@LocoBaxter Not going to work -- you'll still experience the forces, only the bloody pulp that used to be your body will be contained in titanium.
At least your surviving family will not have to deal with the mess.

@Raizak Any activity that a depressed person does in order to avoid symptoms of depression psychologists label as self-medication. You can self medicate with video games, or alcohol, or food, or exercise, or isolation and/or staying in bed. I telling you this as someone who's been diagnosed as clinically depressed. It's not necessarily a bad thing, at least the video game and exercise part. But anything done to excess is bad (yes, even exercise). We all get depressed, but the difference between normal and clinical depression is that when the source of the depression fades, a normally depressed person starts getting back to his normal activities, whereas a clinically depressed person continues to suffer.

It's not Nazis that we are desensitized towards -- it's difficult to be emotionally involved in anything that feels so distant. As someone who's known death camp survivors, and have seen an elderly woman in a rest home reliving her experiences as a prostitute for the Germans while she was a prisoner, it's a lot less distant to me. Seeing something in a movie or a video game is not the same thing as seeing it in real life, or knowing people who have experienced it in real life. It's something that is impossible to relate to unless you've been there and only slightly easier to relate to if you know people who've been there.

What video games do (as well as the news and movies and TV) is desensitize us to violence, which is both good and bad. Being desensitized does mean that it's less painful to deal with. But it also can mean taking it for granted. For most people (especially if you didn't lose anyone to the Nazis or know anyone who lost anyone to them) they are like distant events from books. As we lose more generations, it will continue to become more distant. Which is unfortunate because genocides are still taking place today, and most people just try to ignore them, so they continue to happen time and time again.

A couple of related things that may be of interest, but are slightly off topic:

First, I have to recommend an essay I read years ago by science fiction author Larry Niven about the hazards of super-strength -- "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_Steel,_Woman_of_Kleenex

Second, there is this thing called the square/cube law -- strength tends to increase proportionate to the surface area of an animal/structure/etc. But mass increases proportionate to the volume. Therefore, strength tends to increase as the square of the height, while mass tends to increase as the cube of the height. So as things get bigger, they actually can lift less mass proportionally to their height, simply because they already have to lift their own weight, which is increasing by the cube of their height. In other words, you'll never have a human being with the 'proportional strength of a spider' because too much of that strength is occupied simply keeping the person upright. If you were designing a giant creature, at some point, as the height increased, you'd have a creature so big that it would be unable to walk because its mass would just about match its strength, and any larger, and you'd have something that could actually collapse under its own weight. Whales get around this problem btw, by living in water.

@skipkoto When people rate the game, they are rating their overall experience. You don't believe that people are having fun playing it? I'm having a blast. You think I'm lying? You think everyone else who's actually playing the game is lying? You think that everyone is your clone?

The art design is great -- it evokes the Elder Scrolls universe at every turn, which is what it's supposed to do. There's great evocative landscapes and architecture. It doesn't look like anything else but an Elder Scrolls game. And the graphics quality (as opposed to the art design) is comparable to most modern MMOs. Sure, the animations aren't great, but that's not what you were saying (if you had criticised the animations, I would have agreed with you, but you didn't).

The game you paid for...? It doesn't matter if they paid for it or got it free, they had a feeling about the game, and they rated it based on that feeling. You rate the game and you rate the value separate, with your wallet. Enjoying the game has nothing to do with thinking it's worth your money. That's a totally separate question (which is fair, but should be treated separately). A game can be rated a 10 out 10, but be so insanely expensive that you'd never recommend anyone buy it. Or a game can be free and be a 1 out of 10. That doesn't make it a better game because it's free. A rotten game is a rotten game, even if they pay you to play it.

And THAT's my only real problem with the review -- it's reviewing what the game isn't instead of what the game actually is. You are comparing a game to an ideal that only exists in your mind, and that really isn't fair. That said, if his overall appreciation of the game was a 6 out of 10, then that's what he should give it. That IS the only fair way of rating a game. I just think some of the specifics in the review were not fair.

@BurningUp99 @GrahamZ

Even though I disagree with his evaluation of the game, I am going to defend his review. He's paid to play the game and tell us what he thought of his experience, and he did. I think that some of the disagreement comes from a differing play style and perspective. I went into the game realizing that outside of group and public dungeons scripted events, and pvp, it's better categorized as a single-player social game.in a shared world (as opposed to a traditional MMO). And because I knew that's what it was supposed to be, and in fact, appreciated the game on that level -- it's different from traditional MMOs because of that, but that's not a bad thing, imho,

But Kevin looked at it and said, no it IS a bad thing, and that was his opinion. I might disagree with the perspective of the review, but if you are going to treat it like a traditional MMO and expect it to be like a traditional MMO and want it to be a traditional MMO, then you are going to be disappointed. And that's simply what happened. I don't agree with it. But that was his perspective, and he gave an honest review from that perspective. So don't call it a fail. I think that had he gone into the game not trying to fit it into an MMO framework, and evaluated it for what it actually is, and not what he thought it should be, I think he'd give it maybe 1 more point (or at least, I gave it one more point). That's really not a huge difference to complain about. 6 and 7 out of 10 in gaming reviews are treated like night and day, but the difference in reality isn't much. I'd rather it was a 7. But 6 is still honest. It's not grounds for world war 3.

