#and THEN it’s thoroughly and completely deconstructed over the course of the next two seasons and it’s SO fascinating

[wurmzirkus]

i’m constantly thinking about the “i hope you don’t think we’d go down without a fight” exchange from securite. you can tell something’s wrong throughout the entire episode as it keeps getting worse and it becomes clearer and clearer what the si-5 are there to do but that line especially hurts so bad. it’s so dismissive. “yes, we know you’ll resist, we know you’ll put up a fight and you’ll struggle against us because you’re people and we’ll never forget that. but it doesn’t matter, because nothing is as important as we came here to do.”

si-5 falls victim to their hubris eventually but when they’re introduced they really do look SO invincible. they come up there with all the answers the heph crew doesn’t have, but they also seem to know everything ABOUT the heph crew. they know about their profound struggle and fight for their own humanity but they file it away right in front of them because... weighed against the big picture, it can’t matter. it’s that ruthlessness in action and it’s so chilling.

[caffeineivore]

Commission#4

For @vchanny-og

Prompt: Makoto teaches the girls to cook. To commission me please click here for information! To see what other people are offering up commissions please see here!

The recipe for peanut butter cookies is fool-proof, three-ingredients. Four, if you added chocolate chips. The first time that Makoto had made them, Usagi had eaten two dozen by herself, and when she’d found out how easy they were, she’d begged and whined and pouted until Makoto had agreed to teach her. 

“Mamo-chan would love these, don’t you think? Especially if we add chocolate! And peanut butter is healthy and has lots of protein so he wouldn’t even disapprove!”

Eggs. Crunchy peanut butter. Sugar. Chocolate chips. Parchment-lined baking sheet for 11 minutes at 170 degrees Celsius. 

Makoto lines up all the ingredients on the counter, helpfully preheats the oven to the correct temperature. She goes out to her balcony to check on her plants, and is halfway through dead-heading some leggy basil when the smell of smoke comes wafting through the open door. Thoroughly alarmed, she drops her clippings and runs in, yanks the oven open to find lumps of what look to be charcoal. Usagi’s wail could pass for a fire engine careening onto the scene complete with lights and sirens. 

“I don’t know what happened, Mako-chan! I didn’t do anything except what you asked, and now everything is ruined and there are NO COOKIES and you are probably going to be mad at me!”

With a long, windy sigh, Makoto checks the counter. Peanut butter, check. Sugar, check. Chocolate chips, check-- and if she’s not mistaken, Usagi dumped in about half a cup more than the recipe called for. A bowl of cracked open eggs, yolks almost mockingly bright orange, winked up at her. 

Makoto shakes her head, sends Usagi out to the bakery, and cuts up some peppers and tomatoes, retrieves her snipped basil. It seemed like she’d be having omelettes for dinner. 

**

“So we sear the steak at a high temperature in a cast-iron skillet to take advantage of the Maillard reaction for the sake of optimal flavour.” Ami scribbles some type of complex chemical molecule diagram on the margins of the recipe that she’d meticulously copied from Makoto’s cookbook, and does a few equations, and murmurs to herself. “I suppose that makes sense. The temperature of the cooking surface will exceed 140 degrees Celsius, which will cause the reactive carbonyl group of the sugar present in the molecule interact with the nucleophilic amino group of the amino acid.”

“Yeah. Something like that. And then you finish in a low and slow oven so you don’t overcook the meat. This is an expensive cut of steak-- you don’t want it to be cooked to death.”

Makoto did not care over-much about the complex chemical reactions and science behind the process-- it was enough, really, to know that as long as one controlled the temperature and time, and seasoned the pricey cut of beef simply but well (sea salt, coarse-ground pepper and a few sprigs of rosemary), one could have a fancy date night meal in the comfort of one’s own home. “Medium rare is the optimal doneness for steak, in my opinion. Use a food thermometer, cook it to 54 degrees Celsius, then rest for three minutes before slicing, and you’re good to go.”

“I understand the reasoning behind safe internal cooking temperatures,” Ami muses as she follows Makoto’s lead, carefully wiping down the cherry-red surface of her steak with a paper towel to dry it, then sprinkling on salt and pepper on both sides. “Obviously, you don’t want harmful disease-causing microorganisms to grow within your food product, and it either needs to be too hot or too cold for the bacteria and viruses and fungi to survive. But why are there exceptions to the rule? Your recipe says that a rare steak reaches the internal temperature of 51 degrees, a medium rare of 54, a medium of 58 and so on. Doesn’t that put the person who prefers to eat their steak rare at greater risk? How does a restaurant get around that liability? It’s not as though it can do a medical check of the customer to ensure that they have no history of immunological disorders or gastrointestinal problems. And what about nations which choose to ignore these limits altogether? We serve sushi and sashimi here in Japan, which is certainly not cooked to 62 or highter. The French have their Carpaccio and tartare. The Lebanese have their kibbee nayee, and so on.”

