hugthebed2

Took like 7 years but finally completed Persona 5 with friends.

First play session stopped from COVID, later bought PC port. That one took forever cuz the person controlling it is insanely good at getting distracted. Regardless, gud gaem.

girl choice: 

I remember randomly seeing that "episode" on the TV at my friends house when we were randomly talking to each other. Very strange, but I honestly kinda wish I've seen more ATHF.

Are there any weapons you outright refuse to use out of spite? It bugs me how often I play pyro and I'm like "man the scorch shot would be optimal here..." cuz that's one weapon I haven't equipped in 10 years.

I've also not really used the Kunai ever but I'm kinda just bad at spy in general (i go for ambassador too much). 

I have a prof. Killstreak strange Phlog (obtained from helping someone get a collector's phlog) and Vaccinator (obtained before its final rebalance) and it's a darn shame I just rarely use them anymore because they used to be really fun but now they're CRINGE guns. I still pull them out occasionally.

5 hours ago, Razputin said:

-Brass Beast: should be more extreme, make it unable to move at all and make it deal even more damage. I also rarely play heavy

-Classic: is an awful sniper rifle which means it's still pretty dang good, being able to instagib someone from anywhere

-Thermal Thruster: it's pretty clear valve was scared of bombing pyros because they made this way too restrictive, I wish this was just better because it is quite fun.

No... my three favorite weapons...

idk why this has barely counted in weeks I should be #2 by now. Fishcake giving extra max HP so that the brass beast damage mitigation kicks in faster means most classes need to do more than a magazine's worth to kill you. I feel kinda like a sniper in that they might try and avoid me, but what if I go in places they have go through? Another fishcake upside is that people will probably have no idea I have extra hp and chase a kill only to see an hp of 45 in killcam. That extra hp makes jump revving safer too since you have an extra HP cushion. "But it heals so little!" I agree, it heals so little but I've been learning to play safe enough that I can mousewheel scroll through my G.R.U. to get my max hp down to 150 and give it similar heal efficiency to the banana. Keeping up your fishcake uptime feels kinda like demoman always reloading to me. Brass Beast Dalokohs G.R.U. has legitimately been my fav loadout for months I feel unstoppable but it's definitely not for everyone.

The Classic and Thermal Thruster (with dragons fury mainly) are equally similar in that they were my favorite weapons for a while. They're still my comfort picks. The Classic and Brass Beast are strangely very similar...

My final question if you can read this is if you think there's any sleeper busted or overrated weapons. Comp 6s brain I think has truly poisoned people's mind that the Escape Plan is the best soldier melee (though based on your market gardener comment you probably feel similarly). I can't deny it's good for selfish soldier but the whip is more than a "get to front lines faster" weapon...

thoughts on 
brass beast 
classic
thermal thruster

It really is a far cry from the days of being taught in school "be careful what you post online - it's there forever!".

There's many solo amateur websites over the years I've seen that just don't exist anymore, and their pages were not put on the web archive. There's also so many youtube videos I adored lost to channels being deleted or intentional privating. I should really youtube-dl more than I do.

One of my favorite things to think about with stuff like gambling (unboxing crates or IRL) is that both players and the corporations will only share the big wins, thus making it seem like people win often.

But like, unusuals in TF2 are 1 in 150 (wiki said 1/100 for many many years). Strange knifes in CS:GO are 1 in 1500. CS2 and TF2 don't even announce to people what you unbox unless you're in a server doing the unboxxing (though valve did take the "advertise big wins" with the golden frying pan).

I kinda wish it was a rule for forums and stuff to say how many attempts it took to get their epic heirlooms or australium drop to help dissuade people from wasting money. But as is, people will unbox an unusual and go OMG MY FIRST UNUSUAL and post a phone picture of their screen. Which is fine, it's exciting being lucky! But many times people will reveal "yeah I'd unbox once per paycheck".

2 hours ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

I swear to god people need to start tapping into fucking ANTS already. There are so many fucking different species of ants and they're all wildly diverse and unique. There is so much you could do.

