Monday, March 26, 2012

Biblical Contradictions!

Time to examine a fraction of the myriad of biblical contradictions to be found with the slightest of investigation.

Bible contradictions, here we come!

-Jesus born in Bethlehem
-Jesus born in Nazareth

-God is omniscient, YET:
-Then the LORD said, "The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know."

-Christians assume the Bible god only had one son, Jesus. If this is so, then why does Job 1:6 and 2:1 say "the sons of God"? This contradicts John 3:18 which says Jesus is God's only son. Why does Luke 3:38 say Adam was the son of God?

-Like many other topics, the Bible is ambiguous about dancing. It seems to be ok if done to celebrate "a very great slaughter" of Israel's enemies as is the case in Judges 11:32-34. Many Christian sects consider dancing to be lasciviousness and revelings which are outlawed in Galatians 5:19-21. Reveling is defined as "taking great pleasure". Contrary to Galatians, Ecclesiastes 3:1-4 approves of dancing when it plainly says there is a time "for every purpose under the heaven", including dancing.

-Is Jesus God? Jesus himself seems confused about this. In John 10:30 the Bible says he said "I and my father are one" while John 14:28 has Jesus saying "..my father is greater than I".

-When did Jesus fly up to heaven? Luke 24:1-51 and Mark 16:9-19 both say it was the same day he came back from the dead while John 20:26 says it was 8 days after his resurrection but Acts 1:3-9 says it was 40 days later.

-Mark 10:27 And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible, YET:
-Judges 1 :19 And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.

-Joseph and Mary return for Roman census
-Joseph and Mary never return for any census

-Genesis 1, animals before man
-Genesis 2, man before animals

-One god? OR
-Multiple gods? (ex's: Gen 1:26, Gen 3:22, Exodus 12:12, Deut 10:17)

And there you have a small list of some bible contradictions.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Ruminating on Destruction (The Demise of Classic Video Game Franchises)

Back in January I wrote a blog post entitled “My Favourite Franchises Are Being Destroyed

In light of recent events, I have taken it upon myself to produce a follow up to said post. I am not sure what form the following will take (measured, rational assessment of things as I see them, an angry, emotional, irrational rant, or some combination of the two) but I do know that I am compelled to revisit this perhaps tired, but in my mind terribly poignant point: Classic video game franchises are being utterly raped in this seventh video game generation.


Monday, March 19, 2012

R.I.P. Ninja Gaiden 1988-2012

Am I living in a fucking nightmare? I have been pinching myself so hard I have airplane sized welts all over my body, so I suppose that I am in fact awake, which means I really am witnessing the destruction of the Ninja Gaiden series. IGN has just weighed in with a hilariously bad 3/10 review (yes, 3/10), player feedback on the forums has been mostly bad to downright terrible, and frankly, I fucking toldyouso.

IGN Gives Ninja Gaiden 3 a Fucking 3/10!!!

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/122/1221032p1.html

IGN scores Ninja Gaiden 3 a 3/10. What a fucking disaster. Hayashi and co. have RUINED the greatest series of action games on the planet.

Ugh.

I'll be ranting about the game in detail at a later date.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition Trailer is GREAT

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Ninja Gaiden 3 News: Scythe and Falcon's Talons (Claws) Are Free DLC

http://andriasang.com/con0a4/ninja_gaiden_3_dlc/

Famitsu is reporting that Tecmo Koei will be releasing the Eclipse Scythe and the Falcon's Talons as free DLC. No word of when or how they will be utilized in the game, but my money is on Day 1, and multiplayer/Ninja Trials only.

Oh, and you bet your ass that this is their way of appeasing us because they plan on charging us for the rest of them and they know we are expecting it and will NOT be happy about it.

If Online Dating Profiles Were Honest

If online dating profiles were totally accurate and 100% honest, this is what they would sound like:

Male:

Hi, my name is John. I'm a 30 year old divorced male. I'm skinny-fat and haven't had a tan since my Honeymoon. Have barely had sex since then as well, and I am afraid that I have forgotten how it works, but I digress. I have lost 15% of my hair in the last year and this terrifies me. On top of that, as this hair disappears, other hairs show up in really strange places. I sometimes go three or four days without showering. I am strangely fascinated by the smell of my own farts. I am self deprecating, but only as a preemptive defense mechanism.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Sex Before Marriage Rant

I wanted to rant about premarital sex and religion, and I decided to do it in the form of a response to a fictional character who would represent the real fears of many real people. Hence, witness my rant in the form of a response to Sam, a ficticious 18 year old who is concerned about the fact that he and his girlfriend of four years just had sexual intercource for the first time, despite the fact that they were planning on waiting for marriage. Sam feels dirty and ashamed of his 'sin,' as he calls it, and he is terrified of the possible consequences awaiting him in the afterlife.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Facebook Page!

http://www.facebook.com/TheThoughtfulGamers

Friday, March 2, 2012

Gaming Conventions That Need to Go! Pt. 4

1) Invisible barriers. They just don't make any sense. Either design a real barrier, or get/design a better engine that isn't so restrictive.