Makoto watches as Ami grinds exactly three shakes of pepper onto each side of her steak, then rolls her eyes. “How does your guy like his steak cooked? That’s all I need to know.”

Ami blushes almost as red as the meat she’s fiddling with. “Umm. Medium rare is fine. And he’s hardly ‘my’ guy. More of Mamoru’s, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’ve already split hairs over the science of cooking. I don’t think I have enough energy to argue over the exact nature of your relationship with the mouthy blond menace. Do you think you can put together a nice green salad to go with these steaks? That way we can get done quicker, and I can make myself scarce before he comes here.”

**

Makoto knows better than to attempt to teach Rei anything too outlandish in the kitchen. Rei is a traditionalist in every sense of the word, and probably would not be caught dead in some hipster gastro-pub serving deconstructed salad of micro-greens topped with lobster foam something-or-another no matter how many Michelin stars and James Beard awards the place might have won. Rei is also reasonably competent with her hands and not particularly accident-prone, so something like steamed gyoza seems right up her alley. Sure, making the filling and dough from scratch is an extra effort, but her friend had never been the type to settle for mediocre and ordinary.

Her first warning that things might not turn out quite so well is when Rei takes a full step back when she sets the food processor on the counter. “What is that?” 

Her tone could only have been snottier had the food processor been possibly coated in dung and mildew and maybe plastered with boy band stickers. “It’s a food processor. So we can easily chop up the chives, grind up the pork.”

“I have a perfectly serviceable set of knives here.” Rei turns up her aristocratic little nose and points to the knife-block, which, to be fair, holds a set of heirloom-quality blades. Trust the senshi of war to know her sharp objects, Makoto thinks drolly, but she acquiesces. “All right. You can mince the chives with that, I guess. But I’m using the food processor to grind the meat.”

They both get to work, and Rei glares at the machine as soon as it starts up as though the noise offended her on a personal level. She’s not bad-- indeed, her cuts are decent even by chef standards, but by the time Makoto has finished up her meat and mixed in soy sauce and ginger and garlic and a pinch of allspice and an egg, she’s only about a quarter of the way done with her chives. Slowly and stubbornly, she soldiers on as Makoto measures out flour and water and a pinch of salt. 

“What in the world is that?”

Now, the question is directed towards the stand mixer plugged into the wall outlet. Makoto doesn’t even dignify that with a response, and dumps in flour, salt and water, lets fly. Sure, she can knead the dough by hand if she wanted to. And stretch it, cut it, roll it out for the dumpling wrappers. And maybe, if he’s very, very lucky, Jun would have gyoza sometime within the next two years. She’s just about ready to start rolling the dough when Rei finally finishes cutting the chives by hand, and dumps them into the bowl of the ground meat mixture, scowling at the way the damp green mince clings to her fingertips. Makoto finishes mixing the filling, then shows Rei, quickly, how to pinch the edges of the dumpling shut. 

She waits until the knives are washed and put away and the pot is simmering before turning to her friend with a mischievous look, tongue firmly tucked in cheek. “Well. I’m sure Jun will appreciate your painstaking work on this meal, doing things the old-fashioned way by hand. He’ll know just how much you care from the sheer effort you went through.”

If looks could kill, Makoto would be buried six feet under complete with an ugly angel-shaped monument and an elaborate wreath of flowers on her grave. She manages to keep a straight face while she takes the dumplings out the pot, then excuses herself. She’s still laughing when she arrives at her own apartment a good half-hour later. 

**

Leave it to Minako, of course, to want to learn the most complicated, exotic dish of them all. 

“I think it would be perfect! He doesn’t eat pork or beef, and I love spicy food, and I know you’ll help me and it will turn out wonderfully!” 

Makoto eyes the recipe bookmarked on Minako’s phone-- very heavily starred on Pinterest, and apparently the handiwork of some world-renowned celebrity chef. “Indian lamb curry, though? That’s… quite ambitious of you, Minako.” Indeed, the list of ingredients is daunting in and of itself, even for a seasoned home cook, and Minako’s idea of gourmet home cooking generally involved cracking an egg over her boiling ramen noodles. 

