Salacious Snake

They're talking about this: Which also shows up in an advertisement on the storefront in the background.

Hey!

The first edition took place in 2013. Far flung! There does seem to be a hot, scantily clad babe theme here. One of these drawings also shows up as an advertisement in the trailer, which is kinda nifty.

The voice recognition doesn't work at all.

So what you're saying is that they've updated the style considerably, considering that it's adapting a game from 1988! When I get to a computer (aka cyberdeck) I plan on posting some hair-raisingly 90s rpg art, so hold onto your butts.

Cyberpunk 2020 is one of my favorite games, so I'm pretty stoked, breasts notwithstanding.

Being forced to deal with a 'campaign' in open world games drives me crazy, too. Like, I just want to be an unfettered space asshole without having to worry about being shot at or which area I'm supposed to be liberating. I used a cheating program with Just Cause 2 so I could unlock everything and have a longer, stronger grapple line and it was way more fun. It's weird how so many games get in their own way. The best thing about Crackdown is that you can just go get those orbs and ignore everything else. (Assuming I'm remembering it correctly.)

I felt an acute pang of nostalgia thinking about going to ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/idstuff to download the GLQuake executable. Walnut Creek, y'all.

Hover does seem a lot less sketchy than the guys I'm currently using. I wonder how much of a pain it would be to transfer over. On the other hand, I probably shouldn't even keep my domain. It's pretty pricey to have a .xxx TLD, and google apps doesn't support it, so it's even a pain to have decent email. (Google understandably doesn't want to deal with porn stuff, but goddamn it, wieners.xxx isn't a porn site.) I also don't do fuck all with it. It's just… so amusing to my juvenile brain. edit: it seems weird that we're even talking about the sponsors. I think it's a testament to how not gross it has been on the podcast.

That's terrific!

Having recently finished Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, a bit of dialog from the closing scene comes to mind in relation to this observation: Holly: Ugh... that uniform was too tight in the chest... Ahh, I feel much better now. Here, I stole this gun from the enemy. You can have it. Snake: Yeah... I can see how it'd be hard for a woman to use. Thanks. I was pretty surprised by that. I think there were some other questionable comments earlier in the game.

Love that shop music. I'm mainly looking forward to the Metal Gears. I'd guess they make a certain amount of business sense, though they tend not to take great advantage of the newer hardware. Examples from the last go-round I can think of off the top of my head would be Gun, Just Cause and a variety of sports games. On the other hand, we're probably going to be looking at specs that aren't too weird, so things should scale relatively easily. A lot of current Xbox 360 games make me wish I could just stick a faster video card or something into the machine, and having some extra power juice (very technical stuff here) to spread around won't hurt. Basically I want something like Sega's Extended RAM Cartridge for the Saturn, or the N64 Expansion Pak. Actually, this brings me to another subject. How does everyone feel about the future of the "HD rerelease" trend? I'm sure publishers will continue to dredge up PS2 and Xbox-era games for reissue, as it's a pretty low-risk venture, but what about PS3 and Xbox 360 games? There are quite a few Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games that run at resolutions below 1280 x 720. Would you consider buying your favorites again at reduced prices if it would give you the same experience at 1080p with a consistently high framerate and with a few trendy new shader effects glorped on top? I probably would in a few cases. PC die-hards will surely sneer at the idea, but there we are. This console generation has seen a lot of games with crappy performance that would benefit from a little cleanup. Do we wait another generation before we start getting HD+ versions?

I like to think of the Far Cry 2 system as a gun subscription. My hard-earned diamonds are buying me the Heckler & Koch Unlimited MP5 Plan, along with a few optional service upgrades, like Premium Reliability KochCare. The various dealers around the area are simply honoring my contract, because they have an arrangement with H&K to do so. edit: It also appears that I'm their only customer and they're stocking the guns just for me, but I'm no businessman! They don't seem to have much overhead since everything is done with those shitty computers.

If one of my employees acted like an abrasive jerk to someone while working for me (including undermining one of his fellow employees at the same time), I'd want to know. That's where I'm coming from on that point; it has nothing to do with trying to get someone in trouble. But... I see, that's a very different case. Well, good luck!

After playing through them I'd agree that neither game is difficult, but they would have been more time consuming otherwise, and I've had minimal time for games lately. I figured if I didn't rush through, I'd get sidetracked and fail to finish them (again).

I don't have any advice on how you should deal with the situation vis-à-vis your friend, but after a meeting like that, I would issue a complaint professionally to the company he represents, and tell my organization about the entire exchange as a matter of course. His employers should know how he's representing them. edit: Obviously, I don't know the whole situation, so my instinct may be way off.

I love how we've been able to see the progression from the early bigdog stuff to this. It always looked like they were onto something, but now it appears to be getting very close to being something practical. The people at Boston Dynamics are fucking awesome; they must be super excited about their work. It's terrific stuff.

I recently completed Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, the MSX games as included in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, and subsequently the HD Collection. I played them on the Vita. I had dabbled in them both long ago (especially the NES version of MG1), but never made a concerted effort to complete them. They're totally worth playing if you're into the series. It's crazy how many of the ideas of MGS originated in those first two games. Even iconic moments like super long ladders and elevator rides and all the double crosses and kooky radio conversations are present. I made heavy use of walkthroughs to save myself a lot of unnecessary backtracking and getting lost… both games heavily focus on having the right piece of equipment for a given situation, and it's easy to miss picking something up. It was a cool trip through the early history of a series I admire, but they're fun, well-designed games in their own right. They're very sophisticated, but at the same time, they demonstrate why the later games feel kind of clunky and old sometimes. The 3D games are still holding onto control conventions and other logic dating back to the MSX2. Metal Gear is kind of like a surreal Hollywood version of the original Castle Wolfenstein.

Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh. You touch my crown, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding.

I played only a short first section of Uncharted: Golden Abyss recently, and there's a lot I could say about it. I happen to know from talking to others and reading a postmortem on the game that the (horrendous) early bits are not representative of the whole game; it's front-loaded with very badly done minigames and tutorials, and even contains a half-baked level thrown in at the last minute because it was decided that the opening didn't have enough action. It's not like the fact that it changes later invalidates the early experience. In the case of Uncharted, maybe the terrible early parts are the only parts worth discussing, because after that it just turns into an average action adventure of little note. On sort of a tangent, I don't believe a reviewer should be expected to finish a game in order to render judgment.

It looks like something that crawled out of the nineties, or more specifically, out of the nineties comic book The Maxx.

I had never read this before. I enjoyed it immensely. The style is vivid, but economical; it's the kind of writing I most admire. I think the experience was enhanced by my reading it almost entirely on trains in and around NYC, including bits of Long Island. During passages about the local geography, I had the sound just outside my window.

I was reminded of this podcast this morning while reading a postmortem on Uncharted: Golden Abyss for the Vita. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/181082/postmortem_sony_bend_studios_.php It's a worthy read, but what stood out to me was the director referring to the major areas of the game as "worlds." It's a less archaic way to put it than boards, but it still sounds pretty funny for a modern game that is supposed to take place in the actual real world, as in Earth.