A 1970 Corvette

I had my eye on peripetia, though I've generally stayed away from playing early access games because I don't like wearing out a game before its release. Shame that it seems so slowly paced in terms of updating.

I like stealth games and I honestly don't mind savescumming (Hell, I feel like a lot of the games with ghost runs sort of expect you to) but over time I've come to enjoy winging it too.

I don't really envy anyone designing a stealth action game since some people play it as an action game where you initiate fights on your own terms with stealth and others will quickload the second they run into your lovingly set up combat encounters and you have to sort of cater to both at least a little.

Makes me wonder if anyone's done a slightly different type of stealth-action game where you use stealth mechanics to "set up" a combat arena, and what you do while stealthed impacts an action phase. Sort of like how Deadzone Rogue lets you enter arenas cloaked and set up explosive barrels and stuff, but waaaaay more fleshed out. So maybe in your stealth phase you move some explosive barrels to better spots, turn on a gravity lift that lets you go to a good high ground spot, sabotage guard's armor so they come in without helmets, etc. Maybe if you had your performance in the combat phase (maybe like a style points system or something) then affect the next stealth phase they could both feed into each other. Could also be an interesting fit for an asynchronous co-op game where one player is stealthing ahead and setting up for the other player to bust through.

That's probably already been done though, if I just spitballed it while writing out a forum post

I suspect I should have played on a harder difficulty (I just picked the medium one). Outside of some of the first areas where you might not have the right ammo types stocked for a fight, combat was so easy I felt like stealth wasn't even necessary, so I kind of just defaulted to it. I suppose in that sense I robbed myself a bit.

At the same time I did also intentionally limit quicksaving since it's way too easy for me to fall into that mindset, so I did end up "playing out" most of the failures in stealth that happened which contributed to a lot of shooting.

Oh yeah I actually didn't know about the DLC thing until after I finished the game and was browsing the DLC for the steam store. I remember noticing that I had some stuff in "storage" that warned me about pulling it out but I basically just clicked through it without really reading because it's a singleplayer game and what could they possibly be warning me about for using items in it? What some of the DLC do with the "content" is absurd. I didn't get the DLC missions but they're cheap so I might return to them sometime. The sales the game runs at right now are a good price even if I think the game has a lot of flaws, but I'd feel sorry for anyone who bought it full price on day one.

The graphics in the game, especially environments, are pretty crazy though, I'll agree. I actually had an issue with the game where the pre-rendered cutscenes looked significantly worse than the actual in-engine stuff and it stuck out super bad whenever they switched to them, which was weirdly often. I definitely told someone when I started "damn, and this game came out ten years ago? It looks so good still!" The decay of the hub area was done pretty well, I suppose I just didn't really internalize it well because the game didn't feel like it was a long enough timeframe for things to develop that quickly. The first time some of the displays on the streets were glitching out I did have a legit reaction wondering if it was always like that or it was a new thing and I only realized it was new when more of them started breaking.

I liked exploring Prague maybe too much since a lot of quests ended up taking me back to areas I had already explored. I kind of wish the innocent NPCs yapped less while you're exploring though, I can appreciate the storytelling from hearing things but the dialogue was so laser-focused on the game's main theme that it actually took me out of things, like I know it's a rough situation everyone's in but at least discuss some soccer game results or whatever it is Europeans do outside of being oppressed by martial law.

The random detour where you solved some environment puzzles with the remote hack tool was cool, I would've liked that to be a little more fleshed out but maybe it would've gotten old if it overstayed its welcome. Given that it was a virtual space, it'd have been cool if they loosened up the physics a bit and let you do some more abstract puzzle solving.

44 minutes ago, FreshHalibut said:

As for the hotkeys, I'm fairly certain you can just hit a number key while hovering over an item to assign it 1-9?

Alternatively, there's the console-ified item wheel which has quick access to batteries and medstims specifically.

The wheel is kind of what I ended up using but I guess what I was wanting was something like Dishonored's keyboard keys for quickly popping items. I think they used R and T? I guess I never tested assigning them to number keys because the ones close to my hands (1-5) were already occupied with guns. There's a chance that I missed some options menu keybind option for that but I went through the keybinds at the start of the game and didn't remember seeing something for it. I assumed they didn't because there's multiple types of recovery items

The issue I ran into a lot was getting low on HP while doing something stupid -> pressing tab because it's the closest 'pause button' I had -> navigating to the inventory screen because I didn't want to unpause and then risk dying in between unpausing and selecting the wheel -> running into the significantly more clunky inventory screen as a result. Maybe if the game was longer I'd have corrected my muscle memory, but the game's rather short so I didn't really get that far. I didn't like the wheel because it's still interrupting the flow of combat to pop items (a very Zelda Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom issue) and I wanted to be doing it in real time instead like this - maybe my only good option was to give up the 2 and 3 slots for recovery items and just accept it.

