Raison d'être

If there's anything I learned watching this video, it's that I tend to mentally sort 99% of all pop music into two categories: songs made years before I was born, and songs made sometime last month. "Umbrella" is one of the exceptions because I remember it being mentioned as the hit summer song on the radio many years ago. That's about it, though.

I had a dream last night where I went on a field trip to LA and met a firefighter who was responding to a minor fire somewhere. I talked to him and he let me borrow his outfit for the day. It was comfy and I spent the day in it although I don't recall anything else about that day until the end of it when my class and I walked back to the bus station, almost getting run over by California drivers in the process. I found the firefighter sitting on a box with his company near there, thanked him and gave him his suit back. Uneventful dream, but a nice one.

I saw that video earlier today, TF2 back then looks better than TF2 now. The only things that really bug me are the revolver and syringe gun cylinders not spinning anymore. I know it's because they condensed models a few years ago so the game could run better with 10 billion unusual effects but shit that's sad. At least it proves that I'm not crazy and that there have been subtle overall changes since I played on the PS3.

Nothing in life is free I suppose.

The Anthem trailer reminded me of Rainbow Six Siege's E3 trailer from a few years ago. I admire what they were going for but the guy has the worst aim known to humanity and nobody who's ever played a game before will recognize that dialogue as legitimate.

"d4m0 judges subSPUFers" thread when?

Your heroic restraint is noted and appreciated.

me in high school

It's a bit warm here too.

I have a friend who's certainly been a troll (arguably worse) and he's actually a medic in the US Army. Shipped out to Afghanistan too. It's certainly possible.

I suppose we'll find out once Direct's library fills out.

If you make a lot of games, sure. But I'm not convinced that most memegame creators shit out more than one or maybe two crappy games before becoming bored and doing something else. And hell a thousand dollars in sales isn't that high, I can easily see a crappy memegame making that much if whatever meme it's based on is big at the moment. All things considered I doubt much will change.

The fee ain't higher though. It's the same $100 fee Greenlight had, only per game and can be paid back if your game makes (I think) $1,000. I doubt many memegame makers made more than one or two memegames each, so i don't really see this cutting down on (or encouraging) more shitty games.

Rehost that if you can, I gotta right click view image THEN solve a captcha to see Pete going nuclear.

That's what I was thinking, I don't know who would enjoy this. Casual/normal players wouldn't like it because dying to bullshit is never fun, especially if the guy is better than you anyway. The high-tier players wouldn't like it because it's random (when the buff happens) and also not random at all (popularity contest tells who gets the buff). It manages to be bullshit both by being random AND predictable - that's impressive. The only people who would enjoy it are spectators, and they're not even playing the fucking game. I normally don't watch it but I decided to catch some of it now.

At least random crits are somewhat, well, random. I guarantee you there will be people who will give their buds these "crits" the moment they need them most. If you want a picture of this game's future, imagine a crocket from a 15 health soldier stomping on a full health scout's face - forever. And all things considered I'd rather get fucked by a machine than my fellow man.

I'm not quite sure, it doesn't say exactly. This is all they mentioned at E3 about it and it doesn't explain it at all other then you probably gotta have a Mixer account. If I had to guess each server has its own Mixer stream and they probably (hopefully) have a UI set up for it. I can't see it ending well because experienced players would get fanbases who would then give them buffs that on top of their inherent experience would make newbie's lives hell. And I can't really see many people watching just normal players play a game instead of playing it themselves so the streams would probably be stacked with one guy's buddies who would give him buffs often.

Watched the first half or so of the Microsoft conference just now. What was the point of having actual drivers on stage for Forza? The Porsche babe at least talked a bit and shilled the new Porsche, but the other had I think one line and then walked off. I never got the racing genre's obsession with having real drivers play their games. It's not like you have the guy who shot Osama on stage playing the latest CoD, although I think that would be cool. Assassin's Creed feels just like a Far Cry game, but in Egypt. Looks the same, and has the same goddamn knife throw shit too. Then you get your tattoo skill points and level up owl shit capacity or whatever the fuck skills this game has. Regardless like most modern titles I'm going to say I intend to get it until I see how utterly fucked by DLC it's inevitably going to be causing me to feel disgusted and decide against it. Whatever that second Battle Royale thing was (the game with the shouty bald guy in yellow) apparently has Mixer™ (The Next Generation In Livestreaming) integration which allows Douchebag X to give your opponent a buff which is probably one of the worst ideas in video game history. It's like someone decided to take the somewhat common scene in a game where you're fighting a guy one-on-one and about to narrowly kill him when his teammate swoops in and saves him, and decided "You know what would make this better? The teammate isn't physically in the field so there's literally nothing the player can do to counter it." This is so bad I thought this was a misinterpretation on my part but apparently it's actually there. Better hope you're not playing against an e-celeb.

