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[Forumsdwarf]

quote:Well, Warhammer 40k is originally a tabletop game, and it's struggled with making the transition.

Ooh, conversations on parallel [de]-rails!

One of the advantages of pen-and-paper-to-computer-game transitions are the clearly-defined specifications for the various machinery.
I guess I'm thinking about the "fighting robot" video games.  The tabletop (or I guess they were pen-and-paper?) were kind of silly, but they were extremely detailed, so the game designers had a lot of the unit design, world-creation, scope, and mission design issues all worked out.

Divide the "round" of a pen-and-paper game into 24 frames a second, dividing all the other reload and recharge and cooldown times to match, and you have a video game.

Then you find out that a few hours' practice with whatever weapon has the longest range turns even a novice robot wrangler into the pen-and-paper equivalent of Mecha-Godzilla ... eh, it was a good start.

[ March 04, 2008: Message edited by: Forumsdwarf ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>I was referring to the case striking down freedom of speech where it conflicts with Section 13</STRONG>

Forgive me if I'm irrationally skeptical that your broad and plainly false statement was really meant to mean something other than what you said.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>You can slip in a few extra mentions before you're found guilty; otherwise if you criticize honor killings today, are told at your Section 13 tribunal to never use hate speech against Islam again, then next month you run a scathing attack on Islamic death Fatwahs against authors and artists, it's off to the slammer for mentioning Islam twice. That hasn't happened yet, but it easily could. Western Weekly and Macleans might just be the tip of the iceburg.</STRONG>

The substance of your argument is not something you need to convince me of. My point is that there's no point, even rhetorical, in using words that exaggerate to the point of misrepresentation. If you need to claim that you're punished for "mentioning" Islam in order to make your argument, don't you have a problem with your argument itself? You don't need to make false statements to pose your argument.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>Semantics. Participation isn't voluntary, nor are the injuctions and penalties issued by the CHRC. If "tribunal" is the right word I'll use it, but it's not the end of the world to use "trial", as that's mostly what a tribunal is -- minus the jury of peers or thusfar any chance of aquittal..</STRONG>

Not semantics, technicalities, and I don't disagree that they are so, but they make your argument false. The Canadian Human Rights Commission investigates, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, a separate body, holds the public hearing if the Canadian Human Rights Commission decides to take it to that stage. Not everyone that goes up under the Canadian Human Rights Commission ends up going before the Tribunal. You make it sound like if somebody files a complaint, you're screwed. That's not the case. There's a two step process. Now,  I don't think I've even brought this up about your argument until my last post where I'm listing off places where you've said things that are wrong, since you thought you didn't. That's because -- really -- I know what you meant, or what you were citing. But it's still a mistake to the point that you're wrong on the face of your words. I'm not really criticizing you here, I don't even disagree with your fundamental argument. But your argument will be much more effective if you make it accurately.

As an aside, you may or may not know that people who dispute a decision made by the Tribunal have the right to appeal to a federal appeals court. Don't, like, bother arguing why this doesn't matter, since I really have already mentioned that I don't care about your opinion one way or the other, it's really not why I'm here to discuss this.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>Yes. His argument is that requiring magazines to lawyer up when they criticize religion is censorship whether they're found guilty or not because it costs the magazine money.</STRONG>

If you have a citation, I'd like to see it. Not because I question the veracity of your statement, but I'd like to see how he tries to pull that off.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>I've been close enough. Your goal was to avenge Wiles, not engage in a good-faith discussion, hence the pointless nitpicking and belaboring of semantics. If you're a lawyer then feel free to attach accurate legal jargon to all the sloppy wording, and in that way we can all learn something here, but just browbeating me because I used the word "crime" to imprecisely describe an action for which the government punishes you is pointless and unhelpful to anyone reading the conversation.

...

Right, you jumped in because I was rude to Wiles and it pissed you off. A couple of details I had wrong and the rest were nitpicks: "Technically it doesn't take precedence," when effectively it does, etc. I do appreciate learning the correct terminology, but your playing "gotcha" with de facto terminology because it isn't de jure is just childish.</STRONG>

You seem determined to believe that I have this deep, unrestrainable desire to shank you in the back, and I just showed up out of nowhere with it, determined to go through with my nefarious shanking. So far, you've come up with explanations for this hostility being that you're opposed to censorship (boo, hiss), that you don't think section 13 is great (take him down!), because I don't like your style (beat him with the manual of style!), because I want to play "gotcha" (aren't I clever!), becasue I have mistakes that I need to pawn off on you (shit, I'm not clever after all!), and because I need to take you down with my fist of vigilante justice (for great justice).

