Blackfire

He said that cultural and historical change had led to a "dissolution" of morality in Catholicism. The sexual revolution in the 1960s had led to homosexuality and paedophilia in Catholic establishments, he claimed. The letter sparked fierce criticism from theologians who claim it is "deeply flawed". Vatican expert Joshua McElwee said in the National Catholic Reporter: "It does not address structural issues that abetted abuse cover-up, or Benedict's own contested 24-year role as head of the Vatican's powerful doctrinal office." Some allegations of child sex abuse by priests that have emerged date back to decades before the 1960s, the decade that Pope Benedict claims sparked the abuse crisis. Julie Rubio, a Catholic theologian, said in a tweet that the letter was "profoundly troubling". It is rare for Pope Benedict, who in 2013 was the first to resign in almost 600 years, to intervene in clerical matters. He had been accused of failing to protect children and suppressing investigations, allegations he denied. The only solution to the problem, the former Pope said, was "obedience and love for our Lord Jesus Christ". His analysis of the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church takes a more theological and historical approach than Pope Francis. At a summit in February, the current pontiff called for "concrete measures" to tackle the crisis, not just "simple and obvious condemnations". As he had "served in a position of responsibility as shepherd of the church" when more cases emerged, Pope Benedict said he wanted to "contribute to a new beginning". Published in the German Catholic magazine Klerusblatt, the 5,500-word letter is divided into three parts. Paedophilia 'allowed and appropriate' The first part presents the "wider social context of the question", lamenting the 1960s as a time when "previously normative standards regarding sexuality collapsed entirely". He blames sexual films, images of nudity and "the clothing of that time" leading to "mental collapse" and "violence". At the time of the sexual revolution, "Catholic moral theology suffered a collapse that rendered the Church defenceless against these changes in society", he said. The sexual revolution led to paedophilia being "diagnosed as allowed and appropriate". Sexual revolution led to 'homosexual cliques' Next, the letter examines how this period affected the "dissolution of the Christian concept of morality", particularly in Catholic educational institutions. In some cases, bishops "sought to bring about a kind of new, modern" Catholicism and the sexual revolution led to "homosexual cliques" in seminaries. Pope Francis compares sex abuse to human sacrifice He claimed one bishop showed his students pornographic films to make them "resistant to behaviour contrary to the faith". "The question of paedophilia, as I recall, did not become acute until the second half of the 1980s," he said.

Rejected. Respect model and title then made a new request. good luck T/C

Most people don’t know how it feels to flick the back end of a rally car out on the approach to a blind turn, rain pelting down on the mud before them while someone shouts coded directions at them. It’s just not the sort of thing you find yourself doing, is it? In a game like Dirt Rally 2.0, then, a greater level of abstract thought is required to assess its ‘simulation’ cred than in, say, Project Cars 2. You might not have sent a McLaren P1 up Eau Rouge in your motoring life, but you know how a road car feels on a road. What do the snarling Group B rally cars feel like on a loose surface? Very few people know, and they’re probably much too busy to tell you about it in any great detail. That’s why Dirt Rally 2.0 exists. Since its earliest outings under the Colin McRae banner, Codemasters’ rally series has traded on ‘feeling’ just right. The way its cars squirm and shift through corners; the way you can keep them just about under control while they power through turns at strange, unnatural angles—it’s always felt instinctively right. Never has that been more true than in the Midlands studio’s latest offroad proposition—Dirt Rally 2.0 tells you how it feels to be a professional rally driver with such fearsome assertiveness that you simply believe it. No questions asked. How does it feel, exactly? A bit like the Normandy beach landings, but with pace notes. A rally stage is an assault on every sense (alright, perhaps not