Milcho

I actually really liked that. It's as if, while teaching you the controls, the game being extremely blunt about the fact that combat is deadly and that you will experience loss, whether you're a quick-load-addict or not

But it doesn't really teach you much about combat deadliness. One death is a cutscene death, and the other two are one-shotted by sectoids - which don't normally one shot your troops. The deaths feel just story driven - like they wanted to show how badass the aliens are. At least they could've put in some flying disks or a muton or two to show that off.
Anyway, I wouldn't mind so much if those deaths were avoidable somehow (say you're really really good), but the deaths are just scripted, making me just cringe.

On an unrelated note, the game mechanic that all shots are hit/miss per shot is kind of bothersome. I understand things like sniper rifles, and rifles and pistols maybe. But someone with a shotgun or the heavy that fires a ton of bullets doesn't fit that mechanic too well. I think they should've made those hit/miss per bullet, not per shot - as I said, sometimes even the graphics show one bullet going through an enemy even when it registers as a 'miss'.

I decided to try the game out, since it looked fairly interesting.

Haven't gotten very far, but so far the tutorial has managed to annoy me. Why was the very first mission teaching me how to lose all my party members? Why did only one survive? I have a thing for not letting my squad get slaughtered, but the tutorial gives you no choice of the matter. It's a bad way to start a game when the tutorial pisses me off.... hopefully it gets better.

 

Edit: 6 hours in, the gameplay is fun - though some of the points originally mentioned here are starting to annoy me (the inability to undo your orders like go into overwatch). 

But I just hit the first central story mission (Assault on the alien base), and holy f*ck! 

 

It was like hitting a brick wall in terms of difficulty. Playing on normal, I didn't expect to see 3/5 of my squad wiped at the very first fight in the mission. I'm either doing something completely wrong in terms of how I've equipped my soldiers, or in terms of how I play - but as far as I see, unless you have foreknowledge of what will trigger those 4 legged aliens, you can't hope for most of your squad to survive. Thankfully playing without Ironman, so I reloaded... and then probably reloaded like a dozen times to complete that mission. Brick f*cking wall!

 

Edit 2: After trying my best, I had to relent and lose one soldier on a Very Hard terror mission. This game... I ended up with rescuing 1 civilian out of 6, and losing 1 soldier out of 5. My rating for both those? "Good" ... this game is unforgiving as f*ck. Also starting to hate the RNG. More often than not, my 70%+ shots end up missing. That so far, as a new player, is probably my worst gripe with this game. I've seen shots of a few meters away with a heavy class miss! Even the animation couldn't quite keep up, and showed some of the fired shots connect.. but no - game says they all missed, so I'm effed.

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. If we do not restrict guns, then how do people propose to lower gun violence? It may be on the decline, but it still is a problem. 

 

I'm curious to see what people propose.

 

I think that's the wrong question.

Your question seems to imply that we should always do what results in the most reduction of gun violence, regardless of what it costs, or what situations it would create.

 

All laws take away a little bit of your freedom. As much as people deny that, it's true. Some laws seem like its worth taking away those freedoms, while other laws restrict freedoms that cost far too much.

 

In my opinion, gun restriction laws are closer to the second kind - they cost more important freedoms than the benefits they provide.

As I was pointing out in my post above, the government doesn't really take a responsibility in protecting you. They do punish those who break the law, but at the end, when faced with any situation, the only person who can protect you, is YOU. It seems ridiculous that a government would restrict your right to protect yourself, in my opinion. (edit: mind you that I'm also under the opinion that everyone who wants to own a handgun should have to go through mandatory safety and general usage training, much like you need to pass tests in order to be able to drive)

This is just sad all the way around. In Kentucky, 5 year old shoots 2 year old sister with rifle.

 

So we're going by sensationalism and feel-bad stories?

 

Here's a good case not only why people should be allowed to have guns, but why people should be taught how to use and feel comfortable using guns:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

 

Here's a bit of sensationalism for you:

The police failed to respond to the calls for help, and failed to do anything about the intruders.

For the next fourteen hours the captive women were raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon one another, and made to submit to the sexual demands of Kent and Morse.

 

And the ruling of the court:

The court stated that official police personnel and the government employing them owe no duty to victims of criminal acts and thus are not liable for a failure to provide adequate police protection unless a special relationship exists.

 

 

Basically, according to the decision, the police isn't there to protect you, and has no such duty.

You know who is the ONLY PERSON who can protect you? YOU

People need to understand that, and they also need to be taught not to fear guns, but to be trained to use them, and learn to defend themselves.

Haven't used IE for anything serious for a long time now. Last time I used it was when I was writing some html5 code and wanted to see how it behaved in different browsers.

 

So, i don't know about now, but in the past, IE had some pretty bad security problems, had no real support for ad blocking, no tabbed browsing, and didn't seem to support many web-standards. The security issues were in small part due to the fact that IE was the most popular, by far, browser - so it was the target of most exploits. A lot of people felt that that was only a small part of it, though, and the major security problem was just bad programming.

 

Recent versions also seemed to have support for other things like tabs, ad blocking etc... not that's all of the features.

 

I don't hate IE or its users, I just won't use it again. To be fair, my experience with Firefox was equally bad at one point, with a lot of sluggish elements, crashes and other crap. I also don't use Firefox that often. I also don't use Chrome due to the tracking build into it. Yes, google has a ton of my information, but that doesn't mean I want to freely give them more.

 

The browsers I use, in order of most used to least used: (also the only ones I have installed)

Opera, SRWare Iron, Firefox, and on rare occasion IE. 

I use Opera for maybe 98% of my browsing, and Iron for the other 2%. Firefox and IE get no love from me.