Salacious Snake

Yeah, that stuff is infuriating. There's a tutorial message on screen telling me how to safely fall great distances, so NATURALLY I jump into the huge gaping pit directly in front of me. GET BACK TO THE MISSION AREA, SOLDIER! Destiny has a similar combination of jetpacks and giant, inviting pits that you're not allowed to enter.

Went for the Upright Citizen's Brigade reference. Dropping sweet refs.

The multiplayer feels great this year.

I've become obsessed with the Leader series from Dan Verssen Games. They're solitaire wargames, mostly focusing on air combat, and they're friggin' brilliant! There's an iPad version of Phantom Leader, which covers US air operations over Vietnam, and while it's a clunky app, the underlying game makes up for it. I'm now getting ready to try Thunderbolt-Apache Leader (modern Close Air Support), but I also kinda want to get Hornet Leader, because it has a Lovecraftian expansion that involves dropping bombs on monsters. It sounded like a silly idea at first blush, but after reading some reviews, I'm totally sold. It's hard to describe how these things work, because they have kind of a weird level of abstraction. You spend a lot of time choosing weapon loadouts, and then the actual resolution of a mission is very simple and straightforward. Going from mission to mission, pilot stress accumulates, and managing your people becomes tricky... they're your most precious resource, and you will get attached to them, like an X-COM squad. It's extremely tense, and the randomness of the dice element means you're always a breath away from everything going sideways (which is frustrating, but in an evocative way, and necessitated by the otherwise predictable nature of a solitaire game). There's also U-Boat Leader and an ongoing kickstarter for Tiger Leader if you're less into airplanes. (Tiger Leader is sadly not about large cats.) The reason for my excitement is that I finally had a fairly successful campaign in Phantom Leader after a series of catastrophes. It takes a while to get the hang of things, but I hit that point where it all started to fall into place, and it felt great. Here are some links to people describing things better than I can: http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/08/04/over-vietnam-phantom-leader-deluxe-will-almost-never-get-over-vietnam/ http://www.nohighscores.com/2013/11/08/hornet-leader-cthulhu-conflict-review/ http://lonelymeeple.com/review-thunderbolt-apache-leader-there-aint-no-warts-on-this-hog/ One last note: it's easy to incorporate another player or two in these things by sharing the planes around. They're designed for solo play, but can totally work with more.

Yeah, a lot of the makeup doesn't hold up all that well with the added detail. The funniest thing to me is how much more obvious the stunt doubles are. None of that pulls me out of the experience, but I can see how it could bother people.

The worst is when they do that nonlinear stretch where it is sorta normal in the center and then the stretching accelerates toward the edges. It makes me ill.

I feel like I should do that too; I kinda ran out of steam near the end. Not that I imagine it's necessary to finish the one before playing the other, but I feel weird leaving such a major hole in my game background. It's weird, because I have had an N64 since it came out, but I never played Ocarina of Time, and I'm a pretty big fan of much of the series.

That looks so good. Some great work has been done restoring Star Trek in a similar manner (a show which I will take any excuse to talk about). Trek is so effects-heavy that some extra jiggery-pokery had to be done. In The Next Generation, all the original effects shots were composited onto tape, so the restoration effort involved taking all the separate film elements and compositing them anew, along with replacing effects altogether when they didn't have usable sources. They did a great job of maintaining the original intent, and it just looks like a ridiculously high quality version of the show. One great benefit is that we end up with the show's colors being unfucked after having been ravaged by tape: The original series sees similar benefits, though they redid all the effects in mediocre CGI that in my (probably overly purist) opinion changes too much. With the magic of blu-ray and branching scenes, you can choose to use the original effects shots rescanned in HD, but on Netflix, you're stuck with the new CGI stuff. It's just awesome seeing the crazy uniform and lighting colors really pop. I mean, that stuff was designed to sell color TVs. This kind of restoration is so worth doing for shows and movies that have languished in bad tape transfers.

I love it so much! The best bits are when he gets into Bubbles's head.

I snapped a few shots on my morning walk today. (got a little carried away in Lightroom with that one) And here's a bonus monkey and a dog glamour shot:

Wraith: The Oblivion (first edition) is free for halloween in PDF format: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/350/Wraith-the-Oblivion-1st-Edition?it=1 I don't know how mechanically broken the first edition is compared to second, but Wraith is a brilliant role-playing game. I'd easily say it's the best of White Wolf's work.

God, WFRP is so good. I have nothing else to add, really.

If you want to extend your search to bad GTA clones, this youtube playlist can help you out:

I have a long daily rail commute, so I use the morning to catch up on this stuff (via twitter and this thread, mainly), and let me tell you, it's not a great way to start the day. I should be getting myself psyched up for work, but by the end of the ride I feel nauseated and want to lie down in the dark. Maybe it's a little bit due to reading small text while in a moving vehicle, but that usually doesn't bother me, so I think it's gamer gate.

It's funny how terms like "facehugger" and "chestburster" entered the fan lexicon (and probably spin-off shit like games and comics). I think they only came about because the VFX people needed names for the puppets they were building; they were never meant to be "in-universe" terms.

I'd like to echo this sentiment.

Teen Wolfenstein Too I think I'm doing this wrong.

Owen Good of Polygon has been acting like a big stupid asshole today. He's doing the whole false equivalence "the anti-ggs are just as bad as the ggs!" thing. The corker is this insanely tone-deaf reaction to the backlash: And he still shows no empathy for the people who, you know, actually need to feel safe.

I wonder about that, too. I'd feel better about it if I were channeling that energy into positive action. Then I could at least regard myself among the warriors, fighting the good fight. But no, my contribution is to sit around getting indigestion about it. I'm a social justice wimp.

I feel like an asshole talking about GG's effect on me, since it's laughably insignificant compared to those being harassed, but even as a freelancin' dude writing about shitty games for babies, it has interfered with my ability to make money—at least, it has interfered with my ability to do so with my conscience intact. The idea of having a crisis of conscience in regard to writing about these damn video games seems absurd, but there we are! I pretty much can't tear my eyes away from twitter lately. It's like an intravenous drip of hopelessness and anxiety, and I can't concentrate on anything else.

Here's the guy in charge of the Escapist (known online as Archon and the guy who reached out the GG people) interviewing Adam Baldwin: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/10/06/news/interview-adam-baldwin-gamergate-politics-ranger/ Here's a storify of some of the escapist nonsense: https://storify.com/alexlifschitz/escapist-drama When this shit first broke out, I was like "how is Susan Arendt letting this happen?!"

Warning, hot make-out session ahead

The Star Trek thing is weird. There really was a core ideal in the early goings that involved using the wacky aliens in an almost allegorical way to promote understanding, but it gets very muddied. Likewise, the push to have prominent women and people of color on the bridge (including Majel Barrett as the first officer in the first pilot) was constantly undercut by insanely sexist shit left and right. It was a product of many collaborators and of course of its time, but holy cow. If you marathon Star Trek, you'll get whiplash from how quickly it swings between presenting a progressive message and leaning on the worst shorthand.

I prefer Ratbag as the protagonist so far.

In addition to custom sounds, you could load a bitmap to use as a custom level in the earlier Worms games. I have great memories of crowding around a computer with friends and blowing each other up between Doom/Quake/Duke3D matches. Goty.cx awards should include a category for Sickest Spookified Space Station.