Salacious Snake

There's a rat darting out of that trash can!

The Christmas reminiscences were great. The segment made me a little sad, though, because I was trying to play along, but I don't remember my childhood with that much detail. It was kind of a weird thing to realize.

invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing also spring to mind. Maybe it's just your example that got me thinking horror, but it feels like there's something to it. (I hope I'm not repeating stuff in the cast, I haven't listened yet, but I'm really excited to!)

Not split toning per se, but definitely fucked with the colors. Here's how it looked after the initial raw conversion: I find the split toning tool kind of frustrating, I never get a result that I like. Digging into the straight up color editing stuff (where you can just hijack different bands of color and modify them) can be good, but if you're looking for some stylish results, bust out the separate R G and B curves in the tone curve tool. I'm using Capture One Pro instead of Lightroom now, but all that stuff is basically the same.

And it don't stop DSC00642 2 by J.D. Cohen, on Flickr Stuff like that drives me insane!

I had the same thought. I sometimes also feel like the conditions to trigger a wreck are pretty harsh, like Wipeout would have let me sort of fudge my landing a bit with its wonky physics, and this just has like a zone of death. Really digging the game, though. I think they did an excellent job with it.

I'm not a verbose game player, so no problem there. In general, I let loose many profane words in front of him, and I haven't really started thinking about curtailing it yet. I don't know, I grew up in an R-rated home (only in terms of language!), and I don't think it hurt me in any way.

Yeah, the knockoffs are just as good as the official unit. The Dreamcast looks awesome over VGA; widescreen is a nice bonus, but it's the progressive scan that really makes the difference. It was a significant half-step toward HD consoles gaming. Pro-tip: Some games will appear not to work over VGA, but if you switch the output during boot-up, you can get them going anyway. I have one of these. I think it's defective, because even after tangling myself in a web of various custom adapters, I was never able to get the SCART input working, but it was cool getting scanlines on S-Video and composite stuff. Systems that are designed for an interlaced display look so terrible on HDTVs. Of course, it doesn't do anything for the latency. When I have the space, I'm going to hook all the old junk up to a good CRT; there's really no substitute.

I bought that Neo Geo Humble Bundle, but it didn't occur to me until reading this thread and contemplating my collection that I have all of the games in the bundle as cartridges. Some are home carts and others arcade. (And a bunch of them actually belong to a friend.) At least I'm getting a cool T-shirt. Aside from the Neo Geo, I have a lot of 3DO and Jaguar shit, and a Nuon. I love old game crap!

Yes, actually. I'm able to bounce him around which helps him nap, but my hands remain free. I take it I'm not the first person to discover this! Edit: while I'm here, I want to mention that the system for unlocking characters is horseshit. It feels like an iPhone game.

Haha, I love this.

I like it! Having a baby around makes it very difficult to play any kind of multiplayer game where it'd matter if I dropped out suddenly, so I don't see myself putting a lot of time in, but it's fun. The breezier, easy come, easy go nature of something like Star Wars Battlefront is more my speed right now, where nobody will care if my dude is just standing still at the spawn for a while. edit: I guess I'm a Star Wars dad now

I joined Maelstrom when all that was going on (leaving Goon Squad on Mal'Ganis where I had been since launch, because it had gotten kind of annoying). I think I started out in Mariano (or whichever was the horde one) and ended up in the inevitable Famiglia di Ythrl. There was another one between those... like a runoff guild when I was still on Mal'Ganis that was fun because it wasn't so serious. I don't remember what they were called, though. I think the tabard was a lobster bib?

Trash can Sally, You better slow your trash can down

The demo for Battlefield 1942 contained the best Battlefield map, "Wake Island," and offered infinite entertainment. Even if it hadn't been a particularly good map, any given Battlefield battlefield tends to contain the potential for all sorts of battlefield stupidity to emerge. I think the Starsiege: Tribes demo had similar legs.

I loved those install screens. A weird detail to note is that the full install option came later in a patch. When it was new, there was no avoiding the between-act smoke breaks!

I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it's an interesting discussion. This is kind of a useless reply, but I wanted to give this thread a thumbs up!

Yeah, an unevenly matched 1v1 in a game like Quake is just immensely frustrating, but it's not as bad in a group free-for-all. Or we could join another server together and all get spanked the lunatics who are still actively playing after all these years. The multiplayer was such a huge part of the zeitgeist with these games. Also, don't forget about cooperative! Doom or Duke 3D with a buddy can be so good.

I'll be curious to see your thoughts on Quake 2. I have mixed feelings about it. Do you have any interest in checking out the multiplayer side of these things? I could be down for a deathmatch if you want to hit me up in Slack. (I'm jd.)

My street! DSC09357 by J.D. Cohen, on Flickr

That's not right at all: Quake always had full mouselook. It just wasn't on by default, because it took some getting used to (and would likely result in the uninitiated staring at the ceiling and floor a lot). A common thing at the time was binding a key to mouselook that you'd hold to engage it, and let go to snap your view back to center if you got disoriented (and there were other variations on this... Quake had a complex keybinding system that you could mess with through the console and config files; you can't go by what's in the menus, which is probably what tripped you up). But once you got used to it, you took the training wheels off and just left mouselook on. That's how all ~serious gamers~ played Quake, even back in 1996. You're making a big mistake by not using it. Quake is the game that taught everyone to use full mouselook and set that as the template for all future FPS games. (Heck, it's the game that accidentally introduced rocket jumping... we sure didn't do that without mouselook.) In the early days, multiplayer servers had a hilarious division between people who had figured it out and people who were still using the keyboard, and you can imagine how quickly everyone had to adapt if they wanted to compete. Go into the console (`) and type +mlook. I'm glad you're enjoying the game the way you're playing it, but I'd hate for you to miss out on the full experience. You should play Quake like a modern, 3D FPS, because it is one! edit: if you do use mouselook, you may want to turn off the aim assistance by changing the value of sv_aim to, I think, 1, rather than whatever fractional value it starts at.

I did some candid photos at a friend's wedding reception, and it's making me want to pursue that kind of stuff for real. (photos are here: https://flic.kr/s/aHsko8cxnk ) I don't expect posting about it here to lead to work, unless you're in my area and have an event coming up (I'm in Brooklyn, NY). I'm really posting because I want to show off this sick video I made of people dancing: I changed the music, because I figured the original audio would trip all the copyright alarms, and I love the resulting effect. The couple are huge Star Trek fans, so the selection seemed appropriate. It makes everyone look so goofy! I love it.

You're talking about the Sheepdog: It's not quite as complex as you remember, because multiple people could be in a channel, so you could talk to your whole team at once. Intercepting communications was a neat idea, but the game just didn't support a level of strategic teamwork that would make such a capability useful, at least in my experience. I mean, what could you really learn? "Hey, I intercepted a message from the other team... they're planning to blow us up and capture our bases!" Well, duh, obviously. It just wasn't that intricate. Of course, that could be because I'm a baby, and a pro VT pilot would have a very different attitude about it. Still, I'd think you'd be better off fielding a vehicle with more offensive capability instead of that thing (even though it looks awesome with its sensor equipment). Combat Mission: Black Sea does some nifty stuff to simulate battlefield information sharing and electronic warfare, as detailed in this video: But really, I'd love to see that kind of stuff in more of a grand strategy game like they were fantasizing about on the cast. It could be so rad.

I was thinking the same thing. They even share kind of annoying combat that I'd usually prefer to ignore!

Yeah, the level design in Dark Forces can be confounding at times.