- 0 Posts
- 35 Comments
You know that old E=mc² equation? That’s actually only the simplified “rest” half of it. The full equation that relativity gives us says E²=m²c⁴+p²c². Meaning if it has energy, it definitely has mass (m), momentum (p), or both.
For a massless particle like a photon, that means E=pc, and its momentum is proportional to its energy and therefore frequency/wavelength.
Okay I did some math. If the gun shot a single photon with all the energy of a .50BMG from an M2 heavy machine gun, it would have about 1.2e-4 Ns of momentum. For reference, the bullet it’s compared to would have 38.3 Ns. So the photon has about 32000 times less momentum than a bullet. Do with that what you will.
I haven’t played it, I’ve only experienced it through essays. I think it’s because it took a look at war and such from a pretty different perspective than other shooters had before, and examined the messier psychological aspects of it in a way that incorporated traditional shooter gameplay as hadn’t been done before?
On the one hand, I agree about wishing there was more to find than a new color cloak, but on the other hand I think it’s a neat way to keep the game approachable to more casual gamers (and to try and get as many Harry Potter fans to get it as possible). That being said, I would have liked if there were more challenge, and something other than just flat stat improvements could have been a way to keep that interesting if they had higher difficulties.
She is a terrible bigot, and a loud one, and that sucks because she also produced a cultural phenomenon of my childhood, and while the canon of HP is only just barely pretty okay sometimes, it spiralled out from there and SO MUCH of the media and culture I’ve consumed and existed within since then has been informed by it.
So yeah. If there’s any comfort, let it be that any money she gets from this comes from explicitly affirming a trans woman through the work, as well as implicitly affirming any trans players through the character creation options. Small comfort maybe, but she is far away.
On the one hand, yeah. On the other hand, HL:A ended with an obvious sequel hook, and that hook was the ending of HL2:E2. Spoilers, I guess, but the game’s been out for a while.
Of course, that doesn’t mean another game is coming, but it does mean that HL:A doesn’t mean another game isn’t coming, either.
AoM is one that’s in a little subgenre with games like Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends and total war Warhammer. Fantasy versions of strategy games otherwise strictly rooted in reality. Usually they’re great but left as one-offs forced to wallow in relative obscurity, but every now and again one shines through.
The trouble with “gamelike” as a descriptor is really well illustrated here. People will always disagree on how alike the games have to be for it to fit or what particular things it needs to do the same to match, while others will argue that something they play feels like game so it is now gamelike.
Early roguelike games took something rogue did first (repeating often procedural gameplay that at least mostly resets on death) and often ignored other aspects. Arguing about what exact criteria necessary or sufficient to make a game roguelike is like arguing whether a song counts as “punk” or “pop” or “metal”. Different people will feel like it does or doesn’t fit into any particular category for one or another reason, but ultimately the categories exist because some people put things in them and that’s it.
And I get that the business maybe “has” to be run that way, because of the way it exists in the economic system it exists in, but I’m definitely taking issue with the language he’s employed here. He’s not a prisoner being forced to run things this way.