Taken from the game’s credit sequence rather than the usual title menu that I show.
Otherwise known as Star Trek Troopers. I played this back in June and wrote this around then, but held it back until a little after the midterms because I assumed I’d be doing some political content. This’ll get ya through Thanksgiving anyway.
Non-Sequitur, but I think Species 8472 look like a race of mutant Mewtwos. Maybe the legendary Mewthree? I say Mewtwo is more adorable than 8472- just a big ol’ grumpy kitty.
Your starship was transported into an alternate dimension, its power is being drained, and this is totally not related to the plot of “The Void” which is the same thing but probably was made a few weeks after this game. While in the void, you must fight other folks who were sucked into it and the creators of said void.
You play as a member of the Federation Starship Voyager‘s designated fighting team for places outside the ship. Given that normally there’s a detachment of Marines on ships for this kind of thing, I guess this makes you a Space Marine. Unlike other Space Marines in video games who load a ton of weapons on their backs, this game actually gives a logical explanation using existing technology from the Star Trek universe for why your character doesn’t appear to have a ton of weapons and isn’t weighed down by all of them yet still has access to all of them in combat. This automatically boosts it a couple of points in my view.
They had the TV show’s opening credits, but with the game’s credits (that’s where the first screenshot on this page is from). Except the music was replaced with exactly what you’d expect if you said “can I have something like the Voyager theme but legally different?”
The Game
It’s a first-person shooter using the Quake engine. It took me 19 years or more to beat it legitimately, based on an old save file on my memory card that showed it took me almost 9 hours to reach a spot that this time around it took me less than 4. Maybe the improvement has something to do with the fact that leading up to this I played all the Doom FPS games and only finished playing the add-ons for Doom Eternal a few weeks prior. Some of the same strategies apply, in fact this game even has its own version of Doom 2016’s/Doom Eternal’s Hell Knights except most of the time you fight them they don’t have the space to jump and they have projectiles.
The Bad
The graphics are… well, it is 2001. For the in-game people, it’s like if someone tried to upgrade GoldenEye 64 for the PS2. Not a far trip between the two. The graphics for the stages were pretty good, though once in a while they’d glitch up on you.
Speaking of glitching up, it DOES NOT like skipping cutscenes. In the final boss battle I skipped a cutscene and it kept freezing me in place long enough to take a hit, but that was still better than the first time I skipped the cutscene which led to the entire game freezing. It does like to freeze, at one point I had only played it for like 6 hours according to the save menu and yet it must’ve frozen 3 or more times in that short period of play. One time it even froze in the middle of a battle while the controller still had the “vibrate” command coming to it, so the controller just kept rumbling even a few seconds after I restarted the system.
Now we come to one other thing- framerate. It runs nice and smooth when there aren’t that many enemies, but there are sections where you get swarmed like in Doom 2016/Doom Eternal (or Doom 2 Map 10). Then the framerate drops to where it’s hard to aim and move. It goes from the framerate on the smooth PC Doom to the framerate on Doom 3DO. Luckily it’s usually not long, all you need to do is kill a few enemies and unlike in the Doom games that I mentioned previously as having framerate issues the level design has nothing to do with it. It’s just too many enemies running around.
The Good
The environments are pretty good, and there are some I’d have loved to see more of or spend more time in (namely the original Enterprise-lookin’ areas and Voyager itself). Disappointingly one of those wasn’t available on multiplayer, but there is a map for Voyager in multiplayer for you to run around with some friends trying to kill each other.
I think engineers, architects, and computer science folks have nightmares that look like this: 4 starships from different species at different levels of technological evolution (and from different universes too!) somehow merged to form a space station.
Multiplayer is another high point on this one. You just need your one console to do split screen… and a big enough TV which is no problem now but back 19-20 years ago when I first got this it was.
They actually got the main cast for Voyager to come in and do the voices, and even had some minor characters from the series reappear- and voiced by the same actors. Pretty cool! And the voice acting was actually good, everyone seemed to be taking it seriously.
The story as well was good, it felt a little Star Trekky. You meet aliens that start hostile but turn out friendly, you try to reason with enemies sometimes. While you shoot everything that moves, there’s always an explanation like either a misunderstanding or the enemy ignoring friendly overtures, and in some cases shooting it out is not even the preferred method of advancing through the game. Contrast that with Star Trek: Invasion where the Star Trekky stuff is pretty limited, where almost all of the game is just blowing stuff up while making sure your own stuff doesn’t get blown up- a story set in the Star Trek universe rather than a Star Trek story.
