Salacious Snake

Steel Battalion: Line of Contact featured a Vertical Tank (mech) equipped with a bunch of sensor junk that would allow you to tap into the opposing team's voice communication. Unfortunately, the online implementation in that game was an enormous disaster, but that feature was cool. This is the VT in question:

Hah, that is terrific!

I'm hesitant to make a DeviantArt account, because I strongly associate it with furries and other actual deviants.

That looks like it's from The Last Blade 2! I'm going to see if I can figure out the rest, many of them look familiar. (I have a Neo Geo.) edit: this is a fool's game, but I did spot a few. The deserty one is from King of Fighters 2000. There's a bunch of KOF, Last Blade and perhaps Samurai Shodown happening in that gallery. I'd say it's all from Neo Geo fighters, or at least most of it is. Specifically, they all look like they're from first-party SNK games. The waterfall is from Garou: Mark of the Wolves. The old church with the pigeons and the ruined train yard are from SVC Chaos. Crazy circuitry floor is KOF 99. Fort with cannons is Last Blade 2.

I would enjoy an indie-styled raycastin' pixel bonanza (think a first-person Hotline Miami). So, like, modern effects, but old style art. Of course, there are a lot of old FPS games that are still super fun and can look pretty good with the magic of source ports. Just last night, I played through most of the first episode of Doom (using Skulltag) and holy shit, it holds up well. It scared me a couple of times. Wolfenstein 3D, Duke 3D, Heretic, Blood, Dark Forces, Outlaws and many more I'm sure are still serious fun. Even those that don't have good ports can be run reasonably well in DosBox.

I never asked for this sun in my eyes.

My main requirement for hosting is just something easy to use with an interface that doesn't look like it was designed by aliens. I tried signing up for Flickr, but the authentication bugged out and sent me around in circles, so I closed my account within 2 minutes of opening it. 500px looks like shit unless it's in a huge window. Picasa/Google+ would be great, but album organization is nonexistent. Like, I can't find a way to add an already uploaded picture to another album. Facebook is handy because of its integration with iPhoto (and the fact that most of the people I want to see my crap are already there). I feel like a scrub using it, but I guess it's the way to go! Luckily, I'm not interested in discovery by strangers. I just want to make my friends look at cat pictures. (Like so: http://500px.com/jd_cohen/sets/cats ) Back on the camera talk, I'm loving the hell out of the RX100. Have some more images! http://500px.com/jd_cohen/sets/rx I'm sure they'll get better as I figure out what I'm doing. It's been years since I've used anything more advanced than an iPhone camera. I'm pleased with the output so far.

The most memorable thing about ROTT was that the level design was utterly balls-nutty. They made no attempt to make it feel like you were ever in a place that could serve any kind of purpose. It was surreal. It had a few tricks that were interesting at the time and would become commonplace later. You could look up and down like in Dark Forces, there were jump pads (which would later be a central element of Quake 3), you could do some sick dual wielding of pistols… At the time it was worth checking out the shareware episode at least, but I wouldn't endorse it beyond that. The trailer for the remake looks like it could be fun? The design is obviously more conservative than the original, but it still looks fairly wacky. It looks a bit like what I had hoped Duke Nukem Forever would be like.

While it's fun to read things counter to authorial intent, the thing with games is that they usually have none in the first place. That's a problem. A weird analogy: I can have a conversation with someone who has bad taste, but it's hard to do so with someone who has no taste.

The previous games didn't have the coma conceit, and yet the same descriptions would apply to that world as well. The non-dream version of that world is just as crazy and inconsistent as the dream one, apart from being able to leave one's body and fly around and possess people. (You even get a taste of this in Driver: SF prior to the big accident.) You're giving the creators too much credit if you think any of what you point out is intentional (although it is a cool way to look at it).

I almost lost my mind and went for one of those newfangled mirrorless compact system cameras, but then I saw the RX100 and chose that instead. It's exactly what I need in a camera… the balance between portability and image quality seems pretty ridiculous. I should have it today; I'm excited to try it out. My last camera was a point-and-shoot which turned out to be so shitty that it wasn't worth using over my phone. I have a feeling the RX100 will be a bit different. Someone very close to me just had a baby, which is what got me thinking about a new camera… I imagine babies account for a pretty significant number of camera purchases! Of course, that was my excuse. It'll probably end up taking more cat pictures than baby pictures. That thing is going with me everywhere. edit: Does anyone have an opinion on what is the least worst photo sharing site? (Like your Flickrs and what have you.)

