Games have changed, and for the better.

Ultimately, everything in my little gaming ‘career’ began in the early 90’s, when I was lucky enough to be given a brand new SNES and a copy of Starwing (or Starfox for the US). From these beginnings, I went on to trade in my SNES for a PS2, then eventually buy an Xbox 360, PS3, PSP and Wii, playing literally hundreds of games. For a good while, I had almost totally forgotten my first love of the gaming world. However, for being a very good boy and finishing my A-level exams this summer, my Dad treated me to a retro gaming experience by purchasing a tidy, ancient SNES with a copy of that beauty, Starwing.

Holy sh#t, this game was hard. At the time it felt normal, standard, fun and enjoyable, but after years of auto-saves, variable difficulty levels, improved graphics and controls, SNES games now seem incredibly hard when compared to their modern counterparts. I wouldn’t say that the levels themselves are impossible, but hell, I’ve only got to level 3. It’s more of the fact that you can’t save your progress, you have three lives, and once they are gone, you are dead. Game over. Start again.

Imagine you’re on the last level of the single player missions of Call of Duty 4: the clock is ticking down and you’re about to reach the pinnicle moment of the game, when suddenly a cheeky and unexpected pistol-wielding Russian catches you of guard and kills you cold. Instead of the simple respawn to try again, GAME OVER sprawls itself across the screen, and you find yourself back to the initial training mission. This sounds absurd; insane and frustratingly badly programmed, but this is literally the way in which Starwing functions, as was the case for many SNES games. If you were going to beat the game, there was no going downstairs for snacks or dying a few times and trying over, you had to do it in one go.

Of course, there are reasons for this. Many gamers wanted an experience similar to the arcades where – clearly – a save option wouldn’t work. There was also the fact that memory was not plentiful in the early days of gaming. Every generation has the tendency to take for granted what would have been golden just decades before, and I really think this is the case for the existence of a lot of spare memory in the modern market. Having done a slightly naughty mod on my PS3, it now has 360gb of spare space for game saves, films, music and possibly an operating system. In the same way that car radios would be publicized when selling a car 20 or 30 years ago, “saving” used to be a feature, not standard.

The game is also considerably shorter than most modern shooters, and so completing it in one sitting is not something rendered impossible due to time constraints alone. I have heard a lot of complaints from single-player gamers over the last few months because they feel developers focus more attention on the online aspect of the games and therefore the campaigns and single-player sections are shorter than they used to be. This is true in some cases, but let’s not forget that there was once a time when beating 7 or 8 fighters was enough to complete a game, and could be done in 30 mins (I just re-bought Street Fighter 2 Turbo). Modern technologies allow such an increase in not only detail but also depth of a game’s environment that in turn causes deeper gaming experiences, and again this is worth keeping in mind whenever we feel hard done by about our shooters only lasting 10 gaming hours.

Now I don’t want to totally slate the former masterpiece that is Starwing, but it is also difficult on another, slightly related level. Due to the lack of pristine graphics, at times, it is actually really hard to know exactly where you are aiming. Also, due to the lack of a second d-pad or thumb stick, you can only shoot in the direction that you are traveling, which regularly leads to flying into enemy ships or asteroids, which really sucks.

If you want to keep that memory of your perfect retro gaming experiences intact, I would suggest not seeking replaying your earliest games, as our modern mindset can taint these memories. However, if you are feeling pissed off at the modern gaming industry, grab a SNES and play a classic. You might just find out how lucky we really are.

Big Peace Bunny Summer

Hey guys,


Just a little note of apology for being away so much recently, I have been snowed under with exams/revision for about 6 months now, but within the next few days it will ALL be over.

This summer I will be spending a lot of time with Peace Bunny Perspective, possibly looking at some of the arrangement issues and maybe thinking about having different inter-linking blog sections, one for philosophy, one for politics, one for music maybe, I'm not sure yet, any suggestions just put them in the comments or email me.

Expect to see new posts at around 2 a week and the blog really getting up to date. Thanks for hanging around, I promise to reward you all with plenty of content this summer.

Keep it easy,

Peace Bunny

Feeney and Sanders (1999)

Today I looked at an interesting study by Feeney and Sanders (1999) which shows that arguments between parents and their children increased 63% between the ages of 9 and 16, apparently mainly over religious, ideological and political subjects, as well as simply not wanting to do what they are told! But does this really surprise anyone?

Free Will in a World of Theism

I would like to start by stating that I do not believe in God, and enjoy seeing others having the same viewpoint. However, I feel the most important thing is to have such a belief for the right reason, as being right for the wrong reason is not desirable.