taste or smell if we’re being pedantic), rattling the cockpit camera violently while an audio onslaught of complicated but crucially important pacenotes hits you, whether you’re ready for them or not. Force feedback surges through your wheel, fizzing your brain as though you’ve licked a battery, and whether using a wheel (preferable) or pad, vehicles behave just as you want them to—barely tameable, occasionally balletic in their powerslides, always convincing. This was broadly true of its predecessor—but in truth, Dirt Rally never felt anything like as scary or as taxing. The sequel ramps up the visual fidelity where it counts, using weather effects and time of day to create real drama. Standing water in between muddy tyre tracks glints under your headlights, dust kicks up around your scrabbling wheels, and each of the six rally locations—New Zealand, Argentina, Spain, Poland, Australia and the USA—asserts its visual identity instantly, such is the level of environmental detail. It’s an incredibly handsome game, and one that doesn’t tax a humble GTX 1070 at max settings. Back from the venerated spec sheets of Codemasters’ GRID series is a team management aspect which sees you hiring staff, purchasing vehicles and setting liveries as you decide which event to enter next—a rally or a rallycross stage. Beyond providing a sense of structure to the content that was lacking slightly in the last entry, this serves as a timely reminder of what a brilliant aspect this is in any driving game. Seriously—why didn’t more games rip off Race Driver: GRID? I digress. This is, as if you didn’t know, the official game of the 2019 FIA World Rallycross Championship, which means eight licensed tracks spanning the globe and meticulous event recreation across several series. Rallycross featured in Dirt Rally 2.0’s predecessor too, so its inclusion here doesn’t represent a leap forwards but instead a quiet fleshing out of the 2015 game’s skeleton. As and when you do decide to dedicate some time to rallycross—several cars battling for the victory on the same mixed-surface track, for the uninitiated—a wholly different set of skills are called upon than you’ve been honing with your co-driver over in rally events. Rather than reactive, isolated bursts of perfection, rallycross has you honing lines and lap times. It’s iteration and confrontation—and more qualifying rounds than seems strictly necessary, in all honesty. But that’s not the game’s fault. What these two deceptively different disciplines have in common in Dirt Rally 2.0 is that for the first few hours, you’ll win them incredibly easily. That’s not intended as a humblebrag: the AI really is that forgiving. Stack it even twice or three times on a single stage, and you might still expect to be towards the top of the classification with 20 seconds of penalties. Take an extra Joker lap—a longer layout of the circuit—by accident, and victory is by no means ruled out. Speaking personally, that forgiving AI led to a sensation of ‘failing upwards’ as I took win after win without truly mastering either car or track. It’s probably intended as a means to make Dirt Rally 2.0 more accessible than its forefather, but I’m not sure it quite works. Perhaps a rally school, similar to the one prefacing the famously formidable Richard Burns Rally might have been a more effective solution. Stiffer competition awaits online of course via custom championships, and it’s here that Dirt Rally 2.0’s long-term appeal lies. A talented community of modders and racers crystallised around the previous game, and there’s every bit as much incentive for it to do so once more here. Because although this isn’t a complete overhaul of the last Dirt Rally, it does feel like progress. Certainly progress in the visuals, which look more than just four years down the line in this game. Progress in the level of immersion, thanks to tiny touches like driving beyond the finish line to the steward after each stage. And certainly progress in a sense of overarching structure to singleplayer racing, thanks to the team management conceit. The only area it feels lacking in beyond that tepid AI is licensing—that Rallycross deal’s great and everything, but never has a game more richly deserved the WRC license than this one. Modders will work their magic on car liveries in that regard, but with the recognisable cars and names this might have been the vehicle to bring new fans to rallying.