2) Key cards. These should have went out 20 years ago.

3) Cliffhanger endings. These are evil. Especially in the cases where a sequel never even materializes. I think you should always tie up your story as best you could. Treat each game like a microchosm of the overall story.

4) Kidnapped girlfriends. Some of the best games ever made have this as a plot outline, but still, let it go already. Why not start kidnapping some grandfathers already?

5) Instruction Manuals in 2009......redundant much? Waste of resources? Almost every game now explains the story and controls/how to play in game.

6) Mashing a button to open a door. THIS IS NOT FUN. THIS IS NOT IMMERSIVE. It's stupid, boring, repetitive and ruins the pacing of the game. I blame God of War for this crap (that damn game popularized QTE's in general, damn (still awesome) game).

7) Scantily clad women. I'm sorry, but um....why are people turned on by digital characters that don't even look remotely realistic enough to pass for real people?

The End?

Well, readers, I am sad to say that this may very well be the last Gaming Conventions that must Die! Blog. So, barring any unforeseen flashes of genius, I believe this may very well be it. Don't cry. I'll try not to.

Thanks (yet again) for reading.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Craziest Technological Advancement of Our Time?

What would you say it was?

Here's what a 101 year old woman answering questions on reddit (her grandson was doing it for her) said was the craziest for her time:

Running water. We used to use a cistern or a well to gather water. I remember the first time my father installed a faucet and oh my goodness, I felt like we had won the lottery!

Imagine that! This really drives home just how far we have come. In the lifespan of one human being we have gone from hand pumping water to accessing the world's data in seconds, from devices all around us, including in our pockets! How incredible it is when you 'zoom out,' so to speak, and look at the grander picture, and realize that this progress has come in the most minute little tail end of the human timescale.

Damn!

Judge: A Muslim Has The Right to Attack an 'Offensive' Atheist


Martin further dressed down Perce for his insensitive behavior, going so far as to call him a doofus and telling him that in Muslim societies he could have been put to death for mocking Muhammad.
“Having had the benefit of having spent over 2 and a half years in predominantly Muslim countries I think I know a little bit about the faith of Islam,” Martin said. “In fact I have a copy of the Koran here and I challenge you sir to show me where it says in the Koran that Mohammad arose and walked among the dead. I think you misinterpreted things. Before you start mocking someone else’s religion you may want to find out a little bit more about it. It makes you look like a doofus… In many Arabic speaking countries something like this is definitely against the law there. In their society in fact it can be punishable by death and it frequently is in their society.”
Sgt. Brian Curtis handled the incident aftermath. Curtis explained that Elbayomy admitted to grabbing Perce that October night.

Is this any different than a judge telling a woman that she was "asking for it" due to her chosen manner of dress?

Monday, February 20, 2012

Bioware: Mass Effect 3 is a Shooter

http://gamingbolt.com/mass-effect-3-is-not-a-corridor-shooter-bioware

“There’s definitely been an emphasis on making combat spaces into open battlefields in this game,” he continued. “We’re trying to get away from corridor shooters.”

And now I make my exit.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Shadow Complex Review: Old School, Meet New School

Old School Meets New School



Shadow Complex is a side scrolling shooter with 3D graphics that focuses heavily on map exploration and character progression. This is the game that, as you likely have heard a multitude of times recently, is a downloadable game in the vein of Super Metroid (and a few others). Some go so far as to say this game is a Metroid clone. Either way you look at it, it's definitely very similar. However, for the purposes of this review, I am going to forget Super Metroid et al., and focus merely on this game and its merits. This will be a fairly lengthy review, and I will do my best to describe in detaii what you can expect from this game.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Treatable STD Scarier Than Fatal Flu

http://www.livescience.com/18461-treatable-sti-scarier-fatal-flu.html


Passing someone a sexually transmitted infection is viewed as worse than giving them the flu — even if the flu turns out to be fatal, a new study finds. The stigma surrounding STIs can keep people from getting tested, discussing testing with partners or disclosing to partners that they do have an infection, Moor said. She and her colleagues wanted to understand how much stigma really influences people's perceptions of these diseases. To do so, the researchers gathered 1,158 volunteers via the Internet and had each read a short paragraph about someone transmitting either the H1N1 flu, also called swine flu, or chlamydia to another person. Though H1N1 usually causes nothing more than a few days of misery, people with compromised immune systems, the elderly and the very young can die of it.



