Salacious Snake

The lack of autosave is annoying, plus the fact that when you do save, it's only saving your progress up to your last elevator trip. I wish they had added state saves to the Subsistence versions. God I fucking love Metal Gear. Brb gonna go hatch a Zanzibar tawny owl to confuse some guards. edit: MGS4 was the first in the series that I actually played to completion, and then the rest finally clicked with me after years of dabbling and never really getting it. Kind of a weird point of entry, but now I appreciate them all (except PoOps).

wiener pics

I've been digging the newcomers's stream. I think they still have some work to do in finding a balance between over-explaining certain things while letting other ridiculous jargon slip through without comment, but they're doing a good job. On some level, it seems like an impossible task, since any given spectator will have different gaps in knowledge. I'm not going to remember any of the specifics, but I like getting a sense of the type of logic that goes into the various decisions made during play. If anything, it makes the game seem even crazier. The more sedate tone of their commentary is nice, too; I can never keep up with the energetic play-by-play style in the main stream. They do get excited, and there's a fair amount of clowning around, so it isn't too staid, either. Good shit.

I remember Heretics being the most action-packed of the series, though maybe it's only later on that it picks up. There's a lot of Miles Teg doing bullet-time space karate in that one. Things definitely get weird with the people from the Scattering. This is where the weird sex stuff starts, which gets pretty creepy in the final book. I think a lot of people lost interest at this point in the series. I like to imagine that there would have been a great payoff in book 7, had it been written.

Gosh, I love Dune. I finally got around to finishing Chapterhouse (the final "real" Dune novel) recently, and quite liked it as well. I think it's time for me to reread the entire series. I can totally understand people not being into the sequels, but I found them all interesting. I guess it depends on what you're looking for out of more Dune. I read summaries of the Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson books out of morbid curiosity, and it turns out computers are illegal because a robot literally murdered a baby by throwing it out a window. I don't think the current wardens of Dune have quite preserved the subtlety you so enjoy from the original work. One (very dorky) thing I did was to participate in a long-running Dune RPG campaign (using GURPS); it was fun to explore the setting in our own way, rewriting history as we went. Oh, one thing I want to add is that revisiting Dune in ebook format is frustrating, because the kindle edition (at least when I last looked) is riddled with OCR errors from top to bottom. (edit: did a little research, and it appears that the current version on offer is improved, but still far from perfect.)

The 6 discs making up Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom came in a cool little binder/wallet thing.

They've mentioned stuff like terrorist hunt, so there will probably at least be humans vs. computer-controlled bad people in some form or other. Multiplayer-only doesn't necessarily mean it will all be adversarial. At least I hope not!

I wanted the Miracle Piano Teaching System. I know I saw ads for it, but a small tickle in the back of my brain is telling me I encountered it in person. It's a weird feeling to be reminded of something that you once cared about but haven't thought of in more than 20 years.

I love Grim Fandango. When it came out, I was in my first year of college, and I pulled an all-nighter in my dorm room to complete the game in one go. (Previously in the same day, I played through the second disc of Curse of Monkey Island, coincidentally.) I never applied that kind of zeal to school work, which is probably why I flunked out the next semester. Grim Fandango fully absorbed me. It's a wonderful thing, and I'm very excited to play it again. And this time I won't get stuck on those fucking beavers for so long.

More like excubisoft. Seriously though, they should stop being stupid idiots and fix this stuff.

The birth of the .PNG name: It was PING before it was Portable Network Graphics. (And it's also a recursive acronym which is goofy.) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.graphics/tylpVt2y9s8/eHWKNVLYMREJ So I think we can leave poor ping alone here.

It seems sensible to me when considering the likely transitional form of "Gee Eye Eff," a pronunciation of the initials. From there to "jiff" is no great leap.

There's some prime "voice chat" acted out in that Rainbow Six video. Such a goofy thing.

Nope, but good idea. I did some poking around, and apparently a lot of people with PS4s have been experiencing inconsistency with the recording feature in recent firmware versions.

This game would be more fun if Aiden was a bit sturdier. I keep dying before I even realize I'm in danger, and not in a fun way. Also, my ps4 isn't recording video automatically while i play it. Don't know if that's just something wonky with my system or what.

Very well observed; I notice this a lot lately in popular media. It's pretty insulting.

I was going to buy this "digitally" for the PS4, but accidentally bought the PS3 version instead. That's my Watch_Dogs story.

Neat, thanks!

That cat has so much rude 'tude, winking at me while his New Orderesque theme tune plays.

I think the solved or not indicator is the little geometric shape (the symbol for that particular location) below the orb either being lit or not. I could be misremembering. The aimless wandering factor is killing the game for me. Like Chris, I'm frustrated by the time lost when I go through great effort to get somewhere to find that there's nothing there. Also, I never thought I'd say this about a game, but I wish you could jump, it would make some of the terrain geometry less annoying to deal with. I'm constantly finding ways to reach places that I'm not sure if you're supposed to be able to reach or not, with the answer always being no, this path does not lead anywhere. I feel like a hypocrite, because I always think I want more free exploration and less direction in games, but in this case I'd really like a little more direction. Going in circles forever is pretty frustrating. I do like other aspects of the game very much. I find it visually interesting, and the musical aspects are neat. As an amateur synth guy, I want more tools to mess with in the studio! The screenshot in the first post suggests that there's a point at which they drop the cute labels and reveal the proper oscillator, filter and envelope controls, which is cool. I just want to make shitty music in this thing.

I did notice that in TIE Fighter, Thrawn is wearing Grand Admiral white even though he is a mere Vice Admiral at that point.

I just recently read the Thrawn trilogy (Timothy Zahn) for the first time. It was pretty awful. I mean, I guess for licensed fiction it was some of the least worst, but man, there are ways to describe anxiety other than saying that someone's stomach or throat is tight, and someone can smile without feeling his or her lip twist. The writing style is atrocious. I enjoyed them, though. I was feeling pretty down because of a bunch of heavy real life shit that was beyond my control; I couldn't concentrate on anything more substantial. Some stupid Star Wars books were just the thing. Now I'm playing TIE Fighter and reading the super weird Legacy comics about the great-grandson of Luke Skywalker who is a jerk and a drug addict. TIE Fighter still rules.

Wow, he has paid his dues.

That Fotonovel rules. Earth's history has been restored! One is never done with Trek.

This is super great. Assassin's Creed IV: Accurate Ubisoft Simulator.