A 1970 Corvette

The last month's next fest was kind of barren for stuff I was interested in, but I played a few demos. 

Ctesiphon - Very short demo with some flaws but promising material. The automatic shotgun in this is really satisfying to use, it sounds strong and destroys almost all enemies no problem. Even the SMG, which takes a lot of hits to kill, still feels nice enough. There are some level design issues with visibility of enemies in the jungle, and also you can just run past a boss and end the level at one point, but it was nothing dealbreaking. Has an interesting reaction time mechanic for enemies? If you have your flashlight on they definitely notice you faster and other times you can completely sneak up on them. Not complicated and it kind of made certain enemy placements appear braindead (people getting shot next to you and not reacting type stuff) but it's interesting. It's not a bad way to balance some of the enemies being a party foul of seemingly hitscan ranged attacks... Though obviously it'd be better if those just didn't exist.

Mik - Walking simulator/Parkour puzzle exploration game? I picked it up for the atmosphere it was selling of exploring some megastructure that is abandoned and it definitely is not selling that short. There's some serious graphics issues with this game, in performance, visibility, not straining your eyes with crazy contrast, bugs, but it does a good job of building an atmosphere besides that. The blatant portal inspiration (several areas where a robot voice talks about how dying is not part of this test so don't do it, etc, plus the intro sequence is just blatantly copied from Portal 2 without the cool room destroying scene) kind of wore thin on me, and there's a lot of stuff locked up in text crawls for computer logs I didn't really wanna bother reading, but I am mildly interested in the game still. It's apparently going to be free either way so hey, worth keeping on the radar. Plus, the author snuck in a Girls' Last Tour artwork into an easter egg so there's at least that. It checks out, what with the tone of the demo

Road to Vostok - Janky singleplayer tarkov game. Good simulator of Finnish life, where you scrabble in the dirt and try not to get ventilated by drunk murderers, but a bit too unpolished for my tastes. I can totally see the appeal for a certain type of player though.

The Last Caretaker - I swear every next fes I pick up some survival game that looks like it might have some kind of combat only to spend way too long learning how to make water distillation machines or something instead of anything fun. Not my cup of tea either way.

On 10/17/2025 at 2:22 PM, John Caveson said:

Boy do I have the mod for you.

 

https://tf2goldrush.com/

 

They are more or less ready for release, they're just waiting on Valve to approve the Steam page. In the meantime they're working on polish and bugfixes.

 

I'm actually hyped because I never got to experience pre-F2P TF2, so this'll be fun I think.

Ahahahhaa those are some "inspired" weapon choices, holy shit

valve must have known that letting people make TF2 spinoffs was fine and wouldn't threaten the base game because every single TF2 mod team has two insane ideas for every one good one

Is it funnier that Izumi is saying "ace" like "ass" or the fact that her musical partner Ceras actually IS pronouncing it correctly, and never corrected her?

fuck the dyslexia is spreading because I read "bomb nun," does that mean I have to design a bomb nun now

I like how FEAR is considered a horror game by some (apparently the community tags for it on Steam say so, and the homage game Trepang2 as well) but the entire horror atmosphere is subverted by you being a fucking one man army who constantly shits on supersoldier clones like it's nothing. Like sure, the cutscenes are spooky, but cutscenes in games often take place in separate universes from the game where there are separate sets of rules so they don't really connect well

I guess I'm an outsider to horror games though since FEAR is probably the only one I really like (and mainly because it fails as a horror game). A lot of the other ones I've seen never really interested me because they always seemed so hellbent on limiting what they player can do, which makes sense for the genre, but I never really felt like that's very fun as a result. I do tend to enjoy when other types of games dip into horror themes like how Half Life does on occasion. Or the general atmosphere of STALKER games, though I also feel like they only really lean towards full-on horror in certain parts. And some R-18 games that have strong horror themes like the school chapter in Sol Rui After Mini or basically everything going on in Seal of Lutellaria. I guess in that case a lot of the fun comes from the contrast where often something horrific is going on but since it's not a full on horror game you usually get to tackle it head on and win.