In every scenario in the study, "Christina" or "James" feels a little ill, but shrugs off the symptoms, goes to a party and has sex with a fellow partygoer. In some cases, this sexual encounter transmits chlamydia to their partner. In other cases, it transmits H1N1. After reading one of these scenarios, each participant answered a series of questions about how selfish, risky and all-around irresponsible they would rate either Christina or James.


Keeping a sexual mode of transmission constant was meant to control for any automatic "sex is taboo" reactions from participants, Moor said. But despite the fact that the characters James and Christina acted sexually identically in all scenarios, chlamydia seemed to strike extra fear into participants' hearts.When Christina or James were said to have transmitted chlamydia, people judged them harshly, ranking them as almost as selfish and risky as was possible in the survey. When H1N1 was the disease in question, however, people rated the transmitter much more generously. Even when the sexual partner actually died of H1N1, transmitting chlamydia was seen as much more risky and irresponsible than transmitting the flu.


"It's quite confusing," Moor said. "If sex is taboo and that's why people are thinking STIs are so stigmatized, we just nipped that in the bud. We're showing that you can get H1N1 through sex, but it's still not stigmatized."

This is something that I have considered for some time, and I am glad it is finally garnering attention in the scientific community. While the findings seem to concur with my feelings on the subject, I do have one criticism to make: They say that it is inexplicable that people view STI's in a harsher light than they do say the flu, even if both are transmitted sexually. They say that they controlled for the "sex is taboo" factor by making sexual activity the mode of transmission in each scenario. However, I think they are missing one crucial point: STI's are linked, in people's minds, with sex, while the flu is not. And this is quite likely directly resultant of the taboo nature of sex in North American culture.

Thoughts?

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Namibia sponge fossils are world's first animals: study

http://news.yahoo.com/namibia-sponge-fossils-worlds-first-animals-study-203340973.html


Scientists digging in a Namibian national park have uncovered sponge-like fossils they say are the first animals, a discovery that would push the emergence of animal life back millions of years.
The tiny vase-shaped creatures' fossils were found in Namibia's Etosha National Park and other sites around the country in rocks between 760 and 550 million years old, a 10-member team of international researchers said in a paper published in the South African Journal of Science.
That means animals, previously thought to have emerged 600 million to 650 million years ago, actually appeared 100 million to 150 million years before that, the authors said.
It also means the hollow globs -- about the size of a dust speck and covered in holes that allowed fluid to pass in and out of their bodies -- were our ancestors, said co-author Tony Prave, a geologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Read the rest at the link above.

I find this doubly fascinating, as it acts both as a furthering of our knowledge of our origins and a tentative confirmation of the 'molecular clock' method of dating.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

COD Black Ops: LEGO Edition

I hate COD and I am sick to death of FPS games but this is fucking brilliant:

Monday, February 6, 2012

The Witcher 2 (Xbox 360): Real In-Game Footage

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Socialism in the US; Is America (At Least Partly) Socialist? And Is Socialism '"Bad?"

NOTE: This is an unpublished blog from last year.

So many Americans seem to be up in arms about that ever present enemy, "socialism." Woooooo, "socialism." Scary word down there in the US these days, a word made ever increasingly more hateful by the day courtesy of our friends over at Fox News Channel (and Fox affiliate radio programs, of course. Don't worry Rush Limbaugh, I didn't forget your hateful, lying ass). And yet, this ever increasingly hated enemy is nothing but smoke and mirrors. In fact, the U.S, along with every other developed nation, thrives on semi socialist policies.


Thursday, January 26, 2012

Resident Evil: Revelations 3DS Demo Door Puzzle in Seconds (2 Moves) Walkthrough

This video shows you how to complete that initial puzzle (door lock puzzle) found in the RE:R demo in a matter of seconds (once the screws are removed) by making just 2 moves:



If you have played this demo, what do you think of it?

Also, if you answer this, could you add whether or not you consider yourself a fan of the Resident Evil games, and if so, which ones do you prefer? The old school survival horror ones with tank controls, puzzles a-plenty, static camera angles and limited ammo, or the new school ones (Resident Evil 4 and 5).

Personally, RE6 will most likely turn out to be a far better game, technically, than Revelations, but I think Revelations will succeed where RE6 will likely fail: At being a damn RE game! I hope I am wrong, but I think 6 is going to stray even farther from the series' roots than 5 did, and while 5 was a great game in its own right, it was an abomination of an RE game :(

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Gaming News I Did NOT Expect: New Neo Geo Portable!

http://andriasang.com/comzr4/neo_geo_pocket_2/

Yes, it's obviously designed by totally unimaginative Apple copycats, but who cares?