“Oh don’t you worry. I’ve watched a TON of youtube videos. And cooking reality shows. That Gordon Ramsay is HILARIOUS. And it all goes into the slow cooker, so it hardly requires fancy techniques and knifework and the like. All I have to do is toss everything in there and push a button and spend the rest of my time making myself look gorgeous and sexy, right??”

Makoto eyes the recipe again. She’s pretty sure that Minako has never heard of the term ‘garam masala’ in her life. “Maybe you should at least let me taste it before you serve it. Just in case.”

Six hours later a mostly-decent-looking sample of the dish is placed in front of her. The curry is an appetizing orange-brown colour, and the kitchen smells invitingly of spices. Minako had even taken the time to toss some finely chopped parsley onto the meat for a pop of bright green. Makoto is pleasantly surprised, and gives Minako an approving smile which lasts all of three seconds-- the three seconds it takes to put a piece of the meat in her mouth. She gags, and spits it out. “Oh, GOD! What did you put in this?! It tastes like the Dead Sea… if the Dead Sea were on fire!”

Minako shoots her a wide-eyed look from those baby blues, thoroughly bewildered. “Welllllll… all these videos said to salt with every step of the cooking pricess. So I did. It was probably like close to half a cup of salt total, because I added some after every other ingredient. And then I didn’t have tomato paste so I substituted ketchup. Basically the same thing, you know? And I didn’t have the tablespoon of fresh ginger, so I used a tablespoon of ginger powder, and shelled pistachios look just like cardamom pods for like a tenth of the price, and I used Old Bay seasoning instead of Bay leaves… But the only thing I absolutely couldn’t figure out at all was this ‘garam masala’ stuff! So I left it out.”

Without a word, Makoto dumps the entire contents of the slow cooker into the trash, picks up her phone, and dials the local Indian restaurant, Within short order, two takeout containers are delivered-- an Indian lamb curry, and an accompanying container of cheese naan and rice. 

“Just… put it in your own plates,” Makoto tells the other girl, shaking her head between gulps of water. “The kitchen smells like you’ve been cooking all day. It’ll be our little secret and he will never, ever know.”

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

Video game hardware often serves as a hurdle for developers to overcome. Whether it's running out of memory or figuring out how to translate a player's interactions with a controller into a dynamic 3D world meant to emulate real life, just getting things to work smoothly is an accomplishment in and of itself. But with some games, developers take things further, and the end result can be better off for it.

There have been countless memorable moments in games, whether it's a well-designed boss fight, an unexpected character death, or an awe-inspiring view. But many of the best moments stem from the way games use hardware in unique ways to deliver something unforgettable. In other cases, special hardware or accessories are used to deliver an experience that otherwise wouldn't be possible with a typical controller or keyboard and mouse.

We've rounded up some of our favorite examples of the best uses of gaming hardware, one that saw fans use technology to turn an existing game into something very different, and a few others that were certainly original, if not very good. Be sure to share those that stick out in your memory with us in the comments below.

Metal Gear Solid

For a series chock-full of noteworthy bosses, it's a testament to the creativity of the original Metal Gear Solid that Psycho Mantis remains so memorable. That comes down in large part to the way the sequence utilized the PS1 in ways I had never seen before. The psychic FOXHOUND villain screws with Solid Snake--and the player--by manipulating the PS1. For instance, the screen goes black, which caused me a brief moment of panic where I thought something had gone wrong with my system.

In an even more brilliant moment, Psycho Mantis looks at the save files stored on your memory card and comments on them. He remarks on the number of times progress has been saved in MGS and points out certain games that you have save progress in. (Years later, this led to one of my favorite parts of Metal Gear Solid 4, where Mantis can't pull off the same tricks due to the PS3's hard drive and vibration-less Sixaxis controller.) At one point, you deal with with his powers by switching the port that your controller is plugged into, which I still find an astoundingly bold choice for a game.

Sadly, some of these things were specifically tailored to the PS1 and GameCube versions, and have thus been lost to time if you don't play them on the original hardware. Still, there was nothing quite like getting to experience all of this in the moment without any warning about what to expect. | Chris Pereira

Boktai

Famed designer Hideo Kojima could do no wrong during the late '90s and early 2000s. He won my young heart with the cinematic stylings of Metal Gear Solid and the fast-paced robot action of Z.O.E: Zone of the Enders. So when I found out that his next non-Metal Gear game would be a GBA game that utilized a solar sensor on its cartridge to fuel an in-game mechanic, I was instantly intrigued.