An argument exists against the belief in God, based on free will, and is structured roughly like this:

• God is defined as being all knowing
• All knowing must include knowledge of the future
• If my future actions are known by God, I have one set future path
• I am therefore not free to choose beyond this path
• Therefore, the Existence of God results in no free will
• Free will is good, and so the existence of God is undesirable

There are two key reasons why I find this argument unconvincing. The first is that, whether we like it or not, the world is as it is. Our liking of the existence of God has nothing to do with his actual existence, and not believing for this reason is equivalent to not believing in cancer or AIDS just because we don’t like it. It can still kill us, regardless of belief. There can be no subjectivity on the matter of God, it either exists or does not, and any personal opinion on how useful God would be is totally irrelevant.

However, this is not my main concern. The central reason why I think this argument is flawed is because the existence of an all-knowing being does not necessarily lead to a total lack in free will. It would be fair to say that for God to be fully aware of what happens in the future, each persons life must follow a certain path, and it would be physically impossible to stray from this path. Many people, wrongly, claim that this therefore means the person is not, or more importantly never was, free.

Imagine being told a detailed life story of someone who died year 1034. You, being very clever, can remember every decision that the person ever made, and can see all his whole life in one strand, a rigid set of events that follow one from another to death. The person never strayed from this strict path, but we wouldn’t argue that our knowledge of this linear existence stopped him from having free will. He could easily have chosen a different path, and if so, our knowledge of him would be different accordingly. Knowledge of what someone is doing or has done is not enough to warrant a lack of free will.

Some people may argue that this analogy is unfair, as God exists beyond time and space, and someone in a history lesson clearly does not. In this case, another analogy could be used. Imagine the whole of time, assuming it runs in one continual thread, as the tape inside a video cassette. The film shows the everything that that has ever happened, and you watch a clip of one person choosing between a red can and a blue can. He chooses the red can, and you stop the tape. Did that person have a free choice? He may have been influenced by the biological reaction to red, he may be driven by the emotional connection to the particular can, or he may have been influenced by a local rumour that people with blue cans are idiots. However, he was clearly not influenced, in anyway, by you, the viewer. We may not be able to say that he had a pure and only theoretical version of free will, as he his decision may have a number of unconscious factors. However, the existence of you, the viewer, certainly did not influence the choice.

You may be thinking that this itself is very weak, as the viewer only knew about the choice once the choice had been made, and God knows the future as well as the present. So, imagine rewinding the video, and watching again. You know now he will choose the red can, but is the choice still free? This surely is no different to God’s pre-knowledge that a person will live their life in a certain way, and it does not lead to the destruction of free-will. I therefore feel that the idea that God’s existence entails a lack of free will is logically incoherent.

Of course free will is never pure. I cannot do anything that is not possible, I can not do anything that my body won’t allow me, free will is limited when constrained, there are social and economic factors, I have biological desires that must be met and so on. But any knowledge of my future choices in some being that never interacts with me, or anyone earthly will have no impact on my free will what-so-ever.

This argument can be taken out of its religious context, and into an ever more relevant field of scientific philosophy. There are a great number of ideas about the universe, one is that with every possible ‘choice’ parallel universes are formed, and every possibility is explored in some way. In this reality, there is no argument that our lives are predetermined. If God was to know all about the future of such a universe, he would not know anything particularly special, as not only is anything possible, but everything will happen, in one universe or the next.

However, the argument of a pre-determined life may exist in a rival theory of space-time, which suggests one linear timeline, where space and time are part of the same fabric. Therefore, everything that ever has happened, is happening, and will happen co-exist in different patches of space-time, through which we are said to travel at the speed of light. Here, the same argument can be applied as about God. Just because it is predetermined does not mean we are not free.

It is both foolish and dangerous to accept a world where we do not have any form of free-will, and even more so if we sit back and wait for a God’s plan to take place. It is philosophically invalid to make such a claim, and could wrongly encourage some to not take the problems of our world into their own hands, and work for change, progress and unity.

Religious Experience: Can it Convince an Atheist?

Religious experiences can come in many forms. Some people claim that just the everyday world gives them experience of God, and they will see this as evidence of his existence. Others will claim that they have seen God directly, or been spoken too in some way by God. This would be known as a quasi-sensory experience of God, suggesting that it is a simulation of stimulation of sensory preceptors, for example, the experience of seeing something with no light actually entering the eyes. This will also mean it is unlikely that anyone present at the moment of quasi-sensory experience will experience the same thing. The other major experience is a numinous experience, which is essentially experiencing the holiness and awesomeness of God’s creation. The other two experience types often mentioned are not so much experiences in themselves, but the result of other experiences. This includes conversion, which may require some form of quasi-sensory or awareness based experience, and prayer, which would involve awareness of God’s work to become a religious experience.

A revelation could also be cited as a major religious experience, but I would hesitate to list this as an entirely different type of religious experience, again due to it’s dependence on quasi-sensory or awareness experiences. For example, a person may suddenly be enlightened to the knowledge that they should marry a particular person. Without God actually telling the person to do so in some way, and with no awareness of God’s work, it would be highly unlikely that such an experience could be labelled as religious, and the cause and nature of the decision is much more likely to be based in human emotion.