I appreciate the humor of it, and can understand your presumptions, but you've yet to get mine right, despite several creative and novel attempts across the past few days, so you might as well give up guessing and just go with the ones I've expressed. If you review my first two responses, you'll see that I responded initially with a rather terse disagreement of your rude dismissal toward Wiles, and I responded further to correct you on your misconceptions about it being a piece of criminal hate crimes legislation. My third response actually contained an explanation of my motivation inside itself -- after all, any time you get your arguments compared to those of a neo-Nazi activist, you deserve to receive and explanation   :p -- but that was clearly not sufficient for you.

I just find it rather difficult to think you can take your accusations seriously when you project some vast antipathy I supposedly had reserved for you all along when my second post had the tone of kittens and puppies. I could quote it again, but I think I've quoted old posts enough here. You can go back and read it if you'd like, of course. There's not one criticism of you or your arguments in the entire thing -- the goal is genuinely to help you to understand the law better, since your criticisms were not grounded in fact.

My disgust with you came when you decided that getting corrected about the law was not only time for you to spoil for an argument against me, as if correcting you on a matter of fact where you are demonstrably wrong constitutes a challenge to you, but when you decided that you were going to execute this argument by 1) willfully ignoring the entire content of the correction as if I pulled it out of my ass, 2) going back on your apology for exaggeration, and 3) taking your arguments to the heights of rhetorical absurdity usually reserved for, uhm, well, unfortunately Marc Lemire is the only high profile person who I know of who does that on the issue of section 13. We'll call him an "unpleasantly off-kilter free speech activist" to spare his feelings.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>Ahh ... okay, I get it now. Lemme try again with the kittens:
"Regardless of whether the rest of the CHR Act rescues kittens from trees and puppies from the pound, Section 13 is toxic."
All fixed. I'll assume this controversy's been entirely cleared up.</STRONG>

Fair enough, and I don't disagree with that. But that was never my argument; I was just pointing out that the CHRA isn't hate crimes legislation, isn't a criminal code. The process for section 13 is the same as any other in the legislation, and those aren't designed to be a cruel system of punishment, they're designed to correct situations in which people were targeted by discrimination. Do I think that's an appropriate place to put anything related to censorship? No, no, not really. But I think you should understand the function of the law and its context if you're going to attack it.

Alas, the rest of your post is "un-answerable", since I am under a self-imposed code of silence.

Edit: Requested citation on Ezra twice in the same post with the same quote.   :roll:

[ March 04, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>

Ooh, conversations on parallel [de]-rails!

One of the advantages of pen-and-paper-to-computer-game transitions are the clearly-defined specifications for the various machinery.
I guess I'm thinking about the "fighting robot" video games.  The tabletop (or I guess they were pen-and-paper?) were kind of silly, but they were extremely detailed, so the game designers had a lot of the unit design, world-creation, scope, and mission design issues all worked out.

Divide the "round" of a pen-and-paper game into 24 frames a second, dividing all the other reload and recharge and cooldown times to match, and you have a video game.

Then you find out that a few hours' practice with whatever weapon has the longest range turns even a novice robot wrangler into the pen-and-paper equivalent of Mecha-Godzilla ... eh, it was a good start.

[ March 04, 2008: Message edited by: Forumsdwarf ]</STRONG>

It does help to have those rulesets, yeah. I think the biggest difficulty they've had is that Games Workshop games (like Warhammer 40k) are traditionally social games; you stand around with your dice and your figurines and your measuring stick, you chat and laugh and play with people as your little dudes march over the tabletop and take over the puff of cotton. Taken down to just the rules, much of the fun is sapped away from it. Most developers haven't been very good at finding the formula for replacing that human element with something that makes it better. There are advantages to the computer medium, but they need to really harness them well to do justice to games that have thrived so much in the tabletop format.

[Kagus]

Personally, I've found the Warhammer 40k computer games that I've played (essentially just Dawn of War and the expansion) to be quite enjoyable.  

But then again, I've never played the tabletop variations, and I have no intention of buying overly expensive figurines to do so.  