There are 20 games pre-loaded onto the 2GB of internal storage (an SD slot allows for expansion if desired):


  • 1.WORLD HEROES
  • 2.ULTIMETE 11
  • 3.TOP PLAYER'S GOLF
  • 4.SENGOKU
  • 5.NAM-1975
  • 6.MUTATION NATION
  • 7.LAST RESORT
  • 8.KING OF MONSTERS
  • 9.FRENZY
  • 10.CYBER LIP
  • 11.FATAL FURY SPECIAL
  • 12.ART OF FIGHTING
  • 13.SUPER SIDEKICKS
  • 14.LEAGUE BOWLING
  • 15.METAL SLUG
  • 16.MAGICAL LORD
  • 17.BASEBALL STARS PROFESSIONAL
  • 18.SAMURAI SHODOWN
  • 19.KING OF FIGHTERS '94
  • 20.FATAL FURY
It comes out ______ and is priced at _______

(Yes, that means no one yet knows)

No word yet as to whether or not other games will be available for purchase, if applications can be run, etc. 

Did YOU expect this news? I sure as hell didn't!

Saturday, January 21, 2012

My Favourite Franchises are being Destroyed

Hear the latest news coming from the people behind the upcoming Resident Evil 6? They're after the Call of Duty market....Seriously:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/332888/resident-evil-attracting-cod-fans-the-dream-says-capcom-action-route-makes-sense/

First I see that abomination of a trailer and I figure there is no hope left, but then Capcom decided to at least be nice and remove any possibility of me maintaining even the slimmest glimmer of hope by announcing that, nope, you're out of luck, and yes, Resident Evil is not what it once was, aka what you fans  MADE it to begin with.

And btw, Capcom, RE5 was the biggest selling RE game and the most action oriented, but that correlation is just that: a correlation. To infer a causal relationship between the two is fallacious, and when you FAIL to grab a significant portion of the COD fanbase's attention, hopefully you will re-examine your conclusion. Protip: Was it the only RE game simultaneously released on multiple platforms, both with huge install bases in the middle of a gaming explosion in the mainstream? Was it a game that followed a tremendous entry into the series? Don't many franchises grow with time?

Can I be sure that it [i]wasn't[/i] the action orientated nature of the game that drove sales? Nope. They can't be sure it was, though, and when you factor in things like it following RE4, being multiplatform on 2 very successful consoles, etc., one has to wonder if perhaps they are being a bit narrow in their thinking.

And as if this shit wasn't enough, this comes after the bastardization of Ninja fucking Gaiden of all things, PLUS the shooter-ification of Mass Effect, the whatever the fuck you call it they did to Devil May Cry (although I hold out some hope that one may still be good), the abomination that was Dragon Age 2, the rape of Rainbow Six (although the games are still great, for the most part), the pillaging of the spirit of Fable, and on and on.

Not to mention other people's favourites that have been ASSFUCKINGRAPEFUCKED like Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Hitman, Metroid, Silent Hill, etc.

This is a pretty fucking sad time to be an 'old school' gamer. Everything classic is being bastardized in favour of being "cinematic," and "accessible," and anything that was stealthy, strategic or required any fucking thought, effort, patience, time or conquering of difficulty has become a fucking joke, with hour long turorials, incredibly obvious exposition, HUD's made for toddlers (breadcrumb trails, really Molyneux?), and someone in your ear at ll fucking times, telling you what to do and where to go (even goddamn motherfucking RYU HAYABUSA has someone chirping in his ear in Ninja Gaiden 3....WHAT THE FUCK?).

ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT!!!  FUCK!!!!

/get off my lawn

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Geometry Wars 2 Review

Geometry is Fun Again.....Again

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is the sequel to the smash hit, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, which itself was an expanded version of a mini game found in the game Project Gotham Racing 2 on the original xbox.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, just like its predecessor, is a 2D top down shooter, that is essentially a modernized version of Asteroids, without the warping and with dual stick controls added in. You move the ship with the left analog stick, and fire in the direction you point the right one in. Instead of flying saucers and asteroids, your ship shoots at enemies that take several different geometric shapes, are coloured differently, and behave in different ways. There are simple enemies like the blue diamonds that move towards your position in a non aggressive manner, or the purple pinwheels that spin about randomly, not attacking you but causing your demise if you inadvertently make contact with them. There are green squares that hone in on you, and cowardly move away once you turn to fire in their direction.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Rant on PR Speak (Sparked by comments by EA CEO RE: "Online Pass")

NOTE Major expletive filled rant here, so consider yourself forewarned. Also, please note that this was written quite some time ago, as you would have ascertained yourself. Just thought I'd fill you in. It's still relevant, but a couple of the things mentioned are now in the past. D'oh!                                                                                                                          




Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Nintendo 3DS Swapnote Slideshow Demo Video "God Slideshow"