FreshHalibut

Fellas I feel compelled to share that I became a dad recently
 
My boy is doing great and it has been awesome bar the tummy ache nights where me and my wife get literally 0 hours of sleep

Lol I am so fucking late sholy ssjt, I will necro the topic solely because I promised I'd post (I have some replies to stuff in this thread as well other than noita but I swear I'll work on this after I sleep it's 1am okay please I only feel like writing stuff during the witching hour right before I pass out)
 
The Good
 
 
The Bad
 
 
The Weird
 
The verdict:
 
Bonus best girls:
 

Ok, I have a free evening. Where the videogames?
 
I played a normal amount of new games this year. I don't think I'll outdo last year for a long, long while, but that's ok since that was a huge outlier year for me. However... there's a little bit of cheating in this list due to games I've already played being released in a new fashion and thus earning a spot in the top ten. It's my list and I make the rules, though!
 
Honorable mentions:
 
 
TOP TEN:
 
 
The not very great...
 
Awards
Favorite Music Tracks:
 
Best girls:
 
Backlog:
 

Stuff I played last year:
 
 
 

Stuff I played last year:
 
 
 

Had eye surgery yesterday for my life-long strabismus in my left eye. Went really well according to the doctor, just recovering now and trying to get past the temporary double-vision while my brain adjusts. Apparently I was a bit exceptional, since I did vision therapy for 10 years which kept my affected eye from weakening, so the muscles were still all good and I have 20/20. The doctor was also the successor of the doctor who performed a previous strabismus surgery on me when I was 2, and that guy was basically the best in the U.S., so he was very familiar with his work and knew what to expect going in.
 
Seeing my face in the mirror afterward was so weird, like looking at an alternate universe! My first thought was "Wow, I look like the people on TV or something!"

Install German game with apparently no English version available.
 
Click quit (which is in English for some reason).
 
Message: "Spiel verlassen?" i.e. "Quit game?"
 
No buttons on screen to hit, so I hit enter, only for the message to go away.  Then I assume it wants me to answer on the keyboard, so I press "Y."
 
I did that about a dozen times before I realized that I was supposed to press "J" for "Ja."

As promised a review of Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard.  It's an indie German game (and of course it's German; those guys seem to hold LucasArts adventure games in the same regard that Slavs have for Heroes of Might and Magic.)  It's a retro throwback game, and practically uses the SCUMM system, but it doesn't really ape any one game in particular.  I was strongly reminded of Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, The Legend of Kyrandia, King's Quest VI, Beneath a Steel Sky and Inherit the Earth (though not as much as you'd think for the last one, considering that this is a game with anthropomorphic characters.)  So I guess we're targeting the mid-90's.  You can imagine the game as something for late Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 where CD audio was still a big new thing and get pretty much the right vibe.
 
The plot is about a deer named Finn who comes back home after being gone for some reason or other, only to find that his home has been ransacked and his parents are missing.  Everyone blames the wolves, but the game doesn't really hide the fact that it's really some sort of robots that did it.  Of course figuring out why robots are even around, and why they are doing this, takes most of the game (since the setting is generic medieval fantasy land.)
 
The game is somewhat low-res, like games from that era would be.  But this is a clear design choice, and the backgrounds look great.
 


 
Really captures the feel of artists using the Super VGA card to try to paint on a virtual canvas.  The character sprites don't look quite as good, but they are serviceable, and have top class animations.  The main character has at least dozens of special animations for various actions.  I also quite like how he sorts of skips around for his default walk animation; it stresses the fact that he's a deer and gives you the feeling that he's more care free than he should be.  There's a lot of subtleties.  For example, Finn's idle animation is usually one where he blinks and occasionally glances around.  But in the more dangerous or spooky areas of the game he will pull back and tremble while doing this.
 
Something I like is that in cutscenes, it's still the same resolution as in gameplay.  They certainly could have animated the cutscenes at a higher resolution, since they aren't held back by the game engine or anything, but I think that doing so would just pull you out of the experience, especially when you get thrown back to the lower res gameplay.
 


 
The maker of the game said that he wanted to "put the adventure back in adventure" in that there should be a sense of exploration rather than just a narrative or a bunch of BS puzzles.  I think that it succeeds in that regard.  As you would expect there are never too many locations to go to at any one time, but they are usually varied and you will often find out that a location you had visited repeatedly is hiding some secret or other.  I won't get into spoilers, but there are some pretty big shifts in where you are through the course of the game.  It kind of reminds me of the King's Quest series at its best in that regard.
 