I've garnered most of my knowledge of the WH40k universe from playing those computer games, and I find it fascinating.  The over-the-top aspect that Blizzard attempted to replicate with its Warcraft series is intensely enjoyable, and I consider the Dawn of War games to be some of the best RTS games that I've played.  That, plus I seem to be better at them than I am at most other RTS games.

A computer game isn't just boiling down a social tabletop game to its base components.  It blocks the ability to just sit around and chat with your buds somewhat, yes.  But it also allows you to add a more cinematic feels to your otherwise inanimate troops as they march across deserts planets and fire off massive caliber explosive rounds at the charging orks, who then proceed to give off copious amounts of blood.

And then there are the killing animations.  I'm sure that people have attempted to demonstrate the complicated movements of disembowling an enemy troop with the tabletop figurines, but it's just so much easier when you've got a disposable game model to do it with instead.  I mean, do you know how hard it is to poke wraith claws through a space marine figure's armor?

One is not necessarily better than the other.  Tabletop and computer games are simply different creatures, and must be prepared and treated as such.

If this post is completely out of context, it's because I only bothered to read the last post in this thread.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Kagus:
<STRONG>Personally, I've found the Warhammer 40k computer games that I've played (essentially just Dawn of War and the expansion) to be quite enjoyable.

...

A computer game isn't just boiling down a social tabletop game to its base components.  It blocks the ability to just sit around and chat with your buds somewhat, yes.  But it also allows you to add a more cinematic feels to your otherwise inanimate troops as they march across deserts planets and fire off massive caliber explosive rounds at the charging orks, who then proceed to give off copious amounts of blood

...

One is not necessarily better than the other.  Tabletop and computer games are simply different creatures, and must be prepared and treated as such.</STRONG>

I haven't played Dawn of War, but I've heard it's very good, which would be a big change. Most of the games they've made based on the universe before now have been flops. And they've made many attempts; it's a good setting and a popular game offline.

Really, I agree. It's up to games when making the transition to utilize their strengths to do justice to the game. If they don't capture that epic feel that you describe, or have some other advantage that justifies playing the game on the computer instead of with your buddies, people just won't care much, even if it's loyal to the source material. That's the job the computer game conversion has to do -- action, graphics, smooth interface, everything plays a role in ensuring that the transition is graceful. It has to surpass the expected and justify the effort that went into putting the game into a new medium. I've seen them try many times to do just that, without great success. It's hard to do. But yeah, apparently Dawn of War is pretty good.

[Kagus]

I highly recommend you try out the demos.  It's only a taste of the full game, but it will allow you to see that the epic scale, over-the-top theme, and underlying deepness are adequately represented.

Provided, of course, that those are actually elements of the orignal.  

Also, considering the graphics and the massive battles, it can run quite well with top settings on a mediocre machine.  Relic really is a very good company.

EDIT:  Demo(s).  There's a seperate demo each for Dawn of War, DoW: Winter Assault, and DoW: Dark Crusade (stand-alone expansion pack, has seven races to play as, a freeform campaign, and all the goodies of the other two, if you're willing to only play as the two new races in multiplayer games.  This is the one I've got), and they're all worth playing.  Download one, play it for all it's worth, and move onto the next one.  Repeat until you've done every damned thing possible in the demo versions.

[ March 04, 2008: Message edited by: Kagus ]

[Forumsdwarf]

quote:Taken down to just the rules, much of the fun is sapped away from it.

I don't recall ever playing a strategy game conversion from a pen-and-paper game that was ever any fun, so I definitely agree.

Action games have a certain immersive quality when they're based on pen-and-paper games.  You can't convert the rules of the game without making what is in effect a simulator, a cockpit window into another world which you have to manage as if it were real.  When the interface is clunky the game sucks, but when the interface is efficient and well thought-out you're on another planet.

The best game to ever do that was never pen-and-paper, it was a space game called "Independence War II".  It used Newtonian physics (mostly) and required you to get really, really good on the stick to play it right.

It wasn't just about learning lots of buttons.  To rake a superfreighter with a cutting beam without hitting the cargo containers required finesse.

I think maybe information overload is key to immersion.  Having characters talking to you while you're monitoring and adjusting systems, dogfighting, maneuvering, evading enemy fire, and trying to keep track of your mission-critical objectives leaves little room to reflect on how none of it is real.  Then when the fight's over there's this moment of serenity where you re-enter reality, wipe the sweat off your palms and think to yourself, "This game kicks ass."

[Forumsdwarf]

quote:people who dispute a decision made by the Tribunal have the right to appeal to a federal appeals court.

