Idiot Cube

I'm not even a car guy and I got sentimental over giving up my first car, a '99 chevy cavalier. My parents handed it down to me when I started college, and I ended up using it for several years. But eventually the maintenance costs became unjustifiably high, and I decided to donate it before it could fall apart with me inside it.
 
This is probably hard to understand for those of you who live in real first-world countries with decent public transportation, but for us Americans, your first car is your first taste of independence. Especially if you live in the suburbs of a sprawling city like mine, and everything important is at least 10 miles (16.0934 km (16,0934 if you're one of those weirdos who uses a comma for decimals)) away from your house. 
 
By the way, don't donate your old cars if you want to be sure they'll be put to good use. Less than a month after the cavalier was towed away, I was given notice that it was parked illegally and about to be impounded. Whoever got it clearly didn't need it that badly. 

They could be you! They could be me! They could even be

On my old phone I could set ringtones for individual contacts, but that doesn't seem to be possible on my new one.  (I've posted previously about the many, many, retarded design decisions its software has.)  So with my old phone I set my default ringtone to a sound file of pure silence, then put an actual ringtone on each legitimate contact. Essentially I ran it with a whitelist.  If I knew I was getting a call from someone who wasn't on my contacts I would temporarily swap the default ringtone to something audible, then add them as a contact after they called and swap back.  Or I would just look at the missed calls and voicemail.

the time machine?

Got my hands on a VCR and I've been playing whatever VHS tapes I manage to get my hands on in one way or another.
 
It's kind of surreal seeing actual VHS artifacts on screen (as well as the old PLAY, REW, etc. font) without it being an analog horror or vaporwave video.

Happy Crimbos and all that, hope for a good New Year's.

Open
The Results
Stop having them be closed

Feels like the motto of my life now is "That thing you forgot about is back, except worse!"

I still just say "it's called splatoon."

Congrats!

@Raze and I got a new comm

he's been here since the beginning

A while back I talked about Myst III and how the game really impressed me for how good it looks despite being made in 2001, and I wondered about Myst IV.  Myst IV recently went on sale, so I picked it up and am currently playing through it.  (For context, I first played Myst III and IV when I got them on heavy discount about when I joined SPUF, so around 2010 or so.  This is why I was under the impression that the games came out around 2006-2008, when in reality Myst III is from 2001 and Myst IV is from 2004.  The games worked fine on Vista, but I had trouble getting them to work on my new Windows 10 computer, which is why I didn't replay them until picking up the GoG versions.)
 
My vague memories of Myst III and IV went basically like this: Myst IV had much better graphics and plot, but some annoying puzzles.  How does it actually hold up?
 
Well, the prerendered graphics of IV look about as good as III.  But, like III, they look better in motion.  Unlike Myst and Riven both Myst III and IV use a system where at each location you have a 360 degree panoramic view, kind of like a 360 youtube video or the streetviews you get on maps  I guess.  Early iterations of this technology were pretty grainy and even today some 360 pictures look like crap, which is why I think I remembered Myst III looking blurry.  But in fact it has nice and crisp graphics, as does IV, though, as I've said, the prerendered models in both look about the same level of quality.  The main difference in Myst IV is in animation.  The locations of III are usually pretty static.  Sometimes you get movement of the water or of some plants in Edanna, but even this isn't consistent.  In Myst IV they made a point of including lots of motion, such as as water rippling, things swaying in the wind, animals moving around etc.  Additionally when you have a animation in III, like going through an elevator, the game will generally take control over your view since it's just playing a video file.  IV often allows you to continue moving around as these things happen, unless the animation is very long.  This is not as easy as it might first sound as they have to allow you to see these animations at any angle from your vantage point, and the game isn't actually rendering 3D models.  They even do this for some FMV sequences filmed with actors.  The video quality itself on these sequences is noticeably lower than modern cameras, but the people never look distorted no matter how you look at them and I'm not quite sure how they pulled that off.  Notably it's easier to get distortions on the FMV people in Obduction (from 2016) then in Myst IV (from 2004).
 
So the graphics are an improvement from III, but not really to the point where I would say they are the most beautiful graphics I've ever seen.  Still really impressive for 2004 though.
 
How about the rest of the game?  Well, the puzzles are pretty damn annoying.  The game sets the tone by throwing you into a puzzle where you must create a desired wave by combining two sine waveforms while adjusting their amplitude, frequency and phase.  If you are an electrical engineer or something that may be simple, but for most people it's not easy to figure out at all, and this is the first puzzle of the game.  Because of this, the game has Atrus give you suggestions on what to do ("try increasing the amplitude," "move the phase a little more to the left" etc.)  But he never shuts up so even if you want to solve the puzzle yourself you're going to be distracted.  If you do follow his commands the second wave is so finnicky that you'll usually overshoot where you are supposed to be and when you are close the puzzle AI won't give you good suggestions anymore.  To make matters worse the AI is programmed, for "realism", to occasionally tell you to do something wrong (after which Atrus will say "my apologies, that setting was correct after all.")  Since this is the first thing you encounter on the game it got memed on by fans
 
EDIT: I didn't mean for the rest of this post to be in the spoiler, only the video, but the forum decided otherwise and isn't letting me modify what is in the spoiler.
 