An ape who wants to escape only has a few options, one of which is shoving her human captors into walls so hard that all the blood flies out of their bodies. That's the plan for Ape Out's ape, and it's pretty much the whole plan. After the first human goes splat, the percussive jazz kicks in, and the dizzying improv violence session is on—just keep running and always be splatting. While Ape Out starts to drag after the first couple acts, it's hard to put down anyway, because it looks, sounds and feels so consistently cool. As the ape, you charge across procedurally-generated mazes from a top-down view, shoving, grabbing, and tossing the human-shaped enemies in your way. It's like a twin-stick shooter, where one analog stick controls movement and the other rotation, but your guns are your biceps. I preferred the mouse and keyboard controls, where WASD moves and the mouse controls the direction I'm facing, the same way I played Hotline Miami. Left click shoves enemies with brutal force. Into a wall and they'll splat, and into another enemy of the same size or smaller they'll both splat. With a right click, you can instead grab and hold onto any enemy. Shortly after, they'll fire their weapon away from you, so you can use them to shoot their friends before left clicking to chuck them into walls or each other. It's a bit funny to go from shoving people into pillars like a high school bully (who's a gorilla) to deliberate, tactical use of a human shield, and that tension between recklessness and planning runs throughout Ape Out. At times it helps vary the pace, but it also relates to Ape Out's biggest flaws. Arm race On the reckless side of things, the ape's power is intoxicating. Nothing ever slows you down, nothing can stop your shoves. The biggest enemies splat just as hard as the smallest. A few opportunities for added style are satisfying, too: In one set of levels, you can push enemies out of skyscraper windows, whipping them toward the street with fantastic force. There's not much time to admire a well-placed shove, though. Ape Out demands snap judgments: I surprise a bomb guy and shove him toward another bomb guy, exploding them at a safe distance from me. Immediately, I have to grab a shotgun guy before he can shoot, spin him around and chuck him at another shotgun guy to block his shot and double-splat them. I ignore a couple riflemen who miss me—they won't catch up if I keep running—smash through a glass pane and shove three more guys into splats along a corridor, because sometimes tactics aren't needed, just ape arms. As I improvise my way through levels, the jazz percussion improvises along with me, rising to the action and throwing crashes and squeaks and snares and bells in to mark each kill. Ape Out is divided into four eight-level 'albums,' each with its own rhythms and instruments and themes. Together with the stark, unstable color fields that make up the levels, the weird perspective, and the nonsensical, randomized maze layouts, the high-tension music induces the anxiety I imagine in the ape: being an animal in an unfamiliar environment, lashing out against what's hurting me, scrambling and circling back and shoving everything. Your ape isn't unstoppable, though. When an enemy has a clear shot on you, they'll pause to load and aim, and then take the shot if you haven't dealt with them or turned a corner. It doesn't take many hits to take you down, at which point you have to start over at the beginning of the level. There are 32 levels, plus one bonus level, and while they aren't exceptionally long, they aren't bite-sized, either, so it's frustrating to die just before the end of one. Completing every level only took me a few hours, but Ape Out felt sluggish by the time I got to the third album. From there, the difficulty feels too dependent on randomization, and many of the levels are disappointingly similar to each other. There's not much new to learn at that point, either. After my delirious early experimentation, I wondered where this strange game about splats and snare drums was going to go, and I wasn't too impressed when it added exploding barrels. More variety comes from new enemy types, but they're mostly just annoying: flamethrower guys are best avoided, and rocket launcher guys ruin everything if they spawn in too large a number or at an awkward spot. I'm meant to use their weapons to my advantage, but staying alive is hard enough without trying to fancily tease rockets into other enemies. The procedural generation doesn't help. I can end up at the top of the screen only to find a barrier that extends all the way down to a little gap at the bottom, and then learn on the way there that an inordinate number of enemies spawned along the wall, with too little cover to manage them—another run ended, frustration building. Like Super Meat Boy and Hotline Miami (the first one), Ape Out takes pride in killing you, but dying rarely feels like the learning experience it is in those games. It's just something that happened because I went the wrong way—without any way to know what the right way was, because the level changes every time—or when a rocket squeaked by a corner from behind me. That focus on failure hinders Ape Out's theme of jazz improvisation. I wanted to be reckless all the time, to