A 1970 Corvette

They say that it's great that you can find games being given out for free on Steam.

But are they really free when they are forced to your "Recent games" tab just for redeeming them, even if you have no intention on playing them immediately? I'll let you be the judge.

I still never got to play that idol themed TTRPG. 

Also SPUF which Terraforming Mars expansion should I start with? I really love the game but have only been playing the base + corporate one (which came with the base game) so far.

18 hours ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

Love Live staff are fucking trolling me because BOTH events I went to have had supply issues with the live shirts.

Okay not to just needlessly double post but they re-opened sales online afterwards, and I had my friend who is still in Japan WATCHING for a re-open sale, and they sold out in MINUTES of online orders opening. How is it so hard to stock a bunch of shirts??? They've been having these shirt supply issues for MONTHS now, since it's been a problem since the first leg of the tour. It's not like they should be surprised at this point that the shirts are in high demand.

Whatever. Unlike the shirt for the previous one I went to, I don't reaaaally care for the design of this tour's shirt, so I'll just deal with it.

I went on another trip to Japan to see a Love Live concert again. This time, I only spent a small amount of time worrying instead of like a whole month, so this was a marked improvement. Love Live staff are fucking trolling me because BOTH events I went to have had supply issues with the live shirts. I only have last time's shirt because of a generous donation from a friend, and my only hope for this one is they open up sales again (which those fuckers should since you literally had no chance to get any if you just went to this leg of the tour like wtf)

I also did the usual circuit of weaboo merch buying which was as fun as always. There was a Railgun collab at a nearby Round 1 and I literally only had enough coins to pull the gachapon for it once and got best girl Kuroko on the first try. Baller as hell.

Overall, I am going to say that I'll take Tokyo Winter over Tokyo Summer any time now that I've experienced both. To be fair, this event was at an open air dome venue that is normally a baseball field, so it was probably almost as bad as it could get for an event in the summer, but still. I am used to rough summertime conditions so I managed well enough, but I'd rather not do it again.

I also got to go to a big after-party primarily made of overseas Love Live fans and it was crazy seeing the meeting of all these different cultures culminating in chugging a giant sake bottle while a drunk otaku behind them holds up gravure magazine photos of actresses singing about how big their chests are. It's actually kind of prime people watching material even for an introvert non-party-goer like me

Take color grading tools away from TF2 map makers

they have proven they are not responsible enough to use them for good

That Midna is great, daaaamn

I managed three. someone else finish the rest out

Happy "anime girl in American Flag bikini fanart" day!

I noticed more multiplayer games in the Next Fes lineup than usual, but that may have been Steam's profile of me seeing that I've been constantly doomscrolling Multiplayer FPS game tags whenever I go through my weekly bout of "man I really want a new game to no-life." Also saw a shitton of "extraction shooters" but I chalked that up to recently having played the Marathon free weekend a little bit. But it is also all the rage, so wouldn't surprise me.

Bang Shoot looked pretty fun and I liked the feel of it, but I couldn't find any games when I booted it up so I mainly just dicked around in the shooting range map. The simple gimmick of dual wielding weapons appealed to me, it seems like a competent little arena shooter.

Maybe I should try American Revolution Smuggler. I have no idea why, normally those types of games don't appeal to me.

Somehow I didn't see Virtue and a Sledgehammer whenever I checked the next fes page. Also interested in that, but I guess due to tag shenanigans Steam didn't think I'd be interested.

14 hours ago, Moby said:

Aside the million AI generated games (including a lot of porn ones that use the same image generator)

On one hand it's annoying to see, but on the other hand it's an easily spotted red flag that something is utter trash, so I am conflicted on that. Perhaps the most pragmatic outlook on it is "nobody churning out garbage like this would suddenly start making quality without AI."

Honestly most of the good R-18 games I've seen on Steam are just "localisation" re-releases of games that have been out for years already but only recently been kosher on Steam. It's kind of fascinating to me that there's a fairly large amount of games like that which have had a language/locale/payment barrier for ages due to Japanese DLSite's restrictions and are only just now able to be sold on a western storefront that anyone actually uses. I bet the original devs are happy to see another potential bout of sales for a game they already put out, at least.