• Deterministic ant roguelike with upgrades and trees based on the abilities of real ant species.
• Ant strategy game or RTS with various unique factions of ants and caste unit classes.
• Ant RPG with a myriad of different ant species. Utilize their different strengths to build your party.
• Simultaneous mass-co-op ant puzzle platformer. Cooperate as ants to reach your goal using your combined might.

They write themselves.

Army Men: RTS had a single mission where you got to play as the bug faction. I always liked that one, commanding the ants spiders and cockroaches to destroy the tan menace taking your food...

I randomly joined one of my low-priority discord groups cuz I saw there were a lot of people in a channel. One of them was playing and streaming "Haze", an FPS for the PS3 I've never heard of. I thought it was a relatively intriguing viewing of the game. I was pleasantly surprised by the story, but they reached a point an hour and a half or so in where the person said "and that's where they just... stopped with the story".

I looked up the rest online and 6 of the 7 paragraphs for the plot on Wikipedia were dedicated to that beginning that was neat. A shame the game is actually pretty bad, likely from publisher intervention.

I think I've mentioned once that I accidentally complimented a novice/indie music maker back in my CS:GO days when I complimented the person's music on their Tumblr page (they were like "i made that ty so much").

But another similar story is that when they first added the emotes to steam, I saw and joined the "emote art" steam group where people were making art with emotes on their profiles. I saw this thread (https://steamcommunity.com/groups/emoticonart/discussions/0/666827974867330650/) and I had to get those guncraft emotes for myself.

I've had this Mario on my page since the week it was posted, 2013

I know a lotta people here were victim to my "hey can I send u a Link" and then I'd post an Emote-Link (from legend of zelda) afterward.

Anyways, come 2019 I find a thread of some person making a bunch of fixes for L4D2 maps using pretty advanced techniques with the hope that one day Valve will add them to the game (https://steamcommunity.com/app/550/discussions/1/1651043320659915818/?tscn=1598588468). 2020 hits and The Last Stand update gets announced for L4D2 and I was like "wow those map changes listed on the announcement video... I bet I know who did those!"

So I added him after making a post.

It was then that he complimented my Mario ascii art on my profile... then we both realized that he had made that same pixel art 7 years earlier. A shame he didn't know I did L4D2 mapping stuff cuz I would've been on the community update team and had my name on the update page/in the game (and I would've been able to work on the update - damn!)...

At least I'm on that same community update team now, but even we must abide by Valve time. Most of the map-related bullet points on this update: https://steamcommunity.com/games/L4D2/announcements/detail/3646280012042428637?snr=2___ were done by me!!!

Hopefully we get a new community update, at some point.

new games i played/finished this year (in no particular order)

anyways 70% of my playtime this year was tf2 l4d2 smite and yugioh sooooo ya business as usual

https://twitter.com/mollyyncy1/status/1732382047581446282/photo/1

2 hours ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

 

 

I recently picked up a pretty little CRT for cheap. Thing's in great shape and had a good owner. So I took it upon myself to replay OOT. This was my 3rd time playing it, though my 1st time in about 15 years. You know that bell curve meme? Yeah, that's basically how I feel about the game. Throughout life you go from "OOT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST GAMES EVER!" to "OOT is overrated!" to "OOT is one of the greatest games ever.

 

There's just so much to find in this game. This was my 3rd playthrough and I was still finding secrets and areas I had literally never seen before -- partly because since then I had gotten a rumble pak, which the Stone of Agony utilizes to indicate nearby hidden grottoes. Some of these grottoes you literally will not find without it because there's no way you'd know they were there otherwise, and honestly I kind of like that, hidden secrets that are where you'd least expect them, in the middle of nowhere, right under your feet. There's also a whole secret multi-room segment of the Fire Temple I discovered, which I had never seen before in my life and most other people probably haven't either.