play out the angry ape's revenge like an angry ape, but when frustration set in as the levels became more difficult, I started playing more like Solid Snake in an ape costume: cautious, timid, afraid of dying just feet from a level exit again. I'm not sure that strategy worked better, but the distance between checkpoints and my fragility pushed me toward hesitation, especially in the war zone-themed album, where those barrels love exploding in chain reactions. I felt relieved when I finished later levels rather than triumphant, especially when I breezed through one because the randomization was on my side. Ape on Now that I've beaten every level and I'm a bit better at making the right decisions, I find Ape Out more enjoyable than I did when I was first trying to progress. I can easily run through the early science facility and skyscraper levels, and with less of my attention dedicated to staying alive, I'm more present for the music, which is fun to tap my keyboard along to. My favorite level is a special one, though, where the pressure almost completely lifts and I get to run around smashing everything I see, as if my brain has tuned into whatever frequency of background radiation is angry at humanity's crimes. It's a great pay off after the punishment before it, though I'm not convinced it's great because of that punishment—it's more that it was something different when I was craving difference. I wanted to see this simple control scheme and fantastic art applied to lots of different scenarios, not a bunch of ship decks. Ape Out is so thunderously stylish and thematically strong that I like it even though it loses its thrust so quickly. It evokes anxiety and fear with brutal efficiency, so if you've ever wanted to feel like a cornered animal—or me whenever someone asks me a direct personal question—here's your chance. Those uncomfortable feelings just aren't balanced with quite enough triumph. trailer :

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You rarely see this addressed in the great space operas, but the process of space travel can be boring. Sure, you might feel giddy when you see the Earth’s [CENSORED]ture below you for the first time, and you can look forward to an obligatory existential crisis as the planet and then the sun become indistinguishable from all the other pinheads of pure white light in your perceived sphere of space, but what comes after that? Maybe you start tiring of your functional metallic surroundings, designed to joylessly keep you alive. The dense bricks of space food will dull your taste buds within a week, and you may find that your crewmates—the people you’re presumably going to share the rest of your life with—are a dissonant bunch that you have nothing in common with, making for an infinity of stilted conversations in the canteen. Oh, and you’ve just received word that there’s another fungal bug infestation in the service tunnels. Well, better get to it then, seeing as you’re not only the ship’s captain, but also the only capable pest controller onboard. That’s the scenario of roguelike, first-person shooter and base-building game Genesis Alpha One—space opera without characters; space exploration without context. Cosmic order The constituent parts for something interesting are here though. You start out with a crew of human clones embarking on the Genesis project—a corporate-funded mission to find humanity a new home. Your perspective in the game is divided between controlling your crew captain in first-person, and building and expanding your spaceship on a 3D grid. The cosmos is depicted through a procedurally-generated tile-based map, which you traverse using a simple turn-based screen from the bridge of your ship. When you reach galaxies, you touch down on planetary surfaces in search of resources and upgrades, use those to expand and upgrade your ship, assign tasks to your fellow clones, then beam the ship to different galaxies once you’ve bled that system dry (and yes, what little story there is does allude to the classic ‘space travel is the new colonialism’ platitude). It’s a logical and varied loop of activities, bolstered by the fact that the ship-building system is modular and accessible in a way that doesn’t take you hours to get things done. You plonk down ready-made modules such as weapon workshops, research labs for making new clones, and greenhouses where you can grow plants that provide a biosphere for the various human-alien hybrids that’ll eventually po[CENSORED]te your ship. You connect all this up using corridors, lifts, and eventually teleports, and can set up defensive measures like decontamination chambers, gun turrets and security gates in case any alien life gets onboard Next, you set your crew to automatically work in the various modules, but you need to be there in person a lot of the time to decide what they should be working on: which debris to mine using the Tractor Beam, which clones to create, and which weapons to build. You have to do a lot of running around to make sure everything is working efficiently, so it's best to make sure your ship is sensibly laid out. Then you can step back to watch robots carry resources from your harvester to the storage as your crew diligently perform their assigned tasks. There’s a satisfaction to