Yeah sure, whatever. I'm a dime-a-dozen racist idiot who doesn't know that ethnic conflict is just an urban legend. After all, how can there be conflict when we're all Americans™? You're basically just restating what everyone else already said, dude. But this is funny. "It's not worth my time to even read your essays... let alone bother responding to them," he says, after responding to an eight month old essay.

About 8 months old racist tripe, for one. I mean, what else do you want me to say, man? That it'll be all hunky-dory having multiple large ethnic groups in a country? I don't think that, and I've explained why (perhaps not in the best way). You can agree or disagree but I don't think there's much more to be said.

Man, I forgot all about the Portal 2 store. I think I was just confused by it mostly - how many people would buy any of these things? It turns out not many. Valve's reputation has taken a dive recently (and by recently I mean the past 7 years or so). It's turned from "Valve will do good things, and make a profit from doing them" to "Valve will make a profit and do some good things" to "Well, it's Valve, what did you expect". I sincerely believe that if Half Life 3 came out tomorrow it would have an item shop - I don't think they're capable of making a real game without microstransactions anymore. Although I suppose that's true for a lot of companies nowadays - Valve was supposed to be different.

Battleborn was a good game with some fatal flaws. My friends and I won our first 63 (at least) games in the open beta and had a 90% winrate in the actual game. Good times. The biggest problem I feel was that it came out just shortly after (or maybe before) Overwatch. I'm not a fan of Overwatch but a lot of people are, and a lot of the people who would otherwise be tempted to pick up Battleborn were busy with Overwatch. It also had horrible optimization, neither my nor any my friend's computers could run it at 60 frames, fuck even 30 was a stretch, despite cranking all the graphics options down, and it's not like the graphics were that great either. Both of those problems really combined into the playerbase being decimated, and that's pretty important in a PVP game. I doubt even F2P will bring it back. RIP Stilborn.

I don't think Valve will ever make games again, except for glorified tech demos for new hardware (that they're making/selling). They're supposedly making three VR games now. Three fucking games for VR when they haven't made an actual game in the better half of a decade, all while the old guard who actually made all the games are dropping like flies. And whatever happened to Steam Machines (and SteamOS)? There was so much hype, then they came out, then... nothing. I couldn't go a day without hearing about them back then, then they came out and I ain't heard jack shit about them since. Sometimes I forget they even exist. Looking it up it seems sales for them are really bad. How much you think they lost with those? What if their foray into VR also fails? Companies, don't do things for no reason. Why are they killing SPUF now? If ever there was a time to kill it it would've been soon after SPUD appeared. You'd have a sizeable amount of SPUFers that would've migrated there and given the newbies some sort of forum culture to assimilate into. There's no way to test it of course, but I suspect that simply forcing SPUF to turn into SPUD would've been better than letting two separate forums exist for half a decade then suddenly shutting the old one down one morning with no warning. I suppose you could say that SPUF shutting down was an inevitability, but it was only inevitable in the same way that Korean unification is inevitable - it'll happen eventually, but not until something forces it to. My pet theory is that Valve's decided to go over the books recently because the failure of Steam Machines dented their profits and are looking at ways to cut the fat. SPUF cost money, so it had to go. It also might be causing some management changes, which is prompting a lot of the old crew to leave (since they're probably not making any games they really give a shit about anymore anyway). In the end, it's all just guessing as Valve isn't a public company and thus releases whatever information it wants to whenever it wants to. I seriously doubt they'll go bankrupt or anything anytime soon and they're very obviously still running well in the black but I think Valve's best days are behind them, if not as a profit-seeking corporation then definitely as a game developer. Also it seems I missed where we were posting old TF2 screenshots. Only 2013 kids remember this. Is Pinion even still around? I last played TF2 a couple months ago and never saw a server with it.