Has anyone ever actually won?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>Has anyone ever actually won?</STRONG>

I don't know for sure, but to the best of my knowledge, only one person has ever tried, and they lost as the Supreme Court level. Most of the people involved have been radical, isolated figures though, and only a few are really willing to go the distance to fight for their right to say what they will; on the other hand, I don't think the media would take censorship laying down.

[Forumsdwarf]

quote:I don't think the media would take censorship laying down.

They're not; Maclean's and Ezra Levant among others are fighting it.

By the way, here are some Ezra Levant quotes:

quote:[The United States'] robust First Amendment means that U.S. defamation law is not an effective censorship tool, and that country does not -- yet, at least -- have anything as pernicious as Canada's various thought crimes laws.

I said much the same.  I trust "thought crimes" are an acceptable synonym to "hate crimes"?

quote:kangaroo court

Indeed.  These phrases have the advantage over the words I chose in being both de facto accurate and de jure meaningless, leaving no opening for rebuttal based on nitpicks of legal technicalities.
Censored is censored whether it happened in court or tribunal.  Either way the means don't justify the ends.

quote:The CHRC has a 100% conviction rate under its section 13 thought crimes section

Sound familiar?  But my arguments being more Nazi-like than Ezra-like have more to do with Wiles than the arguments themselves.  I know the score.

quote:people dragged before the commission have to pay for their own lawyers, and often are ordered to pay fines to the commission and to the person who brought the complaint

And if you don't pay you do hard time.

quote:My "support" for Lemire is my support for his fight against the human rights commissions, which are procedurally and substantively unCanadian.

Ezra Levant mentions Lemire.
Here for the first time Ezra Levant departs from my argument: I attributed Canadian censorship versus American press freedom to differences in fundamental values.  This was a worse insult than Wiles: the Canadian public responded to the Levant testimony with outrage against his inquisitor, and she was driven to resign amidst a blizzard of negative publicity.
Canadians clearly don't heart censorship.  They hate it, just like we Americans do.
What I did would be like a Canadian saying that McCain-Feingold transforms America into an alternate-reality censorship police-state the month before every major election because that's the way we Americans like to roll.
Not that McCain-Feingold doesn't do that, but ... no one in America except the Pew Research Center actually wants political censorship.  McCain-Feingold was a Pew-sponsored astroturf campaign with no real popular support.
I should've done my homework before asserting that Canada censors the press because that's the way Canadians like it.  Of course they don't like it.  They're just stuck with it.

quote:Even if he does drop it the Edmonton complaint proceeds.

Something I definitely got wrong: I thought Ezra Levant was completely off the hook.  Levant is still in kangaroo court.

And for the grand finale, the quote you asked for:

quote:... the process has become the punishment.
... That's what censorship and fascism and government political correctness looks like in the 21st century.

But insulting Wiles gets me compared to the Nazi, not the person I was actually quoting.  Whatever.
If I slandered someone as a Nazi I guess I wouldn't want to talk about it either.
No, I give myself more credit than that: I did, after all, apologize for being rude to Wiles.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>I trust "thought crimes" are an acceptable synonym to "hate crimes"?</STRONG>

They're very distinct actually, and though some would argue that hate crimes laws are thought crime laws, they're making a very substantial rhetorical leap. "Thought crimes" is a reference to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which it is a thoughtcrime to not even say certain things, not even do certain things, but merely to think certain things is punishable in and itself. "Hate crimes" is completely different -- it refers to an existing crime for which, after conviction, the sentence is increased due to the aggravating factor that the victim was intentionally targeted not out of a personal hatred or randomness or greed, but due to the victim's identification with a certain group, be it race, gender, or sexual orientation.

If it's a crime to think about swastikas, that is thought crime.

If it's a crime to spray paint swastikas on pieces of fabric and fly them in public, it's censorship.

If it's a crime to vandalize the front door of a Jewish family with spray painted swastikas, or a black family with a spray painted noose, and those crimes are treated as more severe than just spray painting your name in the same place, it's a hate crime.

Indeed, if Ezra Levant were to use the words "hate crime" in the quote you give, he would be very wrong; the United States has many hate crime laws. They do not cover speaking out in public to incite hatred, however -- speaking in public is not a crime, so there's nothing to be aggrivated.