It's not a perfect game, I wish it were a better game. But It's still an incredibly fun game.

BTW, you know how I KNEW it wasn't supposed to be a traditional MMO but a single-player game that you could play with friends? It's because ZEnimax said that during its development. And I can't say that I found that out on Gamespot, but I know SOMEONE covered that story...

@pongley @GrahamZI was never talking about ftl or sub-ftl travel or any kind of travel specifically. I was merely commenting on the expense of travel and the amount of time and expense involved in terraforming anything not in your immediate galactic neighborhood. Here are some issues though that most science fiction does not address (or address with a lot of hand-waving and technical mumbo-umbo)

1. If you are talking about travel within the confines of known or near-future science, then you are limited to either generation ships or ships with slow, but steady acceleration towards the speed of light. Either way, you are talking about something that is beyond any undertaking that mankind has ever done, with regards to expense and resources. Plus, you have to take into account that you'd have to depend on old data as far as where to head to find a theoretically terraformable (or even habitable) planet, unless you get REALLY lucky, and you find one within a few dozen light years. Whatever vehicle you built, would not only have to carry hundreds of human beings plus resources to keep them alive for the journey (some kind of hibernation could help, but that's also really beyond known science at this point). But you'd also have to carry everything that the new human race needs to get a foothold and boostrap itself into a self-sustaining colony, not knowing what the nature of the conditions at the destination will be. The scale of such an undertaking implies a WHOLE lot of planning, and not something you would expect to accomplish with very little warning. Assuming that the engineering piece is even practical (something that science fiction always likes to forget about), this is not something you are going to build with little to no notice. Which alone, makes it even more unlikely. And remember -- all the resources that are being diverted into such a huge project, are resources that are not being used to keep the current at-risk population alive. You think that the backlash about preparing for global climate change is bad, think again. This would likely be much worse.

2. Even if wormhole travel were possible (I'm not saying it's not, but we are way beyond known physics at this point), You either have to create a wormhole, or travel to a wormhole, and you have to have the technology, energy, etc. to both build and traverse said wormhole. My guess is that if it were easy to do, someone would have done it by now. So there's no indication that this is any easier or more practical than sub-lightspeed travel. It's a nice trick in science fiction for when you want to tell a story involving galactic empires on a large scale, because it enables you to tell such grand tales. But that doesn't mean that it's actually possible (or practical).

I'm enjoying the game, in spite of some of its flaws. But I think some of what Kevin considers flaws are actually its best points (the branching quests and quest dialog), and he completely misses some of its worst points (like the incredibly repetitive ambient dialog, and weak UIs for banking and guild stores).

I actually love how I can go into a building, finish a part of a quest, and when I leave, the outside has changed, reflecting the events that took place. That's absolutely terrific. MMOs NEVER get immersion right. You may as well blame all MMOs for that. The fact that you can send tells, breaks immersion (unless you were talking about a modern or futuristic setting with cell phones or walkie talkies). Complaining about lack of immersion in an MMO is about equivalent to complaining that you can't ransom your knight in chess when he gets captured. If you are after immersion, it's simply the wrong kind of game.

Furthermore, ESO has an excellent crafting system. It might not be the best of them, but it certainly is among the best that I've seen (maybe second after fallen Earth).

You made at least one error in this episod. When you spoke about humans having no antibodies against alien bacteria, you actually had that slightly backwards. The general consensus is that, bacteria rarely jumps species, so odds are that any bacteria you encountered would not survive a human host. It's not impossible, but it would not be a high risk either.

There are other considerations as well, if you wanted to create a permanent self-sustaining colony. Genetic diversity is one thing that most people do not consider. Also, remember the end of the movie "Doctor Strangelove", where the titular character is talking about the necessary ratio of males to females. You'll actually need to have many more women than men and optimally you'd want to have non-monogamous family structures for breeding (if you have to limit the number of people in your early struggling society, that's the optimal way to do it -- I think in "Doctor Strangelove", it was stated that something like 10 women for every man, though I'm not sure if that's the actual optimal ratio or not). BTW, it was meant to be funny in the movie, but I remember discussing it in a film class, and the point was that reality was not very far away from this.

Remember, you are going to want to travel as light as possible, and there will NOT be time to terraform a new planet in the disaster as described in the video. If you had terraforming technology and the time, the optimal solution, after all, would be to reterraform Earth, and not a new plahnet, which would be MUCH more resource-intensive.