It must also be remembered that the categorisation of experiences is neither perfect nor water-tight, as due to the subjective nature of experience, many people will feel their religious experience would not fit neatly or snugly into any given category. Again, the same could be said for attempts to answer the question ‘what is a religious experience like?’ The only possible answers would have to have the added response of ‘or maybe something different’. For example, someone could answer ‘Religious experiences give the need to help others.’ However, for a truly correct answer, they would have to include ‘sometimes a religious experience will not give the need to help others,’ as everyone has different and contrasting accounts. Even recurring themes such as joy or inner peace are not existent in 100% of accounts, and so it is impossible to give one objective definition of what a religious experience actually is, and what it is like. Therefore, unfortunately, we have to accept that any attempt to describe such an experience is utterly meaningless. “It could give a sense of inner peace, but it could not” tells us abolutley nothing about the experience, in the same way that “I may own a bible but I may not” would be very unhelpful and give us zero information on my bible-ownership status.

Subjective information always faces such problems, and so maybe it is harsh to claim that religious experience accounts are meaningless, as they have great profound effect on the experiant. However, there is a large problem, and one that could be fatal in the attempt to convince an atheist. If it is impossible to give a full, comprehensive definition of religious experiences, and if it is impossible to classify them correctly and talk of them in meaningful language, then how do we tell apart a normal experience from a religious one? “It may cause joy or it may cause tension”, “you may hear God or you may not” and “you may want to help others, but you may not” apply, as sentences, equally as well to religious experiences as they do to casual daily experiences. Therefore, it is very likely that many things labelled as a “religious experience” by some will have actually been experienced by the atheist, but she did just not come to the conclusion of religious causation. This instantly destabilizes the whole argument, as the atheist will, rightly, feel that as ‘religious experience’ has such a loose definition, and one experience could be seen to be a religious one in one persons eyes, and non-religious in the next, the experience itself gives no evidence of God’s existence. It is not the experience, but the individual interpretation of experience that creates the ‘evidence.’ To understand the colossal size of this weakness, it is important to recall the format of the religious experience argument:

1. I have felt/seen/heard joy/happiness/belonging/presence/God/Jesus/design etc
2. I believe that this experience was caused by God
3. Therefore God exists.

Even a theist could see the sheer lack of philosophical validity in this argument. Surely it is clear that the second premise has no backing, and requires a belief in God in the first place? An atheist would have a very different argument:

1. I have felt/seen/heard joy/happiness/belonging/presence/God/Jesus/design etc
2. I have evidence that this experience could be caused by hormones/psychological disorder/chemical imbalances/trickery/I lied
3. Therefore, my brain caused/created the experience

This argument is strong, and in a vast majority of so-called ‘religious’ experiences, undeniable, scientific proof could be produced to show that the experience has a real, definable cause, in the physical world. The only religious experiences that could not be explained away using science and psychology are those that conveniently fall into areas of science that are not developed sufficiently to give undeniable evidence. Some believers may see hope in these scientific gray areas, but it is vastly more likely that the experiences will have materialistic or psychological causes, and incredibly unlikely that the cause is God. Unfortunately for the believer, the atheist is will but her belief in the most likely cause, and not put faith in the near impossible.

Ross and Brand Sillyness

So J Ross and Russel Brand got suspended this week for a prank call that didn't go down very well. This is a totally senseless issue. Every week, 'Fonejacker' gets away with seriously dodgy phone calls, including some that involve accusations of sleeping with various fictional wives. However, this is hardly ever drawn into question, and certainly never punished.

Maybe this is because non-BBC media love getting one over on Jonathon Ross, who many see as being over-paid. It could be that they have over-publicised this fairly innocent, if slightly untasteful prank call to damage his reputation as much as possible. This lead the BBC to re-act. Or possibly someone at the top has decided it is time that Ross was made the centre of some very negative attention, and so they picked him up on what is a very much a minor issue.

The girl in question, who has been given some 'abuse' in the prank call, really shouldn't be overly offended. She is a member of a band called the 'Satanic Sluts'. How can she be offended when her granddad is told about her having sex. She literally calls herself a slut! This couldn't have been news to him.

Any comments on this event? I think it is total madness, and another sign that the media are the all-powerful force in this nation, capable of blowing anything out of proportion, and destroying the reputations and livelihoods of people. A dark day for entertainment.

The Beautiful Words of the MSN age

“How are you?”
The utterly pointless,
Yet constantly questioned,
Attempted look into,
The emotional perception,
Of a person you’ve just met,
Online or in person,
That always draws,
Virtually no conclusion,
Merely a token phrase,
With little reflection,
Which ultimately results in,
A dead conversation.

Lol