|
SirDifferential posted:Hong Kong is my favorite area of the game. New York felt wide and open with lots of emptiness. With the events of the game I guess this was intentional as everyone is being forced indoors by curfew. In Hong Kong everything represents a chaos of its own. It's a maze of sorts full of life. At that point in the game you are pretty much augmented and can see the area as you want, whereas in New York you are more limited in how you move around. The kick-rear end music helps. Except that it's mostly limited to Market and the Lucky Money area. The canals and to a lesser extent Tonnochi Road still have that desolate feeling. It does feel more like a real city, that's true, but it's the feeling of a city at 4 o'clock in the morning. With some pockets of life but for the most part empty and eerily quiet.
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 21:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 22:54 |
|
|
double nine posted:Except that it's mostly limited to Market and the Lucky Money area. The canals and to a lesser extent Tonnochi Road still have that desolate feeling. Tonnochi Road has plenty of people on it considering the map's size, plus the canals map is pretty interesting with how almost every oddly placed pocket you find has someone living in it. I won't argue about the vibe, though, especially since the soundtrack for those two areas is named "Desolation."
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 21:22
|
|
|
Aithon posted:In the future, stylish Chinese teahouses only sell soda. More like that's all JC knows to ask for.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 22:17
|
|
|
Maybe I missed it, but did you not get the WP rockets and the weapon mod in the weapons bay?
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 22:31
|
|
|
Hong Kong isn't big in this game but it's well-made to give you the illusion of bigness and that's what counts.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2014 22:40
|
|
|
Holy gently caress I had no idea about that alternate conversation with Walton Simons  that's loving badass JC, holy poo poo. Or the secret panel at the confined helipad, I always wondered where that drat lockers key was. And I always wondered how the hell to get those items hidden behind the slats of Wan-Chai Market's initial entrance.I think pretty much everybody loves the music of Hong Kong, all the music really is rather awesome in various ways but the Wan-Chai Market's theme is just gloriously entertaining to listen to. It's one of those songs that you can let go in the background on its own and it never really gets on your nerves because it's just hectic enough to keep up the Hong Kong market feel, but also have enough variation in its notes to still be colourful and rockin' while not being too repetitive...at least the way I hear it. This place was a loving nightmare on the PS2 version, basically there were like five different areas with their own separate loading screens, so going anywhere in the game was kind of a big risk. You did get a warning of a loading screen if you were approaching a long empty street but still, you had to basically access: - Wan-Chai Market - Tracer Tong's Compound - Tonnochi Road - The Lucky Money Club - And the submberged Canal Road All separately and individually loaded up. Each drat place, so yeah, I hated this place for a long while until I got the PC version. ...gently caress that kid 
FinalGamer fucked around with this message at 02:55 on May 6, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 02:36
|
|
|
Kind of an aside, but when we got into the Conspiracy Corner, I had immediately started wondering why everything sounded all NieR-ish and sad. I did not notice that Bobbin actually used music from NieR. I need to learn how to read past the videos.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 02:56
|
|
|
FinalGamer posted:This place was a loving nightmare on the PS2 version, basically there were like five different areas with their own separate loading screens, so going anywhere in the game was kind of a big risk. You did get a warning of a loading screen if you were approaching a long empty street but still, you had to basically access: Sounds like about how many maps Hong Kong has in the PC version, too, although I imagine the maps are all bigger overall and the load times are shorter. How much of the canals does the PS2 version let you explore? That's easily the most complex and expansive map of the bunch.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 03:33
|
|
|
A lot of voice acting in this game is questionable but I unironically love Walton Simon's deadpan. It suits his "I'm a bureaucrat who ends lives" persona. Manderley was working for the bad guys but it seems that he at least thought of himself as a mediator…I wonder if he had ties to the old-guard Illuminati and was just one of MJ-12's hire-overs.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 03:51
|
|
|
Speedball posted:A lot of voice acting in this game is questionable but I unironically love Walton Simon's deadpan. It suits his "I'm a bureaucrat who ends lives" persona. That is most likely the case. He has some ties as you can find him in part of DX:HR background emails.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 03:59
|
|
|
Bobbin Threadbare posted:Sounds like about how many maps Hong Kong has in the PC version, too, although I imagine the maps are all bigger overall and the load times are shorter. How much of the canals does the PS2 version let you explore? That's easily the most complex and expansive map of the bunch. That was its own separate area too, so Canal Road is essentially two separate maps of the tunnel interior and the canal exterior. I'm pretty sure that's how it was. Also Tonnochi Road itself had like two more maps within in the form of, well, two apartments basically. So yeah Hong Kong was not fun to play in the PS2 version and I developed a great dislike for the city purely because of how long it took to get everywhere. And considering this was a place that, well, you had to go from one end of the city to the other, holy christ let's just say there's one character I completely despise for making me go ALLLLL the way back and then go all the way back TO them. I think you know who I'm talking about Mr. Threadbare.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 04:35
|
|
|
This is an all spoilers thread dude. You can just say who you're talking about. Is it Maggie?
