Portal, or how a minimalist game can be utterly amazing

Portal
Grade: B+
Platform: GNU/Linux, PC, 360, PS3
Genre: Physics puzzler
Steam: $9.99
Released: 2007

Portal was both an amazing game and the inspiration of far too many "the cake is a lie" jokes.

What makes Portal amazing is how such a minimalist, and very short, game could be such a huge hit, and have no imitators at all to speak of.

If you haven't played Portal, snag a copy and enjoy.  You'll be glad you did.

One thing that makes Portal so intriguing is that it is such a simplistic game.  You make portals, you bounce through them from point to point, and you try to get to the exit.  Admittedly the puzzles are often delightful and well thought out, but the game taken just as physics puzzler would at best merit a C.

What pushes Portal into the realm of greatness isn't just the fact that it had snappy gameplay and tightly designed levels.  What made Portal great was the setting, the story, and the characters.  And only one of the characters talks which makes it all the more amazing.

Portal is a deeply creepy game, one that manages to be menacing, almost frightening at times, all without gore, jump scares, or or any of the other things that are usually deployed in media to up the creep factor.  The first few seconds help establish how subtly, and not so subtly, wrong everything game is.

You waken from a "brief detention" in a "relaxation vault", to find yourself locked in a cell with no door, a radio playing a cheery tune, and everything tries to look like a shiny futuristic lab but actually looks a bit.... worn.  There's subtle stains on all the surfaces, the glass of your suspension pod is scuffed, there's cracks and discolorations on the tiles, and most disturbingly of all you can clearly see that there are no observers behind the frosted glass windows set high in the walls.

All that even before GLaDOS even has the "glitch" where she doesn't tell you the safety procedures.

There is a not so subtle menace in dialog and warnings pretending to be helpful.  "Perfect. Please move quickly to the chamberlock, as the effects of prolonged exposure to the Button are not part of this test."  The words meant to encourage the player are clearly designed to discourage, and the promised reward of cake at the end of testing seems calculated to be all but insulting to an adult.

Long before you encounter the first overt sign of anything wrong, the first of Rat Man's lairs where you see the phrase "the cake is a lie" scribbled over and over on the walls, you know that the testing is a fraud, that the computer (not yet named) is seeking to kill you.

The Rat Man lairs also provide you with your first glimpse behind the scenes.  The formerly pristine white tiles of the test chambers, now discolored and cracked, are merely a facade on ugly industrial particle board.  Behind the once gleaming lab is a grungy machine struggling to keep up a false appearance.

And then, when you reach the end of test chamber 19 and break out, into behind the scenes, you see it from the other side.

Other than the turrets, so creepily saying "I don't blame you" when you destroy them, GLaDOS is the only voiced character, but the other characters are not exactly empty or undeveloped.  Even Rat Man who appears only in the debris left in his lairs has a personality of sorts.

Like many games, Portal offers no character customization.  Unlike many games, the character you must play is a woman, and Chell is no tarted up sex object.  You catch a glimpse of Chell in the first chamber, hair pulled back into a functional ponytail, a prison orange jumpsuit, and a face with no makeup and no smile.  Chell is very far from a typical game protagonist.  She has no dialog and yet her appearnace and the setting convey some character.  She is clearly not a woman in a place she wants to be, and she will clearly let nothing stand in the way of her escape.  Chell does not fuck around, and every detail of her character is designed to say this.

GLaDOS you don't see until the end, and she is a cluster of spheres on a central apparatus of some sort.  Her voice is calm, mechanical, and menacing even before she begins directly threatening you. The dialog is cleverly designed to sound like bits and pieces of what might be actual testing dialog snipped apart and recombined for GLaDOS' own purposes.

All of which makes the shift in her tone to a less artificial, less distant, sort of voice into one with much more personality and direct interest in you seem so very much more threatening.

A physics puzzle game without an intriguing setting and characters, even one as mechanically sound and well designed as Portal, wouldn't be as memorable.  Portal, like all the best games, gives the impression that there is more to it, that if you tried hard enough you could find out more about the characters, that you could find more secrets, that you could open more doors and find more places.

The fact that the designers managed all this in a game that, even on the first playthrough only takes four hours or so, is nothing short of amazing.  Portal is pure poetry, every line and level polished to perfection.