Honestly a lot of the side stuff is just so weird. What's up with those "triangle codes" that you needed to scan with a phone app? 

I beat Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I'm writing this while the aeons-long-unskippable-credits carry out (this is a mark against the work). Holy fuck these credits are long. Jesus christ I'm interrupting my typing to come back up and add a sentence to this paragraph every time I think the credits are done but they go and add some other studio full of people. IT HAS LITERALLY LOOPED THE SAME SONG THREE TIMES WHAT THE FUCK!! AAAA IT ISN'T STOPPING HELP ME WHY CAN YOU NOT SKIP THESE IS THIS FUCKING GAME MALWARE?!?! The credits are like fifteen fucking minutes long. What the fuck.

Okay that meltdown aside, it's exactly what I was expecting it to be, which is a middling sequel to a decent enough game (Human Revolution). The stuff I expected (like the story being lame) isn't surprising, but the stuff on the fringes is what really surprised me.

First of all, they have the GALL to play like fifteen seconds of The Synapse from the original Deus Ex on ambient radio props while having one of the most forgettable OSTs in gaming history. That actually kind of pisses me off for how little of a detail it is. Those fifteen seconds are better than what I assume is more than an hour of ambient tracks that barely register in your mind even when directly playing.

Second off, the UI is bizarrely awful. It's very minimalist, yet it manages to be obstructive at the same time. If you want to use an inventory item from the inventory menu, you don't just click on it, or double click on it. You have to click on it, wait the right amount of time without moving your cursor too far, and then the context menu will show up with all options. There doesn't seem to be a way to hotkey consumables that you would use often like energy cells or health kits, or shortcuts on the menu to let you do anything faster. The hacking UI is just worse than the original for some reason despite basically being the same minigame. There's this really unified attempt to make it look like this slick projection in the real world for almost everything in the UI, but... it just looks bland. Like I can respect a lot of the tiny details, but it's all contributing to something boring. 

For those of us who know the hellish future of UI that awaits us, they got the basic idea that it's worse for no reason correct, but I think the future will be far, far worse than this.

Third, the gameplay's kind of wack? The core is fine enough, but the upgrade tree is sleep-inducing. They make a show of these illegal mods but they're all boring as fuck? 75% of them just do what an existing item does. You can... shoot a projectile! Or create a concussion blast! Or tazer someone! Or you could fire a gun, throw a conc nade, or use the stun gun, respectively. There are powerful upgrades but they're the BORING kind. Max out your HP pool and damage resistances and facetank mechs' miniguns for around the same price as maxing out these anemic "black market" upgrades. They also artificially split trees just to make them seem like there's more to unlock. The hacking tree takes up like 20 upgrade slots yet is only really a way to score loot and avoid some (but not all) traps and locked doors. I guess they needed to force people to spend points if they're playing a ghost run somehow.

The map design gets a little too linear in certain areas which makes me wonder if anyone can even have fun playing it full-stealth-mode. The base combat is fine, but the elite enemies that turn on invincibility grind combat to a halt because switching ammo types forces you to use the (terrible) weapon ammo switch UI, OR deal with annoyingly long weapon switches (where's the skill tree that speeds those up? the people designing this game literally designed these enemies to force you to switch weapons but you can't make switching faster???).

I carried a lot of weapons when realistically you just need the sniper which annihilates most enemies then a suppressed weapon with EMP ammo which handles everything else. The shotgun was rather satisfying once you get the laser for it and can easily just walk through an entire squad of enemies without armor. Automatic weapons were pointless outside of suppressed headshots and honestly everything was weirdly inaccurate at basically all times until you got a laser on it.

I don't have anything to say about the story or characters other than the game did not manage to win me over at basically any point, it just seemed like Jensen was kind of a schizo since he gunned down police officers then moments later played debate team with a tech priest LARPer about the importance of life (note that I obviously was controlling Jensen when he gunned down the police, but it's obviously an intended way to play yet there doesn't seem to be much dialogue to let the player 'play' cutscene Jensen in the same way they play 'gameplay' Jensen) and everyone else was blandly written. It's just doubling down on Human Revolution which was not the correct move at all. The upside to the weak writing was that I didn't give a single shit about taking the non-stealthy combat route, and the game barely chided me for it outside of the one mission where they set up a bunch of easily KO'd guards then "challenge" you to take them out without anyone noticing.