My Opinion
I liked it. It’s too long and involved to be more than once every several years, but it’s good. And did I forget to mention that it’s the only “Star Trek Voyager” video game? So that combined with how well done it was should be a major selling point… to someone somewhere I’m sure.
I should probably try the PC version; the graphics look better. I doubt it has the framerate issues and some glitches this version had. The PC version and the PS2 version are about the same price as of this writing for the disc alone, but you might need a CD key and might have trouble running something made for Windows 98 on modern hardware (I’ve tried running some contemporary games in “compatibility mode” on modern hardware, but had lousy results) so I’d say the PS2 version would be easier to get going.
Seems I forgot to grab a Game Over pic, though sometimes when I beat the game I don’t bother with one. Anyway, here’s the game’s version of the Doom 2016 Hell Knight.
This was totally not written at the end of January/beginning of February and then delayed until now in case this became a busy time for me.
Ah yes, the Mega Mannix series (sequel to The Rockman Files, followed by a series about the character Zero that spent its time as an anti-America/Blame Bush propaganda fest, which itself was followed by Mega Man ZX Spectrum and Mega Man Legends: Arceus). I was all over Megaman X7 (that’s how it is written on the title in the game, on the box, and on the disc, but apparently it is still supposed to be written “Mega Man X7”) when it first came out. It was one of the first games I sought to buy brand new, and still one of the few because I am a cheapskate. Just slap Mega Man on the label and I’m a mark for it, especially X as related earlier.
This game- despite my enthusiasm- became notorious amongst fans; evidently the community is not too fond of it. I on the other hand didn’t see too much wrong with it, and I played it thrice beginning-to-end inside of a week (once on the Switch and again on the Xbox One, just because I wanted to get all the trophies/”Hunter Medals”/in-game rewards for beating the game that come with the Mega Man X Legacy Collections. I had beaten X7 in the PS4 copy almost exactly a year prior, so narrowing it down with logic that means the third one I played this year was the original PS2 version, for the first time in somewhere between 10 and 12 years).
Xbox One to the left, PS2 to the right
The Plot
Xbox One to the left, PS2 to the right
A strange android named Axl who can duplicate the abilities and appearance of other androids appears and is taken-in by a mercenary group, a group which suddenly acts weird so Axl defects to Megaman X’s robo-police. The mercenaries decide they want him back (what I don’t get is how these mercenaries are supposedly hunting androids that go rogue or go violent or whatever, but they fail to recognize the most notorious rogue/violent android who destroyed the world not too long before this game took place. They must’ve been made in China. Then again, the head android of an entire military built to hunt the rogue/violent androids failed to recognize the most notorious one only 3 games earlier.) and challenge X’s crew. After 6 console games and 2 Game Boy games, X is tired of fighting and has lately been dedicated to trying to find peaceful ways of dealing with rampaging machines that went insane (I guess he uploaded the latest Soros patch), so it’s now a question of “will X be playable in an X-series game?”.
X is kinda a jerkass in this one, he’s much more likeable in the other installments. It’s a weird characterization, in fact it would only make sense if the planned sequel-series had played out the way it was originally intended to, but they dropped those original ideas two years prior to this game’s release, so his attitude just ends up looking out of place since he’s back to normal in the next game (or maybe his peaceful nature finally won out after the trauma of watching the world get destroyed but he gets over it by the next game, seems they missed an opportunity for character development there but then again at the same time peacenik X came out, the sequel series (the Megaman Zero series on the Game Boy Advance) was starting its “America went to Iraq For Oil, the American people are brainwashed, Bush is the devil” storyline so maybe the characterization came from that attitude by the developers). The new character Axl says he’s busting rogue androids the way X used to, which X takes issue with and instead of doing the Captain Kirk thing and deciding to become a teacher for the newbies when confronted by cadets saying they were imitating him, X seems to just want to be even more of a jerkass. Although, the ending you get when you beat the game with Axl does make X look a little more sympathetic, but still a jerk (I should also point out that until my PS2 run this time around, I had not beaten the game with Axl… it took 19 years for me to see all thee of this game’s possible endings).
