Redwall

Yes, hence: I'm of the opinion that in order to bridge that divide divinity and worship must be entirely separated from ethics (and indeed removed entirely), but that's a sort of humanist wet dream and so instead I try to grant what I see as the pros of religion and hope they start to act with more awareness.

(I think properly full titles should be italicized and episodes in quotation marks, but since Telltale's the only real example of episodic gaming the nomenclature is still understandably cloudy.)

I think how and why are getting confused. Rodi, your sense of 'why' is what the religious call 'how', i.e. the mechanics of the events. Religion is intended (at least in any serious perspective, excluding the vast majority of religious, who don't understand their own theologies) as a 'why' in the sense of humanistic meaning (which is why I prefer to term the dichotomy as one between "what does happen" [science] and "what should happen" [religion], making religion just a term for an ethical system).

In the sloping hallway where you can get back to dry ground the icthyosaur can't get to you (it's too big), so just stay in there and shoot out as best you can (IIRC; maybe my memory of the geometry is wrong).

Ray Fiske is by far the best character on Damages. I liked the show, Glenn Close and Ted Dansen are also great, but it's nowhere near as good as Mad Men (the other big new summer series).

XP.

Witness the otherwise inexplicable rash of rabidly conservative American politicians turning out to be secretly drug-addled and/or gay.

Backlash to the backlash to the backlash?

Yeah, I don't the HL2 solution for plot-centric NPCs but there were times when I really wanted to be able to shoot the resistance fighters (when they got stuck in a doorway as a Strider was shooting at us, for example. My Gordon shoots people who are in his way.)

That's one of the things I find really interesting about Bioshock (beyond the whole metagaming thing), that it really mirrors the story of Rapture and Ryan itself in its successes and failures (at least in my eyes).

Nobody's mentioned "The Girl in the Fireplace"?

At least the last four episodes of season 3, probably (Malestrom, The Son Also Rises, Crossroads I and II). Razor is pretty standalone (or at least I suspect it will be) and the middle episodes of season 3 (Taking a Break..., The Woman King, A Day in the Life, Dirty Hands) are much like the middle episodes of season two in that they are mostly bad and have little impact on the overall plot. (I can summarize them: Lee and Kara stop fucking, Helo shows us all that racism is bad, Adama hallucinates his dead wife, and Tyrol reorganizes the union that we saw him leading on New Caprica for all of ten seconds.)

I really liked it, but was disappointed to lose the flashbacks to Cain's past as a young girl (which supposedly explain just why she's a psycho bitch and more specifically what's up with her obsession with that knife/razor). "Buy the DVD!" they say. Eh. I'm not sure there was much point to revisiting Cain and co.--we didn't learn anything new, in terms of the universe or in terms of drama, I think--but it was fun anyway. Lots of nice explosions, the new actress who played Shaw stood her ground well enough, and yeah, the return of the original Centurions was great (not as good as in the web flashbacks where young Adama wrestles with one in mid-air after ejecting from his fighter, though!). The whole thing with Starbuck at the end also seemed a bit tagged in, but it was also fun (and that hybrid was creepy as hell) so whatever.

What I wonder is is anyone actually buying this game? I assume not, and any sales that exist are primarily driven by the publicity it's gotten (and the fact that it's Rockstar). If anyone other than Rockstar had made this, I suspect no one would have given a damn, sales would have been dismal, and censorship would be unnecessary past the enforcement-of-18-limits pretty much everybody already agrees on. Ideally market forces would prevent these types of games from being made at any significant rate because they won't sell well. (And if market forces don't, then we have a problem with our culture, not the company that's taking advantage of it. I don't want to sound like I'm abdicating Rockstar/corporations in general of responsibility, because this is scum, but this is scum that only works if people enjoy the scum itself.)

How does the whole play-a-Middle-Eastern-ruler-until-he-gets-assassinated bit fit into this? Europeans' naivety towards current American attitudes is variously immensely depressing and uplifting.