I've been in hibernation lately, a few things going on holding up my life with large periods of little to do, so I've been focused on playing various XBox 360 games, the most recent of which was this week's release of Magic: The Gathering "Duel of the Planeswalkers". It is a fun game but a few these issues to me mean the difference between playing a little of it once in a while and switching over to it as a primary game. I decided to write this up originally to go post on the game forums but decided to make it into a review of sort.

-- Bugs --

I had some thoughts to sort out about this new game so I thought I'd lay it down to see what others think. There will be some criticism in this post but I hope it is defined as "constructive" in nature.

First off, I gotta say that I think the game is good. However, some input is needed and I can only hope this reaches people capable of changing something, albeit I doubt it would. The most important thing to address first, I think, are the bugs in the game.

Several bugs I have noticed: during multiple occassions I have gotten "stuck" while zoomed in on a card, this often means missing important moments. A friend of mine was playing with us in a 3 on 3 game, he had the same thing happen right in the middle of an attack phase, which prevented him from casting Holy Day in time to prevent combat damage that turn, dealing a considerable blow to him early in the game.

Another bug I ran into was during an online 4-player game. I froze the card with the X button as an attack cycle was about to conclude just to see what was up, and quickly hit the Y button to return the game to action. Upon hitting the Y button my screen unfroze (it went from blue to normal), but for some reason the game behaved as if it was still unplayable. Freezing like this leaves a bad impression for the other players, as each of us thinks the others are holding up the game. If somehow one of the other players were holding up the game, that fact should've been visible to us so we would at least know what was going on, but it wasn't - so either way this is a bug. The white timeout bar at the top likewise counted down, I was hoping this would forcefully unfreeze the game, but it did not. Everyone quit as a result.

At least one occassion I was playing a mentoring match and the game froze entirely, completely crashing and leaving me at a static immovable screen that wouldn't even pull up the Xbox menu. I do not have any issues currently with my Xbox that would lead me to think this is a Xbox issue.

-- Fixable issues I hope are addressed in some way --

While not a bug per se, I did happen to stumble into some kind of timeout or whatnot during a blocking phase that was particularly frustrating. The attacker had 9-10 creatures coming at me in a last ditch effort. I had the game won, I just needed to assign a few blockers, I didn't need to block them all. As I was looking at his cards taking my time, and there was a lot to look at, I was just about to assign blockers and somehow my blocking session ended and the attacking started. Unfortunately even though I had the game at an academic victory at that point, because I wasn't able to assign any blockers that turn I lost. Timeout should be variable based on the amount of attacking creatures during that phase to give defenders more time to mull over bigger attacks.

One thing I think which should really be fixed is a couple of simple issues revolving around land. For one, it is difficult to get up to the screen and count your land cards when they are bunched together, and they do not bunch together in definitive groups of 5 or 10. It would be nice if there was a simple counter on the board that simply tallied how many land cards you had in play so you knew offhand how many of each you had without having to get up to the screen to count each individual card (on the left side of the land area a little bit of text stating "Islands: 7/8" would be nice, with the left indicating how many are untapped and the right being total lands). I can't simply zoom in to flip through the land cards as there is no simple way to highlight them that I have discovered.

Another thing I'll note about land is that you should be given the option of tapping and drawing your own mana, if you want to. While the game is fairly intelligent about doing tapping for you, and usually this is not a problem, there is a rare occassion where it doesn't tap the land you want. For instance, let's say I have a spell for 2 colorless and 1 red mana, and 2 red mana and 1 colorless. I have 3 mountains and 3 forests. Naturally it is possible to tap the land and leave enough room for decent spells but often times I run into a situation where I'll play one of the two cards and it'll auto-tap all three mountains. Then of course I have no spare mountain to cast my second spell. It may intelligently try to predict situations like this but if it does it isn't absolute as I can recall at least once already where I had this happen to me.

One last bit of advice I might throw out there is the blue timer countdowns that give everyone that buffer space to interrupt, I like them being swift as it keeps the game moving, but sometimes they can go by a little too fast. Maybe they should be swift for certain periods where it is unlikely they will be interrupted (like during the main phase transitions) but be extended for moves which are more likely to be interrupted (creature summons, combat).

Otherwise gameplay is great. Works fine and is simple, takes some getting used to but that is what mentoring and playing with friends on XBL is for.

