My new vice. Say hi to Cheney Chick when you meet her and W Bush on the Freedom server.
Posted on 11/18/2004 9:40:03 AM PST by red_is_beautiful
This time, the blood spills in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," which looks, feels and sounds a lot like its predecessors. That means you pull off drive-bys and other hard-core criminal goals, while killing cops, prostitutes and hundreds of innocent victims on the side. Some people complain that the game could desensitize children to murderous images. But it's rated M for Mature. Kids aren't supposed to have access to it, even though we know that many will. [...] There's sex in "San Andreas," as there was in "Grand Theft Auto III." For a small amount of money, you can pick up hookers and drive them behind a bush. The car rocks. Talk is exchanged. [...] The game is smart like that, but the characters aren't. The one thing I can't make happen is intellectual reflection. Characters point guns. Characters kill one another other. Not one stops to think.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesdispatch.com ...
For some reason, I never had problems with that mission, though my friends did.
The RC helo is pretty twitchy, but I found the Red Baron RC biplane mission harder.
Shumpeter was wrong across the board.
Thrift means getting the greatest value for your money, not paying more than you have to so you HAVE money to put in the bank. WalMart and other discount retailers are built on giving the lowest cost possible (though WalMart suffers on the value thing, they generally sell cheap crap for cheap, other discount retailers though do better on the value).
Yeah we're indebted, but there's still a healthy chunk of society that saves up for purchases. Delayed gratification is FAR from dead.
The mass marketer is neither evil nor destructive, he just sells junk, that's his job. He has no agenda of subordinating anything or anyone other than people selling competing products; church, family and culture don't sell competing products so they simply are not on his radar.
He's not destructive of parental authority, but he does understand who actually buys the toys. Good parents though teach their kids the value of the dollar and don't buy Johnny every shiny trinket he asks for.
Do you have any idea how much marketing daytime TV is saturated with? Actually done a stop watch test to find out how much of Rush's 3 hours are spent on commercials? How painstakingly EVERYTHING is marketed. Good marketing doesn't put the marketer at odds with the customer, good marketing works WITH the customer, working against the customer makes them angry and reduces sales.
I know marketers I know for a FACT that the only specific set of values they have is PROFIT. They want it, they're all for it, they'll do anything to get it, and any morality they have is instilled directly from the customer. I'm all for not buying products that you feel are immorally marketed, boycott the hell out of them, but also encourage products that are morally marketed that way your message is complete. You must speak their language, their panguage is money. That's all they want, more money. When you give them a goal outside of profit you are wrong, and in being so wrong you have turned the issue into something it isn't, and set yourself up to lose the competition.
That took me a lot of practice(stairway especially). I eventually got it. I use the chopper blade to take out the IUPAT types that try and destroy it, and just went one bomb at a time from bottom to top. I eventually got it with about 30 seconds to spare.
It's the game that they use on History Channel's Decisive Battles show. Play as one of the three Roman Families, or one of the other civs in the region. The battles are awesome. It takes place ~ 250 B.C. but you build up your family and territory over time. I'm now at 190 B.C., playing slowly, and have just decimated all of Egypt in a series of epic battles, 1500 men on a side. It's a goodie.
It also puts into perspective a bit as to how many men used to routinely die in battle, versus our more 'compassionate' view of warfare today.
Halo and Halo2 are the ONLY M-rated games I let my kids play. I disagree with the M-rating for those two games. Sure, there's a lot of gunfire and explosions, but that's the fun of the game. Then there's a little bit of neon blue/green alien blood when you kill a baddie. Kind of cartoonish, so OK. If a human gets killed, there's a little spray of red on the ground or wall. Not bad.
I'm VERY selective about what TV shows and movies my kids watch and very selective about the games they play. Halo and Halo2 passed the test and my 9-year-old daughter and her 10-year-old brother finished Halo2 in about 3 days. I watched them do most of it. Besides the limited blood and a little bit of PG-rated language, the game was just fine.
If it was rated like a movie, I would give it a light PG-13 and I've let my kids watch a handful of those depending upon the content. R-rated movies are not permitted nor would a game that would earn an R-rating. Halo and Halo2 would not, in my opinion.