Food Blogging: Japanese Style Curry Rice

Curry Rice

Type: Japanese

Difficulty: Easy

Non-Standard Ingredients: Japanese style curry roux

Grade: C+

It's easy to see why curry rice is one of the most popular foods in Japan.  It is one of the quintessential Japanese comfort foods, a dish eaten both in restaurants and made at home, it can be made with expensive ingredients turned into a gourmet treat, or bought pre-made in a pouch for a dollar and poured over some rice by broke college students, or it can be anything in between.  No matter how you eat it, where it comes from, or how much it costs, curry rice is always good.

This is one of the very few recipes where I'll advocate using something pre-prepared as the critical part of a main dish.  Normally I'm all about making things from scratch but trying to make your own Japanese style curry sauce that tastes right is an exercise in futility; so use a curry roux from the store.  I listed it as a non-standard ingredient, but I've found Japanese style curry roux for sale in Wal-Mart so it isn't exactly rare or hard to find.

There are two major brands in Japan, House is the most popular, followed by S&B.  I prefer S&B, but House is perfectly fine too.

As a comfort food, it's hard to beat.  Warm, filling, spicy, savory, filled with onions and carrots, it warms you on a cold night, and tastes just fine on a muggy summer night, it's great for nights alone or nights with the family.  There's never a bad time to eat a plate of curry rice.   Eat it with your family along with a conversation, or eat it watching Netflix by yourself.  It's also delicious put in the fridge and nuked for lunch the next day.  Hell, I've eaten it for breakfast from time to time.

Curry's introduction to Japan shows how secluded Japan had kept itself during the Edo Period.  India isn't exactly right next door to Japan, but it isn't that far away.  Yet curry didn't come to Japan until it was brought by British sailors in the 1870's.  

Which is why Japanese style curry has a distinctly British aspect and doesn't much resemble any any of the Indian curries, or Thai curries, or really any other curry.  Basically it's sort of like beef stew with some fancy spices served over rice.

Japanese recipes always call for potatoes, but I find that redundant since it's served over rice and so I usually leave potatoes out.  Also, if I leave the potatoes out all I have to wash is the pot I make the curry in and the rice pot.

Below is a "recipe", but really it's just my take on following the directions on the box of curry roux. This isn't just an easy recipe, it's the sort of thing a person can do if they've never cooked before in their lives.

Ingredients
1 Package curry roux
1.5 pounds thin sliced beef
1 pound crinkle cut frozen carrots (or fresh if you're super fancy)
1.5 pounds thin sliced onion
1 serving rice per person (short grain rice or sushi rice is best)

Following the instructions for your rice cooker, get the rice going.  It should be finished by about the time you're done with the curry.  If you don't have a rice cooker, I'm very sorry for you and highly recommend you get one, but in the meantime you can make your rice in a pot (don't stir it!).

Heat a tablespoon or so of oil in a very large skillet or a pot.  Slice the onions into long thin strips, and saute them over high heat until slightly browned.  While that's happening cut the beef into bite sized chunks, slice the curry roux into small pieces for quicker integration, and nuke the carrots for a few minutes to get thawed.

Don't brown the meat, normally you'd want to but for thin sliced beef and this sort of dish it'll get tough if you do.

Reduce heat to medium, add carrots, beef, the amount of water called for by the curry roux, and the cut up curry roux.   Stir until it begins bubbling, then reduce heat to low and lid.  Allow to simmer until the rice is done.

I find that the normal S&B is a bit less currylike than I prefer, so I always add a bit of black pepper and some extra curry powder.  Taste it and decide for yourself if you want to add extra spices or not.

Dish up some rice, pour the curry on top, grab a fork, and dig in, life will be better with curry.

Doom

Doom
Grade: B+
Platform: These days literally everything including toasters, originally PC
Genre: FPS before there was FPS
GOG $5.99
Released: 1993

Doom was far from the first FPS game (there were FPS games going as far back as 1974 even though the acronym hadn't been invented yet), but in a lot of ways it is the origin of the modern FPS game.  And yet it differs in a great many critical aspects from virtually all modern FPS games, some good, some bad, and some just different.

Of course, Wolfenstein 3D came before Doom, but it was Doom, not Wolfenstein, that took the title of granddaddy of FPS games, and until the term FPS was invented people described FPS games as "Doomlikes" or "Doom clones".

A good place to start with Doom is what it doesn't have, or didn't require.