Gameplay-wise there’s nothing remarkable about it. It’s a welcome change. The X-series to me had an odd pattern of the third game on each console dragging on, taking way longer than the others to beat. X3 was still ok, but X6 was pretty drawn-out if you wanted to get everything… on the other hand, you could get to the final stages by only beating two bosses so it could be pretty short if you’re good. I still like it, I think Gate and Dynamo are cute, but damn it takes forever to get everything. (The PS2 technically did not break this rule of 3 by the way. Mega Man X: Command Mission is an RPG so of course it’s the true draggy-est of the drags, but even though it was the 2nd X game released on the PS2 by 5 months it still chronologically is the third game. X8 drags too, worse than X6 (even though I like it a little better), but it’s not an RPG so it loses.).
While X5 was the first to introduce characters for you to rescue, X6 was the first to introduce ones that give you items, and the first to let enemies kill the ones you could rescue. It was only one specific enemy in X6 that could kill the rescuables, but X7 decided to “innovate” further and make every enemy able to destroy a rescuable. In X6 and X7, when a rescuable is dead it’s dead for good, you have to reset without saving in order to get a second chance at rescuing it. It just so happens that in the Legacy Collection you get an award for rescuing all the helpless little androids, so I had plenty of resetting going on. Unlike in X6 though, the items you get from rescuables are the same between stages, but equally as necessary. Each stage has 16, you get two upgrade chips, an item that extends your life meter, two items that extend your weapon energy meter, and one extra life. The rest give a little bit of health. And it’s absolutely worth it to get the upgrade chips, because with them you can power up your characters so that their attacks do more damage while they take less damage.
That there blue pod gives X a power-up that eventually becomes a new armor for him once all for pods have been entered. I was disappointed to learn that once you beat the game with the armor and restart, these pods don’t give you a super armor. If you got the armor on the first go, these pods are just decoration. This is from the PS2 version.
On the topic of power-ups: like after every AEW match, once you beat the game there’s an afterbirth. Not just the usual post-game cutscenes either; if you wait until after the credits (there’s some beta footage playing in the credits, you see an enemy standing in front of a destroyable door except there are no destroyable doors and that enemy never stands in front of any doors) you save your progress. Then when you load that save file, you start over but with all the upgrade chips from the rescuables you had previously. You also start out with X as a playable character once you get past the intro stage, which means a certain cutscene later in the game is missing. I think the bosses occasionally throw a new move at you, but otherwise this is the same game that you’ve been playing before, no real increase in difficulty or anything.
An example of a camera issue. Note that in the upper left behind your health meter is an enemy that you can’t see all of unless you were standing right under it because the camera was fouled-up. Maybe the folks that programmed it were really big into legs? Xbox One to the left, PS2 to the right
Another minor issue with the camera that happens sometimes, this is from the Xbox One
Fans by all accounts didn’t like some of the voice work (though they didn’t even bother dubbing X6 into English and the grammar on the English captions was horrific, whereas in this game the grammar and dubbing were ok, with the voices doing better than the subtitles grammar-wise) and did not like the fact that while some areas are the usual 2D sidescrolling (but rendered in 3D), there were areas of 3D movement. I didn’t have a problem with that, but sometimes the camera was a problem. You could only move the camera in certain 3D environments, so there were points where you had to round corners without knowing what was on the other side, including not being able to see rescuables that were in danger and may well get shot if you don’t dash blindly into danger. Sometimes the camera tried to fit itself into the environments by zooming in too much, giving you a very limited view of the environment. However, most of the time the camera was ok and I thought they did a good job translating Megaman gameplay into a 3D world… though the auto-targeting and lack of crosshairs when trying to aim without targeting something was annoying.
The original has some pros and cons over the re-releases… well, just two pros, two cons, and a whatever that I saw. The pros were that the controls felt a little more responsive and the re-releases introduced some graphical glitches when certain enemies were destroyed that were absent in the PS2 original. The cons might be a deal breaker though- the PS2 version had longer loading times and there were points where it lagged incredibly because too many objects were on screen at the same time. Also, PS2s are getting on in years now so yours might need a tune-up lest it start freezing randomly while you’re playing. Sometimes tilting the system got it going again, other times it did not. The “whatever” is that the credits music was changed for the Legacy Collection because of copyright issues, a common occurrence in the other Legacy Collection releases, especially if you set it so that you are playing the Japanese version of the games. Since I mentioned X3, I might as well say now that the copy of it in the Legacy Collection is the SNES copy which is different than the Saturn/PlayStation copies, but that’s a conversation for another post.
