Idiot Cube

Was bored. Decided to mess around with AI. Asked to create an ASCII art, but it got it wrong every time.
With each attempt, it got more and more disturbing.
 
 
I believe a curse has been placed upon my crops.

I had a dream recently that kind of made me realize a recurring trend of mine. I was in a school and I was messing with some student council rep because I was going to be part of an event, and I telekinetically grabbed a nearby book or something to show off that I had this awesome ability. I think in my dream world I did this a lot because they were just more annoyed than anything.
 
Not really that interesting, but it made me realize that telekinesis comes up an awful lot in my dreams, and also it's always done in the exact same way... By flicking my wrist upwards to make the object come to me, and then I can grab it out of the air or throw it or whatever. It's extremely common and it's always that method.
 
It's the fucking gravity gloves from half life alyx. That motion is so damn intuitive for me, that it's written to muscle memory even in my subconscious. This is the most embarrassing half-life fanboyism of mine of all time

Red Sky of Scorched Earth:

 
This was pretty fun to paint and honestly I surprised myself with how it turned out, I was a lot more satisfied with it than I thought I'd be.

According to Steam, I purchased the Orange Box on April 1st, 2009, meaning I played TF2 for approximately an hour every single day since then. There's definitely been times in the past where I played it waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much to get to that number; nowadays I don't have time to game that often anymore and it's just my comfort game.
 
Anyways I thought that was a good reason to start a subspuf thread, see how y'all are doing, and maybe talk about TF2 a bit

Bored, busy with college, some doodles.
 
 

As the kids say, this is a mood:
 
 

Gentleman, behold: I have discovered a new source of licensable music!
 
 

The discourse around this game is hilarious to me because I bought it just because the trailers from a few years back made me laugh and it's only $30. Game is fun, it doesn't have to be that complicated lmao.

This year I set a few challenges for myself:
Use all these sketch books Learn how to use ink pens Improve anotomy Learn how to draw hands Use more pose references 50 OCs Rochelle:
 
Aura:
 
Void:
 
Robunny:
 
Penny:
 
Silvia:
 
Aurora:
 
Carmen:
 
Red:
 
Gray:
 
Lisa:
 
Alessandra:
 
NEW: Urban Bird (Becky)
 
NEW: Queen (Unnamed)
 
NEW: Ghost Girl I saw in a dream once (Unnamed)
 
NEW: Super Hero Bunny (Unnamed)
 
NEW: Ninja Lizard (Unnamed)
 
NEW: Paralysis Demon I saw from food poisoning
 
Some jar of fruit:
 

"Just turn the music off so you can hear the quiet ass soundcues." Genuinely one of the dumbest things I've seen in terms of advice for beating a boss lol.

Now if you'll ex-ceeeeuuuuwwssee me, I'm going to spend a quiet evening my my NINTENDO gameCUBe.
 
This was probably the best year of new videogames I've experienced. Looking at my top ten... looks like a whole two of them weren't released in 2023! Looking back at my previous GOTY thread posts, that is by and away the best I've done. I think I started my last post looking at my steam wrapped with dismay at how much time I poured into roguelikes. Lemme see how I did this year...
 
hm.
 
Well, other than somehow not killing myself while grinding out the maximum rank in Hades, I managed to mostly steer clear of the Roguelike curse this year. I like roguelikes! But I dump far too much time into them and get into ruts far too quickly. But late to the party due to needing to finish up two of them, here are the games I played this year.
https://www.backloggd.com/u/Huff/https://www.backloggd.com/u/Huff/
 
And yes, Silent did post this early to cheese me off a bit; I've been talking to him about how excited I was for this over the past few weeks. Thing is, I'm writing this the night before a plane flight, and IDK if SPUFpowered is gonna save this draft. I still have yet to finish American Arcadia and Cocoon and will post and amend this one once I finish them. I think I know where I'm going to place the latter, but I'm unsure about the former yet. Neither are making my top ten. Here we go!
 
----------
 
Honorable Mentions
 
Top 10
 
 
The Not So Good
 
 
The Huff Awards
Just a couple extra awards and details I want to focus on.
 