seeing everything running in a factory-line sort of way. Your ship layout is important for safety reasons too, because when you beam in resources using the Tractor Beam, or send your hapless subordinates on expeditions without you, then hostile aliens can get onboard. The smaller ones are the real problem, crawling into service shafts running under each module to make nests, then nibbling away at nodes powering the rooms. If they get to the nodes under your reactors or greenhouses, you’re screwed, so it’s important that you can get to vital parts of your ship quickly when you have to. In theory this should create harrowing sci-fi horror scenes as vital systems shut down and rooms de-pressurise to the sound of blaring alarms. In reality though, disaster is easy to avoid. Just set up several turrets around your tractor beam and in contiguous service tunnels and you’re pretty much set for life. In order to get the kind of swarming Starship Troopers-like intensity you see in the trailer, you have to let it happen. Larger aliens, meanwhile, aren’t that much of a threat if you beam them in, because they can’t get into the vital organs of your ship. Yes, they can knock off a few crew members, who seem utterly incapable of defending themselves, but given that the only progression system for your crew is to create new and improved ones, it’s no big loss. There’s an imbalance in the challenge here. If things go wrong on your ship the disaster can escalate very quickly, but it’s too easy to block off the avenues by which that can happen. My first run of Genesis Alpha One lasted about five minutes, as some space-mites got into my ship’s underbelly, nibbled the nodes, and duly blew everything up. On my second run, a rudimentary, never-upgraded defensive setup ensured that I completed a good 10-hour run while rarely breaking sweat. With no depleting resources like fuel or food, you could almost forget this is a roguelike, because you’re rarely forced into those high-stakes situations and dilemmas. Poor man's sky It doesn't even matter when you die. The game auto-assigns you another near-identical crew member when it happens. You're most likely to die during harvesting missions, where you land on procedurally generated planets to gather resources with up to two crew-mates. With the planets’ 70s sci-fi neon tones and synthy soundtrack, you could almost squint and mistake it for No Man’s Sky. What it actually is is a simple wave-survival segment where you harvest resources from within a few feet of your ship while enemies beam in to attack you. You can set up turrets and energy barriers, or take on your assailants using a weapons arsenal that expands as you research new techs and acquire new samples from fallen foes. The shooting is as weightless as the flailing ragdolls of dead aliens, and the rhythm of these encounters is exactly the same each time, even if the aliens vary. Try to explore more than a couple of hundreds yards from your ship, and you hit a force-field. The saving grace of these missions is that they feed back into your ship-building and research—the strongest part of the game. It's exciting to discover blueprints for new modules, weapons and suit upgrades in shipwrecks. When you find new aliens, you can splice their DNA with human DNA back on your ship. There’s a mad-scientist joy to creating rock-monster-human hybrids in the clone lab, or seeing what comes out if you mix in some spider-alien DNA. The statistical and visual differences between hybrids are limited however; each hybrid is essentially a mask wrapped around a human clone’s silly featureless face. But at least it gives you little goals to aim for on a journey that often lacks urgency. If the atmosphere of a planet deemed worthy of settling is filled with, say, nitrous oxide, you may even consider methodically executing your existing human crew and replacing them with N2O-breathing hybrids. Crew expendable That's a cruel way to treat your crew, but they have so little character it's hard to care. The human clones look disconcertingly like Working Joes from Alien: Isolation, except instead of uttering darkly comical meme material while throttling you, they’re just walking tutorial menus that describe the room you’re standing in. You can build a canteen for crew who aren’t assigned to tasks, but even there they bimble around listlessly with no needs or interactivity. At one point, I shot a crew member, partly out of boredom, but also in the hope of getting human DNA samples for my cloning research. But I got nothing, and felt nothing. It’s a stark contrast to similarly reticent people-management games like FTL and the bizarre, brilliant Kenshi, where the games’ clever systems help spark my imagination, encouraging me to mourn lost lives or otherwise weave characters’ deaths into a story. The disparate parts of Genesis Alpha One actually fit together quite well, but none of them are high-quality parts. You can lose yourself for a while in designing your ship, giving its corridors a nice colour scheme, and tinkering with new DNA and alien abilities, but when you’re done you still have to go back to those bland tasks alongside your bland colleagues. Where’s my Working Joe to tell me everything’s going to be OK as he smashes my brains out against the wall?

