point, the world could start over.

    I like G5 as a game. It is a good game. But ALL of the endings are really lousy. Honestly, they resolve nothing. Canisters are everywhere. There is no way to undo that. Another geneforge is bound to be created. For all we know, a drakon could have flown or somehow traveled to Sholai lands. Creations could have packed up and left known lands on shaped boats. There is no way to put the pieces back and have some means of control.

    The Astoria ending is pleasant enough, but there should be an option to truly strike out against the madness and bring it to an end. Burn it all and start over.

    It's worth noting that games that have one side advocating this usually have that side as the villains and their opponents as the sole playable group (i.e. House of the Dead 4.) Similarly, those who advocate this in other fictional works tend to be the antagonists and wind up dying brutally (
    Click to reveal..
    Linderman
    and
    Click to reveal..
    Adam
    in Heroes.) Mind you, what is right by the standards of the society producing such works need not be what is right in an absolute sense, but it is worth considering whether the damage outweights the gains.
  2. I actually used this as early as G1. You know the ornks that are the very first creations you encounter? The ones where the description says they have big tusks, but won't bother you if you leave them alone? I faced the fyoras in the next section at a level higher than I would have otherwise . . . and carrying a dozen strips of meat.

  3. Originally Posted By: Thuryl
    Originally Posted By: I burn alongside the books.
    Just finished We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin


    Hey, synkarius: you should read this book instead of Atlas Shrugged. It's better in every way, mostly because it wasn't written by a raving loony.


    Myself, I thought Zamyatin came off as a bit extreme, if not necessarily a "raving loony." I was particularly irritated by how he seemed to take it for granted that anything he considered dystopian would be considered dystopian by the reader. The society as a whole was abominable, true, but individual aspects he mentioned and dismissed in a throwaway fashion left me intrigued when they were supposed to repel me (for instance, the harnessing of water power on a massive scale, which Zamyatin seemed to view as crass exploitation of nature.)

    On the subject of my own readings, I found a writer I'd never heard of named Adam Dekker, looked at the list of all the books he'd written, and was intrigued. I found out why I hadn't heard of him when he went into--well, I might as well call it a rant, the subject being how agnostics are the greatest danger to the survival of America. Phew. Other books recently read: Melusine by Sarah Monette was confusing, tasteless--and ten times better than it had any right to be. I'm hoping for a sequel. The Bourne Identity wasn't as good as the movie (and how often does anyone say THAT?) The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman is entertaining so far, and I'm reconsidering my previous negative evaluation of their work. Next up: The Red Badge of Courage, for school.
  4. Most of these you can pilot a boat to. If you mean the island you can see when you're in an area infested with acid-spitting plants, there is a switch to get to it, but I only have a vague memory that it's in an underground tunnel at a section shaped like a backwards L.

    Edit: the island I'm referencing is inhabited by undead that terrify you every time you do a melee attack on them. If you've already found it, disregard this post.

  5. So far I love the original best, because it's so open-ended, but I may change my mind if and when I buy the final game--it sounds really cool. G3 was my least favorite, for fairly standard reasons about lack of choice and the annoying island system and yada yada yada. G4 was pretty good, and G2 wasn't bad either.

     

    P.S. Suddenly realized something: G1 was the only game in the series where you could play a "good guy" and not get creamed. I didn't kill anyone who wasn't canister-mad or genocidal, and consequently I had a lot more fun, even if I wasn't "enlightened" much.

  6. To clarify, this may not necessarily be a faction you agree with, or one that is ethical in and of itself. Rather, this is the faction that you choose to help when you're trying to be a good guy. (For instance, a lot of G4 players helped the Trakovites just because they seemed a better side than the Shapers and the Rebels.) If you want to clarify in a reply, you can reference the different endings, but be sure to mark any spoilers.

    P.S. The reason I'm asking is that I haven't decided what faction(s) to join if and when I buy the game.