-- Thoughts for improvement, expansion --

I want to note that I understand that for an 800 point Xbox Live Arcade game that it may be a bit much to ask for the same kind of full featured experience you might expect from the trading card game itself. That said, I would happily pay another 800 points if the developers of this game were willing to add a "customize deck" feature which actually would let me do more than just swap in/out different default decks with their default unlockable sideboard cards, and then take that deck online and fight others with it. I would even, on top of that extra 800 points, pay extra points to unlock boosters and other card suppliments to further customize my deck. A game like this on a network like Xbox Live is really is the ideal way I always wanted to play Magic (let the computer enforce the rules and the players can simply enjoy the strategy and gameplay), after giving up the card game itself some 6-7 years ago, so I'd be willing to invest into it a bit.

As it stands, Magic is going to be filler for me until I get to the next XBLA title I want to play, Battlefield 1943. Whether I return to Magic will depend on exactly what kind of DLC and bug fixes get applied in the meantime, as the game stands now I don't see myself coming back to it on any regular basis but that could easily be fixed by offering a few improvements like better deck customization. Controlling how many land, character and creature cards I have in the deck itself is necessary for proper strategy. The first thing I'd do is go ahead and get some more enchantment destruction spells in my base decks... then you get into possibility for card trading over XBox Live which would really boost the popularity of card expansion DLC.

I'll suppliment this whole "plea for adding custom decks", which from what I read is really the biggest complaint about the game, with a good point I observed on some of the forums: if you don't get a chance to really get into the gritty of customizing decks - from scratch - you are substantially shortening the lifespan of this game. A shorter game lifespan will have less reception to whatever DLC they DO decide to release for the game. The less forward you go in the respect the more it will make DLC pointless. I really hope the developers realize that this is the difference between a "great" game that could last for years and a game that will last a few weeks to a lot of people. If these issues were fixed I could probably get all my friends to go online and download it.

-- Mentoring --

The mentoring system is a great idea... I went in and met a lot of level headed, cool people on there. I got about 8 games in and got ranked a 5 on all of them which was cool. That said, I realized about 3 games in the only reason people were using the mentoring feature was to play for free on the trial game. I couldn't tell if anybody was in there to actually get help playing the game. The trial users definitely seemed to ask a lot of questions and did need help for a lot of things, but that sorta was a little crappy after realizing I wasn't really mentoring anyone who really wanted help to learn the game.

-- Game setting tips --

I also wanted to share some recommended changes to the gameplay settings, available under the game's "help & options" menu under "settings". I noticed people I was playing with weren't changing these settings too much, so I thought I'd point them out for people who didn't notice they were there:

1. I turned off display hints but obviously you can leave that on if you prefer.

2. Hold priority I turned "on", that way every main phase requires an input from the player. I'd rather have a few minor delays in the game than let the game skip through because it doesn't think I have something to play during a phase.

3. Combat animation I turned off, didn't need it.

4. You can turn on browsing the entire library when you pick a card out of it, but obviously it gets reshuffled. In the interest of expediency I decided against turning on this feature, but it is an option.

5. Auto assign damage and simplified targetting are two features which should be "off" by default, but aren't. While most of the situations you get into this is fine, assigning damage during multiple-blocking situations in combat and being able to target yourself or your own creatures can be vital. I had at least one game I recall where a player was trying to steal a creature of mine and I didn't want to wait until the next phase to prevent the action, but I couldn't because I wasn't able to target him because of simplified targetting.

Alright, that's enough ranting I hope people found it useful/thoughtful. Later.

Just thought I'd pop on for a moment and do a quick video to followup on my previous review of PCSX2, a Playstation 2 emulator for the PC. It is coming along smoothly and works much better than it did back in my review of it a little over a year ago.

The Pitch: A little over a year and a half ago I reviewed PCSX2, a Playstation 2 emulator, and it was of a middling quality. During the initial review it even crashed on me a couple of times. While it was playable, it was very painful to play. Well, development on the project has picked up quite a bit, and speeds and compatibility are very noticably improved. Still using the same machine, I decided to record my latest results. Version featured is 0.9.6. (I have finished both Shadow of the Colossus - speed hack settings a must for that game - and We Love Katamari using this emulator.)

Also featured: my strategy for using emulator save states for hunting metal slimes. Now if I could just figure out a way to make that alchemy pot work faster...

