A 1970 Corvette

Is it a bad idea to want to watch The Big O mainly because I like Dorothy's design?

I really think that there's a specific trick to getting out of the water in the Marathon engine, but throughout my playthrough I couldn't figure it out. There's kind of a strong pull downwards when you enter water that guarantees your head is going under even if you're holding swim up, which is what makes it so you can't try again if you're near a ledge. At the same time, getting the apex of swim height briefly puts you in the air or something which is where you'd probably be able to "climb" to the ledge, but there's kind of an overall physics issue in the game.

The gravity on marathon is abysmally low, and your air control is almost nonexistent outside of whatever momentum you had when you became airborne. So this creates a loop of cresting out of the water where you can't subtly influence your movement towards the ledge, but also you immediately get sucked down when you're past the apex of the crest since you're entering the water again.

The same gravity/momentum shenanigans makes fighting on stairs a fucking nightmare since you might just trip down them in the middle of a fight since you go airborne for brief moments and lose all control over your character which makes it very hard to slow your downstairs momentum since you only briefly touch the next step before becoming airborne again and not having much time to apply a slowdown.

I recently had a craving a retro FPS game and I remembered that the Marathon games were free, so I played Marathon 2: Durandal, a game I remember playing the demo of from the Xbox Live Arcade demo system. I also had a passing curiosity about the "lore" of the games which bungieheads always said was better than anything Halo had.

Having played it I don't really agree and feel like it's kind of just a contrarian opinion to appear to be an oldhead since there's basically a couple pages of text crawls and that's it? But I did like the writing for the one character the game has, Durandal, since he had a fun HAL9000 routine going on. 

As for the game itself, I probably need to preface this by saying I haven't played many true classic FPS games, so maybe it's more par for the course if you're familiar with contemporary games, but I'll try and sort that out.

• Guns feel anemic except for the shotgun which has no ammo. The AR you use a ton of but mainly just because it stunlocks enemies and the chinese bottle rockets it calls grenades can be fired at the same time which when added together makes a weapon that sort of works at midrange. The pistols are pointless. The flamethrower is pointless because it has no range and the AR's grenade launcher kills lined up enemies just fine, plus a lot of mobs of enemies that you'd use it on have Hunters mixed in which take basically no fire damage. The alien flamethrower is fine but only has 1 mag. The rocket launcher has no ammo and doesnt really work in most of the maps where you just corner peek enemies in close quarters. The fusion pistol is acceptable but feels weak.
• Several weapons blind you for firing them, like the shotgun's reload covering the entire center third of the screen, and the flamethrower which doesn't let you see that you burned through the workers and are now dealing no damage to a hunter who can take off an entire health bar with a barrage.
• Why the fuck is the sound for "teleporting in helpful items" and "teleporting in enemies" the same?????????
• Several maps have an obsession with teleporting tanks behind you to the point where I was running through the places backwards
• Bungie was fucking proud of their water physics. They really shouldn't have been.
• Did the designers really think that making enemies that are disguised as friendlies and suicide bomb you would lead to anything other than you gunning down every friendly you see because it's not worth risking it? As if the human teammates ever pull their fucking weight ever?
• Did the designers also not notice that for the second to last level where the super OP alien teammates show up, it just meant every player would hit the spawn triggers for enemies and then let the teammates clean up while they hid in a corner?
• Someone on the team had a fucking obsession with making the user swim through lava. Here's a fucking question for all the designers out there: If you make a gulf of lava with two healing stations on either side with no enemies, what's the fucking point other than maybe hoping that the player dies because getting out of fluids in this game is a fucking ordeal? 
• Who designed the final level and where is their house so I can firebomb it? Why does the final boss self destruct with a radius of basically the entire arena? Why does the teleporter to the final boss put you in a vat of lava? Why does the game put you in a room with four panels, and without any warning, have one of them DISABLE THE HEAL AND SAVE STATION IF YOU SHOOT IT? When for all of the previous points in the game you were taught to kill those panels because that's how you always moved forward? And you also have to shoot all the others? And also why does the critical path flood the fucking level with lava and force you to immediately pick a path to run and hope it's the right one?
• Why is there no soundtrack??? Actually if it was just budget that's fine, I just added my own music which was fun I guess.

These are kind of just a few specific gripes but there's a general baffling design where you can only save at save points in the map, and healing stations infinitely heal you. So it just makes you paranoid because if you ever aren't aware of a heal station and save point, you may not want to progress until you can find those lest you end up losing progress from something stupid happening (I learned the hard way after plowing through a level entirely without finding a save, dying in the next level, and having to replay about twentyish minutes of the game as a result). Was it really any better than just letting you save at any time? This is one where the game doesn't really screw you much once you internalize that you really should never commit to anything until you save, but like... Why? I know it was an age of exploration for the genre but this really comes off as something that someone should have stood up and said "wait this isn't very fun? it just makes you play slower"

The middle of the game is probably the best, I really liked the first Citadel level in particular which had a good flow and a lot of fun combat. The start felt like the mappers were trying to flex how big they could make maps, and the fucking water (see above link). The end felt like you were emptying an entire mag of AR into each enemy because you were.

The modern port to Aleph One (or is that just the name of the port? idk) and support for 4k like my dumb ass has is pristine though. Other than the archaic keybinds which took a few minutes to reconfigure to something sane I had the smoothest experience ever playing a game as old as this, it was fucking awesome.

6 minutes ago, TheOnlyGuyEver said:

>is a box

>no orange version

They had one job

They're waiting to sell it as a special edition, like how they did for the various Steam Decks.

With that being said, I have no real use for the Steam Machine, but a semi-transparent plastic smoke case would look so goddamn cool. I still wish I got that Steam Deck edition, but alas. I blame the N64 for imprinting the love for that kind of stuff in my brain

I put on twitch on a laptop and leave it in the corner now and then to get twitch drops and it's always funny to see where it ends up after the five hours of idling

The headset is definitely the piece I'm most interested in since it solves a lot of problems my (now positively ancient) current setup has. Mainly wires and base stations, god I am not a fan.

I am mildly interested in the controller, but my gamepad needs are kind of limited to begin with considering my current one is a madcatz-esque 360 controller with maybe like ten hours of usage over the last ten years.

On 11/11/2025 at 4:41 AM, Moby said:

If the value gets automatically converted to my currency, yeah.

sent ;)

now ill just need some time to gather my reference sheet for my OC

47 minutes ago, Moby said:

I need 10 dollars for Warframe related expenses. Any wants to buy a commission? My prices are low.

lol this was me a few ago with the maid outfit in the finals. Do you take steam gift cards?

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