Doom is not, actually, 3D.  It pretends to be, but it isn't.  You aim only horizontally and there is no vertical control at all.  This is sometimes a bit jarring, such as when you meet the first imp and it is standing on a raised platform, but you can shoot it despite your gun clearly being aimed at the platform, not the imp.

Doom does not require a mouse (though it can use one and only the most masochistic modern gamer will try it without a mouse).  In the dark days of 1993 mice were still far from standard peripherals and a great many people, even gamers, didn't have them.  I didn't when I first got Doom, in fact playing it through again for this review is the first time I've ever played Doom with a mouse.

Doom has no shields.

Doom has no regenerating health.

Doom has no regenerating anything.

Doom, compared to modern FPS games, has a shockingly low rate of fire for most weapons.

Games evolve, and Doom is ancestral to the modern FPS, but still clearly shows its descent from other games and gaming styles.  Clearly one of the parents of Doom was the shooter game, a genre mostly extinct but with a closely related descendant genre in the bullet hell style of game.  In shooter games, the player moves quickly, usually much more quickly than the enemy bullets, and gameplay involves dodging enemy shots.  Doom is like that, with the player zipping across the battlefield at high speed and dodging enemy bullets as he goes.

In the modern FPS the idea of dodging most enemy attacks is simply absurd, but it is a critical component of Doom.  Enemies fire attacks that crawl towards the player not merely allowing, but demanding, that the player dodge them.

Because, as noted above, nothing in Doom regenerates.  There are no shields, and your health is limited, and enemy attacks take off a lot of that limited health pool if they hit.

The modern FPS turns the player into a meat shield, while seeking cover is both good and necessary, it is understood that the player will be shot, several times, during any encounter, and that in between encounters the player's health and shields will fill back up, or that the player will even hide behind cover at least long enough for their shields to recharge.

In Doom you dodge or you die, and a skilled player can dodge virtually every attack directed at them. This clearly shows a common ancestry with games like Galaga and Vanguard.

Also unlike your average modern FPS, Doom isn't much on story.  Sure, there's an instruction manual that talks about Mars and demons and so on, but the story isn't in the game.  You shoot demons, find keys, and shoot more demons until you can get the BFG and kill the big boss demons.  There's your story chum.

Doom came from an era when games were, mostly due to hardware limits, fairly sharply divided into story intense but graphically limited and mechanically limited games, and games with little story but detailed and snappy game mechanics.  Doom fits unapologetically  into the second category.  It is a game, first and foremost, about playing the game.  Story is crammed in as a far distant second priority, and the game doesn't really suffer for that.

Where Doom shines is in gameplay and level design.

Once you remap the controls (using a separate utility, no in game keymapping supported) to use WSAD, with A & D being strafing rather than turning, Doom is a game with tight controls, allowing you to dodge enemy attacks with ease, while positioning yourself to take down the enemies with a few well placed shots.  I have absolutely no idea how I managed to win the first time I played Doom with the default keybinds (and no mouse) way back in the day, but I managed it somehow.

As mentioned earlier, Doom has remarkably slow animations and firing on the first two weapons.  Your pistol fires only once every half second or so, and the shotgun takes at least a full second to ready before it can be fired again.  This requires you to play defensively, dodging around while you arrange matters so your slow firing weapons can take out enemies.  Later weapons sometimes have faster firing (the chaingun wouldn't be a chaingun without a high cyclic) but many still retain a much slower rate of fire than many modern gamers expect.  You mostly can't just spray and pray, you must aim, and that's a bit tricky sometimes due to the lack of a targeting reticle.

Doom is hard, and that's part of the point and joy of playing.  Back in the old days games tended to be harder than modern games, and Doom is no exception.  I can understand why game difficulty was decreased, but I often wish games had at least an option for greater difficulty (even BioShock Infinite's 1999 mode wasn't really that hard)

Doom also features level layouts that are, in my opinion, often vastly superior to the level design in many modern FPS games.  The image on the left (a meme floating around the net since 2010) is exaggerated for comic intent of course, your typical modern FPS isn't quite that simplistic in its maps, but it is true that compared to most modern FPS games, the maps in Doom are sprawling and complex.  It's easy to get lost, especially given how few textures they were able to cram in (again, hardware limits), but fortunately there's a built in map feature that helps you out.

Doom maps were also a first for FPS games because they were dynamic.  Platforms moved, doors opened and closed, pillars lowered to reveal prizes, and monsters burst from hidden doors to surprise you.

