FreshHalibut

I played through all the Shantae games so now I'm gonna review them.

 
 

Now this, this is pure art right here.
 
Also, going back through this thread and seeing all of the borked links and images makes me a sad hoovy.

Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
 
Extra
 

This is what is often referred to as "The Golden Age of PC Gaming."
 
The exact dates given vary but it always includes 1998 (which gets you Half-Life, Thief and Starcraft.)  Sometimes I see it go as early as 1993 which gets you Doom (the first game to really show that the PC could outdo consoles) but I don't see it go before 1996 too often (Quake, Civilization 2, Red Alert.)  Like I said, 1998 is pretty much always included.  The end is sometime past the millenium with some people ending as soon as 2002 (Warcraft 3, Morrowind, Serious Sam) but usually extending to at least 2004 to pick up Half Life 2 and Rome: Total War.  It's generally acknowledged to be over by 2008. (If you put the end exactly at 2008 then that makes TF2 one of the last games of the golden age.) However you put the exact beginning and end Deus Ex is certainly in it, and Half Life 2/Jedi Knight probably squeak in.
 
The basic story is that before the golden age games were too limited by technology restrictions.  After the golden age we started getting overwhelmed with franchise tie-ins, DRM and microtransactions.  Basically the games went from (mainly) being creator driven and experimental to (mainly) corporate driven and customer exploitative.  The distinction can probably most clearly be seen by considering popular genres.  In the early days the popular stuff tends to be just what can be done, which is why you have so much interactive fiction and economic/wargame simulators in the really ancient time of PC games.  PCs simply couldn't do much of anything else.  After the golden age you get more and more of the "mud" genre (you know what I mean: fps or tps base with "open world" elements, light character customization and crafting, a (generally poorly implemented) stealth system, etc.)

So I officially got a car with its title under my name recently (not for christmas, tho), 2022 Honda Insight, brand spanking new with 13 miles on the odo when picked up.
 
feelsgoodman
 
best part is I got enough saved so I don't have to pay ripoff rates of intrest
 
Oh, and I got a raise coming starting the 10th, good way to start the year.
 

it wasn't sitting right with me so i remastered it

hap turk day

Steamworld Dig 2 for free on Steam and GOG till tomorrow.

For a while I only listened to Undercode's Serious Sam songs, like:
 
 
But damn if this album isn't all top notch.  Two more samples:
 
 
 

Had thought about that one but it's ultimately too goofy to function as well as the stuff on the list.   I also wasn't fond of using things that were actual soundtracks (I mean, is the Labyrinth Soundtrack a rock opera?), though the Doomstar Requiem does function independently.
 
For completeness, here are albums I thought of putting on the list but didn't for a variety of reasons (some listed in the preamble, others just because they didn't quite make the list; keep in mind that the list is quality as rock operas not necessarily overall quality.)  You can think of them as the "runners up." (Some of these probably aren't rock operas, but I still considered them.)
 
America: The Last Unicorn
Avantasia: The Metal Opera, The Scarecrow (and sequels)
Blind Guardian: Beyond the Red Mirror, Legacy of the Dark Lands
Brendon Small/Dethklok: Galaktikon 1 and 2, Doomstar Requiem
Daft Punk: Discovery
David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Diamond Dogs
Devin Townsend: Ocean Machine
Dream Theater: The Astonshing
Emerson Lake and Palmer: Tarkus
Genesis: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Haken: Aquarius
The Protomen: The Protomen (Act I)
Queensryche: Operation Mindcrime
Rainbow: Stargazer/A Light in the Black (i.e. Rising side two)
Rhapsody of Fire: Various albums, but particularly The Frozen Tears of Angels and Symphony of Enchanted Lands
Rush: 2112 (the song), Cygnus X1 books one and two
Sabaton: Carolus Rex
Saga: The Chapters
Styx: Killroy was Here
The Who: Tommy

I'm glad it's not a DLC. I see a lot of people shitting on it for not being DLC, so I'm assuming they either haven't played it, bought it and are salty they paid $60 to beta test Nintendo's online, or are too stupid to realize all the problems with Super Mario Party that it would inherit, such as:
-Very slow movement
-Long downtime of star-related cutscenes
-Tiny (and few) boards
-Dice only go up to 6 instead of 10 (because the boards are tiny)
-Character dice ruin the game balance (making Wario and Bowser two of the best characters in the game, for instance)
-Allies ruin the game balance (because they not only add rolls, but give you their character dice and also help you in minigames)
-Fucked up coin economy (stars and gold pipes cost only 10 coins, hardly any items in shops or any worth buying)
 
Luckily all of these seem to be staying behind, because the new game appears very faithful to the originals in most aspects. The boards have the same amount of spaces give or take like 2, you move fast as fuck, no more long star cutscenes, dice go up to 10, etc., every bullet point here does not apply anymore.