My Opinion
Well, I liked it all the same. It’s a good game in the series, casual players or strangers to the franchise may want to skip it because people get all picky about things like a camera that works 100% of the time or controls that always work exactly as intended (sometimes the moves that rely on holding or releasing buttons for certain lengths of time didn’t always work), but here I’m way more easygoing on those points. Besides, if you have this because you bought the Legacy Collection you might as well play it. It’s also surprisingly inexpensive on the PS2 if you want the original (some earlier games in the series can cost $40 or even over $100).
From the PS2 release. I’ve been playing this game for 19 years, and just when I thought I understood how you get your ranking, they go and throw a curve by having PA (Pennsylvania) being the second-highest one possible, with GA (Georgia) the third highest and UH (University of Houston) as the highest which I never obtained because out-of-state tuition is way too expensive.
Sure seems like we’re heading for one. The Left is horribly aggressive, as I’ve noted lately. So we’ve gone from War Games with foreign nations to Civil War games.
Image from WWE
The Game
Side-by-side of the PS2 and 360 versions. This is from the first level of the Confederate campaign, depicting the Battle of Bull Run. It was the earliest battle in the game (the only earlier battle in real life was Fort Sumter) so it was the first mission I played. Three or four of the game’s levels for the Confederate campaign take place before the Union campaign levels. Arrogance and public/political pressure to act quickly (but not nepotism, contrary to public belief) and an inexperienced military led to the North’s defeat at this battle… and led to the North initially derisively dismissing the plan(and other prescient suggestions by the plan’s author) that helped them win the war.
Sorry folks, just have the PS2 and 360 versions here. The PC version escaped my notice… and I’m bankrupt anyway so I couldn’t have bought it even if I wanted to.
You get an old-timey lookin’ menu where you select your missions, and once the missions start a video plays explaining the background of the battle you’re playing in, as you might see in a History Channel documentary. Then comes the loading screen. Both versions show a letter in the background, I assume from the character you are playing as. But the Xbox 360 version gives you a mission overview, which is actually annoying because it pops up when you’ve had just enough time to start reading the letter but not enough to finish it, and you can’t read it with text blocking it.
Civil War-era cannon ramrods do not float.
As for gameplay, it’s a first person shooter with Civil War-era weapons. You’re not going to get that fast-paced machine gun Call of Duty stuff here when you have to take 20 seconds to reload a musket or put 12 bullets into your rifle or pour what I think is gunpowder into your revolver. The missions and maps are identical between consoles, but there are minor differences. When trying to replicate pictures I took on the PS2 version, I couldn’t find precise matches for the pics in one of the levels on the Xbox 360 version, and one of the secret areas in a PS2 mission was absent from the Xbox 360 version while another secret item was moved. However, the 360 version allowed access to more weapons in each mission, and had an extra cutscene during the Bull Run mission. Both had graphical glitches, with the PS2 being egregious in some instances, but the 360 version had audio glitches too (at least on my equipment). Plus the 360 version had achievements, to immortalize in your profile your actions during the Civil War. But overall you aren’t missing much if all you have is one version of the game, though you miss less if you have the 360 version.
Wikipedia talks about critics giving poor reception for historical inaccuracies and how easy the game is. I always thought of it as just giving you the flavor of the battles involved, or important highlights, while you get background details on the starts and outcomes during the pre-loading and post-level cutscenes. Some historical things were sacrificed for the sake of gameplay, such as how you meet like 10 gatling guns during missions taking place as early as 1863 when in reality only a couple were used at the end of the war in one campaign and on some gunboats. As for the difficulty… on easy, I see their point. Hard mode… no, not at all. That is very hard, as in “I don’t know if half the missions could be completed” hard.
History Lesson
Petersburg Exchange Building, as seen in the game and at present. Don’t know if they renovated the steps or if it’s artistic license, but you can kinda tell they got the buildings on the right correct. Also, they found live cannonballs in that building in 2017.