Two last things which are only mildly the game's fault: At high framerates Jensen becomes unable to walk up tiny height differences which is funny but annoying when you keep stubbing your toe on a vent's grating. The other is that fall damage starts at like 90% of your base HP for some bizarre reason. You just get nearly instakilled for falling one inch higher than the threshold for damage. I honestly think it might be another framerate related bug rather than intentional design, but I beat the game with it and didn't buy the no fall damage aug, so not a huge issue I guess.

That issue of what is put up on streaming services is actually what made me handwave stuff like Crunchyroll really quick back when it was new. I can't remember what it was exactly but I remembered being tilted that some show I wanted to watch only had the second season or maybe just the OVA and not the entire series so I was just stuck there without anything to watch since it'd be pointless to just start in the middle of it all. It was the exact problem I had as a young kid with watching crappy pirate uploads of Yu-Gi-Oh on vimeo (random gaps in what you could watch), but at least those weren't giving off any expectation of being a real service.

2 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

Haruhi is at least available everywhere you'd expect, so there's no significant barrier to entry other than snooty fans and debates over viewing orders.  But I wonder if vanished from streaming services whether any new fans would bother tracking it down.

Probably not since streaming fans will just stick to their platform since they have so much available that they wouldn't bother looking past what's in front of them. After a really long time I guess there'd also just be the force of entropy on pirate sources, though Haruhi in particular is going to be very well archived (same can't be said for everything, obviously)

However, you've fell into a trap with your wording because The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzimiya is widely considered the best part of the entire series, so true fans already know what it's like when Haruhi vanishes from the public view.

Haruhi handles the basics well enough to stand above other seasonal stuff from the same time, but that's to be expected for anything that didn't immediately fade into obscurity. It's hard to separate a bias but I do think it is just executed so well and this weird blend of fantastical and mundane is just so interesting that it really sucks you into the world and characters in a way not many others have managed. That being said I think a lot of original fans can't really remove themselves from the time frame when Haruhi exploded in popularity, most likely coinciding with the individual's discovery of anime/otaku stuff with access to the internet. That's obviously not everyone but hey it was me and a lot of people I know. Even now that the internet has moved past that era, it's definitely still alive at least a little in their minds.

I sometimes pull that as a joke "You haven't seen Haruhi?! You must not even like anime!" but anyone who thinks it's required are silly. It's an excellent recommendation to anyone that has any interest in the themes the anime touches on, but you'd be clueless if you grabbed some person who watches jujutsu kaisen clips on tiktok and said "WHY AREN'T YOU WATCHING HARUHI YET???" I do think it's also a good recommendation for someone wanting to know about what was hot in the 2000s because it's a top example of the urban fantasy trend that was huge at the time, plus you can throw them Lucky Star right afterward to show the almost unrelated internet otaku culture boom where people endlessly discussed these urban fantasy works but mainly just to admire the cute girls instead of anything else (admittedly, discussing cute girls instead of what actually happens wasn't new even back then).

To me, it is THE anime of the 2000s, but obviously that's just completely founded on my own experiences. It just conveys what was fascinating and fresh and exciting to me as an anime fan at the time, I hadn't really found any fiction like it before then. You'd need to also get a Haruhi anti's recommendations to balance things out.

idol music does go in weird directions, but I've never heard an officially released song like this (admittedly a remix, but you can check out the original if you want to see how far from the original it is)

it sounds like a fucking russian hardbass remix or something

I had the most American dream I can think of:

I went to a gun store and brought my own gun, without any intention of selling it, I guess I was just open carrying a hunting shotgun (not something I even have in real life either). I was looking through the racks they had on display, the guy behind the counter was saying something about legalizing missiles, and I set down my own shotgun near the rack to try holding some of the long arms on display. After doing that for a bit, I panicked because my shotgun was amongst the guns for sale and didn't want to cause a misunderstanding that I just was shoplifting by grabbing a gun off the rack and walking out. Before a wild-west shootout could develop, my panicked state woke me from the dream.

In a similar vein,

I randomly remembered this dumb joke video that I saw posted on SPUF for a time and I was fucking shocked I could find it just by searching "augmented snort snort." We all know how unreliable searches are nowadays so I didn't really have faith. I guess there's just nothing for the search algorithm to misinterpret. Either that or it just connected the already known 'TF2 video watcher' profile and that narrowed it down enough

There is nothing funnier as someone who looks through network logs than seeing admins mistype things. It brightens up my day every time I see them forget an IP address's octet or just fail to spell "ping" right.