Doom both invited and rewarded exploration in a way that many modern games don't, and due to their mechanics often really can't; regenerating health and shields takes away the urgency of finding boosters in game.  Often Doom will give you a glimpse of a valuable prize, which can be seen easily but which can only be reached by hunting around for hidden doors or finding concealed elevators.  The player has to learn to look for out of place (or sometimes backwards) textures, and is rewarded for this by gaining access to better equipment.  Sometimes finding the secrets is the difference between life and death, no regenerating health means getting the healing packs is often absolutely essential.

The modern FPS could stand to take a lesson or two from Doom on level design, and how the level design lead the players to the secrets without the need for in game exposition or explanation.  Like the way first few seconds of Super Mario Bros is a perfectly designed tutorial on the basics of gameplay, the first few moments in Doom show you that there are areas in the game that require you to hunt for secret ways to access.  The very first thing you see as you begin play is a courtyard viable through a window, but not accessible through the window, with a giant glowing set of armor set on a pedestal surrounded by toxic waste.  The invitation to find a way to get to it couldn't be clearer.  When, at the end of a level, it shows you a percentage for secrets found, the urge to go back and play through the level again to bring it up to 100% is almost overwhelming for a certain type of gamer.

On the bad news side, it turned John Romero into a crazed ego monster who harmed the developer centered model of game design with the execrable Daikatana and the godawful hype built up around it that fed his ego.

But that to the side, Doom stands up well to the test of time.  It not only spawned a genre that continues to be massively popular, but at least in terms of level design it remains superior to many of its descendants, and remains playable and enjoyable to modern gamers, and a game that programmers have taken as a challenge to port to a truly ridiculous array of low powered devices.  That's an achievement not many 23 year old games can claim.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road
Grade: A
Genre: Action

I'm not an action movie fan.  I don't particularly dislike action movies, but they aren't my favorite genre.  Which is why, watching Mad Max in the theater last year, I was surprised to notice, about halfway through the movie, that my face ached and I felt kind of stiff because I'd been sitting, literally, on the edge of my seat with a rictus grin of joy, awe, and amazement on my face.

Before I get into the more important parts of the review, there is one thing that stands out about Fury Road that makes it amazing, the severe shortage of downtime.  As Randal Monroe observed in this XKCD strip, most "action" movies are mostly about a bunch of people talking with a few spurts of action in between the talking.

I can't find an actual breakdown of action vs talking in Fury Road, I may try to time it myself one day, but there isn't much talking and there's a whole lot of action.  If, out of two hours of movie there were even thirty minutes that wasn't action I'll be amazed.

Fury Road is simply one long, extended, car chase filled with explosions and gunfire.

It is a movie that grabbed me from the first scenes, held my throat in its fist for the full two hours, and finally left me gasping for breath and begging for more at the end.  I have never, in my entire life, experienced a movie that managed to maintain the adrenaline pumping thrill of a well shot and choreographed action sequence for that long.

And yet, if that was all there was to Fury Road, it'd be a fine bit of action poetry but ultimately (like Sucker Punch) kind of forgettable.

But unlike Zach Snyder, George Miller managed to put characters you care about, characters who grow,  and even a plot and some serious thinking into the poetry he wove out of sheer pulse pounding action.

Miller takes the axiom of show, don't tell, to an extreme and manages to make it work.  The setting tells the story, the costumes tell the story, the characters tell the story by the way they look and how they stand and move and behave.  But they don't tell the story by talking much.

I'd compare this to the way that some very good written science fiction conveys a wealth of world building through only a few lines of dialog or a description that isn't directly exposition.  The exposition, the unveiling of the world, is there but only to the reader willing to invest the time to think it through and figure it out.  Fury Road is much the same.

We know, for example, a great deal about Furiosa.  We know that she believes she has crossed the moral event horizon, that she has done things to survive that violated every moral and ethical tenet she holds.  And we know this not through someone telling us, but simply by who she is, what she is, and the setting she exists in.

She is the only woman to hold any position of martial power in Immortan Joe's society.  Every single other member of his military is a man.  His entire society is based around turning women into property, valuing them only for their reproductive ability, in a way that is a cartoon caricature of the worst of patriarchy.  And yet, in that society, Furiosa, captured as a slave when she was a child, has risen to be one of his most trusted lieutenants.

All this is conveyed simply by the setting, Furiosa being who she is, and, when she was asked what she was looking for, her one word answer: redemption.

