All Kinda Classics

 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!

 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. 

  College of Ben Franklin Heraldry at Yale

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.)

 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...

 Unlike  The Reckoning  we did have  Ground Zero  when I was a kid. Looking back, I think a fair number of my  Quake 2  annoyances were mostly from it. This is a very traditional expansions, bigger, harder, slightly more technically developed than the base game. Rogue software's stuff is kind of hit and miss, but I don't think they have anything actually bad. They worked closely with id (literally closely, same building), and I'll be looking at more of there stuff as this series of posts continues. Big picture, this is a decent expansion. They looked at Quake 2  found some areas that were lacking and polished them, moved the difficulty up in a mostly appropriate way, and put together a couple cute set pieces. The overall design doesn't quite align as nicely as  Quake 2  did, but it's better than  Reckoning, Evilution , etc. I will note that the remaster team made some substantial changes to this. I think they mostly got it right, an...

 I dunno, was gonna do some more DQ  today, but this felt more timely. I don't think I've ever actually sat and watched a whole futbol game before, so semi-live-blog here we go! I like the way they do the national anthems. They actually sing along, instead of just awkwardly standing there while someone hopefully doesn't butcher it like they do in most US sports. Watching it in the lounge at the campground we go to in the summers. As always, it's very important to get into a pissing match about how much you like soccer. I don't know why, I just feel like this is common when I'm at a watch party. We're 2 minutes in, and the commentators have already gotten awkward. Oop, don't talk about refs. Oop, don't talk about war. 3:30 and the begging the ref for a penalty. This is a real professional sport. Don't ask questions. ~4:00 Spain's first shot on foal, almost immediately followed by a turnover for a second. Argentina gets possession and runs down...