FreshHalibut

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

pizza tower GOOD

Well Windows 98 STILL doesn't recognize the disc as a data disc, but since it can handle filenames longer than 8 characters it recognizes the custom iso I made with all the files.  So it's now installed!
 
Even starting up the game is kind of sketchy as it says "PLEASE INSERT ED HUNTER DISC 2" even though the install disc is labeled CD 2 (from the 3 CD set) and you actually need to put int the third disc.
 
Click okay and get this beautiful logo plus a voiceover saying "Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number."  Not a bad start.
 

 
The game constantly plays various Iron Maiden tracks. The Number of the Beast plays over the menu.  Apparently you can choose from any of the 20 tracks on the album for any of the stages, though it defaults to Phantom of the Opera for the first stage.  The musical quality is surprisingly good; I was expecting it to be bit crushed to hell (especially since I have run multimedia programs on Windows 3.1 that did that) but it sounds fine. Not quite CD quality, but fine.  Sometimes there was skipping during transitions, but this is probably due to me dropping my virtual CPU speed to the minimum requirements for the game to make sure that Windows 98 ran correctly.
 
The game itself is a rail shooter.  We're theoretically playing as Eddie, or "Ed Hunter: Private Eye"
 

 
We've been given a note to help someone out, and then its off to the streets to kill waves of punks:
 

 
(Incidentally I thought that "5th nut" was some sort of bizarre game mechanic, but just means that the 5th score on the high score list is to someone who put in the initials NUT.)
 
And that's pretty much it. Mow down waves of enemies like any other rail shooter, then the scene transitions, and repeat.
 
The connection to Iron Maiden, beyond playing as Eddie, comes from the music blaring in the background, Iron Maiden posters being present in many locations and some of the locations/enemies being inspired by album art.  For example I'm sure that we go to an asylum and meet this guy because of the Piece of Mind cover:
 

 
Was kind of hoping that there'd be some adventure game elements or a variety of game styles, not just rail shooter gameplay, but it does seem to just be a rail shooter.  That being said, it's pretty competent for what it is.  It's hard to explain without a video, but the view often quickly pans from place to place and moves the enemies appropriately, even though they are all just sprites and none of this is actually 3D.  They did also include some variety with multiple route choices and so on.
 
Final thoughts:
 
I wasn't expecting much, but I probably will go back to play this from time to time. If I had purchased this in 1999 when it came out, I would be pretty psyched.  (Well, assuming that I could get it to install at all, which is doubtful considering I had to use a workaround that wouldn't have been possible in Windows 95/98.)  From what I understand this collection was largely marketed and priced as a music compilation first and foremost.  You do get 20 solid Iron Maiden tracks even without the game. So the game is more of a bonus than anything.  There was lots of that kind of stuff in the 90's and a lot of it was of questionable quality (for example, see LGR's videos on the "Hot Wheels Computer Cars" programs that came with certain hot wheels toys.)  So the fact that this is a competent game AT ALL is pretty cool. Speaking of LGR, I feel like I have a good understanding of the pain the likes of him, Ross and Mandalore go through.  I'm pretty sure I've went through the exact sort of troubleshooting hell that Ross has bitched about in specific videos.  I would say that I am on the edge of becoming one of those channels, but realistically half of what makes that stuff hard is the video editing and I have NO desire to go through video editing hell on top of game compatibility hell.

People comment on screenshots because private profiles don't automatically make your screenshots private, and you can just go steamcommunity.com/id/#idhere#/screenshots and view em all. Some default to that route cuz it'll work for both private and nonprivate accounts.

I think Firefox containers are probably what you're looking for.

I am a developer for Microsoft Teams because I sold my soul for a paycheck a long time ago.

I'm using teams every day now. It's how we send files back and forth, host virtual meetings, and organize our calendars.
I'm afraid I have no real complains, because I mute any chats I don't want to ping me and it's the only program we have to use.
 
I did have an amusing moment where I.T. kept checking my windows version because we're forced to use Windows 11 now (ick) and I immediately installed classic shell.

Necromancy powers activate! Looks like I need to eat a hat now.
 
Anyways, the MCC is awesome now. The Steam Workshop update is probably the single greatest thing 343i has ever done for the franchise. Of course, that bar was never particularly high, but still, when you get something like THIS on the workshop....
 
....then MCC will become the next Garry's mod, because this is epic. Especially for Steam Deck users who are forced to use the anti-cheat disabled version. All I really want now is a version of the Custom Games Browser that can play modded servers with AC disabled. I might even need the AC to work on Proton anymore if that's the case.
 
Seriously, whoever is leading the MCC team is single-handedly keeping the franchise alive, cuz Infinite sure shit ain't.
 

Vermintide 2 is free to keep on Steam.

GOG is giving away Jazz Jackrabbit 2.

I think the AI art stuff is really neat. It's fun when you can submit any nonsense and get something back.
Seeing how the AI responds to the input is half the fun, there were similar shenanigans with AI Dungeon.
 
Trying to turn AI art into real money though becomes a really complicated issue really quickly and I'm not educated enough to speak on it.
I'm sure there are legitimate professional applications for AI art, I've heard backgrounds or concept sketches being cited as legitimate uses, but there are also people stealing art for training sets or trying to pass something off as their own.
 
Basically I think the technology is cool and people are the issue.
 
I don't see AI anything going away though. I'm now working at a tech company and a lot of the newsletters talk about new applications for machine learning.
They also talked about the future of the metaverse though, so maybe it's not a good metric haha.

Hurricane: survived
Power never even went out. No flooding, no trees on the roof, just the usual shit ton of debris everywhere.