FreshHalibut

>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.

I'm sure most half life fans out here already know about this but there's a really awesome commentary playthrough of half life from a valve employee being uploaded right now. As a rabid half life fan this kinda stuff is so cool to see, he shows off stuff like early design documents, old names that were voted on for the project, even some old renders / concept art.
 
I love how he brings up that every single person that playtested Anomalous Materials bobbed their heads to the HEV suit equip music. 

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.

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.
 
 
 

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.

I was digging the depths of my hard drive and I just want to dump some old TF2 media here.
 
It's not the Black Box we got, but has ideas later used for the Beggar's Bazooka.
 
BUT THERE IS ONE THEY FEAR
 
Gang Garrison Engineer
 
The Holy Canteen
 
Part of a Fake Engineer update. Never got a nailgun, but the Cloak draining and EMP ideas were used in the Pompson and Short Circuit.
 
How tob eat spycicle
 
Pirate Fortress, Someone made models for them, don't know if they were ever released.
 
Before Collector's quality weapons, there was Science Achieved.
 
What if we could burn like... way more stuff?
 
I don't know if this was ever released as a mod.
 
Behold this ancient crossword puzzle.
 

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.

I was digging the depths of my hard drive and I just want to dump some old TF2 media here.
 
It's not the Black Box we got, but has ideas later used for the Beggar's Bazooka.
 
BUT THERE IS ONE THEY FEAR
 
Gang Garrison Engineer
 
The Holy Canteen
 
Part of a Fake Engineer update. Never got a nailgun, but the Cloak draining and EMP ideas were used in the Pompson and Short Circuit.
 
How tob eat spycicle
 
Pirate Fortress, Someone made models for them, don't know if they were ever released.
 
Before Collector's quality weapons, there was Science Achieved.
 
What if we could burn like... way more stuff?
 
I don't know if this was ever released as a mod.
 
Behold this ancient crossword puzzle.
 

I was digging the depths of my hard drive and I just want to dump some old TF2 media here.
 
It's not the Black Box we got, but has ideas later used for the Beggar's Bazooka.
 
BUT THERE IS ONE THEY FEAR
 
Gang Garrison Engineer
 
The Holy Canteen
 
Part of a Fake Engineer update. Never got a nailgun, but the Cloak draining and EMP ideas were used in the Pompson and Short Circuit.
 
How tob eat spycicle
 
Pirate Fortress, Someone made models for them, don't know if they were ever released.
 
Before Collector's quality weapons, there was Science Achieved.
 
What if we could burn like... way more stuff?
 
I don't know if this was ever released as a mod.
 
Behold this ancient crossword puzzle.
 

I was digging the depths of my hard drive and I just want to dump some old TF2 media here.
 
It's not the Black Box we got, but has ideas later used for the Beggar's Bazooka.
 
BUT THERE IS ONE THEY FEAR
 
Gang Garrison Engineer
 
The Holy Canteen
 
Part of a Fake Engineer update. Never got a nailgun, but the Cloak draining and EMP ideas were used in the Pompson and Short Circuit.
 
How tob eat spycicle
 
Pirate Fortress, Someone made models for them, don't know if they were ever released.
 
Before Collector's quality weapons, there was Science Achieved.
 
What if we could burn like... way more stuff?
 
I don't know if this was ever released as a mod.
 
Behold this ancient crossword puzzle.
 

I was digging the depths of my hard drive and I just want to dump some old TF2 media here.
 
It's not the Black Box we got, but has ideas later used for the Beggar's Bazooka.
 
BUT THERE IS ONE THEY FEAR
 
Gang Garrison Engineer
 
The Holy Canteen
 
Part of a Fake Engineer update. Never got a nailgun, but the Cloak draining and EMP ideas were used in the Pompson and Short Circuit.
 
How tob eat spycicle
 
Pirate Fortress, Someone made models for them, don't know if they were ever released.
 
Before Collector's quality weapons, there was Science Achieved.
 
What if we could burn like... way more stuff?
 
I don't know if this was ever released as a mod.
 
Behold this ancient crossword puzzle.
 

I was digging the depths of my hard drive and I just want to dump some old TF2 media here.
 
It's not the Black Box we got, but has ideas later used for the Beggar's Bazooka.
 
BUT THERE IS ONE THEY FEAR
 
Gang Garrison Engineer
 
The Holy Canteen
 
Part of a Fake Engineer update. Never got a nailgun, but the Cloak draining and EMP ideas were used in the Pompson and Short Circuit.
 
How tob eat spycicle
 
Pirate Fortress, Someone made models for them, don't know if they were ever released.
 
Before Collector's quality weapons, there was Science Achieved.
 
What if we could burn like... way more stuff?
 
I don't know if this was ever released as a mod.
 
Behold this ancient crossword puzzle.
 

Minnesota is winter to summer, no transition. Sometimes it oscillates for a while, I guess you could call that state of affairs "Spring."  It was in the 40's a few days ago, got to around 90 today and may snow tomorrow night.

i beat the video game
its extremely good