Miller writes dialog like words cost money, and the result is beautiful, rich, storytelling done with almost no words at all.  The entire evolving relationship between Max and Furiosa, a relationship that begins with them as bitter enemies and grows to them becoming true comrades in arms, is accomplished with virtually no dialog at all.  Words are almost wholly replaced by action and expression not just there, but through the movie as a whole, and it is vastly better for it.

Unlike the other Mad Max movies, there is no voice over dénouement at the end.  I think Miller made exactly the right decision there.  The movie stands on its own, and it doesn't need Charlize Theron explaining it to us once its over.

All told, Fury Road is well deserving of an A, it is easily two steps up from the average movie in terms of artistry, craft, and sheer enjoyment.  Especially when you remember that they did almost all of it with practical effects, not CGI.  Miller made Fury Road by heading into the outback with a bunch of cars, cameras, and actors, then shooting over 500 hours of material that he cut down to a single, glistening, gem exactly two hours long.

Food Blogging: Rigatoni alla Genovese

Pasta alla Genovese

Type: Italian
Difficulty: Easy
Non-Standard Ingredients: None
Grade: C

I'd never made la Genovese before, but prompted by a posting on reddit, I decided to give it a shot.  I stuck with the most traditional recipes I could find, looking for that authentic taste, and I think I'd have liked it better if I'd moved away from the traditional a bit.

For my taste, it's kind of bland and way to sweet.

My partner said she thought it was pretty good, but that she preferred a more savory sauce herself. Our kid said he thought it was OK in his "I'm being very polite" tone of voice, and then asked me not to make it again.  Unfortunately he's quite picky so that wasn't a surprise. How a pair of foodies like us wound up with a picky eater is a mystery.

My hope had been that, like all the people singing the praises of la Genovese say, the simplicity would make things amazing.  Either my palate is too unrefined, or I did something wrong, or it just plain isn't the sort of thing I like.  I'm leaning towards the last option.

Make no mistake, it wasn't bad.  I just felt kind of meh about it.  If I were to make it again I'd add rosemary maybe, or perhaps oregano and basil, maybe some tarragon to go with the onion. Something.

It is not a short recipe.  Total cooking time is around six hours, but your involvement is about 30 minutes of prep and occasionally stirring.  Not a great meal for a weeknight, but you can make it on the weekend and still get in your reading or Netflixing or gaming or what have you.

You begin with a mirepoix, or at least the carrot and celery parts of a mirepoix, because you'll be adding plenty of onion very soon. I used a rib of celery and a carrot, some recipes called for two celery and two carrots but most called for one so I went along.

Then the meat, in my case 2.8 pounds of bone in shoulder roast, nice and fatty, bone for extra flavor, and all in all a good choice of meat for a long braise, which is basically what la Genovese is.

I cut it into bite sized chunks, browned it, then added the carrot and celery, also the bones and all the meat I couldn't cut off the bones.

dang that's a lot of onions

That's 7 large yellow onions, one onion short of 5.5 pounds, six thin sliced and ready to go the seventh left for scale in the photo then sliced and added to the bowl.

They filled the pot, almost to the brim. Slapped a lid on, gave it stir every now and then, and an hour later it looked like this:

Why no, I didn't add any liquid, that's all onion and meat juice.

After letting it cook for a total of five hours or so, removing the bones and pulling all the cooked meat off I could, and then letting it gently boil down with the lid off to get a bit less watery, it looked delicious.

The recipes all said a big cylindrical pasta was best, so I went with rigatoni.  Mixed the pasta with the sauce, plated, and the result was indeed a lovely looking dish of pasta.  I added Parmesan, the real stuff not that nasty crap from Kraft, per the recipe, before I ate, but took a picture of just the sauce and pasta.

And it was.... ok.  Obviously a lot of people like it, but as I noted earlier I found it a bit meh, and too sweet.  I knew it'd be sweet, you can't cook down 5.5 pounds of onions for hours without getting a sweet result, but I was unprepared for how almost cloyingly sweet it was.

Again, it wasn't bad.  I just didn't care much for it.  Which is a shame, because I love onions, and really wanted to like it.  Oh well, I may make a less traditional batch with some herbs and spices added someday.

Full Recipe:

2.8 pounds of fatty beef with bone in, or 2 pounds of leaner boneless beef.
5 to 7 pounds onions
1 rib celery
1 carrot
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Rigatoni or your favorite large cylindrical pasta

Thin slice the onions, this will take a while, there's a lot.  If you have a mandolin that'd be the quickest and most dangerous way to get the job done.

