"Once you have given up the ghost. . ."
That's my old userpic, right there. When I first started journalling, back in July of 2002, I used three covers from Atari 7800 games--Xenophobe, Dig Dug, and Kareteka. I kept those until 2004, when I photographed the cover to Tropic of Capricorn, touched it up, shrank it, and pasted it down on another 7800 box scan. I was exceedingly proud of myself, at the time. I deleted the other three userpics.
"So what's the point of the game?" someone once asked. "You gotta boink some chick?"
That really irritated me, not least of all because she employed the word "boink."
As I put that little graphic together, the game I was imagining was very different. You played Henry Miller, sure; you've got a suit and tie on, a little fedora, you're wearing roller skates, too. In the main stage of the game, you rollerskate through various rooms of the Cosmodemonic Teleghraph Company's headquarters in New York City. You skate around collecting spare change and abandoned bottles of bathtub gin. You need to avoid colliding with desks, secretaries and intoxicated homeless men of all ages, colors and creeds. Your boss occasionally gets on your case like Evil Otto, so you need to avoid him. Hitting a chair, for instance, will slow you down--maybe even enough to allow your supervisor to lay his hands on you and drag you back to your desk.
Provided you manage to waste enough of your workday, you get to go on to a bonus stage. The bonus stage takes place outside the Cosmodemonic building. It involves drinking all of the contraband liquor and then pitching the empties through the windows of assorted banks, federal buildings, and police stations. Should you get more work than skating, done, you're forced to go back home, to your wife and kid.
I still think that's the best game I've never played.