I have no idea why it's so funny to me. I guess looking through logs which normally are so formalized that a human misspelling error wouldn't ever show up makes it stand out even more when one happens.

On 5/11/2026 at 8:29 PM, John Caveson said:

If you've ever played classic Gears of War and don't mind going a little hacky, I've been enjoying Delta Online. It's a fan-made, native PC port of Gears of War 3's (with some Judgement and Gears of War 4 sprinkled in) pvp and pve modes. All self-contained, no emulation, or .iso files, or hacked consoles needed, you can download straight from the website, all completely free (they don't even accept any donations or anything, the mad lads).

 

A lot of character/weapon skins to unlock, both official and fan-made. All the maps, including DLC, for Gears 3 and Judgement, plus fan-made, "Gears 3" versions of maps from the other games (Including 4 and 5) as well as several, totally original works. Matchmaking works like Gears 1: a peer-to-peer lobby system, using Steam's networking for friends lists, hosting games, and Steam Input/Overlay. Bot backfilling is supported for pvp, just like the original game, so you can host a Friends Only lobby, if you want grind for a particular medal/unlock without having to deal with randos.

 

Of course, this being fan-made, and not at all endorsed by Epic/The Coalition/Microsoft, I would recommend downloading it on the off-chance it get C&D'ed.

I actually have never played any gears of war games which is funny. I never got to play it whenever we were at a friend's house since I was the youngest, and by the time we got a 360 ourselves MW2 and Halo 3/Reach were literally the only things anyone could ever think about. It might show my ignorance but I wasn't even really aware those games had pvp modes (I guess this was back when you still had to no matter what). Pretty crazy to see a native PC port considering how console-locked they seemed to be outside of whatever questionable remasters they put out there recently.

1 hour ago, FreshHalibut said:

Despite loving Dishonored 1, I never played Dishonored 2 or the DLC.

So I played Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.

 

Mechanically I really liked it, but narratively it felt really unfulfilling.

Yeah, that's kind of the best way to describe it. I feel like that's a pretty common sentiment about D2. 

For D2 I think they did a good job of moving to a new area without making it feel too drastically different from the original Dishonored. With that said, I really feel like they could have just... not bothered with the narrative structure they had at all. They obviously wanted to do a parallel to the first game and keep the whole "dishonored" title relevance, but I think most people would have preferred a larger departure since it just sticks way too close. Plus, it kind of works against the dual character game since Corvo already did all this shit before and they don't do anything interesting with how it's technically his homeland.

I'd have preferred if the initial coup just didn't happen at all and perhaps the game of D2 is a true reversal of D1's plot where you find the conspiracy before the coup and take it apart before they get to execute it. You could keep Serkonnos as the location easily by writing Emily and Corvo visiting for diplomatic reasons. Or diverge more between the two characters and have Corvo go back for a completely different reason. In fact you may not even need a conspiracy plot at all, Corvo could just try and track down some truth about the Outsider leading to running into the witch cabal and Emily could run into the same because she's apparently a swashbuckler aspirant in her spare time anyway.

As for Death of the Outsider... I definitely agree that it'd be better if the Outsider stayed unexplained. I don't really think the angle they took was terrible, but it wasn't great either. I am in the same boat in hoping that they use it as a branching point to go weirder with any further entries. But at the same time they didn't even need an excuse like this, they should have just done it from the start!!

All of it makes me think that more than anything else, the atmosphere of D1 was what sold the non-gameplay side of the game. I'd love to see something less narrative focused that just kind of lets you soak in the environments. Just pick up any random urchin in Dunwall or Serkonnos or one of the other islands we haven't seen yet, have them find some supernatural force, and let them do whatever they want with it.

Further back in the day I definitely wanted to make sure I was watching stuff in the right order but I think it's way better to get into a series by following the part that interests you over anything else. Luckily for me a lot of the series I stick to are pretty much entirely self-contained between spinoffs and sequels and stuff so you get people entering from almost any direction.

A general release order isn't bad to use as a loose framework for something that has a lot of spinoffs that run alongside a main entry but even that isn't super important. The only thing I can think of is the Index series since that has been running for a long time with a "main" entry while having a lot of spinoffs happen over time in parallel. I'm keeping an idea of when things came out but now that I'm fairly deep into the series I can tell that even the spinoffs aren't really written with an expectation of you to have a really sharp memory of the series nor do they plaster gigantic spoilers for other parts early on either.