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 04:40
|
|
|
FinalGamer posted:That was its own separate area too, so Canal Road is essentially two separate maps of the tunnel interior and the canal exterior. I'm pretty sure that's how it was. There is one exit from the market area that leads into a portion of the Canal Road Tunnel, which is a small map and a dead end; there are two exits which lead into the canals themselves, including a famously out-of-the-way detour that leads to another section of the Canal Road Tunnel. For comparison, the canals area CRT section is about the same size as the entire map for the regular CRT zone. So my question is: just how less expansive is the canals area on the PS2 compared to the surprisingly vast canals area in the PC version? If you're not sure, just wait a week. Exploring every nook and cranny of the canals along with the Lucky Money is going to be more than enough to fill an episode.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 05:11
|
|
|
Speedball posted:A lot of voice acting in this game is questionable but I unironically love Walton Simon's deadpan. It suits his "I'm a bureaucrat who ends lives" persona. The voice acting hits a bottom in Hong Kong, but I find it gets much better in Paris and towards the endgame, I think mostly because they stop trying with the accents. Gary Savage I remember actually being well voiced. And then there is the bomb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG1qKzIsisU
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 06:10
|
|
|
Man, Hong Kong, lots to explore and find, spectacular music, hilariously bad voice acting, it's just so good an area, best part of the game. It was at this point in my first playthrough that I really started to appreciate the game, just how big and interesting it was, I really can't say enough goods things about Hong Kong. Penakoto fucked around with this message at 06:59 on May 6, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 06:57
|
|
|
Xander77 posted:Ah, that Hong Kong theme
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 08:02
|
|
|
Penakoto posted:Man, Hong Kong, lots to explore and find, spectacular music, hilariously bad voice acting, it's just so good an area, best part of the game. Yes. All these things.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 08:32
|
|
|
Bobbin Threadbare posted:Considering that half the replies in this Invisible War debate have been actual quotations from the last time the debate came up, I think we've said all that can be said on the subject. Luckily, I happen to have an update to distract you! Mao aint cause no drat famines. Cmon son. You do research better than this. I don't know if you just phoned this one in and ran Whatever or if thats your real idea but look deeper at Chinese history.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 09:21
|
|
|
chopper city posted:Mao aint cause no drat famines. Cmon son. You do research better than this. I don't know if you just phoned this one in and ran Whatever or if thats your real idea but look deeper at Chinese history.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 09:38
|
|
|
JT Jag posted:Are you claiming that the economic and social policies of Mao's PRC, particularly the Great Leap Forward, was a non-factor in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961? Because you're the first person I've ever heard to make this claim. No, no, I think he's got a point. I'm sure that having farming villages abandon agriculture in order to make steel in lovely wood furnaces with no expert oversight had no effect on their ability to produce food on the scale needed to provide for three quarters of a billion people. It was probably just the weather. 
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 12:11
|
|
|
Bobbin Threadbare posted:There is one exit from the market area that leads into a portion of the Canal Road Tunnel, which is a small map and a dead end; there are two exits which lead into the canals themselves, including a famously out-of-the-way detour that leads to another section of the Canal Road Tunnel. For comparison, the canals area CRT section is about the same size as the entire map for the regular CRT zone. So my question is: just how less expansive is the canals area on the PS2 compared to the surprisingly vast canals area in the PC version?
