Gyokuyoutama

This is exactly how your first fight against Ran in Touhou 19 will go:
 

CANON INFORMATION LEARNED FROM TOUHOU 19:
 
-Rin and Chen are now playmates
-Chen now likes finding corpses
-Ran used to be part of a gang that ruled part of hell

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.

Trust me, sometimes I'd like to have some words with the Outlook team as well, because they broke it so bad for me at one point that I had to use the web browser version for a month or so until the issue resolved itself.
 
Surprisingly (or not surprisingly), I've had very little cross Microsoft communication. I think the external team I've talked to most is the one working on the sidebar in Edge browser.

Well, I don't post much here now, but turns out this year, two of my remaining uncles got diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, one passed already and one is in pretty bad shape, gonna go visit him while I still can.
 
moral of the story, don't smoke, esp a pack or more a day.

Was chatting with my parents and brothers during coffee, when the conversation topic got to "little kids with unsupervised access to phones and PCs" because of my neighbor's loud and obnoxious kids.
 
Me and my brothers only got our first phone at 15 (my parents got their first ones at almost 40), barely used the internet back then due the lack of technology and we are arguably normal people, while they were given PCs and phones since early age and got diagnosed with autism. Then I remembered, my other young cousins that also were given phones since early age and had little parental care also were diagnosed with autism.
 
That got me thinking, does the combination of mind rot and overstimulation from constant unsupervised internet access, plus lack of parental care, causes autism?
 
Now, I am not saying "phone radiation causes autism", but just wondering that if someone spread that "unsupervised phone and internet access to kids causes autism", we would have less kids being raised with phone glued to their face.
 
....Nah, nothing would change.

I put in a bunch of SPUF related terms and told it to draw it in the style of team fortress 2:
 

 
This is how the computers interpret our existence.

This Bing image generator is kinda crazy.

The (robot) girl next-door. Her name is ABI:

 
It was fun to design a character with less strictly-human proportions for once. Fun detail: If you look veeeery closely at the long blue parts of her arms, legs, and torso, you can see that they're slightly translucent, because that's cool. I imagine they're also slightly squishy.

I was looking around my emails since I've been getting massive amounts of spam these days, and I found an email from December 2010.
 
It was the original pics of the DemoPan thread.
 
 
 

That's clearly a Nitorindo Hyper Famicom.

Feels wierd to listen to that song after Chester's death.

Made a meme from a recent Jobel stream.
 
 
 
 
Its a long story.

Software back then was interesting because it had enough hardware power to do pretty cool things, but the internet wasn't big enough to the point you could rely on a site to do everything for you, if you even assumed the user had internet access at all.

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,
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

I look forward to the next Accursed Farms video where Ross not only talks about the insanity that is Unity's insane pricing plans (i.e. charging for every single install), but also the fact that people are getting mad at it for the wrong reasons.  (Specifically: yes, the price structure is unjustified and going to kill developers, especially those making free games.  But the bigger problem is that to implement this scheme they'll have to use invasive DRM to determine exactly when and where every game was installed.  After all, they've tried to claim that games installed by pirates and those installed from charity packs won't be charged back to the developers, but how would they know that without extensive data harvesting on the machines in question?)  The only real bright side is that a lot of the policy is clearly the management speaking out of their ass without any real idea as to how they are going to implement it.

Uh oh, oh no! The Annual Smissmas 2020 LordAIDS Monkey Extravaganza has been CANCELED due to the widespread outbreak of CORVID-19!

I played the demo for this game called Peripeteia recently. It's an "immersive sim" game set in a sort of bleak cyberpunk-ish post-Soviet Poland. You play as soulless cybernetically-augmented girl who lives in a crummy apartment and takes on various hits for a living. I don't usually blogpost but I feel like writing about this game so...
 
By far the biggest thing in the demo I enjoyed was the independence it gives you. I guess I get what they mean by immersive -- you can really just do anything. The guy you talk to at the start to get your first job? You can just kill him instantly with the gun he gives you. Or you can steal the stuff behind him and get shot instead. I was immediately surprised by how I could just pick up all the bottles lying around and keep them in my (tetris-style) inventory, after which I went outside, stacked some boxes, and climbed up an entire skyscraper just because (and accidentally ended up out of bounds henceforth). You play as a character, certainly (named Marie), but you're not steered down any particular path. The first person I killed for instance was a random homeless man I shot from a rooftop. I didn't even know he was an innocent homeless guy until I got down to check his corpse, and when I did, I actually felt bad. I had gotten so used to the videogame style of just shooting every person I saw that I just did it there without thinking. And he didn't even have anything on him. That's when I felt the sense of agency that Peripeteia creates.
 
