I hate to encourage this behavior, but it's true... I've not yet been present when you have erred. DAMMIT

All right then! I'm trying out a shorter banner so the site content is nudged up a bit. It's reduced by all of thirty pixels, but it seems pretty dramatic to me. I'm not sure I like it (indeed, I'm sure I dislike it), but that could just be a getting-used-to period. Any reactions? 

Also adjusted other stuff to include room for a tenth image. Why? Because I decided to make this one hard. You heard me right. I've been too passive and kindly. No more, I say. It's my New Year's Resolution. Steerpike done brung the pain.

Shit.

Just.

Got.

Real.

Yo.

Hidden, like diamonds, among the gimmes tossed in as misdirection, you will find grueling mental challenges to tax your very souls. Google Image Search will not avail you! I hurl down my gauntlet to thee!

...

Oh! Right, the last one.

This one was hard too. I mean it, no more being nice. I is all a hard-ass mofo and be up in your shizzle. You guys really screwed the pooch on this one, too. I'm ashamed to know you. And this one was easy - a cinch - compared to the horrors that await you now. What I just uploaded is the god damned Demon's Souls of website headers!

Ahem.

1. Sanctum 2. I knew I'd get you guys on this one.
2. Postbox. Curse you Gregg.
3. Fallout New Vegas. Curse you Xtal.
4. Frontiers. It's a Kickstarter I backed. Behold! http://www.indiedb.com/games/frontiers
5. Kerbal Space Program. Haven't actually played this yet but my mind went to it for some reason.
6. Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim. CURSE YOU GREGG.
7. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman. This was practically labeled. I mean come on people.
8. Logitech Game Framework. Sometimes I really draw a complete blank on what to use next.
9. The Wizard and the Princess, a classic two-word text parser adventure from Sierra On-Line. Good stuff, though when we were little my brother and I hurled ourselves against that fucking snake and shattered against it, much as you will shatter against my new banner. You have to kill it with a rock, y'see. But every rock you encounter has a scorpion lurking behind it... except one. And since that snake is, like, four screens into the game (in the past games had "screens," which you young people will not be familiar with. These are static, 8- or 16-color images that rather clumsily depicted the action. Kids are so spoiled these days, with their ambient occlusions and their Twitter).
   Where was I? Four screens into the game. Practically the beginning. We knew nothing of the Wizard, let alone the Princess, at the fourth screen. All we knew was that great big periwinkle snake wouldn't let us by. To this day the snake haunts me.

The forum was getting its enema when I put up the latest, so I had to delay the revelatory secrets now exposed:

1. Raindrop (this interesting-looking puzzler has roots in STALKER and recently failed its Kickstarter)
2. Eden Star (an upcoming indie title with really fun parkour and throwing-stuff mechanics. I played at EGX last September. I had company at the time, but for some reason I can never remember whether I was with Gregg, or Mat, or Harbour Master, or Lewis, or Warren, or Ryan, or some combination thereof, during any given EGX moment. Which is weird because they all look completely distinct)
3. Max Headroom (the short-lived 1980s American television show based on SHOUTFactory's character, starring Matt Frewer and Amanda Pays. I have the DVD box set. The effects don't age well, but it's nothing short of fascinating how prophetic that series was about the future, from news as entertainment to extreme sports and drug culture)
4. King's Bounty: Armored Princess (or "Armoured Princess" if you prefer. I could never get into King's Bounty for some reason. The new ones I mean. I played the bejeezus out of the old SEGA Genesis version)
5. Splice (one of the games from Cipher Prime, the musical developer who I love for creating the beautiful Auditorium. I've not really been impressed with any of their work since, but Splice has its moments)
6. Knock-Knock (I haven't been back after finishing and reviewing the latest from Russian Ice-Pick Lodge, but I've been meaning to. Something about this otherwise mechanically simple game evokes a skin-crawling terror, plus the sense of deeply hidden secrets)
7. Impossible Mission (a classic for the ZX Spectrum and a number of other archaic platforms. I hoped to pull one over on Gregg here, since he's uncanny recognizing these. But he beat me)
8. Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason (if you have not played this intriguing environmental horror game, give it a try. It has an uncanny ability to make you feel the cold as if you were really on that stranded, haunted icebreaker)
9. Persona 3 (I spent a weekend addicted to this game, and would have spent longer but the week intervened and I'd sort of lost my place by the time I got back. It's a fantastic social JRPG with lots of activities and interesting characters, great combat, and pretty discussable reflections on teen suicide)
10. Lucifer (my friend Pete loaned me this a while after I finished his Sandman collection. I'd heard it was good, but I wasn't expecting this dark and literate tale to be almost - not quite - but almost as good as its progenitor. Everyone who's a comics fan has probably already read it, and those who aren't would need to start with Sandman, but if for some reason you haven't read Mike Carey's Lucifer, correct that)

This month's should be pretty easy. One is a clue to another, and a third is a clue to a project I've been working on and am very excited about.

Here we go...

1. Planescape Torment - I've been given the ridiculously undeserved honor of working with inXile Entertainment on Torment: Tides of Numenera. I really hope saying that doesn't violate my NDA. Watch for unnecessarily wordy dialogue in late 2015!
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation - "A Final Unity"  - clearly remember buying this game when it came out, but my rig was in no way able to handle it. The Spectrum Holobyte animation ran at, like, a frame a second. I returned it to Media Play and never actually got around to re-buying the game after I'd upgraded.
3. Chrono Trigger - this is a favorite around here at Tap-Repeatedly, one I'm ashamed to admit I've never played much of. I got it for the DS, but then my DS broke, and I'm lazy. What I saw was classic JRPG fun though.
4. Vincent Ward's A Map of the Human Heart - I first saw this movie in my Subjective Camera class in 1994 and it's become one of my favorites. Ward hasn't produced a lot of work, but it's of a near-Gilliam level of visual stunnery. This is the opening of the famous "firebombing of Dresden" scene, which alone is worth seeing the movie, even though the rest of the movie is similarly awesome and features a brilliant performance by the late Brandon Lee (not to be confused with Brandon Perdue, though he'd do a fine job in the role, I'm sure)
5. Overlord - the old one, not the new one. A nifty but not fantastic space 4X.
6. Overlord - the new one, not the old one. For some reason I could never get into the Overlord games, even though they seem sort of up my alley.
7. Wasteland - Youth of today may not remember the original Wasteland, the game that would later spawn the Fallout franchise. It's still amazingly fun today, running as it does on the Bard's Tale framework, which ages nicely.
8. Choplifter - I once had a long, earnest discussion at GDC about this game. None of us could remember the title of "that game, you know, with the helicopter? The one where you rescued hostages? And they used the French word sortie to describe each mission?" After the conference we all hurried home and Googled, and then about eight people simultaneously sent an email with the subject line "CHOPLIFTER!!!!" and no content. We're kinda dorks, we games people. But we're nostalgic dorks.
9. Quake - Quake.
10. Knight Orc - Every now and then I draw a blank and have to turn to MobyGames' Random Game button. This reminds me of some of the old text-parser adventures, a couple generations past the gold-label Sierra On-Line ones, but honestly I have no clue what it's about. Since when are orcs knights? Orcs are the bad guys. Unless you're an orc, of course, in which case they're just... other orcs, I guess.

This new one has some toughies and some easies. Gregg will have to plumb the deepest depths of his knowledge to guess #6... a reappearance by Scout or input from Helmut might make the job easier, but it's a very difficult one no matter what. No Google Image Searching! That's cheating!

Enjoy. : )