 

OOT just has so much shit in it. The good type. Shit that exists purely for you to discover, for the joy and sake of discovering; items that exist purely because they are fun and cool. There's an entire sidequest you can do where you unlock a bunch of masks that you can wear for neat extra dialogue, the grand prize of which being a mask that lets you talk to Gossip Stones, revealing hidden secrets and world lore to you -- and you even get a few bonus masks for completing it. You can get mobile explosive Bombchus to use, you can acquire optional spells for combat or utility, you can get hidden elemental arrows, you can dive deeper with a Golden Scale, you can buy a fuckhuge sword that breaks, you can acquire a PERMANENT version of said fuckhuge sword -- even one of the very first items you get, Deku Nuts, are optional for you to use. Every consumable item in the game even has two capacity upgrades for you to find as well, some of which I had never discovered until this playthrough. As you ever going to need that many Deku Sticks? No, but it's cool that you can now! I feel like this is something that's seriously lacking later games -- just cool, entirely optional, unique items for you to find. Instead, so many items in later installments are just a lock for a key, and have no use or reason outside of that one specific thing.

 

OOT-specific section ends here, for additional dialogue concerning the series as a whole, click below:

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It's seriously insane how much they got right with their very first outing into 3D, and then just proceeded to fuck it up harder and harder with every subsequent installment until they ended up with Skyward Sword. The Zelda devs talk about how linear and restrictive Zelda games became, when it was entirely them who made them that way -- because they didn't start like that at all. In OOT's case, there are about one-dozen different orders you can do the 5 adult dungeons in (if you include the 2 mandatory mini-dungeons, this actually rises to 55). Completely legitimately without any funny business. I didn't even REALIZE this until this playthrough because I had always followed the game's guidance, but you totally can just do some dungeons in different orders if you want. In this regard, OOT follows the formulas of the big games before it, like Zelda 1 and ALTTP, allowing you to do some, but not ALL of the game's dungeons in a variety of orders. You are guided down a linear progression, but nonlinearity is allowed, and there are very few arbitrary story-flag barriers blocking your progress -- almost all progress throughout the overworld is tied to the items you find. People complain about the later games -- especially the 3D games -- being "formulaic" without realizing that they don't even follow the original formula. For whatever reason, the developers decided to INSTEAD pursue making the experience more and more linear and restrictive, to the point where you physically can't go somewhere until the game says you can.

 

I understand why they decided to eventually hit the nuke button on that formula and go full blank slate with BoTW and ToTK, but those two aren't exactly my cup of tea either. Instead of having structured nonlinearity, they have absolute no structure and no progression; you're given all the tools the game has to offer straight out of the box and can go club Ganon's skull in as soon as you're off the tutorial island, if you want. There are almost no unique or interesting items to find, and the dungeons are entirely optional puzzleboxes, only serving to make your fight with Ganon easier. It was pretty shortsighted of them to make the games successively more restrictive and then complain that they've become too restrictive, but it was also shortsighted of them to kneejerk all the way to the other end of the spectrum and completely remove all structure. And it is extremely stupid when people try to argue that this is how Zelda was from the very beginning and that BoTW is a "Zelda 1 remake". It's a real shame that the series has gone both extreme routes now instead of pursuing the perfect middleground formula that only a very few of its games inhabit. In fact, it took until ALBW, 15 years after OOT, for them to finally revisit the original, nonlinear Zelda format with a new game -- which they only did because it was going to be a remake of ALTTP in the first place. That's slightly sad to think about; the fact that they only came back to the formula because they were remaking a game which followed it to begin with. And now it's been 10 years since then.

 

 

TL;DR: OOT is one of the greatest games ever it's true.

Amen to that part about the non-linear dungeons. I'll always remember as a kid not knowing where on earth to find the thing Sheik's talking about thats hidden in kakiriko (the hookshot) so as kids we stumbled around until we ended up completing all of fire temple without even getting the hookshot then doing ice cavern (and then proceeding to be stuck for months unable to enter water or forest).