Mechanically, the game has some interesting ideas. Like I mentioned, you can climb. Pretty much any surface that has a defined edge, you can cling to, shimmy along, and leap up. This means that there are virtually infinite ways to reach your mission objective, and the game is designed with this in-mind. For the first mission, you have to infiltrate a building, crack a safe, get a keycard inside, and bring it back. There's probably a more "intended" way inside, but I ended up sticking to the rooftops and then leaping down to a small metal balcony. I was a bit strapped for ammo so I played it more stealthily, using some of the bottles I picked up earlier to distract guards and whatnot so I could dispatch them quietly. There are also a variety of cybernetic augmentations you can toggle at the expense of a gradual energy drain, though I feel like I didn't make good use of these during my gameplay. Once I took out the boss and got the code for the safe, I got the keycard, began heading out, and along the way ended up in some tunnel underground where I found an arms dealer. I sold all the guns I took from the guards I killed and bought some new weapons. I also think I found a secret room? Then I went back, and mission complete. Also a cool thing worth mentioning is that your inventory is persistent and carries over between missions, so what you do exactly and how you go about completing levels does have an impact on future levels in that sense.
 
Criticisms and such
 
Now conceptually, I feel like there is an amazing game in Peripeteia. I love the ideas, the concepts, and atmosphere. But I feel like the systems in the game don't serve those ideas to their full potential. For instance, in the first mission, I tried to play it stealthily, but all the weapons you're given are very loud. In the second mission, there are rooms full of enemies where it was much simpler to just go in guns blazing than try to play tactfully. The enemies also can't open doors, so I ended up exploiting this a couple times, which just felt bad and cheesy. As it stands, it feels like there's little reason to not just go ape with all your guns and kill everybody; there is no difference in the outcome, even killing random bystanders produces no effect. The game gives you all the agency in the world, but no consequences around it. For instance, that arms dealer I mentioned? He has a bodyguard blocking the door to a back room. The only way to loot the back room is to kill the bodyguard, and hence the dealer, who will then aggro on you. There is no way to go about it stealthily. The optimum "videogame" play here IS to kill the dealer, take what he was selling, kill the bodyguard, and loot the back room, because, as is, there are absolutely no consequences for doing so. You just get a ton of stuff for free.
 
I also do feel like the game could use a liiiitle bit more direction in its mission objectives. I'm not talking Ubisoft shit, but for instance, in the first mission, you're told to go to a building, to the west, by the canal, with scaffolding around it, and retrieve a keycard. I feel like that's very clear yet non-intrusive. The second mission, however, has much less direction. You're told to blackmail or kill a certain politician, and that's it. I ended up wandering around lost for a long time, because I had no idea where this guy might be in this huge map (where you can traverse almost any vertical surface mind you), or how I might even begin to blackmail him. I ended up on a very, very distant rooftop where there was a random clue, which only raised more questions than answers. Tangentially, I feel like the game also needs better out of bounds safeguards. That may seem antithetical to the game's approach of letting you go pretty much anywhere, but I'd argue that being able to go out of the bounds of what is intended is antithetical to the game's core principal of creating immersion. I ended up getting out of bounds in the first mission when that wasn't even my aim, I was just wanting to climb up a building, because it was possible.
 
Final thing
 
Now, this was just a demo I played. The gameplay was a little rough and crusty in some places, but from what I understand, the demo is several years old by now and the internal state of the game has gotten a lot nicer since then. And it's worth mentioning that in regards to my criticism about there being no consequences or weight to your problem-solving, that the demo does have a relations system, it just wasn't really utilized in that brief demo snippet. I'm really looking forward to this game still, it feels very ambitious and unique in its ideas and I love its weighty atmosphere.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/08/17/xbox-360-store-will-close-july-2024/
 
God, I hate when I'm right. The final countdown is on boys, get 'em while you still can. As for me, I've pretty much gotten whatever was on my radar, aside from some Minecraft DLC and OG Xbox games that don't license transfer if you get them from the modern store. That being said, I will still keep an eye out for anything that might catch my interest from now until the closure. I'll try to prioritize non-BC games.

Ok.

I still have super fond memories of Heroes 4 but that is as far as I know an unpopular opinion among "real" HoMM fans. I still have the bigass instruction booklet in my desk drawer.

That's a deep cut. But let's see them recreate the tenth edition art.