For those who weren’t aware, the Civil War wasn’t exactly about slavery. The North and Lincoln had some abolitionist Republicans, but you know how politicians are- they go with what’s popular. Like how modern Republicans railed against Obamacare and claimed to have replacement plans but turned out to be full of it when they took power.
The idea of slavery being the North’s cause for the war from the start is similar to the idea of us going into Iraq because of 9/11. Lincoln never said anything about abolishing slavery, but the South decided that this must be what was about to happen so they seceded. Just like how Bush never said anything about 9/11 when invading Iraq, but the Left decided that must be what it was about so that they could attack him for drawing a wrong conclusion that started the war that liberals supported(and instead of admitting they were wrong, the fake news media decided to create the conspiracy theory that Bush planted thoughts into journalists’ heads, I guess through HAARP or Reptilian telepathy or something). The North picked up on slavery later, but that was mostly to keep Britain and France out of the war. The folks overseas might’ve interfered with the blockades or forced an end to the war if they thought it was just two belligerent countries, but telling them that “trying to stop slavery” was the reason kept them out. That didn’t come until 3/4ths of the way into the war.
As for the South… slavery was the reason inasmuch as it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The South was gradually, slowly, less than snail’s pace, working towards ending slavery, like at the same pace they were working towards industrialization (the North didn’t want them industrialized and fought to keep them agrarian- the North used the South’s resources for its factories and didn’t want the competition- thus causing them to depend on slavery for their economy. The whole argument that the South stayed agrarian because they wanted to keep slavery is bogus, just look at the Nazis who CREATED slavery in their country to run their factories). The Confederacy even had provisions in its constitution that no new slaves were to be brought into the country, abolishing the overseas slave trade.
Man the South’s cannon at Chancellorsville and aim for distance!
But after years of taking economicabuse from the North and almost seceding 30 years earlier (unrelated to slavery, like how the North wanted to keep Native Americans in the South because they preferred to have non-voting people occupying land that the South could grow its voting power with, like how the North and South’s bickering impacted decisions on every new territory we thought about taking in, and even kept Yucatan from joining), when those highly populated Northern areas elected the abolitionist party to run the country the South figured it was just another way to needle them, another example of “tyranny of the majority”, so they seceded.
The North tariffed the imported goods the South needed to be a modern society, and now were going to destroy the one economic institution the South was still allowed to have by removing the only labor source they could afford, thanks to the North hoarding the money for itself. So guess what you Marxist liberal, the Civil War was a class war and you would’ve been on the impoverished South’s side, rather than helping the greedy capitalists and bourgeoisie in the North. Under communism all people are slaves to the government- all people are forced to work for the glory of the party in charge, forced to work so the government doesn’t kill them because no government pays for people who refuse to work, unable to make any money to escape, only able to travel when the government approves, only able to talk with who the government allows them to, and with their “rights” changing on the whims of the government’s leader- so pretty much all you would’ve done is expand slavery to include just about everybody.
Today we see slavery as what the North and South were fighting over because our moral compasses say that was the biggest wrong (and our textbooks have a bit of propaganda in them), but at the time aside from the radical Republicans there really wasn’t much of a drive for abolition. I suppose they were more or less the “Tea Party” of the time. Most Northerners though only voted Republican to spite the South; the North mostly hated Blacks and rioted when draft time came because they saw Blacks as the cause of the drafts. This was very unfortunate for Blacks.
If you think this was revisionist, liberal, yourheroWoodrowWilsonwould disagree. He’d disagree with me too because he thought slavery played LESS of a role than I did. Hey, he’s YOUR hero. (He was also a know-it-all who thought he knew better what non-whites wanted than those races knew, which kinda explains modern liberal attitudes that lead to white Black Lives Matter protesters torching Black neighborhoods and shouting racial slurs at Black cops. Liberals just emulating their hero, Wilson.)
Speaking of the average soldiers, as you can see from men charging through smoke at a trench, the Europeans were totally right when they dismissed what they could learn from the Civil War. This is from the Battle of Chattanooga.