If you don't believe me, play it yourself for a while. Buy it from a store that would let you sell it back if you don't like it. Sure, you won't get what you paid for it but at least all your money wouldn't be wasted. My bet is that you'll approve it for your kids to play.
Are you familiar with CounterStrike? How does it compare? I guess as long as they're killing aliens -- rather than other human beings, as in CS -- Halo should be okay.
So put your money in the bank, teach your children to do the same, and leave the rest of us alone. I no more want you dictating my life than I do Hillary Clinton.
Holding out on buying any of the GTA series until they add liberal reporters to the game.
Actually, that was my thoughts. Now, don't go off thinking that Halo2 is not violent or that there is not any frightening imagery. There are some aliens that are pretty gross and scary and some humans do get killed.
Plus, the XBox Live stuff is human vs. human. And, as with any XBox Live game, the language on the headset from the other live players is very foul. We play with the headset disconnected. Now, with Halo2 you can put the live conversation through the speakers - in fact, that is the default. I would recommend you change that if you have kids. We keep it off.
I'm gonna try out the gamefaqs.com tips I found tonight.
Wasn't arguing your premise either way, just pointing out an oft-repeated error.
W was reelected because America is in the midst of a full bore Christian revival that sees no reason why America popular culture cannot be what it was before 1970.There's one huge reason: individual liberty. We're simply not going to accept that voluntarily, and you're unable to force it without dramatically curtailing said liberty. For everyone. Are you willing to live in what amounts to a police state to ensure that your neighbors aren't partaking in "naughty" entertainment? By the way, if so, you'd better get rid of the Second Amendment, too.
Bush and the GOP know that there's two critical parts to the current GOP coalition. One is the social conservatives. The other, perhaps even larger, is the fiscal/defense conservatives who are socially libertarian.
Ronald Reagan built the greatest electoral majority in recent history by keeping the left from forcing their anti-religious propaganda on the religious right, while refusing to let them enforce any cultural restraints. Conversely, when the religious right was allowed to have too much control of the GOP's agenda, we got eight years of Clinton.
It happens historically. A full bore Christian revival replaced Regency culture with Victorian culture. And it was Christianity in the first place that displaced the carnal culture of late antiquity.That was not in a free society. A free society such as ours inevitably resists any attempt to dictate what shall be culturally popular. Indeed, America has developed the first true "popular culture", based upon individual preferences instead of "what's good for us", as interpreted by an elite. This culture is spreading the globe, carrying basic American concepts like individual liberty and freedom of conscience in its wake.
"Cultural conservatives", who are actually cultural collectivists, hate this, whether they are in Alabama , Afghanistan, France, or Brazil. In nations where liberty has not taken root, they have been able to suppress it.
Here, such an attempt, if made, Shall Be Resisted.
We have already seen the cultural reaction building up and it is only starting as America gets redder and redder.America is getting redder and redder because the Democrats are all about the centralization of power and authority. The way to continue that trend is not to ape their approach towards same.
And it is what makes defenses of GTA on "free speech" ground so ridiculous. GTA was never meant for adults. It was always marketed entirely to children. It was never meant for "mature" audiences. It is a shot across the bow from mass media to every family in this country. The people who created GTA have targetted your child. So censorship is how parents fight back.Interesting. Several of us, presumably adults and presumably conservatives (the latter proven by our unzotted status) have and play the game. So your claim that it was meant primarily for children falls flat on its face.
Proposing censorship "for the children" is much like arguing that adults must subsist on formula because baby can't handle steak. It's become a favorite tool of authoritarian wannabes on the left and right, the Hillary's and the Wildmons alike. It is, however, fully incompatible with liberty and freedom.
-Eric
I think everyone here played cops and robbers as kids... I wonder what everyone thinks of that murder game
I don't recall the America of 1960 being a police state. Sure there were stag films in 1960 but nothing like the mainstreaming of porn you see now. So your equation of the reChristianization of America being something like the "Handmaid's Tale" doesn't work.
I will reply more later, but the displacement of Regency by Victorian culture was a democratic victory. It was the churchgoing, pious middle classes imposing their morality or at least the pretense of it on a gambling, bed hopping aristocracy.
My kids said the F-word is uttered by some aliens in the original Halo. (?)
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