Get it: http://www.pcsx2.net/
Specs: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS 320MB (a bit old now, I know)

You can now log in via Facebook to leave me comments. Soon I will be adding a similar functionality with Myspace accounts. To see it in action just click the comment total at the top of this post or the "read & post comments" link at the bottom right of each post.

Comment!

Edit: I've now added commenting via Myspace to the script as well, so please leave me feedback!

I've done a lot of thinking on the precise nature of ethics, given that ethics grants a fundamental understanding of the relevance of all other philosophies. Trying to tie down a base of knowledge to a single set of ideas is difficult, but a very important thing if you want your ideology to be consistent. Then again, logic and consistency are not two virtues extolled by the average American public. In fact, I will assert that you can balk at logic and consistency and still be a very functional member of American society.

What I find about most people is that nobody is really inherently evil or good in the way they behave. Rather they act in a manner befit their attitudes, which are compromised mostly of whimsy. A lot of what most people do makes no real sense whatsoever, despite people trying pretty hard to find justifications. I find justifying human activity to be a pointless and wasteful activity. For the most part, the average person has only a rudimentary and simple understanding of their own likes, dislikes, dispositions, and they act accordingly. A lot of the time, this means people act to their own detriment. A lot of our understandings of society rely on assumptions to the contrary: for instance, markets presume to work because we assume people act in their own interest and thus this facilitates exchange. I would assert one of the central failings of these ideas is that people really don't adhere to even common sense principles. To many people it is simply not important to consider this.

What a lot of us forget is that most of what goes on inside society doesn't have any firm rules or requirements and by no means must make any sense. So making sense of it all is necessarily a difficult challenge, by no means does it need, ultimately, to make sense. That goes for the economy, politics, science and is thus extended to all human activities. We define our own conventions, for the most part, and while we certainly adopt educational norms in our various societies, no single society of mankind has ever adopted a real consistent understanding of the base function of knowledge itself. That is because seeing and demonstrating tasks and skills is more fundamental to our ability to grasp things than thinking very deeply about them. I guess you could say I'm a skeptic of the civic functionality of reason. Emotive, expressive ideas built on an untrue ideology can result in a functional, healthy society (inasmuch as the function and health of society are not judged by how silly they are, and rather, how they culture, progress and live). If such is true, many generations could pass through life blissfully ignorant and somehow figure to get by. This may be silly sounding, but the understanding of this idea itself reveals quite a bit about the vices and virtues of humanity.

This being a given truth (and really that whole insight warrants its own article), attempting to define purpose and ethics to the human mind is difficult. What do we really know for sure? In fact, who am I to even say one way or another? When contemplating it all we quickly cave in on our own nonsense. I am an atheist, too, making this whole process a bit more involved. I really don't believe there is a god, and naturally a religious stance fills in some of these holes.

Well, my first reflection goes back to a religious man who was asking similar questions of things back in the early 1600's, Rene Descartes. He thought the best way to approach this problem was to create a method which would help him make sense of basic truths, and then build from that. I believe his assumption was correct way to begin, but the method he created is no single absolute principle by which to start. Methods, like his - which was a form of methodological skepticism - have no intrinsic worth. They are models by which we filter our many understandings. One could take a diametrically opposed "method" - like irrational presumption - and come to the same necessarily true idea. I guess what I'm getting at is that methods are not important to understand necessarily true things, because once something is realized to be necessarily true, it is incontrovertibly. As in, it would make no sense to deny something found to be true regardless of the methodology you use to come to your rationalized conclusions. Descartes, picking a reliable and sound method, came to understand one fundamental truth that makes a cornerstone of knowledge: that we exist.

This, to me, is really the best starting point for understanding conscious thought, I like to think of it as the first principle. Descartes' insight is simple: he wanted to figure out what in the realm of the world is real, and to do that he pretended that everything he knew was some grand deception. He figured that no matter how deceived he might admittedly be about reality and his perception of it, there was one thing he was not deceived of: that he existed. If he doubted his own existence, the substantiation of his doubt meant there was an object - himself. Whatever he might be, his doubts proved that he was at very least a "thinking thing". Otherwise he would not be capable of sustaining the doubt required to contemplate his own existence in the first place. He found the truth of "I think, therefore I am". He was by no means the first person with this idea, but deserves credit for this articulation as we popularly understand it today. Consciousness of oneself and the reality of existence is something that we all intrinsically understand, but few of us actually contemplate to great length.