I was going to say that this is a short game, since I beat it in about 8 hours with only checking a walkthrough  three times.  But that's actually about standard for adventure games I think.  I can get these comparisons for other adventure games I've played recently: The Curse of Monkey Island: 7.5 hours, Toonstruck: 6.5 hours, Zniw Adventure: 5.5 hours, Pegasus Prime: 4 hours, Stasis: Bone Totem: 11 hours.  So it's within the parameters of the genre.  I played on "classic mode" which says that it makes items harder to find and timed puzzles trickier.  The times I did look at a walkthrough did all involve not realizing that I could interact with some object or other, or assuming that it wasn't worth it (there's dozens of rocks that you can examine, but only one which helps you solve a puzzle.)  There's a "modern mode" which is supposed to help with it, but I didn't really think that the game was unfair in classic mode.  Then again, I have played something like 30 or 50 adventure games before so your mileage may vary depending on your experience with the genre.  In any case, it definitely doesn't follow the modern trend that some adventure games have done by having "puzzles" consist of being told you need an item and then having your main character tell you where you need to use the item.  There are hints that you can get by examining objects and talking to people, but you will have to think things through.  This is an adventure game so some of the solutions were off the wall, but nothing stuck me as completely illogical or something that should have been easily avoidable given your resources.  If you've played adventure games from the time period that this is targeting, you will be satisfied with the gameplay.
 
You can die in the game, but the game will throw up a save icon when you enter a region where you can get killed.  If you choose not to save, that's on you.  I find this a nice compromise between the brutality of classic games and the "can't fail no matter what" attitude of modern adventure games.  The deaths are both brutal and comedic at the same time, which does fit with the likes of King's Quest.  I don't think that it's possible to get yourself into a situation where you can't win because you fucked yourself over somehow; at least I didn't run into any and I noticed that the way that you interacted with certain items definitely was there to prevent you from losing an item you would need later.  Similarly, if you need an item late in the game, you will always need it to solve a puzzle before you reach a point of no return.
 
There is a lot of detail put into the game.  It's not to the insane degree that the first Edna and Harvey game was, but still way more than they had to.  For example, most characters will have unique reactions to being shown your inventory items.  They will have a "I don't know what that is/I have no opinion about it" generic reaction, but I found that they only gave it to maybe a quarter of the items I showed them.  Some of these reactions contain hints, but mainly it's just world building and telling you more about the characters.  There's also some minor stuff like when you pick up a fish to solve a puzzle and you can choose to take it back to its lake (though there is no in-game reward for doing so) or leave it in your pockets to die (if you are a horrible person.)
 
I don't like the English voices very much, and Finn in particular sounds like an annoying wimp.  I didn't have any problems with the German voices.  Finn still is overly cheerful, conflict averse and kind of a coward, but he comes across much more as someone who prefers to find a clever way to solve a problem than someone who is just woefully unprepared for an adventure like this.  I'm not fluent in German, but there are subtitles and you can swap the language for those independently of the audio.  When I understood the audio it mainly lined up with subtitles, though there were a few places where the German audio was a short matter of fact statement like "I'm scared/ich habe Angst" but the English subtitle was much longer with a pun or other joke.  But overall it seemed accurate.  Music was fine, though the only piece I can remember after the game is the main theme.  They sell a soundtrack now; I don't see any need to get it.
 
The story of the game isn't exactly groundbreaking since I've seen every idea it used done somewhere else, but at the same time it does have plenty of twists and turns.  It did feel like it ramped up at an appropriate pace, both in terms of the threats that you face and the way that it explains the mysteries of the game.  You will run into plenty of points where you aren't sure what to do, but I got through most of them without hints and can't recall any points where I got through things just by clicking on stuff until something happened; it was always a matter of guessing a solution and then implementing it.
 
Basically if you like adventure games, you'll probably enjoy this.  If you specifically like early point and click CD adventure games from the 90's, you'll definitely like it.  I look forward to more from WatchDaToast, just like I'm eagerly awaiting the sequel to Zniw Adventure.  Speaking of WatchDaToast, he also did some Doom WADs, though the first one is really more of a Wolfenstein 3D homage.