Hate crimes usually entail extra long prison sentences and public condemnation. Censorship laws, at least in non-dictatorships, are generally much less heavy handed. If a censorship law was under hate crimes code, it would imply a very brutal level of censorship, especially if it were a hate crime merely to present a criticism of another religion.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>Censored is censored whether it happened in court or tribunal. Either way the means don't justify the ends.</STRONG>

Agreed, but it is not censored if the speech is not restricted. Until a decision is made by the tribunal, or if the CHRC demands so beforehand (which they have not in the Maclean's case), no such restriction is in place. While being investigated, Ezra Levant continued to publish the cartoons on his web site without punishment; while being investigated, Maclean's has continued to publish the articles under contention online, and indeed, I've read Mark Steyn's article that caused this whole debacle on their website. No restriction on speech is in play yet.

Edit: To clarify, the "Supreme Court" the quotation that follows refers to is the United States Supreme Court, not the Canadian Supreme Court.

 

quote:Oxford University Press:
<STRONG>The Supreme Court has found censorship to be an especially intolerable restriction on freedom of expression. The term censorship might encompass almost any restriction on the dissemination or content of expression, but most fundamentally it means prior restraint—any government scheme for screening either who may speak or the content of what people wish to say before the utterance. Although the Court has never held prior restraint to be inherently unconstitutional, it has emphasized that “any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” (Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan 1963, p. 70).

...

In recent years, spirited scholarly debate has arisen over the question of whether the evil of prior restraint might be overstated. Some have argued that judicially imposed restraints are less serious than administrative censorship, that freedom of expression may be served better by the use of prior restraint than by severely punishing expression after the fact. Fear of severe subsequent punishment, they assert, may have a far greater “chilling effect” on speech than narrowly focused, judicially supervised prior restraint.

The Supreme Court appears thus far not to have been swayed by such argument. It appears to remain committed to the view that censorship, whether imposed by administrators or by judges, is presumptively unconstitutional and the most deplorable way of restricting freedom of expression.</STRONG>

Note the distinction that is made by the US Supreme Court between post-speech punishment and prior restraint when concerning the constitutionality of censorship. The US Supreme Court would be extremely unlikely to hold legal defense fees alone to be a great burden on free speech; but they would very likely hold the cease and desist order that follows this under section 13 to be unconstitutional.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>Sound familiar?</STRONG>

Familiarly horrible. I would not have made this comparison because I didn't know Ezra made such false arguments. It's no greater of a complement to him that he said it than it is to you.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>And if you don't pay you do hard time.</STRONG>

That extension of his argument would never fly in a court of law, which is probably why doesn't make it. You could falsely argue that every crime is punishable by a life sentence. After all, if they order you to do community service for littering, and you don't show up, they might fine you, if you don't pay the fine, they take you to jail, you resist arrest and then escape from prison (because the law was wrong and they're infringing your rights!), next thing you know you're on a life sentence in a maximum security prison... "for littering". But that's nonsense. You can't take it to even one step. Any court will uphold the legality of applying a stricter punishment if you simply refuse to obey the lighter one, as long as the lighter one was appropriate. The crime is not the original crime anymore, your problem at that point is that you have flagrantly defied the judicial system.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>Ezra Levant mentions Lemire.</STRONG>

And he does so in a way that I agree with. Similarly, he qualifies his support to be limited to Lemire's free speech activism, just as my comparison is and always was (even if you read the original post!) a qualified comparison to his arguments in his fight with the human rights commissions. The only time I've mentioned his other propaganda specifically was as trivia, when I linked his site.

Edit 2: Clarification: I'm specifically referring to my description or comparison to his white nationalist arguments/propaganda, which would not have been relevant. I certainly called him a neo-Nazi with a chip on his shoulder over his site getting hit, but the comparison was with his arguments over free speech, in which he sounds like he's hyperventilating behind the keyboard sometimes.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>Something I definitely got wrong: I thought Ezra Levant was completely off the hook. Levant is still in kangaroo court.</STRONG>

I believe that he may be under pressure under provincial laws similar to section 13, but not on the federal level. I haven't looked into it.

 

quote:Originally posted by Forumsdwarf:
<STRONG>... the process has become the punishment.
... That's what censorship and fascism and government political correctness looks like in the 21st century.</STRONG>

I'm specifically looking for an argument that the process of defense constitutes censorship in and of itself, which is what you've attributed to him. This doesn't say that -- it shows that he's calling the action under the law censorship (agreed) and that he feels that being forced to defend himself constitutes punishment (reasonable). But he's not saying here that the punishment of defending himself is the censorship he's referring to, as opposed to the perfectly correct suggestion that if the tribunal rules against him, he will be subjected to censorship. To merge these two statements the way you're implying takes two otherwise reasonable arguments and merges them in a way that produces an unreasonable and false result.