From that point Descartes was able to substantiate little else. His attempted ontological proof of god from that viewpoint was admittedly on unsound basis. I almost think he didn't quite believe that part of his meditation as strongly as he said he had, but he did reiterate a belief in it later in life. Still, I'm sure Descartes had the time to hear about how Galileo's ideas were received by the church, so I take his level of dedication to the topic with a grain of salt.

So where do we go from here?

If I think and therefore I am, we have a basis for considering our experiences real, and we have established the premise of logic, that subjects (in this case "I") have definite meaning and can be given attributes (in this case, existence). If I can show one subject being given definite meaning and thus am able to associate an attribute to describe it, then I've proven my point. Thankfully this ties into the first principle of "I think therefore I am". As if I were proven wrong, then "I Think Therefore I Am" is nonsense, as the subject (oneself) cannot be given the attribute of existence if attributes can not be associated with subjects. I might frame this argument as such:

If 1 is untrue, then we're unable to identify what "I" actually means, and the notion of ideas becomes brittle indeed. While a "subject" can refer to many things, in this light, I mean that something which is a subject is a topic, notion or idea. All ideas, notions, topics, etc. bear some sort of definition, if they did not it would be impossible to differentiate them from one another. The notion of self - "I", the id, whatever you want to call it - is an idea which can be described, and that is what I mean when I say it is a subject. If it was not an idea which can be described, then no attribution could be deigned for "I". Thus, you would have to reject the notion of "I think therefore I am", because you could not identify yourself differently from anything else. Again by the act of thinking you identify yourself, thus we see how this statement must be true. Merely by describing oneself, you become something which bears description, thus "things" can bear description. Follow me on this one, as it is an important point to retain as we proceed.

If 2 is untrue, then while we might be able to identify ourselves as a "thing", we could not associate an outside idea - existence - with it. The point I am getting at with this, is that all logical prepositions consist of this pattern of thought, involving the necessary assignment of subjects to attributes. Thus, just as existence is an attribute which describes a subject, a subject is an object, idea, topic or notion which is being described.

Because this logical argument follows, we know that the notion of "things" (ideas, notions, topics, subjects) and "attributes" (descriptive properties) are necessary forms of language. Because if they aren't, then I think therefore I am breaks down into gibberish. Thought being something to be described does not gain an association to "I" or an association to existence and thus becomes nonsense. Likewise, if 3 and 4 are untrue, then we've failed to provide a concrete proof for the notion of subject/attribute relationships in this, the principle Descartes and so many skeptics have found as being really the only sound one. So whereas Descartes is correct in finding we exist, the conclusion of that also substantiates that logic exists. As a principle, logic - the study of properties and propositions - requires subjects and attributes such as the "self" and the attribute of "existence".

Which is funny, Descartes doesn't quite prove god actually exists as he set out to do, but he does prove that the idea of "god" and the notion of "existence" do, because while language barriers can have us find alternate uses and meanings for the word "god" and "existence", they are necessarily descriptive properties that are real. At least, as real as language and vocabulary that ultimately generate the descriptions are.

The second part of this notion I want to analyze is what really gets me back to the point of my little rant, that being of course ethics. We established above that we think, and exist, and that subjects and attributes of our existence are fair things to consider - logic exists - its only limitation being coherent language to communicate the ideas. Of which, the most base communication, that I exist, being necessarily true and thus a good place to stage our furthered observations. So what does this possibly have to do with ethics? I think the important thing to consider is as follows...

I think therefore I am.

If you accept "I think" nothing outwardly compels you to accept "I am", to arrive at that you must make a conclusion, you must decide that "therefore" one, then the other. Of course we are all free to decide one thing from another, but if we all accept the Descartes maxim here, then we all accept that we all decide at least that one thing. Thus independent volition, or will, exists. If it did not, then there would be no therefore, and thus no conclusion, as no ideas could be consulted without a will or volition to contemplate them. A conclusion, which in the structure of logic simply acknowledges the truth of some idea, is an act or volition. You would have to decide, upon volition of the will, that it follows from thinking that one does in fact exist. If you denied this, then you reject the notion of "I think therefore I am" because there is no therefore and again as said before, if you reject that basic notion, then we find ourselves in a state of nonsense. Effectively, reason - which is a byproduct of our ability to decide and conclude things based on prepositions which we don't always word so straightforwardly as we are now - exists in the same light as logic does.