I remember the AVGN episode on that game, I had no idea that they made two sequels for a cereal game.
 
I still find pretty cool and funny on how the old Doom modding community is so active. A few days ago I decided to play a few rounds of Reelism. That is a mod I still wonder why nobody tried to emulate or copy it on a more modern game.

Playing Miitopia after becoming enthused with the demo. It's very fun and silly and...cute.
 
Makes me truly wonder how game "developers" still get away with putting bog-standard turn-based combat straight out of 1986 in their RPGs in the year of our Lord two-thousand and twenty-one. Just make the turn-based combat unique and interesting, c'mon, not that hard, guys. I could go on and on all day about how Mario & Luigi features the greatest and most engaging turn-based combat of all time, but this post is about Miitopia, so...
 
In Miitopia, your other party members act autonomously during battle; you can't tell them what to do, not at all. But what they do and can do and how often they are likely to do it all depends on their relationships with everyone in your party. You can grow relationships with your party members by having them bunk together at inns, letting them go on fun little outings together, as well as through random events or even in-combat abilities which are themselves unlocked through relationships. The greater level a relationship one person has with another, the more co-op moves and combos and status buffs those two people unlock between the two of them. So you want to build all your party members relationships with each other so that everyone likes each other and is encouraging each other during battle to deal more damage or warning each other to dodge attacks or performing co-op moves and generally destroying.
 
Relationships can also sour through jealousy, squabbles, or events determined by the personality of one of your characters. A character with a sour relationship will generally act petty towards that person and underperform during combat, but as you might imagine, relationships can be fixed, mainly through letting them bunk together at inns and talk out their issues.
 
I thought having the other characters act on their own would be weird and lame at first, but I actually like it a lot. It's interesting, and they're actually pretty smart, and come to think of it I've never really had anyone do something that was not the right call for the situation. If you could willingly choose to act on a teammate with a status buff or a co-op move or something you unlocked through a relationship, the relationship system would basically just be a plain old level system which unlocks new moves (which there is in the game, in addition to the relationship system). But instead, since the likelihood of co-op stuff happening is directly tied to relationship level, it encourages you to develop everyone's relationships instead of stacking onto a single one, since you don't get to choose when one of those co-op things happen. It feels like your really seeing the fruits of your friendships pay off.

As someone who just graduated college and has been having a lot of introspection these last few days, it's been real weird. I've had quite the reliance on my SPUFriends to keep me sane. My family is about to go through a major change in 30 days, and I don't think literally any of us are prepared for it. The future is unclear for all of us in the Wicket clan, and that's the first time in ten years that that's been the case.

Watch as George Jetson cringes at anime while he eats ramen:
 
 

I started watching Civvie's Postal 2 videos, then I remembered that GoG gave it away a while back and decided to try it out.  About as crass as I expected, though I do appreciate that (at least until the expansion) the game doesn't force you to do that much mayhem.
 
Anyway, somehow I stumbled across some secret tech that I can't find anyone talking about.
 
In Apocalypse Weekend cats will turn into Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil whirlwinds of destruction.  You encounter a large number of these and they are basically intended as a new enemy.  Most people don't seem to know (though I did find a couple references online) that they can also be used as weapons.  If you get a cat in your inventory, you can throw it and it will attack the nearest thing in its whirlwind form.  That could be you, but if you're not an idiot it will be an enemy.  Conveniently after devouring its target the cat will revert to a docile state and you can pick it up again (be sure to crouch and slowly approach so it doesn't run away).
 
But what about all the permanently aggroed cats you encounter in the hospital and the pound?  Well, you can deaggro them by dropping a catnip.  However that might not seem very helpful since catnip supply is very limited in the expansion (I think that there's only two in the expansion, and the first is hidden on a ledge on a wrong way path).  But (and this is the part I haven't seen anyone talk about), you can infinitely use catnip for this purpose if you pick it up before the lid pops off.  You won't get the attracting cat effect, but the cats will remain deaggroed and you can pick them up after they stop running.
 
Using this trick and together with the cats that I had from my 5 day playthrough (since I figured the safest place for them would be in my inventory) I ended up with over 50 cats.  Killed every enemy, with the exception of zombies that need to be headshotted, by throwing cats at them.

http://orteil.dashnet.org/randomgen/?gen=uz37UMe3
 
 
well, this brings back the classic SPUF memories

It's 2021 and somehow this forum is still alive. The true miracle of 2020.

Got to go on a trip to Arizona the last week,  visited Phoenix and its suburbs, Sedona/Red Rock state park, and the Grand Canyon,  hiked for about 20 miles in total, great weather there (compared to chicagoland) too, was a fun trip.

For good reason. Codename 47 is nigh impossible to find a copy of, and Silent Assassin has aged incredibly poorly; and that was true when I played it for the first time 7 or 8 years ago. Contracts is where the series really starts to find its footing.