Finding a cheap copy of Master Quest with case and booklet for gamecube years ago was also very cool, and while 95% of the changes are cool, the puzzles that are literally "find this hidden switch lol" are really awful. Master Quest really reminds me of the work I do on TF2 and L4D2 maps, in which I can't modify level geometry but I can add and remove any entities I want.

Sonic Symphony cool

Started as a symphony

Intermission

Crush 40 concert

Shame the lead was sick, but the backup singer did really well

I still think it's really funny how in Deus Ex that the laser sight gives perfect accuracy to hitscan weapons and I didn't really know that but it made the game so much more approachable as a shooter for someone in the more modern shooter age after putting it on pistol on level 1.

I also remember having to lose an hour or two of progress just to backtrack before I put a scope on that same pistol due to jank where it removes that perfect accuracy (and you can't unattach it).

I should really play through more 90/00s shooters like System Shock...

I'll always remember once when someone on SPUF linked this version from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic,_Frank_C._Stanley,_Elise_Stevenson.ogg?useskin=vector

Was the first I ever heard of it, this recording has a special place in my heart, for some reason.

Never being able to play the Sonic CD disc we had always sucked as a kid because we never understood why it wouldn't work. The other two discs (Sonic R and Sonic 3+Knuckles) worked completely fine, but never Sonic CD. Was very frustrating but it was due to specs issues and such.

Also,

On 1/8/2023 at 12:21 AM, hugthebed2 said:

I guess as an update to this - I worked on this map quite a bit in the early parts of the year

 

Then out of nowhere after a year of silence, someone revived my L4D2 group, and made my tf2 map progress to a halt because my free time for that got fed into l4d2 modding (hey I guess I said I wanted to get back into it...).

 

I did get the main part of the map ported into TF2 and released an alpha version for some friends, but getting accurate map lighting and the entities from the game into tf2 is tedious work that I'm still learning how to do efficiently.

 

 

I very often want to work on it, but it turns out the work is 50% modeling, 30% placing the entities into tf2 (using math because I had to rotate the map 45 degrees in tf2 to make it play better)., and 20% tf2 map editing.

 

Still, I worked on it very sporadically throughout the year, and there's still a ton more left to do for it to be "good enough" in my eyes. It's come a long way from that singular room I posted at the start of last year though.

EVERY day at work I get the urge to work on this, but I never do - I've even super streamlined a lot of the annoying processes by writing basic scripts or learning new methods, but I've barely put any of them to practice. Grumble

On 7/9/2023 at 6:08 AM, Raison d'être said:

Black was a great game in a lot of ways, and I'm still wondering why I've never seen another FPS toy with the concept of dynamic reloads/weapon swapping (faster in combat, slower out of combat). It's such a small feature but it really improves the "flow" of the game, especially since they're new animations, not just sped up ones.

 

Example of a fast reload:

 

Slow reload:

 

After I first played it about 15 years ago I was thinking that there's got to be other games with this feature, but I've not seen them yet. Which is strange, since it's a really neat TECHNOLOGY feature to have. The closest I've seen was Killing Floor 2 changing some reload animations with perks, but that's not really the same thing (though it is also cool).

Huh, I was actually just thinking about this earlier and how a game like Payday would be really good for it.

30 minutes ago, Moby said:

So, they censored a bunch of stuff of the game because the new team "core values" changed over the years or something.

 

Literally 3 days later:

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Oh, right, "core values". Their "core values" that specially changed, Hidden Variable's Core Values.
These "core values"?

What on earth is this post supposed to mean

11 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

During the period from about 1993-2001 many CD games used redbook audio for their music.  This meant that they would put music data on the CD and play that music like any other CD while it was in your drive.  In terms of consoles these were common on the PSX and Sega CD, but many PC games also did this.  For PC games specifically there were several advantages. For example you would be able to play high quality music in a way that didn't eat up valuable hard drive space.  It was also inherently an anti-piracy measure, both in how it encouraged you to play the game with the CD in the drive and how pirated copies would frequently lack music.