If you asked the average soldier on either side why they were fighting, the answer for the North would be “because I was drafted” while the answer for the South would be “because they invaded”. And the North was pretty ruthless to its own people- the whole reason for Andersonville was that the North refused to exchange prisoners and did not care that the South didn’t really have the infrastructure to handle a bunch of Northern POW’s. The North was more focused on winning the war, so they didn’t want to give any fighting men back to the South. They knew they always had more and could forget about the folks at Andersonville (POW camp where the prisoners starved and died of disease because it was way overcrowded and the South lacked resources to improve it, and the guards were brutal, and the Union refused to take the prisoners back when the offer was made for a prisoner exchange), while the South had a much smaller population so the North returning soldiers would just give them a better chance at victory. The South actually won a lot of battles aside from a few key ones you might be familiar with, but ultimately the North’s idea worked and the South ran out of men and supplies.
None of this is to vindicate the South, like the North they still insisted Blacks were subhuman, and still insisted that Blacks within their borders were slaves. I’m just pointing out the nuances on both sides. The Southern government was lousy, and the North was acting like a jerk so that’s why you get pseudo-abolitionists like Robert E. Lee fighting for the South. He opposed slavery, but he didn’t like what the North was doing. And remember: slavery was only just beginning to gain traction as being unacceptable for moral reasons in the U.S., while being ravaged by an invading army was never acceptable no matter what their motives.
I wanted to humanize some southerners because it’s so easy to see things as black and white, especially today. As you’ve seen in this blog, it’s pretty easy to generalize groups. Like saying all Democrats are evil, sadistic, pedophile-loving liars. Just because that’s how they vote doesn’t mean that’s how they feel, they might think Trump is worse, assume the accusations are lies by the other side, or live in an impenetrable bubble of ignorance. No one does a third party because you’re too busy making sure the least evil person is in office.
Today’s Cold Civil War
No Gatling Guns were used in Gettysburg, contrary to what this game says. Yes that is a sniper rifle, it was a real thing, and the South had the best sniper.
If Democrats win next week, theywon’tbe gracious. I went over their plans and threats already. And if they lose… everything they talked of doing will still happen, it’ll just start with extreme violence the moment Trump wins instead of being done gradually during a Harris Administration (Joe Biden is a trojan horse, he’ll be thrown out of office pretty quick).
The 1860s Civil War was clear-cut along geographic lines, and involved the Southern rebels trying to separate themselves from the North. The South’s Constitution largely reflected the North’s, except it clarified points about slavery and established it uncompromisingly as an institution. The modern Civil War that liberals want is entirely different. Liberalsare plotting secession and Civil War, according to the New York Times. The geographic boundaries are not so clear-cut either- it’s wealthy elitist city liberals and anyone that believes their lies (mostly cronies, people who solely get their news from Leftwing outlets, people whose race’sculture compels them to be a Democrat, people living in poverty who want all the breadcrumbs that liberals promise them, and socialists who never lived outside of mommy and daddy’s basement or were never without their trust fund who want government to coddle them as adults) vs. everyone else. There are city liberals in every state.
Secession talk is bogus otherwise California would’ve done it, and it goes against the Left’s philosophy- they believe they are right on every issue, that all contrary views are wrong and evil, and that theyMUSTpurgethis world of evil. Secession would mean admitting failure in stopping evil, and would allow evil to continue.
City liberals want to overthrow the government and establish their own dictatorship, as I outlined in their own words and acts last time. City liberals believe this country is racist/homophobic/sexist, they believe the Constitution from which all of our rights are derived is racist/homophobic/sexist. They want to tear it up and create their own model. As I went into in-depth before, their model would end your religious liberties, control what you are allowed to say with the threat of imprisonment or legalized lynch mobs, take away any ability you had to protect yourself from those mobs, create a one-party government solely ran for-profit under self-proclaimed millionaire socialists (like Pelosi, Bernie, AOC, any given socialist actor in Hollywood). And as of right now they’d take away your rights in the name of safety from COVID and social justice, and people are stupid enough to want this. City liberals are ready to fight, and havebeenfunding their mobs in the streets.
I may have mentioned that Liberals like wars a lot. I don’t think they’re interested in war with Russia anymore, because Russia is too good of a boogeyman to annihilate (and as you saw in the link Biden is pretty soft on them anyway). It’s much more convenient to just scapegoat all their failings on Russia, just like how if liberals are in power they will always blame whites and Republicans for their woes no matter how little sense it makes, no matter how little influence whites and Republicans have, even if they exterminate them all they’d still be blamed.