It's absolute shit.

Sorry, because this is a bit of a tangent, but this drives me absolutely batty. I can't deal with how Amazon has the one pool of reviews for every printing of a book or release of a movie or whatever. If you dig down into them, sometimes you'll find the one with a subject like "KINDLE VERSION IS BROKEN." It can be really difficult to see what the word is on the actual thing you're trying to buy when there have been a bunch of editions. edit: I have seen them remove especially bad Kindle editions when it's pointed out. It may take a certain critical mass of complaints.

They let you play Dust 514, a cheap, clumsy, generic first-person shooter with awful graphics. The hook is that it brings all the inscrutable menus and bad fonts that you love from Eve Online. disclaimer: I played a while ago, things may well have improved.

My girlfriend has had nightmares from this game.

Are you using a touchscreen device? The regular kindle makes this kind of a pain, because in order to activate the link, you have to cursor your way around the screen to get to it. It sucks, especially compared with having the footnote simply sitting there visible at the bottom of the page. (Although it sounds like Infinite Jest has endnotes, which are a pain no matter what.) For most of my reading, I'm perfectly happy with crappy ebooks (as long as they aren't full of OCR errors), but for harder to digest works, you'll have to pry my Norton Critical Editions from my RSI-afflicted hands.

Browsing the store in Steam is not great. The scrolly list thing (where you hit "Next 10" and it rolls to the next ten items) which doesn't save your place if you go back to it after looking at an item is basically useless. The whole thing could be a lot more responsive, and could be far better at formatting itself for different window sizes. The more I think about it, the more I realize it's quite bad. Of course, we're speaking comparatively about a bunch of services which are all at different levels of oafishness. I don't think Apple's App Stores, Xbox's Dashboard, Sony's Xross Media Bar or any other such thing that I've used lately is particularly well designed. I guess this stuff is pretty hard, or someone would have gotten it right. They should all be more like this: Uploaded with ImageShack.us

I find the value pretty questionable for me, but then I keep paying for it. The dashboard shit is egregious; I hate trying to find my games.

Never!

I finished the plane.

Haha, wow, yeah. "Man, woman; thus copulation." Definitely not what I meant.

The person with whom I played this and I both really enjoyed episode 2. There were some tough choices, and it was very stressful (in a good way). It's a little frustrating when you figure something out so far ahead of the person you're controlling in a game: Then again, we're approaching the situation as people who are knowingly participating in an expression of zombie/horror fiction, whereas Lee is not. Were I really in his shoes, I doubt I would jump to that conclusion so readily. I felt bad about some of the shit I did. My girlfriend thinks it's cute and maybe a little weird how much I care about Clementine. I find it nearly impossible to be dishonest with her, but I also wish I could insulate her from some of the grim reality on display. Some of the choices have made me wonder about myself in a way that games generally don't. Like, when I have decided that certain people just deserve to be killed... I'm not thinking about them as video game entities. I love seeing the statistical breakdown at the end. It feels more like I'm participating in a psychological experiment than a game sometimes.

I wasn't going to bring up my anecdotal experience, but I'm emboldened by Ben's contribution, so I'll say that my experience is quite like his. I am in a monogamous relationship right now, but last year while I was between relationships, I slept with a variety of friends, acquaintances and strangers. (They are women; I'm a man.) In all cases, both parties appeared to be perfectly happy with the situation. Sometimes there would be a repeat performance, but oftentimes not. It never got awkward, unless I'm just terribly oblivious. The worst thing to come out of it was a case of scabies. This mostly happened in New York City, which I've come to believe is a region with a particularly high incidence of people who are very free with casual sex. edit: As for pick-up artistry, I'd like to add that I've never gone out with the objective of finding someone to go home with. It just happens sometimes! I swear I'm not a creep. edit 2: Swearing I'm not a creep probably makes me look like a creep.

it looks like a lot of fun. I enjoyed seeing the player character jump and mantle up onto a hanging light fixture.

Brandon Sheffield wrote a nice article about the portrayal of women in games on Gamasutra: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/173227/Opinion_Video_games_and_Male_Gaze__are_we_men_or_boys.php