Cut the beef into bite sized cubes and brown with a touch of olive oil in the pot, including the bones if you've got bones.  Once browned, add the carrot and celery, saute for a moment, then reduce heat to medium add the onions.  All of them.

Add salt and pepper, then lid and allow to cook for ten or fifteen minutes before stirring for the first time.  Lid again, and give a stir every fifteen or so minutes for the next four to five hours until cooked into a delicious mass with the onions mostly dissolving into delicious oniony mushy goodness.

Once cooked to mush, remove the bones, pick off any meat left on the bones and reintroduce to the sauce, and discard the bones.

Remove the lid and allow to boil down until it thickens, depending on how watery your onions were, how tight your lid was, etc this could take anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour.

Prepare your pasta ever so slightly al dente, once it is finished mix with the sauce.  I used a pound of pasta and found it to be not quite enough, I had sauce left over.

Plate, add a healthy sprinkling of fresh grated Parmesian cheese, and broil util the cheese is nice and melty.

You're finished!

Not gaming related, but answers to Today Christian's 10 questions they claim atheists can't answer.

Grade: Difficult to assign a single grade.
Grade for the questions as questions: D-
Grade for clickbait quality: C

Today Christian indulges in the periodic exercise that many Christian publications do of asking fake questions of atheists.  Mostly this shows that the author of the piece has never actually met or talked to an atheist, usually they have clickbait titles, like this one does, making the assertion that an honest atheist can't answer the questions.   

Their clickbait intro above the questions exposes the actual purpose: "Some Questions Atheist [sic] Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer! Which leads to some interesting conclusions…"  

I'm betting it has to do with Romans 1:18-20 and the conclusion that atheists are all secret believers in God who just want to rebel or live in sin.  That's typically where publications of this nature go when they think about atheism.

I have a few questions of my own, beginning with, how did they decide on the name "Today Christian", because that's a terrible, awkward, name.  Perhaps the founder wasn't a native English speaker?  But I'll save my questions and answer theirs.  Unsurprisingly, the answers are not difficult at all.

Link to Today Christian's list of "questions".  

1.       How Did You Become an Atheist?

 I didn't become an atheist, I started as an atheist and see no reason to change that position.  I wasn't raised religious and never had any faith in any god.  Unlike many atheists, I don't have a deconversion story.  I've always been an atheist, kind of boring I'll admit but a very easy answer.

2.       What happens when we die?

We cease to exist. Not exactly a fun or desirable prospect, but reality is what it is and wishing won't make it any different.  One day we may discover a way to do mind uploading or some other technological way to cheat death, I'm pretty sure that we will one day, but I doubt it will be in my lifetime.  My child or possibly his child may live to see immortality,  I almost certainly won't.

3.       What if you’re wrong? And there is a Heaven? And there is a HELL!

What if you're wrong and the real god is Allah? And he's mad because you worshiped Jesus instead of him?  And he's going to throw you into HELL! 

Pascal's Wager only works if you assume there exactly two options: your specific religion and atheism.  Once you widen it to include all the other religions that actually exist then it fails.  And, really, even if it made logical sense, I don't see how it'd lead to salvation.  Surely an all knowing god would be able to differentiate between a genuine believer and someone faking it as a sort of spiritual insurance policy?

Moreover, the question is just a not so veiled threat, a Mafia protection racket on your soul.  Worship my god, you say, or he'll torture you for all eternity.  That's not one beggar telling another where to find free bread, that's a threat and a worse threat than any gangster has ever made.  A mortal gangster after all can, at worst, torture you to death once.  You claim the sadistic and cruel god you worship can torture a person for all eternity without even the hope of death as a way to escape the agony.  That's only "kind and loving" if you suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.

If I'm wrong, well, any just god wouldn't torture people forever based on a failure to worship him, and any unjust god is unworthy of worship.  

4.       Without God, where do you get your morality from?

The same place you do.  There's a bit built into our genome, and a lot from society.  I'd like to imagine that I'm some sort of paragon of virtue and that if I'd lived in the Roman Empire I'd have been an abolitionist and an advocate of women's rights, but in all honesty I'd probably have been like any other Roman citizen.  People generally conform to whatever conditions exist in their society, with a few reformers urging progressive change, and a few reactionaries fighting against progressive change.  