Remember the last episode of Lost? Where several seasons’ worth of narrative groundwork was abandoned in favour of a series of nostalgic flashbacks and weepy reunions? Looking back, you can see the sense in it: having written themselves into a corner, the show’s creators decided to tug at viewers’ heartstrings in the hope that they’d invested enough in the characters to at least feel emotionallysatisfied. The Walking Dead: The Final Season doesn’t have the same knotty lore to deal with, but attempts to pull off a similar trick. Unlike Lost, it’s a missed opportunity to connect more fully with its past. But it’s similarly likely to provoke tears—and a few howls of frustration besides. Whether this is close to the send-off that was originally planned for Clementine is hard to divine—but surely her story wasn’t set to wrap up quite like this. It hardly needs repeating that the team that finished this season isn’t the same as the one that started it (they’re credited as the ‘still not bitten’ team, which feels like a crass misjudgement in the circumstances). Penultimate chapter Broken Toys doesn’t seem to bear too many obvious scars from Telltale’s sudden, awful closure, suggesting the bulk of the work had already been done. Instead, it’s the last, crucial chapter of Clem’s story that feels curtailed and compromised. Until then, the final season makes a case for being the strongest since the first. Our increasingly world-weary protagonist has grown from a timid child to a tough-nosed survivor, prepared to do whatever it takes to keep her friends and loved ones alive. Here, her story comes full circle: she’s now the adult half of a surrogate parent/child relationship, imparting vital life lessons to the orphaned AJ as Lee did to her in Season One. You have a little more input in the rules you establish for the kid, but otherwise we’re on similar narrative ground—with one small but significant difference. Born into a violent world, AJ has never known what life was like before the zombies arrived. As a result, he’s much more volatile, with a twisted sense of right and wrong. As ever with The Walking Dead, it’s best not to get too attached At times, that makes for great drama. You’re often reminded that he’s just a kid, though his outbursts make him a very different proposition from young Clementine. It’s a risky move: hardened by circumstance, he can be difficult to warm to, but trying to address his warped idea of morality leads to some thought-provoking moments as Clem is forced to consider the hypocrisy of her own behaviour. And you’ll soon learn that leading by example only goes so far. Your choices can be misinterpreted in ways you don’t expect—most obviously in a disturbing scene right at the end of episode one, a jaw-loosening cliffhanger that proves, after all this time, The Walking Dead is still capable of shocking us. To paraphrase Hideo Kojima: you will feel ashamed of your words and deeds. It also handily solves the second season’s biggest issue, where Clem somehow became the de facto leader of a bunch of adults. Now, having fallen in with a group of school-age survivors at an institute for troubled youngsters, it makes more sense that she’s the decision-maker: she has, after all, spent longer in the world beyond the boundaries these resourceful kids have established. And the story pumps the brakes just often enough for us to get to know them—though as ever with The Walking Dead, it’s best not to get too attached. A nearby group of survivors hoping to forcibly ‘recruit’ your new friends are this season’s main threat, while the confrontations that follow include a surprise encounter with a face from Clem’s past. As usual, the writers get to decide which relationships are important, though this time you’re given the option of beginning a tentative romance with the introverted Violet or laid-back Louis, offering some welcome moments of tenderness amid the tension. Regardless of your choice, Clem’s love interest is largely sidelined in the later stages—even more so if you make a certain, seemingly unrelated, decision in an earlier scene. But that’s nothing compared to an eleventh-hour surprise that feels like a total cheat. It hinges upon a sequence that requires at least two huge leaps of faith on the player’s part, undermining the credibility of the climax. Yet I’d be lying if I pretended, as with Lost, that I stayed dry-eyed until the credits—though much of that is down to the efforts of those who never got the opportunity to put the finishing touches to Clementine’s story. She may have been too good a character to be left in limbo, but this concluding chapter leaves you wondering what might have been had Telltale still been around to close the book.