Posts

Classic Cocktails: Martinis

 My wife and I are on a cruise. One of my favorite parts of cruising is getting to try a whole bunch of cocktails that I'm interested in, but don't necessarily know how to make (or want to answer 15 questions for the bartender at a regular bar). I've been going in pretty hard on martinis this trip. Last time, they had the Vesper (James Bond martini-- 4 gin, 2 vodka, 1 discontinued apatrif that you sub with a different apartif and a little tonic), which I enjoyed way more than I expected to. I've been going more traditional. I've decided the following (in order of preference): Gibson: THE BEST! The pickled onion really ties it all together, and I don't have to say dry. It's a shame more people don't have cocktail onions in stock. But at least one of the bars on our ship does, so I'm good. Gin: Dry and with a twist Vodka: Olives
Post a Comment
Read more

Call of the Machine

Call of the Machine is MachineGames' expansion for the Remaster. It reuses a bunch of expansion content (monsters more than the guns, because fuck you), a little Quake 1 content (because every id universe needs to be forced into being a linear series now), and one or two original enemies. Also one from the Playstation port (but they still left one out?) A common critique of Quake 2  is that it's sort of stuck between two generations of shooters. Quake  is a clear evolution of Doom. Weird maps that exist to be levels, piles o' monsters, blast everything.  Half-Life  and  Unreal  at least sort of try to be realistic, and bring the crazy factor down considerably.  Quake 2  kind of splits the difference, in a way that doesn't satisfy most people. Call of the Machine gives a kind of "what if..." approach, with 6 mini-episodes (your guns reset, it counts) hitting at different places on that spectrum. You start out on a not-quite-as-cool-as- Quake-1 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

I went to a classic car show today

Image
 Those are clearly classics. I was dumb and didn't take any pictures. Here's a picture of an obvious classic: Apparently Azteks have been cool for the last 5 years or so. I always thought they were cool. The SAFETY YELLOW is the canonical color. I went out tonight and saw one!
Post a Comment
Read more

The Stupidest Spot The Differences

 I was looking at a game last night, and they had done some of the art with AI. It wasn't very good, but at one point there was some brainwashing/flashback memory/spot-the-difference bullshit. I thought maybe they'd used the glitches in the AI images as the spot-the-difference points. They did not. 
Post a Comment
Read more

YALE FRANKLIN!

Image
  College of Ben Franklin Heraldry at Yale
Post a Comment
Read more

We're going to visit the Yale Library

I will be an insufferable Harvard fanboy, since that's what the blog is based on. (Not really it's gonna be really freaking cool.)
Post a Comment
Read more

Quake 2 Extras

 Nightdive generally does a pretty nice job with their re-releases. You get the usual concept art, but they often grab stuff like deleted levels, demos, etc. and include them. Quake 2  comes with two such demos. Neither is worth a real post (they're levels from the game with less stuff, yay!) but a couple general observations: 1. The decision (or at least the work) to make every everything as dark as possible was apparently made pretty late in? A lot of these levels are actually visible, which is a cool change. It's fun to look at vintage screenshots and see how everyone yanked the brightness/contrast up (and made everything washed out) to compensate. And the visible levels were there all along. To be fair, a few are actually even darker than in release. 2. The levels work a lot better as a continuous set. There's some debate on pistol start vs full run in Doom , but Quake 2 's interconnectedness is critical. These just felt like weird speed runs (some were very skippa...
Post a Comment
Read more