Titled Boktai, the game stars Django, a young vampire hunter on a quest to avenge his father's death. Equipped with his trusty solar powered gun, the Gun Del Sol, Django takes on all sorts of undead foes. This is where the game cartridge's solar sensor comes in; your gun only holds a limited amount of energy, and once depleted, you need to charge it by holding the gun up to the sun. But in order to do this, you literally need to hold the game up towards the actual sun, so the solar sensor can detect its warming rays. Of course, this means you actually have to play the game outside.

Boktai is a strange yet entertaining action-RPG made all the stranger by its solar sensor functionality. I recall spending hours playing the game outside--or occasionally cheating by opening my window to briefly charge Django's gun before retreating indoors to play until I needed another charge. In my experience, the only real drawback to the game is that you couldn't effectively play the game during the colder seasons--for obvious reasons.

I thoroughly enjoyed Boktai's sunlight mechanic as a kid, and it remains a joy to play even now thanks to compelling dungeon crawling and a slew of clever puzzles that took advantage of the game's real-time clock and day-night cycle. To this day, the game remains one of the most memorable and innovative uses of GBA hardware. If you can track down a copy, I highly recommend it--if only to experience one of Kojima's quirkier and more adventurous game concepts. | Matt Espineli

Image credit: donpepe

Sega Activator

Anyone who played console games in the early '90s is well aware of how many gimmicky controllers made it to market. Of the wacky lot of plastic trinkets that cluttered our basements, you'd be hard-pressed to find one as over-the-top as Sega's Activator for the Genesis. The octagonal ring promised to let you punch and kick in the real world and have it translate to fighting games like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter II.

Sounds amazing, right? Well, while not an outright lie, the advertisements for the Activator may have been stretching the truth a bit. In practice, you couldn't simply punch and kick as you would hope; to execute a specific action, you would have to send your hand or foot over a specific part of the octagon. Each section of the ring corresponded to a button on the Genesis controller and contained a light sensor that detected when you crossed its invisible threshold. Imagine waving your palms frantically around your body trying to move your on-screen character, throw a punch or two, or god forbid execute a complicated combo attack, and you can easily understand why the Activator was derided by early adopters (read: suckers) who fell for Sega's brief marketing blitz. It is, at best, an interesting footnote. | Peter Brown

Image credit: SegaRetro

Pokemon Go

People still debate Pokemon Go's quality as a video game, but there's no doubt that it uses smartphone technology in an inventive and powerful way. By utilizing your location and some fiddly but capable AR, the mobile game turns your local area into your very own Pokemon adventure. It means you can explore your own neighbourhood in the same way you explored Kanto all those years ago. It's immediately nostalgic and emotional for anyone who played the mainline games and wants to be the one catching Pokemon and venturing across the land.

To some people, Pokemon Go might just be a throwaway mobile fad, something that went viral overnight because The Internet and that's that. But to others, including myself, it allows us to finally achieve what we'd always wanted: To transport ourselves inside a Pokemon game and be the very best, like no one ever was. | Oscar Dayus

Let's Tap

Let's Tap is a game, but it deserves an entry here for the interesting way it made use of Nintendo's Wii Remote. At a time when every studio under the sun was working on the next great motion-controlled game (bless their naive hearts), former Sonic Team head Yuji Naka conceived a game that utilized the Wii Remote's accelerometer, but without the user having to hold the controller in their hand. Instead, you would lay your Wii Remote face down on a cardboard box, and tap the box with your fingers to interact with Let's Tap's collection of mini-games. These included a Jenga-like deconstruction game, a multiplayer sprint race, and a basic rhythm game, among a few other simple applications.

Let's Tap and Naka get bonus points for originality, but the game failed to make a splash despite its inventive spirit. As former GameSpot reviewer Luke Anderson pointed out, "Let's Tap certainly offers a different way to play, but the games don't completely mesh with the control scheme and, with the exception of Rhythm Tap, could have worked every bit as well with a more conventional control setup." | Peter Brown

Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck

As someone who likes to tease and bug my friends, it makes a lot of sense in retrospect that I had such a great time with Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck, a game all about annoying Daffy Duck. Based on the classic cartoon of the same name (pictured above), which sees an off-screen animator mess around with Daffy, Duck Amuck tasks you with generally tormenting the character. It's a creative idea for a game, but what makes it special is the way in which it leverages the DS hardware.

