Salacious Snake

I'm so glad they made it! Sportsfriends!

This does seem like a good fit. I've always thought of the old Mindscape Warhammer games as pretty direct ancestors of the Total War series. And hey, it's gotta be better than Mark of Chaos.

I want the next Halo to put the player in the role of a college-age Gravemind, skipping out on poetry courses and trying to score hot dates.

I wish more games would create that sense of urgency by having things happen on an actual timeline, a la Star Control II, Dead Rising or X-COM. I also like the system in Persona 3 and 4, in which time jumps forward in increments when you decide how to spend a chunk of it. (Like, going to the movies will eat up your evening, meaning there are other actions you won't be able to perform until another time, some of which are only available at certain times.) Major events happen on set dates, and you must spend the intervening time wisely. I know it's scary to design a game with time constraints like that for variety of reasons, but man, it can be so great. Imagine how much more tense Mass Effect would have been if the Reapers were actually coming.

If this is actually good, then the marketing did it a major disservice.

I experienced both thrill and shame at hearing my embarrassing old user name referenced in the opening bit!

It's not an energy drink. It does tend to be caffeinated, but it's more along the lines of a carbonated soft drink like Coca-Cola, but with a weird, overly sweet citrus thing going on.

Oh man, Frog Fractions. GOTY material right there for sure.

I've played all the games aside from ODST and I'll never make sense of the story. 343 Guilty Spark, Mendicant Bias and the Gravemind walk into a bar, and… yeah, I don't know.

I'm still like "Oh, shit!" whenever a new episode comes out.

Yeah, I love the drunken staggering. Physics-based animation systems like that tend to have really goofy results. I'm totally into it.

One of my favorite things about this game is eating everything in sight. I love going into someone's kitchen and just munching everything down. I even like the sound effect. Crunch crunch crunch, now your pantry is empty, Lord Whatsisface. I wasn't even hungry.

I'm saying that the setting would sabotage the execution in this case. Whatever poor soul was contracted to write Worlds of Power: Dishonored would have to waste effort writing around gameplay conceits. A Dunwall-esque setting invented specifically for a novel would be approached differently.

I'm torn in my opinion of the setting. I'm pretty fatigued by alternate versions of industrialization. I'm beyond sick of zombies, and elaborate, foppish clothing can go back into game artist portfolios forever as far as I'm concerned. I would be way more turned on if Dishonored took place in 19th century France. On the other hand, the art direction in the game is great, and the weird hybridization of old shit and future shit actually looks cool in this case, unlike all the "steampunk" garbage that's eroded my soul over the past few years. If someone had described the style of Dunwall to me without letting me see it, I'd have rolled my eyes and dismissed it out of hand, but, you know, it turned out pretty cool, at least visually. And of course, they get to pick and choose based on desired gameplay elements. They want reprogrammable forcefields that can vaporize people, but no security cameras or telephones? OK, it's a made up setting so they can do whatever the hell they want. It's not very compelling, but it works. The magic also is clearly there for gameplay reasons, so, you know, there we are. I don't think the Outsider works at all in a narrative sense, but if they feel the need to have some external justification for my ability to teleport around and possess rats, then I'm not going to protest too much. I like teleporting around and possessing rats. I guess what I'm saying is that Dishonored may be full of questionable elements, but it's in service of making the game work a certain way, and I like the way it works (and the way it looks). I sure as shit wouldn't read a novel set in Dunwall!

That's wonderful!

I didn't have to do anything to save the guy from the poison. I was hiding in the corner, both guys came in, then they ran off like lunatics for no apparent reason and I got credit for saving him. Very mysterious!

I didn't know there were people who disliked The Life Aquatic. It's well-received among people I know, more than a lot of Anderson's other work.

I gave myself a mustache. I've been hanging around in Brooklyn too much. (This picture is in a hotel in Grand Cayman. Had an excellent trip.) Also, check out my sweet as fuck video game shirt.

hey, it's another one of these things:

Funny stuff. I don't think he sounds particularly down on the film. The "featurette" you posted above makes it look like an interesting project, at least. It still seems to me like a crazy thing to even attempt. It's like a hail mary pass for the Wachowskis.

I finished the book and listened to the cast today. Both were very enjoyable. One thing that really surprised me in the book was the self-deprecation, or at least insecurity which pops up. In Frobisher's reading of the supposed journal of Adam Ewing, not only does he see the twist ending from a mile away (as spork armada points out), but he's unconvinced by the attempt at period language. Frobisher also casts doubt upon his own work, wondering if the structure of the Cloud Atlas Sextet will come off as a gimmick. The structure of the sextet is the same as the novel itself. Mitchell's voice comes through in the end when he (as Ewing) lays down the morality, but he uses Frobisher to express himself in an entirely different way. I loved that, and thought it was a great way to gently deflate things before it all felt too overblown. How the heck do you make a movie out of this? One other minor observation: I liked how Zachry's oral account reports Meronym's dialog in Valleysman vernacular. That whole section worked way better for me than I would have expected.

This used to happen to me like crazy. It's calmed down a lot in recent years, though. I often get the twitchy feeling that I should pull out a device and look at something, but then I realize there's nothing I actually want to look at. Of course, I do spend a ton of time on the internet on the whole, but it's mostly at work. It just doesn't keep me up into late hours anymore. I wish I knew why the urge has waned so I could give some advice.

As a dillweed myself, I can't be so picky.

I can't estimate a number, but I'm sure I still have sealed games from older consoles. I have a bunch of discs for PC games which have never entered a computer. As for "digital" collections like Steam and GoG? Quite a few. I make dumb choices. I also pre-order stuff at the drop of a hat and then forget I did so. By the time the item arrives I may no longer be interested. I've more or less stopped doing this, I guess. If the question was "how many games do you own that you've played once and never looked at again?" the answer would be hundreds for sure.