So Liberals decided to direct their bloodlust internally.
Battle of Selma
Liberals absolutely want a Civil War today. They will come out the other side as dominant, here is why. The news networks and media will have endless reporting, and a monetary boom from scared citizens staying tuned. CNN was $100 million shy of their financial goals this year, they are desperate. The liberal media won’t be hurt unless someone outright blows up their buildings with them inside.
Liberals are globalists, so the inevitable intervention of foreign powers will be welcome. And guess whose side the U.N. with all its Russian and Chinese henchmen will come in on. Not the side of Conservatives, that’s for sure. Do you think that U.N. occupation of American soil in the name of stopping a Civil War will unite the country against foreign invaders? It won’t, because half the country WANTS them right now to help their party win, and after a few months of misery from the Civil War much more than half the country will be begging for the safety promised by the U.N. occupiers. Look at how many people throw their rights away in the name of safety from COVID, on the grounds of what are often lies we’re told about it.
After all is said and done, historians will blame Trump and Republicans, and the U.S. Constitution, and everything will be rewritten as liberals see fit.
This Is Nothing New.
Second Battle of Fort Fisher. Looks like D-Day: you see the Union Navy in the background shelling the place as you advance across a beach to a shoreline fortress.
The Democratic Party has not changed much since it represented slavery and seceded from the country. They just changed their tone a little, but we saw that starting in the 1910’s. Remember when celebrated progressive Democrat icon Woodrow Wilson RE-segregated the military? He said the reasoning was that Blacks were inferior so needed a little extra help. Today Democrats still make that argument, they just find different excuses. But the idea is always there that Blacks can’t succeed. Holocaust survivors can enter this country with nothing, barely even any substance left on their bodies, and become successes, but Blacks are so inferior they can’t even figure out how to get an ID to vote. So say the Democrats.
They really topped themselves thoughwhenDemocrats and some Black professors got together and decided that whites were the sole reason civilization advanced, that we had to FORCE the values that lead to scientific, medical, and economic progress onto Blacks. That’s what Black scholars and Democrats think. Democrats also believe that Blacks should be seen and not heard, unless they’re repeating the party line verbatim.
So tell me how much has changed for Democrats between now and the Civil War? Like in the 1860s Civil War they want foreign governments to come to their rescue. Heck, Nancy Pelosi once said that a Klansman Senator who opposed the Civil Rights act was the voice of reason in Congress and on the right side of every issue, and Pelosi’s father dedicated a statue of a Confederate General. Speaking of the faces of the party, how about Joe Biden who helped segregationists out and opposed integrating schools, or Kamala Harris who married white, started her career by sleeping with whites, is funded by white billionaires, has an ancestor that owned slaves, and who spent her career locking up Blacks for use as slave labor? Why was she picked over anyone else, like Stacey Abrams for example? Well, her record on race shows you (that and she is a Biden business partner). Just look at the Party’s track record. After 8 years of Obama, people thought race relations were WORSE than after 8 years of George W. Bush (and remember how divided we were then- half of Democrats were racist and the other half were sexist, while Democrats greeted Republicans with the stern position that “Bush lied, people died” and Republicans would destroy the world either with oil wars or global warming if elected. The Democrat half thought the Republican half was trying to kill them, and the Democrat half was split over who was racist or sexist in their ranks. 8 years of Obamacrats and their media acolytes led to polls showing people thought we were MORE DIVIDED THAN THAT).
Speaking of things that haven’t changed, remember when Democrats became terrorists and lynchers after losing elections in the post-Civil War time? Doesn’tthatseemfamiliar? (We’ll already see mobs at polling places just like in olden times… and 2008, we see Democrat leaders restricting lethal and non-lethal weapons to fight the mobs with, and we might even see voter suppression in the name of fighting COVID as lockdowns stop people in conservative areas from voting in-person).
What Do You Think?
Sounds like a fun game? Vote Democrat and make it so! FYI- I totally called it on the purges, long before Project Veritas showed Democrats demanding them. Too bad that if liberals come to power, writing all this will become a crime… not that I’d ever be able to find sources to backup my claims once their digital purges are finished. We already see the Left actively suppressing important news about their corrupt Presidential candidate, we have the Left calling for censorship laws, it’s pretty obvious where this is going.