Honestly the general halloween experience is pretty terrible since the maps are on a spectrum ranging from "The worst gamemode ever on a poorly designed map with stupid gimmicks" to "an acceptable map at the very least still ruined by the base halloween gimmick of 'doubly random crits' if not other things"

The mask thing though, I definitely think that's just an issue of everyone that cared already having it, and anyone who would need to get it nowadays not even knowing it exists. It is absolutely absurd though. Honestly I'm surprised they at least had the bright idea to not force people to play halloween maps in fucking sequence for once, what an absurdly stupid thing especially considering there are like forty maps now

Realize youtube videos aren't loading.

In a panic, check all the ad blockers and extensions one by one. Rarely, a video manages to get through, but I can't figure out that root cause. Is it possible that they've caught on to my blend of adblockers and extensions?

Eventually I check my browser's reddit to see what people are doing. Several worrying threads with the same problem as me. It's clearly over for me.

Turns out it was a general outage for everyone. It all came back to full in like thirty minutes

It's bad when a store page gives you Half-Life: Source vibes. The screenshots make me think "if this was some guy's remaster mod it'd be mildly interesting but they're charging thirty bucks for this"

SPUFers fought to kill the ETF2L heavy, but the maintenance engineer heralded the end of SPUF itself, so I feel like that establishes a clear power ranking

Who would win in a fight (SPUF edition):

ETF2L Heavy or Forum Maintenance Engineer?

1 minute ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

Will it include an arachnophobia filter?

save on art costs by enabling the filter by default so that entire route just has a black screen 

Currently weighing if I can figure out what was going on in my previous subnautica playthrough. I kind of wish there was a big GO HERE DO THIS IDIOT for people like me. Actually I think they do exist via the life pod beacons but I can't tell which ones I've already checked and which ones aren't? Either way I have like 11 hours on the save and I think that might be a bit too much to just restart the run 

14 minutes ago, Moby said:

I had a crazy idea for a game, anyone that knows designing, programing and has money? I am the ideas guy.

I wanna supply subpar anime art for an indie game some day, but it would have the issue of the game becoming unplayable since I wouldn't want to stare at my own art for the time it takes to play through a game

I feel like my movie video game trauma is still in the past because despite hearing good enough things about the RoboCop games I still was hesitant about them. I might hafta give them a try.

I already was planning on getting Brazilian Drug Dealer 3 though, with a title like that one you know you're in for a good time

But what about the ranking of "how important the fox angle was to the purchase of the game?"

Perhaps this is out of left field for someone who often professes their hate for fandoms as a whole but I really do wish we still got forums for things. I understand why we don't have them anymore and how we got to this point but I still wish they existed. They usually created interesting microcosms as the people who posted there slowly drifted away from staying on topic due to there only being so much to discuss... As we all have observed in the past, obviously.

Though to speak to the concept of "in world" documents and games, man I am glad I was around back when game booklets were a thing and usually always had some kind of fun lore to read about. Kind of unrelated to the greater internet thing but that concept of reading stuff related to fiction that comes from "outside" the main medium (in this case a real world booklet for a video game) is so fucking cool. It's honestly probably why I've gotten into a lot of multimedia franchises along the general musical-band-idol axis because you get a lot of different angles to experience the content between TV adaptions and real music releases and live shows and game stories and radio segments and such.

What the fuck, one of the first things on the internet I ever saw was the fatkins diet animation. Despite the dated nature of the video as a whole the delivery of "I can't eat that, it has carbs!" still pops into my head often enough.

My mind definitely filed all of that away as the type of "show" that died once it became too much work to keep updating their website in the early 2010s though, exactly as you said. Interesting to see that it did not.