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 15:42
|
|
|
chopper city posted:Mao aint cause no drat famines. Cmon son. You do research better than this. I don't know if you just phoned this one in and ran Whatever or if thats your real idea but look deeper at Chinese history. While Mao was an incredibly skillful revolutionary, he... wasn't particularly talented at agricultural planning, to put it politely.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 16:14
|
|
|
Keeshhound posted:No, no, I think he's got a point. I'm sure that having farming villages abandon agriculture in order to make steel in lovely wood furnaces with no expert oversight had no effect on their ability to produce food on the scale needed to provide for three quarters of a billion people. It was probably just the weather. I think the best part of the GLF was how nobody up top figured out how badly they were hosed until way late because Mao launched this 'if you have good politic you will succeed' thing right on the heels of the anti-rightist campaigns so everyone was super paranoid. And then one regional party member starts lying about his output, and then everyone else has to lie to catch up... There's actually a great documentary shot of a village coming down from the collectivization era where they're bitching and moaning about how, just as they've figured it out, the government is yet again loving with their lives.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 16:18
|
|
|
I think the operative word is 'caused'; there would likely have been a famine of some sort anyway. It probably wouldn't have been nearly as bad without the unique cocktail of terrible policy taking place, but the climatic effects would've been pretty lovely by themselves. So, the great chinese famine was not 'caused' by Mao in the same sense as the Bengali famine not being 'caused' by the British Raj, but unlike the sense that, say, the Dutch famine of 1944 was 'caused' by the Germans and the wartime conditions.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 16:40
|
|
|
V. Illych L. posted:the Bengali famine quote:the Dutch famine of 1944 You better stick to the Irish potato plague and the Golodomor if you want to make sense.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 17:14
|
|
|
Xander77 posted:Who? A pair of famines which can be directly blamed on World War 2. Bengal is a region between India and Japanese-occupied Burma, so the British scorched the earth and confiscated all the boats to make it more treacherous to travel through. However, the administrators failed to account for how little food would be left for the people living there and didn't issue sufficient rations until after it was too late. Foreign supply was also low thanks to the Atlantic and Pacific campaigns, but ultimately protectionist policies that prevented the movement of foods throughout India and nonexistent economic statistics which allowed policymakers to ignore the facts are what left the Bengali starving. The causes of the Dutch famine were very similar: The Allies had landed in France and reached the southern parts of the Netherlands, but in the winter of '44 the push had stalled somewhat and as the Dutch resistance geared up the Nazis retaliated by cutting off food shipments. Between a harsh winter, being the a battlefield for months, and a lack of food from outside sources, the Dutch went hungry. Their troubles were ultimately lessened by careful rationing and eventual food drops from Allied and neutral nations, but thousands still died. Droughts are caused by nature, but for the most part it seems like politics cause famines once a population has gotten past the subsistence level.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 18:10
|
|
|
Bobbin Threadbare posted:Tonnochi Road has plenty of people on it considering the map's size, plus the canals map is pretty interesting with how almost every oddly placed pocket you find has someone living in it. I won't argue about the vibe, though, especially since the soundtrack for those two areas is named "Desolation." And it's a good showcase of how make a big map with still a lot of content. Compare that to some of the mods attempting to recreate large locations and you get a different appreciation for what they did with let's say, half of the RedSun 2020 mod where they go for sprawling large locations, a quarter completely in the dark. Small things like having a miniature Tonnochi Road (With the pink haired student walking around the bottom) on Versalife or rendering some "rooms" behind the windows helps give the whole city a wider feel that it actually is.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 19:35
|
|
|
paragon1 posted:More like that's all JC knows to ask for. You'd think so, but the two other people in the teahouse, who recommend you fancy Chinese teas, also only have cans of soda sitting on their table. Clearly all of Chinese tea tradition was reduced to different flavours of carbonated beverages.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 20:06
|
|
|
Maybe they just switched to selling their tea in cans and licensed the Nuke label. I guess I'll be the voice of dispute and say I hate the Hong Kong music. Too overbearing for my taste, and the dose of orientalism doesn't help.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 21:07
|
|
|
Bobbin Threadbare posted:Droughts are caused by nature, but for the most part it seems like politics cause famines once a population has gotten past the subsistence level.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 21:17
|
|
|
JT Jag posted:Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, argued in his book that famines only take place in a political environment where information is controlled: No free press and no voting. A famine has never occurred in a democratic country, because in a democratic country the leadership would be forced to make solving a crisis on the scale of a famine its first priority or otherwise risk being tossed out. Dictatorships (and, in earlier centuries, feudal societies) can ignore the plight of the common man for a time if they consider the harm they are undergoing to be worthwhile in the long term. Does the dust bowl count as a famine, and if so do they bring it up at all? Because the US is a democratic republic.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 22:35
|
|
|
FoolyCharged posted:Does the dust bowl count as a famine, and if so do they bring it up at all? Because the US is a democratic republic. It counts as a drought, but FDR's government reacted fairly quickly to mitigate the damage and minimize starvation, so "famine" would probably be stretching it. More people probably died of dust pneumonia than from lack of food, to put it in perspective. If anything, it'd be evidence for their conclusions, rather than a counterpoint.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 23:10
|
|
|