Christians don't get their morality from the Bible, much as they may claim to.  Note, for example, the near total absence of Christians protesting against bankers who charge interest despite the Bible being very explicit in condemning loaning money at interest, and the long history of Christians persecuting Jews who did loan money at interest.  Or the almost universal Christian acceptance of divorce, even among Catholics (though some will justify it by inventing loopholes and rule laywering to allow someone to "annul" a marriage, which totally isn't the same as divorce, because annul starts with an A and divorce starts with a D).

5.       If there is no God, can we do what we want? Are we free to murder and rape? While good deeds are unrewarded?

If the only thing holding you back from murdering and raping is fear of some father figure in the sky punishing you after death, you must be a pretty awful person and I'd really rather you weren't around children.  Perhaps you should seek professional help?

Can we do what we want?  No.  We exist in a society and that society has rules.  Violate those rules and they'll be enforced by society.  And, thanks to our evolutionary path, societies tend to have very similar rules for the basics.  Murder, rape, theft, and assault are crimes in every society.  It gets less universal when you get to the details (what, exactly, differentiates murder from a justified killing?  what, specifically, makes for assault?) but the broad patterns are the same across human societies.

More important, we have an innate sense of morality due to our evolution as a social species.  That fails sometimes, sociopaths for example lack that sense of empathy and morality, and the inborn sense was evolved to be beneficial in a small tribe or pack of humans.  This means it can lead us astray in our current environment.  But that sense that it is wrong to kill or hurt other people has been demonstrated to be inborn rather than social.

Good deeds are unrewarded sometimes.  That's not nice, but it's true.  And bad things happen to good people, because the universe has a large random component.  

Most importantly, why would a god be considered objective even if there was a god?  That's not objective, that's just a god's subjective opinions coupled with a belief that might makes right.

6.       If there is no god, how does your life have any meaning?

I make meaning for myself, as do you.  That's what people do, we make meaning.  

7.       Where did the universe come from?

I don't know.  Current best evidence says there was a big bang around 14 billion years ago and that started the whole thing, but what came before that (or if that question is even meaningful) I don't know.  People are working on figuring that out, and perhaps they'll have an answer before I die.  

The GodDidIt answer is just a long winded and confusing way of saying "I don't know".  The difference between us is not that you know the true origin of the universe and I don't, it's that I'm honest in admitting my ignorance and you aren't. 

Until the 1920's no one knew how the sun burned either, that didn't mean it was a miracle beyond human understanding, it just meant that humanity hadn't yet discovered the principle of atomic fusion.  

8.       What about miracles? What all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?

I would say such people are either mistaken or lying.  People, it turns out, are really bad at accurately observing things.  One of the things that makes science work are the steps a process takes to minimize human error in the observations.  That's why science uses double blind tests, control groups, measurement by instrument rather than human senses, and all the other annoying, painstaking, steps it does.

Human memory is infamously malleable.  People adjust their memories all the time, and will in all honesty remember events that never happened.

Show me a testable miracle that can be empirically verified and I'll concede that it is real.  A bunch of people who imagine that once they saw an angel, I'm afraid I can't just take them at their word.  UFO believers swear they see little green men.  That doesn't mean aliens are really performing proctologies on rednecks.

9.       What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris?

They have (or had, Hitchens is dead now) the occasional valuable contribution.  In addition to that Harris is a right wing lunatic who can't or won't apply even the tiniest bits of reason or self examination to his thought process.  Hitchens was a contrarian for the sake of it and took pleasure in annoying people.  Dawkins has turned into a jerk, or perhaps he always was and it just wasn't obvious, with a serious case of unexamined privilege.  

I'd also ask why you call out those three, I suspect its just laziness as it isn't as if they are the only atheists, or even the only outspoken atheists, in the world.  Asking me to justify them is no more proper or fair than me asking you to justify Timothy McVeigh simply because he happened to be Christian.

10.   If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?

I'm not an anthropologist, but my layman's understanding of it is that it seems that our brains are hardwired for the pathetic fallacy, which has a survival benefit out in the wild even if it isn't true, and which will tend to develop into religion among smart people as time passes.  I will note that "religion" and "god belief" are separate things and that there are societies that have religion while technically being atheist in that they have no gods.  For example, many forms of Buddhism involve no gods.  

