Gyokuyoutama

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.

Wrong:
 

 
 

Power metal bands are Finland's second greatest contribution to the world.

I saw a guy that I used to watch devolve into a baittuber in just a few months. It was both sad and extremely pathetic.
 
Face cam, clickbait ALL CAPS titles, open mouth reaction thumbnails, copying whatever the big streamers are doing, jumping immediately into the current trend, bending down to the algorithm, torturing himself with bad stuff because it "generates more clicks", demanding people to leave their PCs on to fake audience for advertisement streams, stopping doing stuff because it was "not getting views".
 
The first red flag was set during one stream I joined and noticed the views had dropped by almost half of what it was a few hours before, so I asked what happened and he immediately snapped thinking I was insinuating he lost views because he was ranting (again).
The second flag was set when he stopped a stream for one hour to review his blocked word list and it was entirely made of single words that made him mad, including common verbs and even a few colors.
Then what made me stop watching was when I joined a stream and , like always, every ""joke"" was "haha cock", "haha gay" or "haha doing your mom". I made a side comment saying "recently all his jokes are either "penis" or "haha gay"" and he once again snapped saying "fuck you, you are not even subscribed".

My new tablet arrived a few days ago. (Huion HS64)
 
Pros:
- Cheap
- Pressure levels are good
- Driver worked from get go
- Came with adapters for mini-usb and usb-c
- The rough surface is nice to draw on
- Pen is rubberized, feels nice to use
- Bigger drawing surface than my last tablet
 
Cons:
- Very small, about 3/5 the size of my last one. Not a problem, but I liked having the tablet on my lap and being bigger was perfect for that.
- A bit too sensible, was detecting micro jitters because I had it on my lap, putting it on a stable surface stops that
- Pen could be a bit heavier
- The USB cable does a 90º curve to the left, all my USB ports are at the right
 
I like it.

All rise for the "you bought a blu-ray from Discotek" anthem:
 
 

Have you tried Shift + Right Click on the taskbar?

If you are interested in hearing the TRUE ghostbusters midi, play this wad and go to map 03.

Though you should be warned that while the wad has some nice midis and some cute graphics/sound conversions, the actual level design is pretty horrendous.

Did you know that there's supposed to be a siren and a scream at the start?  I didn't until I heard it in doom.
 
EDIT: This made me realize that if you want to hear old midis as their composers intended them to be heard, your best bet might be to make a doom wad, put the desired songs as level music, then load the wad into some ZDoom variant (including GZDoom).  All the actual music players I know of that play midis use the Windows library, which usually doesn't match the AdLib sounds people were going for.
 
EDIT2: I have spent a half an hour trying to find a better way to play AdLib midi files without loading them into Doom.  I have found a DOS player which I can't get to work at all in DOS Box; all sounds are silent for midi files and files that I KNOW were for AdLib claim that they are in an unsupported format.  I did get the AdPlug plugin for Winamp working, kind of.  Now Winamp won't play normal midi files (including the infamous ghostbusters one) but it WILL play the Doom soundtrack files correctly, however I need to rename them from .MUS to .MID files.  I know for a fact that the Ghostbusters one IS intended for Adlib, but it's possible (and actually pretty likely) that the version I have is a conversion from .MUS to .MID that somehow destroyed the file format.
 
Conclusion: I wasn't joking when I said that the easiest way to listen to these songs properly is to put them as background music for a Doom wad and then load that wad up.

This time it's only two pages in the "chapter" before the next big arc (hinted at in the first strip.)
 

 
"Kitsune style udon" is udon with deep fried tofu in it.  There's two ideas for why it's called as such: I've heard that the fried tofu was originally made in triangular shapes, like a fox's ear, but now it's rectangular like you see in panel 2.  The second idea is that fox's are supposed to love fried tofu.  Real foxes don't, but maybe mythical ones do.  In any case this idea is commonly used in fox fiction: in addition to what you see here The Helpful Fox Senko-san and Tamamo-chan's a Fox both had this come up as a plot point repeatedly.  I don't remember if it came up in Wagaya no Oinarisama, Konohana Kitan or Gugere Kokkuri-san.
 
The cup noodles are probably Nissin's kitsune udon line.  I suppose this is another good time to bring up their long running series of commercials featuring foxgirls (under the spoiler.)
 
EDIT: SPUF software acts weird if I put multiple video links in a spoiler, in particular not letting the spoiler ever end (regardless of where I put the /spoiler tag.)  So you'll have to open up the spoiler for the second page.
 

17 years ago we had DOTA
 
 
And now, finally, DOTA 2
 
 

Reasons to learn each language:
 
You are a weeb (default answer) - Japanese
 
Who  cares what they use it for, it sounds cool to speak - Latin, German
 
You need to watch fansubs of some shit anime - Spanish, Indonesian, Italian
 
There are people in your FPS or RTS chat that you need to chase away - Brazilian, Korean, Chinese
 
You need to install mods for Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - Russian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian
 
You need to find new death metal - Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish
 
Who cares what they use it for, it sounds hilarious when people speak it - French, Dutch, Afrikaans
 
EDIT: I though this was in the general thread, not the gaming thread, but I guess it doesn't matter that much.