2 hours ago, Moby said:

I've tried Delta and I couldn't handle it. I don't have the required level of autism to make the movement system flow.

Air strafing, boost jumping, jump chaining, surfing, circle jumping, rocket jumping with chain jump boost to get more height then wall rocket jumping to AAAAAAA-

Nah I totally get it. It goes way too deep, like expecting someone to know this stuff just to clear a level (let alone do it fast) is kind of crazy. But in this case the crazy worked for me

1 hour ago, Silent said:

Maybe Baba nullified this because of the music and the colours and the cute lil rabbit guy.

Baba's music did have a life-extending effect even for me, a person who kind of hates puzzle games.

While playing Delta I actually thought, "Man I wish I could play puzzle games and just run them back iteratively until I solve them like I can do with these stupid jump maps" somewhere around the 100th try on a specific part

So, next fes is ongoing. I've been trying out some demos. Most of them have been disappointing, but this game Delta is crazy. Definitely made by a fan of source and quake movement what with the surfing and rocket jumps and whatnot.

It kind of addresses something I thought about when playing Neon White where a lot of the speedrunner schmoovement games I've played don't require mechanics in the way something like a TF2 jump map does, even though they may appear on the surface to be the same kind of flashy quick movement (not saying that's a bad thing, either, since fucking hell a lot of jump maps are psychotic). Well this game actually does have this level of mechanics just to gain/maintain/transfer speed and man is it way interesting to me as a result. I think this game is going to have a crazy cult following and (sadly) bounce off of a more general audience. For what it's worth, the tutorial even in the demo is very tight, it has recordings of every demo mechanic with input displays and you can even slow down the timescale to work on execution. There's one advanced mechanic in the tutorial with the plasma gun that I spent like an hour practicing for just one tutorial jump though, so they don't pull punches with the advanced stuff even in the demo.

I've never just grabbed a random demo on a whim without any expectations and been so blown away. What's sadder is that I've been checking the Next Fest page every day since it started, and only JUST now saw this gem of a demo. I know that the first few days were not "curated" so it was just shovelware mainly, but this game has tags that I'm sure Steam knows I'm interested in even before any Next Fest-specific data came in. I'm just glad I found it at all amongst the utter crap out there.

54 minutes ago, Moby said:

I tested checking my posts and I read how much of an annoying jackass I was 14 years ago.

It's okay I feel exactly the same whenever I read my own posts

27 minutes ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

The "terrible guitar form" after the rest of that is what makes me crack up the most.

It does fit the cadence of a lot of actual threads pretty well. Those posts that ignore where the thread discussion went towards just make some banal comment about the starting post really hit my sense of humor

I was shocked to find that in this 90s aerobics video I found there was a girl wearing shiny blue pants. Just right in the frame! The video wasn't even rated for sexual content but a girl was wearing blue pants. I can't believe they got away with that back then. I just hope no kids saw that video.

Classifying when something becomes sexual content is always a very funny line even amongst humans, especially in the field of fanart/cartoons/drawings. I probably draw my line a lot earlier than others, and it might be due to drawing some R-18 content myself and knowing that certain details don't just magically appear. If AI is trying to mimic human thought processes then it just has to be as unhinged as a normal human would be and we're good

8 minutes ago, Moby said:

I'm at the "an usable wiki doesn't uses a mobile layout on desktop" level.

 

I swear to god, every time I have to block elements so the wiki page takes more than 30% of the screen. And that's not Fandom only, I've seen some official wikis do that.

Yeah my joking aside it's miserable out there, I'm glad that there's been pushback resulting in migration to less terrible wikis with reasonable formatting and layouts for some communities, but it really needs to be all of them and it needs to be RIGHT now.

I sincerely wish the biggest problem that people regularly encounter was whether or not the search bar is focused on the main wiki page by default, really

We do a lot of discussion of UI on this forum nowadays. I have recently formulated a theory which I submit to you all:

"A wiki is only truly virtuous if the main page automatically focuses the search bar."

So far, using this theory, the only virtuous wiki I can find is the Old School Runescape one.

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.