There you have it Today Christian, your ten "unanswerable" questions answered, completely honestly and without any real difficulty or trouble.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a review of a classic

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Grade: A
Platform: Windows, Mac
Genre: 4X
GOG $5.99


Easily one of the best 4X games ever developed, available at GOG now for only six bucks, if you haven't played it yet just stop reading and go buy it and you'll easily spend a couple hundred hours playing before you realize it.

Or, if you insist there is more to say in review.

Positioned as a sort of thematic or conceptual sequel to the starship victory in the Civilization series, Alpha Centuri follows the colonists to their new home where they promptly split into ideology driven, as opposed to nationalist or ethnic, factions and start competing for dominance.

It plays largely like other games in the Civilization family tree, the most obvious mechanical difference being that unlike most other Civ games you can design individual units rather than just getting a default unit with certain tech advances.  But there is more to the difference than the obvious, some of the mechanics are significantly different from Civilization's model, and often better.  Alpha Centauri has a dynamic weather system and you can use terraforming to not only help your own society but to hurt your enemies.  Change rainfall patterns to make their crops wither, or even flood them via global warming.  The tech tree is improved as well and has an option for blind research that adds an interesting element to the game.

But what sets Alpha Centauri apart from the Civilization series is not just setting or tone, or even the mechanical differences, but the fact that Alpha Centauri has a story and characters.  The characters are developed mainly as you climb the tech tree or build wonders, each tech or wonder has a quote that is usually from one of the faction leaders and helps breathe life both into their faction and the leader themselves.  The story develops as you play, both in alterations to gameplay and in small text vignettes.

The planet, simply called Planet, is inhabited by life that's alien beyond even starfish aliens.  The dominant life form is a fungus, simply called xenofungus or "the fungus", and all the other life you encounter is deeply related to and basically part of the fungus.  The fungus is also telepathic and pre-sapient when you first encounter it, but grows into a person, a single mind, as it spreads over the planet.

At first the fungus is an obstruction, worthless in terms of resources, slowing down your units, and acting as a hiding place for mind worms which are exactly as awful as they sound; the discovery of fungicidal add ons for your terraformers seems like the best thing ever.  As you progress you can learn how to make the fungus the most valuable resource in the game, you'll be carpeting your territory with as much as you can manage and you'll curse your earlier efforts to get rid of it.

Alpha Centauri takes a decidedly transhumanist approach to things, allowing cybernetics, genetic engineering, brain mapping and upload, and more.  All of which fits the game perfectly and helps propel the story to its natural conclusion.

Each faction is clear, has advantages and disadvantages that fit its ideology, an agenda that makes sense given that ideology, and they will react to you based on your social decisions as well as your more overt diplomatic or warmaking decisions.  The AI isn't especially amazing, but it does a good enough job of providing a challenge.

In addition to the quality writing for the factions and the storyline in general, Alpha Centauri features well done voice acting for each faction leader that helps make them memorable.  The rich rolling voice of CEO Nwabudike Morgan helps establish him as the sort of person who despises most of humanity but makes a pretense of caring about the little people, while Sister Miriam Godwinson speaks with a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle), but threatening, air of conviction and righteousness.

If it weren't for the overarching story, the rich world building, the well developed factions, and the integration of transhumanist themes, Alpha Centauri would simply have been Civilization with different art assets (looking at you Civilization: Beyond Earth) and we'd have long forgotten it.  As it is, it stands out not merely as a well done member of the Civilization family, but also as one of the better 4X games yet developed.  This shows that it is possible to incorporate a story and characters into the 4X genre, and that if done well it can make the game vastly better.

It holds up very well, both in terms of graphics and gameplay.  Despite being 17 years old  the gameplay is still fresh (which says something not at all hopeful about the 4X genre, which seems to be stagnating) and the game entertaining and challenging.

The only expansion for the game, Alien Crossfire, is a mixed bag.  The alien factions are interesting enough, and obviously thought went into trying to make them alien, but the extra human factions mostly seemed cheap and lazy compared to the original factions, a couple stood out as worthwhile but mostly they were bleh. Mostly it is worthwhile for the gameplay improvements, the addition of fungal towers we very good, and some of the added tech improves the game greatly. Fortunately it is possible to use the improvements of the add on without bothering with the somewhat inferior factions it included.

The combination of a fresh take on the 4X genre, the well executed world building, the addition of personalities, characters, and story to the 4X genre, all combine to make Alpha Centauri a game truly worthy of an A.