Salacious Snake

TOS really does hit the ground running no matter which episode you consider the first one. The original unaired pilot, The Cage? Awesome. The second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before? Super Awesome. The first episode to actually air, The Man Trap? A totally solid episode of Star Trek. Emissary (DS9) is pretty good too.

This is a thoughtful and great post, thanks for writing it! You bring up a lot of good points, and in response to what was kind of knee-jerky and even a little facetious on my part. The rest of this current discussion is an interesting case study in how people can engage so differently with a game. On the subject of being chided for acting violently, I honestly didn't notice. The narrative side of Dishonored failed to grab me from the start, so I ended up ignoring it and approaching the levels as objective-driven sandboxes. The story was so not a driver for me that I didn't realize until like a year later that I had stopped playing a few minutes before the ending.

Awesome! That's a very photogenic group of cheetahs. Weirdly, I think my favorite subjects are the insects, particularly that very boldly patterned katydid. https://photos.app.goo.gl/HYetXnIlzANyYA0z2

For me, Dishonored facilitated a pretty satisfying middle-ground playstyle. I'd go into every situation with the intent of being stealthy, but ready to "go loud" when I fuck it up and the shit hits the fan. Then there's a sort of ebb and flow to the action as you flip between those modes. If I may be so bold as to make a sweeping and probably stupid generalization, I think RPG-style progression mechanics can really fuck up immersive sims, because you can so easily pigeonhole yourself into a certain approach. I'd like to make a mod of Deus Ex (any of them really) where it just awards you with certain augmentations at predetermined points in the story. Then it'd be like "OK, I've been sneaking around for a bit since I got that cool cloaking device in the last level, but now I've got the super duper assblaster, so maybe I'll try that out." It could encourage trying things that you otherwise would ignore. My favorite game in the immersive sim category is Thief, which has minimal progression stuff, aside from getting some new gadgets. I can say pretty confidently that it wouldn't be improved by having to dump experience points into your archery skill. Basically fuck RPGs.

If you prefer your tutorials in video form, there's a fucking TED Talk about how to tie your shoes (which despite my dismissive tone actually improved my life). https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes

Ugh, god. It would be mortifying, like hearing your own dumb voice on an answering machine times a thousand. edit: and they just got there

So where’s that Disneyland photo?

So I just finished season 3 of Enterprise, and it was pretty good. People kept saying it gets good, but I was getting pretty skeptical as the first 2 seasons wore on.

I kinda read the Klingons as republicans with their directive to stay Klingon, or whatever. It gave off a real MAGA/America First vibe for me. They're trying to build the wall, etc

It definitely works in his voice. Classic Breckon self-hoisting.

I love the movie and SG-1 and the roleplaying game campaign that I played in for a bit. When I saw the movie in the theater, the marketing up to that point had been cryptic. Trailers would just show them digging out this ring or whatever and activating it and stepping in, with no material about what would be on the other side, or really what the premise was outside of the gate itself. I feel like that made it more fun. I also love the music and sound design, some of which was drilled deep into my brain because of how extensively it was sampled on the FLA album Hard Wired.

Oh fuck dude, I love Condemned. That was a hell of a launch title to usher in a new console generation. It kinda jumps the shark, but, you know, video games. They rarely know how to end.

Somebody is making a game wherein you control both the ghost and the goblin https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/09/11/over-my-bead-body-for-you-puzzle-game-released/

I enjoyed the original Crysis a lot more once I cheated to make it so I'd never run out of suit energy and have to wait for it to recharge. I was just full on Maximum man all the time, and it was a hoot.

Oh yeah, TNC is the best trek podcast.

One thing to keep in mind with the CoD series is that from CoD 2 on, consistent 60fps performance and low latency on consoles (primarily Xbox 360) has been a major target. They certainly could have beefed things up for the PC versions, but the sacrifices are understandable if you look at it as a 360 game. It would lose a lot if they dropped it to 30fps, and it really wouldn't play right if they'd gone for some kinda Killzone 2-style "you'll get your frames when we're good and ready" renderer.

Enterprise 3x10 - "Similitude" Dang that was a good episode.

Cool! Was it annoying to track the boat while it was cruising along? I've been dying to get a drone of some kind for a while.

I can never get past a point early in the game where you find a plasmid, but you have to ditch another plasmid in order to equip it. I freeze up and just quit the game.

At least for now, they'll be playing a bunch of smaller games. That could free them up to have more fun, since they won't be worrying about building another epic. Once they settle on what will be the next major campaign... then yeah, they could get psyched out because they feel the pressure to recreate the magic of tres horny boys. But, you know, whatever happens, happens. Maybe we'll get more great #content, and maybe we won't, but they sure sizzled it up this time.

Yeah, that whole thing of feeling like you have to tie everything up as if it were a planned saga all along when you were just kinda goofing around in the beginning can lead to some weird shit. One of the best/worst examples of this is Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which tries to treat all the previous material as if it were all real and very serious. Then you're supposed to be getting choked up about this guy grappling with his mortality who a few games ago was sitting on an egg to hatch an owl so he could use the owl's call to distract a guard. edit: speaking of which, I really want to replay MGS4. I wish (Fuck) Konami would do a PS4 version.

Wow, those look great!

The Adventure Zone!

Yeah, although in the early (Roddenberry) days of TNG, they wanted it to depict a future of causal space banging among mature colleagues. Shit was envisioned as super horny.