  7. Originally Posted By: Tem44e

    Rhetoric isn't mind control! Convincing someone can be immoral, but entirely depriving someone of will adds another level of harm. Or, depending on how things work out, it could be more moral. Convincing someone to kill his family for no reason leaves him with the moral burden of having done so. Literally forcing him to means he may have no family but at least he doesn't have to blame himself. I don't think rhetoric and mind control are the same, but I do agree that both can be right or wrong depending on circumstances.
    I'd call it mind control if you convince someone by saying something that, if considered logically, has no more meaning than "Dogs are ducks. Therefore, dogs can swim." I have a sort of defensive reaction whereby when someone else makes an argument, even one I believe, I start automatically coming up with arguments for the other side. (This is why I tend to get called a neo-Nazi whenever someone brings up Hitler--I hate the guy too, I'm just playing devil's advocate.) Anyways, if an argument turns out to be a string of non sequiturs, it's less "convincing" than "hacking," or exploiting some glitch in the human brain that allows charismatic people to bypass rationality. The reason I call it "black magic" is that it gives me the same feeling as if the control came from reciting a gibberish incantation rather than just plain gibberish.
    P.S. Not that I'm completely immune to this stuff. After all, there was the year I spent believing that Bush arranged the 9/11 attacks. I just have a strong resistance.
    Edit: almost forgot. Your argument for a baby-killing society was in a thread on gay marriage, in response to my attempted disproof of the Divine Command theory of ethics. You joked that you could make a sci-fi novel out of said society, and that you would "start looking for a publisher with a strong stomach immediately."
  8. Ooh, I sense another SCREAMING MATCH coming on! These are so fun to watch as half the Spiderweb community gets up in arms over nothing at all! That said, they get a bit disruptive, so it might be better to just quarrel amongst yourselves privately. (You can't punch each other out and get it over with in a forum, but perhaps you could blow each other's heads off in an online shooter.)

  9. Myself, I would argue that almost anything would be ethical in some hypothetical situation. Consider Alorael's ideas about a society of baby-killers. That said, some acts, such as rape, can only be justified under circumstances that in real life have almost no chance of occurring. On the specific subject of mind control, I have an unusual perspective, because I see people "mind controlled" every day by politicians, teachers, and other authority figures, while I myself only go along with what makes sense to me. I can even control others sometimes, saying utter nonsense in just such a way that people do what I want. It feels like black magic, and I tend to avoid it even when I'm arguing with someone who won't listen to logic, but it's been used for good at times. (For instance, most of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches can be called mind control in the name of peace and love, because most of his arguments make no sense in and of themselves, but everything he argues could be argued in such a way to make sense, and his arguments seem to be more effective than logic for rallying people.) I would justify literal mind control in the same way.

     

    P.S. If you don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about by "mind control," a good place to start would be the "Cross of Gold" speech by William Jennings Bryan. For instance, he says he's not going to criticize the people of the Atlantic right before he criticizes them, and he invokes symbols like the titular "Cross of Gold" in such a way that one can float on a sea of emotion rather than actually think about what he's saying. For the grandmaster of the technique, try Hitler.

  10. I suppose Mental Magic can also be called more moral if you use Daze on a foe, then run past them without killing them. (This isn't too far from the tactics I use in games that aren't experience-based, but I've found--through personal experience--that playing Geneforge morally is a sure path to a Game Over.)

  11. Knowledge brews require one of each "classical" (standard) potion ingredient. Typically, what will hold you back from getting more is a lack of mandrake root, though graymold is occasionally a problem. I myself used every mandrake root I found to make a knowledge potion, and even Dorikas became easy (on Normal, anyways.)

  12. If you hang onto all the potion ingredients you find, you're in for a treat once you reach Muck and talk to the potionmaster. I was able to make 13 Knowledge Brews in that first meeting, and if you're a singleton, that equates to a bonus of 26 skill points, making your life a lot easier.

     

    In the meantime, well, this game wasn't intended for a singleton. (I think Jeff specifically stated that it was to be unbeatable with a singleton on Torment.) I'll let the others tell you how to keep yourself alive that far.

  13. As of G1, Dexterity increased acid resistance, according to Matt P.'s walkthrough. As of G5, people said that Endurance had been modified so it no longer gave poison and acid resistance. Attempting to determine whether Dexterity or Endurance gave acid resistance in G4, I found that the "resistances" link in the Strategy Guide no longer works, and that nobody's compiled a description of what the skills do. So, anyone? Also, are there any other stats that don't do what they say/what one would expect?(By the way, someone probably ought to change the links in the Strategy Guide. A lot of them are dead now.)

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