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Savage 2 is really a melee-focused game. It's not so much of a first-person shooter than a third-person hack-and-slash. Sure, all classes have melee weapons and ranged weapons, but the view switch to first-person when you're using a ranged weapon and to third-person when you're holding a sword. Most importantly, the ranged weapons do very little damage and are either slow-firing or inaccurate as a primitive musket.
Still it's fun in that there are a number of interesting spells and stuff if you're able to fork out the gold and the souls. There are 4 free-of-charge classes - builder, 2 offensive-oriented classes and a healer. Then there are another 3 classes that require gold but have very useful abilities. For example on the human side there is the steambuchet which is a mobile trebuchet. I've never used it before but from what I've seen so far it's rather slow moving, but can fling huge rocks pretty far. The other is the battering ram, which is exactly what its name says except it moves on its own.
On the beasts side there is the tempest, some kind of demonic spirit thing that has only 3 abilities - it can push enemies back some distance, turn ethereal (moves slower, can't attack, doesn't receive damage and drains mana) and best of all, summon a meteor strike. The other seige weapon is the behemoth which is rather self-explanatory. Very useful to kill enemies and structures since it's got this heavy blow kind of ability and a stomp ability.
With enough souls, one can also become a demon if the team has built a Hell Shrine. Hell Shrines can only be built on Scars, which most maps only have one of. Demons are basically the stalemate-breakers unless the players are newbies. I've never had the chance to be a demon before because most of the time my team couldn't hold the scar long enough to get a Shrine. But I have been encountered one of the demons called Malphas before, several times. I think it's the most popular class out of the three. To summarize what it does, it pwns.
I thought I had posted this before, but apparently I haven't. Must be some kind of connection problem that didn't save my changes. Anyway, here's what your McNuggets are made of.
It's on the left, not the one on the right. That is chicken!
Letters from Iwo Jima is a good film. It tells the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima from the point of view of a low-ranking soldier, PFC Saigo, and the garrison's commander, LG Kuribayashi. This battle happened at the end of WWII, before the Americans decided to use their trump card on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The soldier is fictional, but the general was really there commanding the entire defence force of the island. It was Kuribayashi's letters that later formed the book, Picture Letters from Commander in Chief, on which the film was based on.
What the fuck? It's 12.14am on a Monday morning (or Sunday night if you prefer) and someone's drilling and hammering something? What. The. Fuck? Okay, it's not very loud, but seriously? 12am on Monday? People have to go to school/work in a couple of hours!
Alright, seems to have stopped for now. Back to the film. Most of the drama probably wasn't real, but the battle was based on the actual event.
Kuribayashi had a rather unorthodox strategy of focusing his defence in Mount Suribachi instead of the beach (the conventional wisdom then was to stop the landing at all cost with heavy defence there). Therefore he had his men dig a complex network of tunnels in the volcano and focused on hiding his machine guns and artilleries.
It worked in the end, with American casualties exceeding those of the Japanese despite overwhelming American firepower. They had all the battleships and bombers blowing up everything on the island, but the tunnels made the surface bombing practically useless.
After the battle, over twenty-six thousand Allied soldiers died on that island. Out of the twenty-two thousand Japanese soldiers only about a thousand made it. No one knows what happened to the general, though the most common belief is that he fought without his rank badge in the final charge against the Allies and hence could not be identified. This was what the film depicted.
Throughout the film, especially in the scenes where the Japanese soldiers commited suicide instead of retreating, I kept thinking how wasteful they were. Those men could have been put to better use if they could retreat as the general had commanded (he was very much against suicide, eg suicide charges and seppuku) and continued to fight on the northern part of the island.
As much as I respect their commitment to their code of honour, I do not like the way they threw their lives away uselessly. Officers committing suicide I can understand, but common cannon fodder pose a lesser security risk if captured. Plus the remaining forces needed all the men they could get in their night-time guerilla warfare.
I think it was battles like this that justified the atomic bombings. If the Japanese could defend this hard on a nearby island, think about what they could do on their main island. The Battle of Okinawa (about a month after Iwo Jima) was even worse, with the Allies losing fifty thousand men and the Japanese a hundred thousand.
According to Wikipedia....
Freaking hell! It's 12.50am and the drilling is back! What the flying fuck are they doing?? I could probably call the police, but I'm not one of those sleeping. And it merely annoys me, not stopping me from blogging... or is it?
Anyway according to Wikipedia, within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki. Sure, most of them were civilians, but people are people. I think these numbers are low compared to what they would have been if the Allies had reached Tokyo and threatened the life of the Emperor himself!
If you haven't read about the bombings, you should! The part about how the Japanese discovered they were hit is especially interesting. Imagine: no one knew about atomic bombs back then. The Manhattan Project was top secret and few really knew what the scientists were doing. The biggest conventional bomb could only blast a building or three to smithereens.
And fuck you whoever is renovating his home at 1am on a Monday morning! Stop drilling and leave it for later! Like when the sun is up or something! I am now curious about what sort of urgent problem would require drilling and hammering at such a time on such a day.
The first people to even suspect that something was wrong were really the guys in charge of signals. At first it was the operator of NHK (the Japanese version of Mediacorp) who noticed that the Hiroshima station wasn't broadcasting. Then twenty minutes later someone found that the telegraph had stopped working somewhere north of that city.
Following confused reports of huge explosions from people close enough to see from a distance, the military sent a plane to scout the region. This was what they saw:
Below: what they expected
How To Ctrl-Z in Real Life for Dummies.
Three days later the Americans performed an encore performance due to popular demand, this time with a lacklustre feel to it. The noob crew kind of missed the planned target and had the bomb explode three kilometres from it. Bad weather, they say. Excuses, excuses.
Above: before and after Fat Man.In case you were wondering why they couldn't just shoot it down, it was because the bombers were not escorted by fighters. In proper bombing runs, bombers were always escorted by a fleet of fighter planes. In this case, the Japanese assumed they were recon planes, which were not important enough to be shot down due to Japan running out of ammo.
It's true that the atomic bombs were a low blow, but imo this was better than prolonged fighting all the way to the capital. At least the victims of these died before they even knew what was happening. I just wish they could have done it earlier to Hitler in Germany. I hate rage-quitters.
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