The only exception, of course, is that everyone is required to watch Haruhi twice so they can experience both orders.

31 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

Saw an add for Canva targeted towards teachers.  The tagline was something like "it will work so well, it's like a hack for your class."

 

I don't know if this is a horrible or brilliant slogan at this time.

They're maximizing engagement using keywords that they know are connected to the product, it's actually genius marketing

Since I am bitching about no multiplayer games really speaking to me right now anyway, if any of you have any softball recommendations I'd hear them out. I guess my only big criteria are a non-miserable solo experience and pvp.

3 hours ago, Huff said:

On the other hand, I adore Deadlock's aesthetic. Big sucker for fantasy early 1900's/Art Deco stuff.

It was kind of a kneejerk reaction of mine at the time it came out, I can respect that Valve understands how to at least make something cool (unlike the people making MtG nowadays)

I went back and forth between a few thoughts like "you've bounced off of every moba you've played without really learning anything about them" and "I didn't play long enough to learn because I wasn't having fun" and then for deadlock in particular "you've dropped games for less than this, valve fanboy." Much like fighting games I doubt I'll ever find something that will make me break through that wall

a less excusable reason was that the aesthetic reminded me of that terrible nu-MtG set new capenna 

All I can say after watching old tech reviews is that print catalogues are the last bastion of actually understanding what things sold for and what they were even capable of, and after that point we can't trust anything.

Unless it was like a low-end model that wasn't flashy enough to end up as anything other than a single line in the catalogue, then we're completely fucked as to understanding it anyway.

after tiring of planetside 2 i will never have fun again 

On 3/31/2026 at 4:37 PM, A 1970 Corvette said:

Loud obnoxious love live fan here, and I'm excited for both the Hasu no Sora Movie and the anime that was just announced for next year! It totally won't confuse people if it gets localised since there's three (secretly four if you count the extra novel) years of stuff that happened before that is not officially adapted! I guess that's not unheard of for anime adaptions though.

Having (totally legitimately) watched the movie now, I see its role in this all as basically a primer of the characters so you could theoretically understand the basics for the anime. It's kind of divided evenly three ways between spotlighting the existing characters, building up two new characters that will be in the later anime, and sending off the graduating class. I wonder how much of an impact the graduating class sendoff scenes would be to someone who's just watching the movie and hasn't been with the characters for an actual factual three years of real time developments though.

It was awesome seeing Hasu no Sora story done outside of the game's stiff style either way. It doesn't sound like much but when most of the story was delivered in this sort of weird format where the characters are always sort of just arranged next to each other and maybe emoting after saying their lines at best, the actual animation of the movie was such an insane jump. It's kind of crazy to think now we have a full 3DCG movie that looks good when Love Live's first anime was some people's first experience with janky 3DCG inserts.

It was nice watching an anime movie for a franchise I actually liked for once since the last three were the Uma movies which made me realize that S2 was a fluke and I'm not really into the series.

The funniest part is that I'll be drawing fanart of scenes that I shouldn't possibly know exist due to it being only shown in theatres and physical releases in Japan. Don't tell anyone. I was totally there then came back to draw.

Yeah holy cow, most of mine are supremely janky looking. You did a great job with them

I've had my hands full with OSRS recently so I haven't spent much time playing tomodachi. I'm trying to diversify my island a bit so the creation process takes a while.

I've been having a lot of fun with it too. I have a rather schizophrenic population of half FPS game characters and half idols

I watch a lot of windows log sources for my job and jesus christ will microsoft sneak edge-copilot-onedrive updates literally any second of any moment.

If we didn't tune those logs out half of all the alarms we would see are just windows updaters being aggressive as fuck the second anyone turns on their computer

31 minutes ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

That is an unanticipated representation of myself but I welcome it nonetheless lmao

Your alligator hat is the perfect accessory for anyone who once posted on a Team Fortress 2 forum

See the generation is all wrong, I actually think stealing all the fire axes was very fulfilling and useful

A fucking scorpion was in the toilet today. I am scared... shitless.

On 4/7/2026 at 12:30 PM, Moby said:

I'm thinking of making a dumb game for that Joel's Gamejam.

Anyone wants a cameo? Send me a design with some dialogue and I'll try to make an npc or something.

Honestly I'd be afraid of making a cameo in a game for jobles (speaking of being scared) but good luck either way!