This is not only one of my favorite games for the PlayStation 2 (PS2) but it is also my favorite of the Final Fantasy games so far. I also have to admit it is my first Final Fantasy game and you never forget your first. 😉
The game follows the narration of the protagonist known as Tidus. Tidus lives in the hyper-advanced city of Zanarkand and follows in his father’s footsteps as a star Blitzball player. Life is pretty sweet for Tidus with all the groupies and fans. At the start of the game, we find our protagonist playing in the Blitzball championship. That’s when disaster strikes as during the game a giant creature attacks Zanarkand and a mysterious man in red saves Tidus. This man is later revealed to be Auron a friend of Tidus’s father who then sends Tidus through a portal created by the enormous beast.
Tidus later wakes up on a beach on a tiny island named Besaid, but when he asks the locals how to get back to Zanarkand they seem to think he is sick. He later finds out that the Zanarkand they knew of was destroyed by a creature called Sin……. 1000 years ago.
Tidus meets a young Summoner named Yuna who plans to make a pilgrimage to the ruins of Zanarkand and agrees to accompany her on her journey. Together he travels with her guardians, Wakka the Blitzball Player, Lulu the Magician, and Kimahri of the Ronzo Tribe. They are later joined by Auron who has mysteriously appeared in Spira and Rikku of the Al Bhed. Together they embark on a journey to Zanarkand stopping at all the temples along the way to gain the powers of the Aeons to stop sin. As they journey they will unravel the secrets of Yevon, the Aeons, Sin, the Final Summoning, the disappearance of Tidus’s Father and of Spira itself. Theirs will be a journey of both laughter and sorrow till the climatic and unexpected end.
So there is a lot I like about this game. My favorite thing by far is the Aeons and their Summoning animations. They are pretty sweet as are their overdrive attacks and the power of the Aeons are key to winning against many of this game’s boss monsters. It is creepy though when you learn that they are the essence of dead people in Statues but it still doesn’t make them any less cool. 🙂
But you can’t forget the characters. There are seven playable characters and each battle consists of a three character team. You can switch out characters during battle so there are no worries if your team isn’t the most effective against a certain type of enemy, just swap a character out for one who can exploit that enemy’s weakness. 🙂
Now a lot of you who played other FF games but haven’t gotten to this one yet are probably asking yourselves, what about the class systems? Well, the beauty is the combined many of the job classes into each of the seven characters. This is how they broke it down:
Tidus: Freelancer
Yuna: Summoner and White Mage
Wakka: Imitates Ranged attack classes with some aspects of Knights
Lulu: Black Mage and Time Mage
Kimahri: Lancer and Blue Mage
Auron: Samurai and Knight
Rikku: Thief and Chemist
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You can also teach character skills other characters have learned but depending on their class build that could be ill-advised. Don’t let that discourage you though. I have had good success in mingling the skill sets of Lulu and Yuna.
The score of this game is also equally amazing as are the visuals. As you can see above there are some excellent CG scenes throughout the entire game. And the Score composed by Nobuo Uematsu is to die for. I especially enjoyed the Orchestral version of Suteki da Ne (How Wonderful is It?)
Now, of course, there is the downside to this game but it’s a fair trade-off. Besides having to play 2 rounds of pain in the ass Blitzball which I never got the hang of, the system for leveling up is a little overwhelming at first. Yes, you do gain levels but instead of automatic stat increases and skill additions, you get points. You then have to use these points and spheres gained in battle to move along the Sphere Grid (depicted below) and gain stat increases and learn the new skills along the way that will make life easier as you come up against stronger bosses and opponents.Â
All in all though, the great aspects of this game outweigh the few crappy parts. I have enjoyed playing it time and time again and it will always be my favorite game among the Final Fantasy Franchise. I fell in love a long time ago with the story and the music and the characters. The world of Spira is beautiful and enjoyable to explore and you’ll never want to finish playing. I guarantee you will enjoy it if you are the discerning gamer. 🙂
While this game was originally on the PS2 there is an HD Remaster for the PS4. Either are good, it’s the same plot in either game. The PS4 version, however, comes bundled with the sequel which sadly was not as good as the original so keep that in mind when you are deciding which format you want to play in.Â
C-Gaymer 