I'm also looking for a link, actually, not just an unattributed quote, because I want to see the context and the substance of his argument. I've tried googling this, but there are no matches for the exact quotes.

What I do know that Ezra Levant has argued is that the law does not authorize the prosecution of his case, and that the commissions are overstepping the authority granted to them by not dismissing the charges immediately. He does not argue that it is a hate crime to criticize Islam, he argues that it is not, and never was punishable for him to publish the cartoons, not even under section 13 or anything else, even without having to appeal to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, although he does do that as well. He argues that they are trying to censor him, and he as argued that he hopes they will, and that he will be penalized, so that he can use his right to appeal to the court system and thereby have the commissions and tribunals at all levels of government that seek to manipulate and abuse the power granted to them beaten back.

[ March 05, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[ March 05, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Cthulhu]

quote:Originally posted by Kagus:
<STRONG>I highly recommend you try out the demos.  It's only a taste of the full game, but it will allow you to see that the epic scale, over-the-top theme, and underlying deepness are adequately represented.

Provided, of course, that those are actually elements of the orignal.  

Also, considering the graphics and the massive battles, it can run quite well with top settings on a mediocre machine.  Relic really is a very good company.

EDIT:  Demo(s).  There's a seperate demo each for Dawn of War, DoW: Winter Assault, and DoW: Dark Crusade (stand-alone expansion pack, has seven races to play as, a freeform campaign, and all the goodies of the other two, if you're willing to only play as the two new races in multiplayer games.  This is the one I've got), and they're all worth playing.  Download one, play it for all it's worth, and move onto the next one.  Repeat until you've done every damned thing possible in the demo versions.

[ March 04, 2008: Message edited by: Kagus ]</STRONG>

In an attempt to keep this thread on a non-argumentative path of derailment.  I agree.  If you only play one demo, play Winter Assault, it's by far the best of the two demos I played.  Imperial Guardsmen are weaksauce, and you're fighting Chaos Marines and Raptors.  Situations like that are fun for me, I enjoy seeing my troops getting slaughtered by enemies.

((Shot in the dark here, but does anyone know of any free games that involve large numbers of player-controlled characters fighting small numbers of large enemies such as robots/aliens?  This concept has always struck me as very fun))

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Muffles:
<STRONG>((Shot in the dark here, but does anyone know of any free games that involve large numbers of player-controlled characters fighting small numbers of large enemies such as robots/aliens?  This concept has always struck me as very fun))</STRONG>

And sometimes way more fun than the more common alternative of having the roles reversed. While it's a rewarding thing to be able to take on the endless hordes, if they're all stormtroopers/redshirts, what's the point? Cutting down the swarms isn't much more epic than farming if they're always weak. Now, if they're usually tough enemies, and suddenly you get the MASSIVE DEATH RAY that brings them down like blades of grass, that's a little more epic.

The difficulty is getting specific heroes in play that you'll care about, as if they're too weak, they'll just die, and you'll just hide them in the back ranks instead of using them.

Edit: This is one of only a few complaints I have about Call of Duty 4 -- it's a great game, but they spawn endless enemies against you at some points. Come on, it breaks the modern warfare realism factor if I have 100+ kills on a mission as an infantry guy.   I'd rather have fewer, harder enemies, and be allowed to hang back and take these tough guys out in a brutal firefight before moving up, instead of a hacked together system where I have to leave my relatively safe place to charge into machine gun fire in order to move the chains forward and stop the enemies I kill in this location from respawning.

[ March 05, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, I'm amazed Generic Middle-Eastern Country could support an army of that size.  The only time huge numbers of nameless weak enemies is okay is if they're zombies.  That's why I can't wait for Left 4 Dead.

[Torak]

quote:Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
[QB]
The difficulty is getting specific heroes in play that you'll care about, as if they're too weak, they'll just die, and you'll just hide them in the back ranks instead of using them.

Inquisitor Toth Vs A swarm of Chaos Marines and Armored Tanks/Mechs = Epic, especially when he wins thanks to his mind blast and amazing ability to rape just about ANYTHING.