1 minute ago, Raison d'être said:

Spent 3 years cooking up that banger

There was probably a span of fifteen seconds between me thinking of that joke and then trying to think of a place to send it before remembering we had a terrible joke thread, thank you terrible joke thread for giving me a place to put this random thought I had

I bet if there was a Mario horror game there'd be too many jumpscares

I mainly play stuff made once the reign of CRTs was already over (or about to be over at least) so I kind of just had an averse reaction to CRT filters in general but I guess they make more sense for stuff like that. I will now mentally move the CRT filter away from the "literally violence against the user and for some reason always on by default" category where motion blur resides and into the "in a small number of situations it can be useful" category of graphics effects.

Still don't get why Balatro has it though. This might be a "person who's lived in Vegas all their life" kind of thing, but that filter mentally reminded me of the old CRT displays of video gambling machines that were set up absolutely everywhere and only really started disappearing for more modern displays once I was an adult. The issue is that unlike those old gambling programs, Balatro's UI actually is well designed and looks good. So I always felt like the effect being there and on by default kind of was to the detriment of the overall smoothness of the UI.

Actually as an aside, a lot of gambling programs seemingly have not updated their UI even though they're being ran on sharp widescreen flat panel monitors. It's really funny seeing the extremely shitty, probably designed-in-the-90's programs put alongside newer ones on the same boxes. Ain't no way the gambling companies are going to alienate their old retired gamblers by revamping the blackjack game's UI, they know they'll drop them in a heartbeat and use a different machine even if a UI revamp was an objective upgrade.

3 hours ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

I guess I could probably could be a lot better right now if I actually bothered to study! But I dunno, I've always drawn for fun, and studying away grinding out constructions and practice poses every day doesn't appeal to me. The way I see it, every drawing of mine is practice.

Yeah I feel the same, I would never practice as much as I do if I wasn't just drawing stuff that I found fun anyway so I try to keep that in mind when thinking about how much "real" practice I could have done looking back

every time I wonder where the fuck the team is and then my death spectator cam goes to some idiot fiddling with some stupid eye candy map feature I die a little inside

this is a fallacy because these people that play the carnival game on Pier would not be any use if they were actually trying to play, but it doesn't help that it's such an easy thing to notice at the same time

The timing/set up for the heart and space segments got me.

Was the Conan one just a reference to Detective Conan? I love the structure of the joke there but I definitely missed the content of it

38 minutes ago, Rynjin said:

Don't you understand? Doom Guy is the COOLEST guy! So cool we can't even call him Doom Guy anymore. He's the DOOM SLAYER. Isn't that metal as hell?

 

[20 minutes of rambling about how cool Doom Slayer is later]

 

And that's why you should care.

having not played eternal yet, this is the exact experience I've got whenever doomguy "lore" comes up in a discussion

at least some people liked it all and they are very vocal about it

 every now and then I find these type of remixes and they always frustrate me because they usually NAIL one part, but some other parts usually reaally don't work at the same time. The chorus for this is good and the second chorus is really good but the intro and bridge aren't really there.  I suppose that's to be expected for an intentionally limited medium, but it always makes me wonder if it's just the arrangement they used or something that just won't really work at all.

It is sad though because the bridge is really cool in the original. I guess even if the notes were closer to what I wanted, the lack of the lyrics would still be working against it

52 minutes ago, Moby said:

But can I play as currently marketable sub-celebrity or random pop culture using a bright pink dildo gun with weed stickers I got from spending $300 on rotating shop/lootboxes?

Honestly I don't think Battlefield games go quite as hard on that as the Call of Duty ones do, I get the feeling they'll mainly make edgy skull-pattern ballistic masks and punisher tattoo types for the expensive cosmetics look. Luckily the cosmetics and customization are NOT part of the beta... Which might actually be the appeal of playing betas nowadays other than them usually being free. Everyone actually just looks like a grunt in a ground war and doesn't have Flecktarn-patterned fatigues while fighting in a desert city in 2025.

BF6 beta is pretty basic. Not bad for free but I'd not be caught dead paying 70 bucks or whatever games cost now for it. The biggest impression it's left on me is just wishing they didn't even make it and just organized BF4 play/return events instead, but that's not how the industry or greater FPS-playing community works. Unfortunately