FoolyCharged posted:Does the dust bowl count as a famine, and if so do they bring it up at all? Because the US is a democratic republic. That's just the thing, the Dust Bowl was a catastrophic drought to which the government responded by buying up cattle for more than they were worth to keep the ranchers in business, provided money to farmers who followed land conservation techniques, and then gave away the food it purchased in this manner to the poor and starving. There was a widespread drought, but no widespread famine. Actually, I found a couple articles that called called the Dust Bowl a famine, but they're both based on a single Russian researcher who looked at US Census data and very little else. One article was on the English language version of a Russian media site which explicitly used the phrase "Russian patriotic historians" to describe people who agreed with the data, and the second was an unvetted CNN post which called out the Masons for deleting the Russian historian's information from Wikipedia and is exactly the sort of article I'd use as a source if famines came up in Deus Ex. So yeah, to answer your question I'd have to say "No, and thank goodness it wasn't." Oh, and I spoke too soon when I said the canals would be in next week's video. Turns out the waterways and the mall maps have enough content that I split them into two videos.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2014 23:23
|
|
|
JT Jag posted:Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, argued in his book that famines only take place in a political environment where information is controlled: No free press and no voting. A famine has never occurred in a democratic country, because in a democratic country the leadership would be forced to make solving a crisis on the scale of a famine its first priority or otherwise risk being tossed out. Dictatorships (and, in earlier centuries, feudal societies) can ignore the plight of the common man for a time if they consider the harm they are undergoing to be worthwhile in the long term. That is a very interesting way of looking at it. It made me curious, so I poked around and found some counterexamples pointing to post-independence countries that had famines, specifically Niger and Malawi. However, as far as I can tell, both Niger and Malawi had single-party states until the 90s, so I don't see how it's fair to cite them as counterexamples since they couldn't really be called democracies at the time. Still, very interesting. Also, don't look up Famine on Wikipedia or Google unless you want to feel absolutely horrible. To a certain extent, we all should probably feel a little bad about it just in general.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2014 04:50
|
|
|
Magnetic North posted:I don't see how it's fair to cite them as counterexamples since they couldn't really be called democracies at the time.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2014 09:08
|
|
|
They didn't say that they didn't count because there was a famine, but because they were single-party states. Democracy is supposed to be multi-party, so there's any sort of discussion in the government. Seems pretty clear to me.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2014 10:42
|
|
|
Soricidus posted:I wonder if it would even be possible to disprove this theory, though. It seems very open to this defense: if people starve in a democracy then it wasn't a real famine, if a real famine happens then it wasn't a functioning democracy ... I had the feeling this might get "No True Scotsman'd" on me, but, yeah, what Aithon said: It's not a logical fallacy to indicate that a government is not a democracy. Now, to be fair, I don't know if these governments claimed to be democracies when they in fact were not, or if the opposing theory simply didn't address that it was countering an argument that was not in the source material either in error or due to intellectual dishonesty, or (I think most likely of the three) if perhaps he's saying that "it's not that a lack of democracy causes famine, but rather that democracy can prevent them" in the sense of arguing over logical constructs. I don't wish to get too bogged down in it, but the theories are interesting to me.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2014 15:03
|
|
|
And then there are the ecological gently caress-ups that aren't necessarily the result of a government misleading everyone but everyone everywhere doing stupid poo poo because they all think it sounds cool. Like someone discovering adding lead to gasoline makes your engine stop knocking, so, hey, let's do it! Hindsight is always 20/20. I think that's why Helios makes its case: it claims it's capable of anticipating the outcomes of actions better than humans can, who tend to jump into things with both feet all the time.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2014 19:17
|
|
|
Speedball posted:Hindsight is always 20/20. I think that's why Helios makes its case: it claims it's capable of anticipating the outcomes of actions better than humans can, who tend to jump into things with both feet all the time. Helios also has the collective consciousness of all humanity at it's metaphorical fingertips. If something seems like its going to majorly ruin the lives of a larger segment of the population than is necessary, then it is probably a bad idea.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2014 23:02
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 22:54 |
|
|
JT Jag posted:Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, argued in his book that famines only take place in a political environment where information is controlled: No free press and no voting. A famine has never occurred in a democratic country, because in a democratic country the leadership would be forced to make solving a crisis on the scale of a famine its first priority or otherwise risk being tossed out. Dictatorships (and, in earlier centuries, feudal societies) can ignore the plight of the common man for a time if they consider the harm they are undergoing to be worthwhile in the long term. This actually is a good example of how correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. Since the majority of the world's liberal democracies also happen to be among the richest countries in the world it's not very surprising that you don't see many famines there. On the other hand you probably wouldn't see many famines in the modern western world regardelss of the political system. If we limit ourselves to thrid-world countries the comparison becomes more apt, but then we're left with a pretty small sample size of liberal democracies. We're also left to debate what constitutes a democracy and what counts as a famine. Because lord knows that malnutrition at least is pretty endemic even in the most democratic third-world countries.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2014 23:32
|
|