You see, you could say that ethics don't exist without some great outside influence, such as a god. I might argue that ethics necessarily exist, as the notion of ethics arise from the notion of conclusion. Conclusion is an idea inherent to logic itself, which again while being limited by our language and capacity for imagination, is a real thing. The idea of concluding something or acknowledging the truth of something, is an act of will, the conclusion that one exists the first real fundamental act of ethics. Ethics, in this light, being the assumption that we ought to do some things over other things. In this instance, we all ought to conclude that we exist. This is if anything my first commandment. If you do not acknowledge that you exist, there is literally no point to communication, as you cannot effectively comprehend anything until you actually make this acknowledgement. To put it another way: we already established that we think, we established that things exist, and that we exist because we think. Well by making this initial assumption, something nearly every conscious human being understands intuitively, we've made a judgement, that judgement being a recognization of our own existance. We have no cause to actually conclude one thing from any other thing, that we can is to me a defining property of intelligent conscious life.

So, to wrap up, I would assert that if we exist - and I cannot really assert if you do or not, at least from the methodologically skeptical point of view, but I know I exist - then I in making that determination substantiate that logic exists as does ethics. If logic did not exist, rather if I could not relate concepts to others, then the terms become impossible to define. If ethics do not exist, then I have no basis for making conclusions, as will and volition is an activity. We showed this with the one idea you can't really deny, but another way to put it is that if 2+2=4, the mathematical operation while being a logical one is still an act requiring a decision. The decision being, something equals something else. This requires will and volition on the part of the observer. Of course, one could deny that 2+2=4 especially if they abstract or silly reasons to do so, but nobody can really deny that "I think therefore I am" as denying that effectively renders any part of logic, reason, deduction and in fact reality void.

Many theories of god's existence tend to attempt to prove god exists as the thing which substantiates reason and ethics. Descartes tried to prove god existed as the "guarantor of reason", the thing that effectively proves reason is a sound concept. Really, it's the other way around. Because Descartes made the correct assumption that he existed, so must reason by necessity, and so must ethics. Unless you believe it is impossible for god not to exist, you must conclude now that ethics does whether the god does or not. Perhaps the truest thing that can be said, is if you are an entity which is conscious, a being in the truest and simplest sense of the word, you might consider yourself that "I am that I am". Which, quite oddly enough, is one of the famous transliterated versions of the name of Yahweh, the Abrahamic god of the Bible. Perhaps one of the most stark things that ever made sense to me in a religious text, was a god describing himself as a being which is, as this is a foundation for understanding all other things that are. Interesting, really.

I thought that was a set of thoughts worth sharing, sorry if it sounded a little rambling. Later,

- Phoebus Apollo

You may have noticed some changes, I launched a new and improved paoracle.com. I apologize if it seems a little wide to some of those with older computers, I wanted a layout that would last the test of time and that means I need to embrace the wider screen layouts that people have nowadays. This width should last me quite some time as it renders more nicely on a standard widescreen LCD monitor that you are used to seeing.

There are a couple of features I intend to add that have not been yet put up: the ability to comment on my blogs here on my website via your Myspace/Facebook accounts, and content for my "Interests" section. Those two things may take a while to put together and in the meantime I didn't want to let the new design go to waste.

Always remember in the content to the right on every page is my contact information, I always appreciate it if you get in touch with me.

I have a lot to comment on right now but I am pressed for time, I have quite a few projects to wrap up as I want to have most of my affairs in order to prepare for the upcoming period of unemployment I'm looking at, as Circuit City was purchased by liquidators. Which is really sad, given the potential of the company, but it's a story we've heard over and over this year because of the economic downturn, which as I recall, I wellwished to happen.

This is the type of thing I'm confident I'm prepared for, so it's no big deal to me. I'm an asset with any company that'll have me. Plus, I needed a better pay grade than what I got at Circuit City anyways. However, I'll miss the work environment and some of my coworkers after Circuit City is done liquidating its inventory.

Explore the new website, it's got a much better organization of all my written and video works. You can find it always at paoracle.com.

- Phoebus Apollo