Best Music Track
 
Best Girl
 
 
Best Moments

Pizza Tower good.
Armored Core 6 good.
Remnant 2 good. except the final boss god that shit was frustrating
Mario Wonder good.
Pikmin 4 good.
Baldur's Gate 3 pretty damn good.
Hi-Fi Rush made me happier than any other game has in a long time.

My gf and I have been on a disney binge during the holidays:
 
-Hercules: not as good as I remembered, Hades and the Muses are great but otherwise it was kind of dull
-the Hunchback of the Notre Dame: best songs, I kind of wish this was made with an older audience in mind (holy shit are the gargoyles annoying and out of place)
-Pocahontas: one of the 'super classics' I never watched; I found it dull and surprisingly ugly for a movie mostly set in lush forests (a lot of rotoscoped animation too)
-Emperor's New Groove: has to be the funniest Disney movie
-Moana: we wanted to watch a modern disney movie to compare; very pretty but otherwise boring
-Princess and the Frog: excellent music and some really funny characters (mostly the crocodile) but it has no plot; half the movie feels like filler
-Mulan: Very good but we found Mushu to be really obnoxious; Eddie Murphy should've really cooled it a little bit
-Aladdin: Probably my favourite of what we've watched; gorgeous, well-paced, funny and great music. Robin Williams just gave 200% as the Genie
 
We still have a week of holidays so I'll probably extend the list

Submarine Shrine from Stick Ranger:

 
A semi-obscure Japanese browser-based Java game

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.
 
 
 

And it's too late to acone for your sins.

Nay, it's -core. 80score

First Nintendo would have to admit that the new Paper Mario games are awful.

Had a dream that I accidentally found that the old private Ragnarok server I used to play was active again.
 
I was doing something on my PC and found the old patch you had to install on the original to access the private server.
I click to start, and it actually works. It recognizes my old account and character, the screen brings me to the server select, and shows that there is one player online.
I walk around Prontera and find the other player. Apparently, he got the full source code and database of the server and was testing it when I joined, which is why I could use my old account and character.
I look around my character, inventory and stored items, and suddenly memories start to flood back. The events, the community, the in-jokes...
When I check the city again, a few more players start to pop up, like they never left.
For a brief moment, I am transported back to almost 15 years ago.
 
You know, I woke kinda happy today.

This popped up in my recommendations and I was forcefully sent back in time to middle school.
 
 

This popped up in my recommendations and I was forcefully sent back in time to middle school.
 
 

One thing that's fun about digging into old games from about 1991-1996 is that they tend to have all assets uncompressed and unencrypted.  For example, with Myst you can look at the CD and load any animation into quicktime.  This is probably the easiest way to confirm the "Rush Limbaugh Understands" message (which is said in backwards speech): simply load the relevant file and select "loop forwards and backwards mode."
 
The Journeyman Project Turbo is even more extreme.  All animations are accessible in standard quicktime format, but that also includes all location backgrounds.  Locations are actually stored as frames in videos that go to each position in each area and look at everything from all four angles.  Another interesting animation is the biochip menu.  In the game you may notice that the chips are all dark with no letters on them until the menu is fully opened.  This is because the opening and closing is saved as a set animation, and they didn't want to have all possible combinations of chips show up (only the number of chips.) After the menu fully opens they draw bmp images over the dark chips.  The animation also confirms that you cannot fully fill your biochip menu; even if you get every chip in the game there will still be a blank spot at the end.
 
All sounds, including all music, are simply stored in WAV files.  All death screens and inventory elements are stored as bmp files.  So outside of the text and the game logic, you can easily access pretty much everything.
 
I kind of miss games doing this.  There's sort of a purity to simply allowing the user to see the component files.  And it often does raise interesting insights in terms of how the game was actually put together.  It also puts the sort of "cutting room floor" search for dummied out files within reach of the average user.
 
But I especially miss music being in the clear, since it's a very handy way to add soundtrack music to playlists.  I think developers were aware of this, because soundtracks in WAV, MP3 or OGG formats were pretty common until 2007 or so, but then they started hiding them in order to sell separate soundtrack DLC.  This also made soundtrack swapping in games more annoying.  (My WOG version of Heroes 3 has every single music file replaced, just because I can.)

Ho-lee shit. What a labor of love. They even got the original voiceactors.