 

On the player end, one advantage is being able to use the CD as a music CD in a normal CD player.  Like the soundtrack of the likes of Civilization II, Sim Isle, Warcarft II, Heroes of Might and Magic, Half-Life, etc.?  Pop that baby into your CD player and you can listen to it wherever you want.  Ripping the soundtrack is also trivial.  Since you were encouraged to have the CD in the drive for music (and sometimes other media files, such as the videos in Sim Isle) these games often didn't have proper CD checks, meaning that you could play them with any CD in the drive.  Some games did a check on the number of audio files, etc. to make sure that the right CD was in the drive and refused to play music if it wasn't, but others would just play the corresponding track of whatever was there which could lead to some interesting results.

 

As far as I'm aware, no game embraced this as much as the 1999 version of Aliens vs. Predator.  It was a 2 CD game, but the second CD was nothing but the soundtrack.  It was straight up a normal music CD, no data of any sort.  Because of this you could easily use any CD you wanted for music, and the game even included a config file to select which tracks would play in which order on each level, or when playing as each species in multiplayer.  Unfortunately the GOG/Steam rerelease doesn't do this and simply plays music files from the hard drive.  It's a niche enough feature that I'm not sure if anyone has even modded it in.

You remind me of this really good dev commentary node from a mod called "Half-Life C.A.G.E.D.". https://vocaroo.com/1hrZvB6PLlju

The "Big Lolly" mod he was talking about

I wonder if he knows how much of an impact his map, pl_hightower, had on the tf2 community... https://caylegeorge.com/

I wonder if people/hollywood will view the 2020s as the "Cyberpunk" era. Sounds vile just thinking about it considering its much older roots and tones.

Something I've been reminded of after working for 9 months is the things people just do without realizing it. I'm referring to myself in the sense of - when walking, I generally try to make as quiet of footsteps as possible. I've accidentally scared coworkers and to compensate I do loud stomps whenever I enter the lab or approach their office.

Another thing is that when walking, I generally have my vision angle pointing slightly downward, which I'm guessing is a habit I picked up as a kid when looking for coins or wanting to step in between the lines of tiles. I haven't really run into anyone (at work at least), but it explains why my shoes are cleaner than others since I try and avoid more spills or grossness I suppose.

I got in a car crash semi-recently and I had to pay a ticket. They said to not do it until at least 10 days after so the ticket could be mailed to the courthouse. I've gone in twice to pay it but it wasn't mailed yet. It's now been more than 3 weeks and they still haven't mailed it to them for me to pay it. I no longer have weekdays off to even GO pay for it (had plenty before this week). I have to pay for it soon or I have to go to the court hearing, but it's not my fault they haven't mailed it to the courthouse for me to pay it yet 

Is everyone I know who talks about the end of Cyberpunk Edgerunners being "da saddest show ever ;~;" because the ending is so mid?

My friends and I completely checked out after 

"I Really Wanna Stay at your House" is nice tho.

As I play more TF2 and be insufferable on mic by saying "MY ULT IS READY MY ULT "GAS PASS" IS READY" when I have built up my Gas Passer damage, I really think making it recharge like Jarate might just be boring and there's room to make it more fun for the Pyro to use.

My three ideas that could be added on to it include:

1. Make those covered in gas take more damage from you specifically.

2. Give you a speed boost while people are on fire from it.

3. Heal you for every afterburn damage tick.

I'm not saying all three, but 1 and 3, or just 2, could make it more interesting. It really needs something besides damage if it wants to be different than the flare guns. Right now its only perks are setting pyros on fire as well as 5 seconds of "area denial" (which is why it can't be resupplied).

Reminder that Gas Passer is fun on Halloween maps with spells, since it's so easy to charge. Honorable mention to the Huo Long Heater, which is programmed to give you 25% bonus damage whenever it's deployed and someone's on fire (which makes your spells do 25% more damage while it's deployed, granted they're on fire. It's a good thing two spells set them on fire...).