"You can't criticize this software while it's still in beta!" -Me as a developer, because I can't be assed to do more than the bare minimum amount of work.

It's so silly how people try to say you shouldn't criticize a game that's still being developed, when the period where the game is still being developed is the perfect time that you SHOULD criticize it.

Did an audit on the amount of entities each map in tf2 has. Unsurprisingly, the maps with the most entities are the halloween maps mostly. The limit for a server is 2048 entities and the map with the most is pl_bloodwater (badwater event) with 1586 without any players connected. Each player, cosmetic, and weapon is an entity so each player at least will count for 7 entities.
 
1586+(24*7)=1754 entities used up by players alone. Any player with a cosmetic item in their use slot (like a spellbook or duck) will add yet another entity, and certain classes take up more entities (engineers and spies alone can take up an extra 10 each with buildings and disguises). 2048-1754 gives us 294 entities to work with in a perfect scenario. This is a halloween map, which means everyone will have a spellbook equipped (minus 24, 270 entities to work with). Any spell such as pumpkin bombs, skeletons, or monoculi will add entities, can assume 40 would be in use by these at max at any given time. so we only have 230 entities to work with.
 
This means on the map with the most entities, that if the entire server went engineer and had every cosmetic slot filled AND built all 4 buildings that the server would crash.
 
Want less coordination? 13 demoman (max cosmetics) laying out 14 stickybombs with the Scottish Resistance, and shooting 4 pills each at the same time is enough to crash the server on their own (without any soldiers launching rockets, or other projectiles existing on the map).
 
What's that? Want even LESS coordination? How about this? If you can get 6 medics (max cosmetics) to go to an area with a high ceiling (badwater event last) and look straight up and unload their entire syringe gun magazine into the sky, then the server would crash from just your guys' contributions alone. You can queue into casual servers with 6 people.
 
Basically, what I'm saying is, the fabric of tf2 universe relies on the syringe guns not being popular, since it's the most amount of entities any one player can make on their own (without exploits).
 
 

ok then
 

We already had Metroid: The Baby.

I wouldn't want TF2 to make many more big balance changes this late in its lifetime. I'd like to see some stuff touched up but honestly, TF2 is probably the most balanced it has ever been right now. There's a lot to complain about but they're all nitpicks, there's no class that I think is truly overpowered or underpowered. Like I complain about the Kunai abuse but Spy is still the weakest class, it's more just obnoxious to see your team get eaten because everyone is apparently deaf to death screams.
 
That being said, in the fantasy world where we get TF3 I'd like to see sweeping changes:
-#1 with a point , an alternative to medic as currently even in a 12v12 game one team having a single medic greatly increases the odds of that team winning, like giving engie or heavy some kind of improved healing abilities to offset how powerful Medic is
-Spy and Sniper should probably be the same class, also Sniper quickscopes oneshotting half the cast gets pretty insane at high levels. I've seen several people argue uncharged headshots should deal 120, and then still charging up to 450 damage max charge in the same time.
-Demo somehow getting the melee class taped to him is super weird in retrospect and seeing an actual dedicated melee/tank class designed from the ground up would be great
-related to the above, melee hitreg not being complete yank would be great
-pyro serves no purpose and the few things he is good at currently are super obnoxious (airblasting ubers, countering spy way too hard with the homewrecker, also somehow countering himself???)
-In general I'd like to see some classes getting some kind of way to play around their hard counters, like scout becoming utterly useless once sentries get involved and spy getting bullied by half the cast (why the hell did scout get an anti-spy secondary???)
 
And of course remove random crits and get an anti-cheat that works, but those speak for themselves

Don't know about the other eight but Spy is 100% at the top of that list and I'd even say it's hard to argue otherwise
 
You get to play the suave cool character who is generally seen as a weaker underdog class, whilst at the same time getting rewarded for preying on inexperienced players AND you get to bait your team by lonewolfing without adding much to the actual win objective? Smug levels in danger of collapsing into a black hole.

15.ai has had pony voices forever, but its use only really blew up when TF2 characters were added:
 
 
 
This finally establishes that TF2 is the true immortal meme franchise.

You know what would be really poggers, fam? If you yeeted yourself off a fucking cliff.

You know what would be really poggers, fam? If you yeeted yourself off a fucking cliff.