Some of the ways of interacting with Daffy are pretty straightforward--you use the touchscreen to poke and prod him or to pick him up and launch him off the screen. Where it really blows my mind is in the way that it allows you to physically close the system, something which would normally suspend what you're playing and put the handheld in sleep mode. Instead, the game keeps going, and Daffy shouts out at you, allowing you to continue playing a mini-game using the shoulder buttons. It's a feature that I'm still glad that Nintendo allowed, and it made for an experience I still remember vividly more than a decade later. | Chris Pereira

NeGcon

Namco's legacy took root in the arcade, a place where games and hardware often combined in surprising and unexpected ways. This innovative spirit stuck with Namco; in 1995, it fundamentally reinvented the standard PlayStation controller in hopes of improving the experience of playing racing games at home. The result was the unusual NeGcon controller, which was split down the middle from top to bottom, allowing users to twist the controller's two halves. Compared to the digital inputs of a d-pad or the short throw of an analog stick, this wide range of motion allowed for more finesse when turning the wheel of a virtual car. Despite its odd appearance, the NeGcon found wide support from other publishers and could be used with games like Gran Turismo, Rally Cross, and Wipeout (including Wipeout Fusion on PS2). It's an odd-looking controller to be sure, but it fulfilled Namco's promises. It was such a success, that Namco would follow-up with another racing-centric controller only a few short years later... | Peter Brown

Image credit: Wikipedia

Jogcon

Rather than iterate on the NeGcon, Namco went back to the drawing board for the development of the Jogcon, a controller with a force-feedback-enabled wheel crammed into the middle. It was marketed alongside Ridge Racer Type-4--the final entry in the series on the original PlayStation--but would also be compatible with PlayStation 2 games like Ridge Racer V. Not one to forget its past, Namco allowed you to trick the controller into a NeGcon mode, which allowed for wider support, albeit without the force-feedback feature. While it didn't enjoy widespread success like the NeGcon, the Jogcon still deserves respect for packing force-feedback into a standard controller, allowing players to experience the push and pull of the road without having to invest in expensive and bulky racing wheel setups. | Peter Brown

Image credit: videogameclipcollect

Twitch Plays Pokemon

Okay, Twitch Plays Pokemon wasn't technically a unique use of video game hardware, but it was still one of the most creative moments in recent video game history. It allowed those watching the stream to control the protagonist of a number of Pokemon games, starting with Pokemon Red and continuing with sequels such as Pokemon Crystal, Emerald, and Platinum, among many more. Viewers achieved this by typing in commands--"up," "down," "B"--to make the main character move and perform actions.

As you can imagine, that made actually playing the game very difficult. Trying to beat a Gym Leader, catch an elusive Legendary, or even walk in the right direction is tricky when dozens of thousands of people each have a controller.

However, as we all know, give enough typewriters to enough monkeys and they'll eventually beat the Elite Four, and that we did. And when the moment came that this cacophony of monkeys finally beat the first game, pure joy ensued. We'd done it! Twitch Plays Pokemon had made us the controller and we didn't mess it up. It merely took us a brief 16 days, 9 hours, 55 minutes, and 4 seconds. | Oscar Dayus

Plastic Instruments for Guitar Hero and Rock Band

The plastic instrument revolution led by the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises came and went, but its impact on rhythm games (and games in general) is unforgettable. GuitarFreaks in Japan preceded other instrument-based music games, but it never matched the reach and influence of Guitar Hero. In 2005, developer Harmonix nailed the feeling of shredding in Guitar Hero by simply pairing five notes as frets on the guitar neck with a small lever that acts as the strings in the packaged instrument. The other key ingredient was obtaining hit songs that captured a Western audience regardless of the diverse tastes in rock music, whether it be classic, punk, metal, or indie rock.

Seeing Guitar Hero in action for the first time with the plastic guitar immediately makes perfect sense: follow the pattern on screen and pluck the lever while holding down the correct note(s). In this regard, the game is accessible to those who have never picked up the instrument before but also challenges those actually knew how to play a guitar. The series provided an avenue to not just discover new songs but build a rhythmic connection with the melodies and harmonies of songs you already loved.

In 2007, Harmonix topped themselves with Rock Band, which cranked the concept up to 11. Not only did it retain the intuitive guitar gameplay, but the game included a microphone for vocals, a full drum set, and the option for a second guitar to cover basslines. The game really lived up to its name. It was the perfect blend of karaoke, Taiko Master, and Guitar Hero with the continued tracklist of diverse rock songs that satisfied nearly all tastes in music.

Unfortunately, the genre lost its appeal over time and the accumulation of plastic instruments became a burden for both retailers and consumers. The concept is still more than a novelty; dusting off those old guitars and drums can make a good party great. | Michael Higham

from GameSpot https://ift.tt/2GZ2WId