Dead Rising 1 (original) works great, 60fps with full controller support. This version came in out 2016 actually. It was never on PC before that weirdly enough.
Dead Rising 3 works great, 60fps on pc with a simple ini tweak (unofficially sanctioned dev tweak).
Dead Rising 4 works fine, but has some weird AA blurriness I had to mess around with.
 
Dead Rising 2 and OTR do have some jank left over from gfwl.
Post was getting long again, so details inside.
 
The tldr is performance was good for me but controller support is picky.
 
 

I guess I've developed an interest in historical game packs like the SNK collection, since I picked up the Atari 50 collection.  This is an interesting contrast to the SNK collection because to be frank it's something that if you don't have a historical interest in Atari or the early days of video games, it's really not worth it.  Most of the SNK games still hold up so you get a solid collection of games, but many of the games in the Atari set are not things that most people would be interested in playing.  There are a few reasons for this:
 
Since we are literally at the dawn of video games (reports at the time called them part of the "pinball industry") some of the games are extremely primitive.  For example, "Touch Me" is basically just Simon (i.e. push a series of buttons in response to what blinked.)  Games like Breakout are certainly playable, but since they invented a genre later games innovated so much on the basic formula that going back to the original will feel lacking if you've seen anything from later on. Many of the games are two player only, like Pong, Combat and Air Sea Battle are meant to be played 2 player.  There is no AI at all, so no real game unless you have someone else playing.  These games actually do hold up if you are willing to look past their age... but since we are talking about local multiplayer with two controllers only, you will need to find someone to agree to play a mega-old game when you could easily be doing something else.  Not an easy sell. Many of the games are arcade games.  In a way this is nice, since they punched higher than the console games of the time.  But the downside is that sometimes they used special peripherals that you won't have on PC or modern consoles.  In particular, Missile Command, Centipede and Crystal Castles all used a trackball.  I guess there are trackballs you can use with PC, but who has one?  Missile Command and Centipede work pretty well with a mouse and Crystal Castles is at least playable with a joystick, but you are missing a key part of the experience.  Similarly there are some arcade racing games that are meant to be played with a steering wheel, some games meant to be played with a paddle (i.e. a rotational dial like what you use in Pong), etc. Some of the games are just not good.  Sometimes this is due to technical limitations, like what you have on Atari 2600.  Sometimes it's just because the library sucks, like what happened with the Jaguar (but at least you get a historical perspective of why the Jaguar failed.) Some of the actually fun and innovative games are so far back that you really have to stretch your modern imagination to get into them.  Adventure is an example of this; it's a pretty neat little top down action adventure game, but it's also a game where you are a dot carrying an arrow to fight ducks. The collection also suffers from the fact that this is Atari only.  In particular no Activision (made by disgruntled Atari ace employees) so no Pitfall, River Raid, Kaboom!, Keystone Kapers, etc. This is a shame, since those are some of the best games for the 2600.  No tie ins with other companies like Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, Pole Position.  This in particular hurts the Jaguar, since you won't be getting games like Cannon Fodder, Aliens vs. Predator, Theme Park or Rayman, leaving Tempest 2000 as the only great game on the system.
 
With all that being said, there are many games you can have fun with here.  I think that Asteroids, Centipede, Tempest and Missile Command all hold up and help to see how people got obsessed with the arcades in the early 80's.  Cloak and Dagger, Warlords and especially Food Fight are some great arcade games from later.  (Crystal Castles would be perfect if I had a trackball.)  The consoles include a mix of mediocre (but high selling) stuff, experimental games like Club Drive, Ninja Golf, Basketbrawl, Haunted House and Solaris, and even some home brews and unreleased games.  I imagine that you will find at least a few games that you will legitimately enjoy (I recommend starting with Food Fight and Tempest 2000 since those are both pretty straightforward to understand and well done.)
 
There are a lot of repetitions through ports and the like.  For example, with Asteroids you have the original arcade game, the sequel Asteroids deluxe (really more of a remix of the game), ports for the 2600 and 7800 systems and a combined port of Asteroids and Missile Command for Lynx.  Similarly, there are 5 version of Missile Command.  Normally I would say that this is just padding, but there are 109 games in total if you include ports, and if you only include "original" games you still have 77 games.  But what makes this interesting is the historical perspective.  You can see what Asteroids was like in the arcades, then play the 2600 port to see what was available at home.  In some ways the games are very similar, but in other ways the home experience was obviously inferior.  Very unlike today when you can get everything you want on a PC or modern console.
 
