To further expand on what I was saying, there were popular Christian "rock" groups (e.g., Beatles knock-offs) as early as the late 60s, and once it started, it generally didn't take long for Christian artists to begin emulating the popular music of the day whenever a new variation of rock came along (See: Larry Norman). Typically, they had fans who realized they were trying to use modern music to preach Christianity, and they had opponents who believed the devil was in their music.

Growing up as a fundamentalist Christian, I got to witness this bizarre schism first-hand as I listened to speaker after speaker tell me that the "backbeat" in rock and roll music was pulled from African witchery, and it was this beat that made the music evil - not necessarily the lyrics or the singers. If you look hard enough, you can still find old webpages devoted to exposing the evils of "Christian Rock." I'm so happy I grew up like I did, because it made it so much easier for me to forget about Christianity

like i said, i understand others that ridicule them and i think they probably deserve it. But, I have been there and i feel bad for the individual developer, not the company. I know what it's like to have a game you made raked over the coals and how frustrating it is to work while making those games.

and spoco, i DO feel very bad for the people in sweatshops making knock-off designer crap. That's a horrible life. I don't want the crap they produce, but i can still empathize with the worker that is powerless to make a difference.

>> ^daxgaz:
I had to down-vote this sift. I realize the games are awful and i feel bad for anyone who gets one as a present. however, from their site:
"With a small elite team of 6 people ...
...We boast the shortest time required from development to product release in the industry. Ordinarily the average development period for a game is 18 months, whereas Phoenix need a mere 3-5 months."
I work in the game industry and I can read between the lines and know what this actually means. Those six guys probably sleep at the office more than at home. if they have kids, they might as well be orphans and I would bet they don't get paid overtime. I have been through a situation like this (i started my career at the infamous 3DO) and I know that even good people will make a crap product when put in a situation like this.
So, while I understand why others ridicule them, i can't do it myself. walk a mile in another mans shoes, etc...


Nope, it's no excuse... it's like saying "Look, all these knock off brand sneakers, glasses, bags etc. may be absolute shit, but come on, let's not point out how bad quality they are because people who aren't doing very well make them"

Nope, doesn't cut it. Yeah you can feel bad for people down on their luck, but these are people with at least the education required to be able to code, so they should be doing better than this. And even with a short turn around time they aren't EVEN TRYING. Come on, you get together a bunch of your mates and I GUARANTEE you can get better written and performed voice work than this... it doesn't take more TIME it takes SOME CARE.

So I think downvoting this is the wrong attitude, you don't hide shite quality like this and allow them to keep making it, you call them out on it and make them lift their shitty little game a bit and actually... TRY.

Also, just pumping out copies of other things. BAH, at least try to make something vaguely original.

No sympathy.

Great piece. Pure sarcasm. Not the blatantly obvious kind, like some cheap knock off walmart sarcasm. This is the good stuff.

>> ^Farhad2000:
Personally I don't think Iraq war was ever conducted for any altruistic reasons because if it was it means one life is valued more then the other, I think the largest example of international do nothingness is the 800,000 killed during the Rwandan genocide.
Somehow Iraq is okay to invade to liberate, Bosnia is okay to invade to liberate but not Darfur and not Rwanda.


I agree 100% with this. I fought against the Iraq war for this and many other reasons. At one point as my other reasons got knocked off I fought it for SOLELY this reason. If the American's couldn't be bothered to save nearly a million Rwandans, then why should anyone take humanitarian issues as a reason America would intervene in Iraq.

Then I remembered my entire argument was based on wishing America HAD gone into Rwanda. I can hardly say that I don't want America in Iraq if I believe removing Saddam will serve a great humanitarian cause, just like the one in Rwanda they(and the entire rest of the world) failed to serve.

I only care about America's motive in removing Saddam when it starts to adversely affect Iraqi's. The overall invasion and removal of Saddam ended a reign of terror the likes of which the world rarely sees and unimaginably worse than most realize.

>> ^volumptuous:
I actually didn't see a single person get knocked off of that dock.


Watch the left side of the video at the beginning. There are hundreds of people on the bank. Shortly thereafter they are not there...

I actually didn't see a single person get knocked off of that dock.

Oh, too bad they got knocked off. I imagine seeing a boat go in the water first-hand would be an amazing experience.

It's worth it. I played the first campaign, the same one in the demo. The missions are a little longer than what is in the demo, and it seems to be more refined. It took several tries on normal difficulty, but I finally finished it. Technically I didn't because I was dead when the helicopter took off. I was right there at it, but I went back to help a team mate, then I got knocked off the platform. Then was about to get on it again when another member behind me got knocked down. I went back to help but then he got killed and I got knocked down, so the helicopter took off without me.

That was three hours of game play right there, and I haven't even tried the other 3 campaigns yet, I want to survive the first one before I go to the next.

Yeah, we have no idea what happened before this clip starts. This isn't really comparable to the other arrest videos that show up here tho, as noone was tazed and noone knocked off a bicycle.

Then again, I'm just a 17 yr old knee-jerk who watches colbert or whatever.

No doves in the John Woo one? That's how you can tell it is a Michael Bay knock off.

From your own link:

FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength — and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."

"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.

The Madrid fire burned for 24 hours at temperatures up to 800°C (1500°F) and did not collapse. In 2004, Venezuela's tallest building burned uncontrolled for 17 hours and did not collapse. WTC7 had two small fires which burned for 6 hours and it collapsed in what looks like a controlled demolition.


When the tapes from 9/11 firefighters in were released, there was no mention of communication problems as we were told, and firefighters only reported small pockets of fire, not a huge inferno that can melt steel.

Two hose lines are needed, Chief Orio Palmer says from an upper floor of the badly damaged south tower at the World Trade Center. Just two hose lines to attack two isolated pockets of fire. ''We should be able to knock it down with two lines,'' he tells the firefighters of Ladder Company 15 who were following him up the stairs of the doomed tower.

Lt. Joseph G. Leavey is heard responding: ''Orio, we're on 78, but we're in the B stairway. Trapped in here. We got to put some fire out to get to you.''

Ladder 15 had finally found the fire after an arduous climb to the 78th floor, according to the tape. They were in the B stairwell. On the other side of the fire were hundreds of people, blocked from fleeing by smoke and flame on the stairs. Chief Palmer was facing similar fires in the A stairwell, across the floor.

''We're gonna knock down some fire here in the B Stair,'' Lieutenant Leavey is heard telling one of his firefighters. ''We'll meet up with you. You get over to the A Stair and help out Chief Palmer.''

If those fires were burning at 1500-1800°F, the people on that floor would have been dead.

I'm no conspiracy theory nutcase, but I'm also not stupid, the "official" explanations of collapse just don't match reality.

>> ^Tymbrwulf:
>> ^tagomi77:
Star-Telegram Article
The robbers ended up being one of the clerks husband and dad, who she recognized, after he got the wig and glasses knocked off his face... assuming she wasn't in on it.

1:16 - I think she's helping him get money out of the register!



Definitely.

>> ^tagomi77:
Star-Telegram Article
The robbers ended up being one of the clerks husband and dad, who she recognized, after he got the wig and glasses knocked off his face... assuming she wasn't in on it.


1:16 - I think she's helping him get money out of the register!

I hate to laugh at someone else's misfortune, but this was kind of funny. I mean, no helmet? Did you notice that both of his shoes were knocked off? He seemed pretty calm about the whole thing as he lay there, though. He's probably just trying to play it off, though. Inside his head, his little man is setting shit on fire and throwing paper everywhere, shouting, "We're gonna die, we're gonna die!! Help us, help us, oh, God, help us!!"