In terms of emulation, it has what you would want.  You can mess with filter and border options depending on whether you want a clear view or a simulation of what it would like at the arcade.  Arcade games have DIP switch options to let you change starting lives, freeplay options, etc.  The games for the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800 systems let you control the difficulty switches on the console for similar results and you can mess with the controls.  My only real complaint there is that you can't remap controls for multiple players to a single keyboard; you need a controller for everyone which can get annoying on the 4 player games since I generally don't have 4 controllers connected.  Having two people on controller and two people on opposite sides of the keyboard would work fine.  But let's be honest, I'm never going to get 4 people to agree to play these games so this is a rather minor complaint.

Where the collection shines is in the historical aspect.  You get a good feel for that from the games themselves, but the collection has a timeline mode that is loaded with features.  Digital Eclipse did something similar for the SNK collection, but there it was really just a brief description of various games with some idea of the context, some screen shots, and maybe some promotional art or manual pages.  The Atari collection has that too, but also includes a wealth of video footage including historical interviews, retrospective interviews done for the collection, historical news footage, etc.  They go into a lot more detail on important games that were not included in the collection to give a real feel for how Atari was doing on a year by year basis.  This is particularly the case with Atari's ill-fated Pinball games (the only pinball game in the collection is a virtual table for the Jaguar.)  I like that they aren't shy of saying where there were flops and where there were successes.
 
Like I said with the SNK collection, you can emulate this stuff rather easily, but the historical presentation of the collection really adds to the experience.  Digital Eclipse has found a niche and is doing their best, when they could have easily just slapped a bunch of roms together in a cash grab.  I'll probably pick up their Jeff Minter game collection if it goes on a good sale.  They also have a "Making of Kareteka" collection, but that might be too niche for even me since it focuses entirely on one game (and its many, many, ports.)

Didn't see Hellsinger in the thread. The soundtrack is really good.
 
 
 
 

Well, looks like Microsoft is having a clear-out sale of Xbox 360 games and DLC before the store closes. I honestly, truly didn't think they would actually bother doing it. I thought they would just pull a Nintendo and just keep prices as they are until the end. Considering all of their braindead ideas and decisions as of late, it wouldn't surprise me. But color me pleasantly proven wrong this time. This first of three waves of sales contains 66 games, with reductions ranging from 50% all the way to 90%. The second wave will be on June 18th, and the last wave on July 16th, just two weeks before closure.
 
The full list of the first wave can be found here.
 
I would also highly recommend watching the following video that will provide additional info such as price, physical availability, platform availability, and even whether or not the 360 port is worth it compared to other platforms. For example: Trials Fusion has a port on Steam that is utterly bogged down with always online DRM that the 360 port does not need. So, it would actually be prudent to grab it while you can on the 360 otherwise your only choice would be the crappy PC port or emulation, which for the 360 is not nearly up to par quite yet.
 
 

>reading old threads
>reliving all those small moments from 12 years ago when spuf was a thing
>familiar faces and fun moments everywhere
>when we were hyped by TF2 updates, MLP, Homestuck, secret santas, Minecraft server
 

 
>all puush, imageshack and photobucket images gone, some imgur as well
>12 years worth of internet story, memes and memories, gone, never to be seen again
>people that just vanished from the face of the Earth
>remembering the forums were killed for the shitty, no moderation cesspool that is Steam hubs
>knowing you will never find that same fleeting happiness you had for so long
 

I have achieved the CEO Grindset.

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.

I ended up playing a mix of new and old stuff this year.
Ended up on the hypetrain for a decent number of high profile releases.
 
As I wrote this, I realized I played a ton of short games, mostly shooters, this year.
 
Stuff I played this year.
 
Top picks are probably
TitanFall 2 - One of the best campaigns I've played in a really fun shooter.
Disco Elysium - This one's going to stick with me
Metal Hellsinger - Finally a heavy metal Rhythm FPS game that isn't a roguelike
Robocop - Weirdly really good
Shadows of Doubt - Hope it gets more updates
Pizza Tower - Of course
Resident Evil 4 Remake - Really solid
Armored Core 6 - Really Solid
Slay the Princess - Not usually my thing, but was very surprised.
Tears of the Kingdom - Really enjoyed the new stuff, need to go back to it at some point.

I ended up playing a mix of new and old stuff this year.
Ended up on the hypetrain for a decent number of high profile releases.
 
As I wrote this, I realized I played a ton of short games, mostly shooters, this year.
 
Stuff I played this year.
 
Top picks are probably
TitanFall 2 - One of the best campaigns I've played in a really fun shooter.
Disco Elysium - This one's going to stick with me
Metal Hellsinger - Finally a heavy metal Rhythm FPS game that isn't a roguelike
Robocop - Weirdly really good
Shadows of Doubt - Hope it gets more updates
Pizza Tower - Of course
Resident Evil 4 Remake - Really solid
Armored Core 6 - Really Solid
Slay the Princess - Not usually my thing, but was very surprised.
Tears of the Kingdom - Really enjoyed the new stuff, need to go back to it at some point.

I ended up playing a mix of new and old stuff this year.
Ended up on the hypetrain for a decent number of high profile releases.
 
As I wrote this, I realized I played a ton of short games, mostly shooters, this year.
 
Stuff I played this year.
 
Top picks are probably
TitanFall 2 - One of the best campaigns I've played in a really fun shooter.
Disco Elysium - This one's going to stick with me
Metal Hellsinger - Finally a heavy metal Rhythm FPS game that isn't a roguelike
Robocop - Weirdly really good
Shadows of Doubt - Hope it gets more updates
Pizza Tower - Of course
Resident Evil 4 Remake - Really solid
Armored Core 6 - Really Solid
Slay the Princess - Not usually my thing, but was very surprised.
Tears of the Kingdom - Really enjoyed the new stuff, need to go back to it at some point.

Hey! STOP playing videogames. I’ve had enough of your STUPID videogames. Aren’t you a little O-O-OLD to be playing videogames-
 
This is mostly to piss Huff off because he hasn’t finished everything yet, but I also heard there were rumblings that there were “no good games this year”. Also another friend of mine said I needed to get this posted to keep old school internet forums alive. Little half-baked in some parts but I might add a lil to it.
https://www.backloggd.com/u/Silentology/
 
------
Honorable Mentions:
 
Top 10:
 
The Rest:
 
Backlog/Frontlog for 2024
 
 

A game that didn't receive any updates for the last 3 years.
A game that is just Fallout 4 with less features, which already had less features than New Vegas, with most of the new gameplay copied from No Man's Sky.
 
Fuck off.

I present to you the greatest anime opening ever made:
 
 
I guess to appreciate this you have to have both played Snatcher and watched Patlabor, so maybe the audience here is just me.
 
But the rest of you may be interested to know that this was literally drawn in MS paint.  No seriously, that's what the description of the video says.

I'm gonna have to play more Engineer now!
 
Maybe I should take that approach for Heavy items now that I think about it.

I've still got my gifted items with names from the old SPUF server, weapons from Facade and Silent and some changed names I can't recognize.
Not a famous name or anything, but as one of the resident Deus Ex fans I'd craft a Widowmaker for you.
 

I finished playing the Castillo Duology, Castillo - Shattered Mirrors and Castillo - Nine Circles, and I found them really interesting.
I actually played the first one last year, but the sequel Nine Circles came out in October.
 
Out of the gate, both games attempt to be something quite rare in the FPS space, they are trying to be a hybrid of collect-a-thons and FPS.
 
The first game, Shattered Mirrors, takes heavy inspiration from Mario64.

Rambling Overview
 
So in summary, the first game is a weird experience that mostly functions.
It's this combination of ideas from Mario64 and FPS games made by someone who clearly doesn't understand FPS games.
In a world of polished FPS gems and bland clones which miss the point, Castillo is neither of these.
It's a FPS collect-a-thon made with a clear vision and a lot of heart, but is really rough all over.
 
So let's get into the sequel which came out bit over a year later.
The second game, Nine Circles, follows something closer to Banjo Kazooie.
 
Rambling Overview
 
So I'm fascinated by the Castillo games, because I'd say they achieve being collect-a-thons, but fail at being engaging FPS games.
The FPS mechanics are incredibly basic at best and enemy damage, both taking and receiving, is incredibly unintutive.
 
There are interesting worlds to explore, but the level geometry is all slipshod and janky.
The story, while basic, is taken seriously and has stuff going on, but is plagued with audio issues.
There's a lot of heart and design intent, but polish is nonexistent.
 
It's like playing someone's college term-project, but they had money and time to make it a decently long experience.
Polish is nonexistent, but a lot of ambition and positive energy went into building the game.