A 1970 Corvette

13 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

I've heard other people talking about citadel, mainly in the context of being a one autist passion project (if I recall correctly.)  I like old shooters but I was still kind of on the fence for this one.  I guess I'll move it up in the "check this out" list (but it's a long list.)

I think if that's true it makes a lot of sense because despite having a lot of old shooter style there's plenty of little things that diverge from retro shooter conventions at the same time that I think a larger team might have said "maybe we don't need to put this in?" Stuff like the mag dropping for faster reloads mechanic (something I love btw more games need to do it), ADS systems, toggles between "arcade" and "tactical" spread styles in options menu, the hunger system, and of course the elephant in the room of all the anime girl dismemberment. It also explains why the maps all share the same tilesets too, but I think the game does a great job of varying levels without changing visuals and just changing layout.

Marathon was directly called out in the store page for the game and it's funny to have played Marathon 2 recently enough to see that there is a bit of inspiration there. You can see a lot of other inspirations and all the secret levels are level layouts from other games so that's fun too.

Looking forward to getting Beyond Citadel. I initially was turned off of trying the game before I played the demo because people were saying that the combat was hard and janky but my experience was anything but, I enjoyed that you could play it both like a boomer shooter and also more tactically too (and on hard you have to at least recognize when one style is more effective than the other)

Recently played The Citadel, then played through it again on the harder difficulty since I enjoyed it so much. It's funny because apart from maybe one or two boss fights the difficulty didn't change anything for me, you were basically always at full armor or you fucked up and got one-burst'd by enemies anyway. I guess the difference from medium to hard is that in medium it took two enemies laying into you to kill you from full, whereas it only took one in hard. I guess the thing is that you have such good awareness that you can basically kill most enemies before they get a chance to shoot you outside of situations where you're dropped into an arena with a lot at once, so for the majority of the time the only thing the harder difficulty impacts is the lower spawn rate of items. But since enemies can be taken out efficiently that wasn't really a problem either.

There are optional difficulty settings that up enemy awareness, health, and aggressiveness though. If you play with those maxed (the default difficulty settings don't change those settings no matter if you play easy, medium, or hard, so they're kind of a secret extra difficulty level above hard) then I think the game actually becomes really fucking hard. Will have to give it a try sometime.

Hey at least glass UIs are based 

-t. win7 baby

2 minutes ago, Moby said:

But seems the good stuff has risen to the surface at the final day, so I will try some this week.

I feel stupid that I never thought to do this

Next Fest is still ongoing but I went through some demos this weekend and I wanna blab about them before they fade from my mind:

• Data Center: This is every bit as terribly jank as I thought it'd be, but it was funny. I got the hand cart stuck in the data center hallway and made it impossible to efficiently move equipment. I didn't really expect anything technical but it was more simplified than I thought it'd be.
• Fate/Trigger: Anime PUBG. It's a pretty competently made game, but doesn't really go head and shoulders beyond the genre. Has a serious "characters blab too much" and also a "characters do not have enough unique voice lines" issue which is a bad combination to have. Also padding lobbies with bots, unless console players are literally that bad at the game (I refuse to believe they are). Vehicles, as usual, kind of ruin the game due to completely dominating teamfights with their massive health pools. The shooting is pretty nice. Apparently in this playtest they upped damage for everything and it feels a bit too lethal.
• Gal Vs Village: Like twenty minutes of gameplay tops and extremely barebones but has an endearingly scrappy nature to it. There's not even a y axis on the mouse! The actual shooting, dash, and melee feel pretty good despite how janky everything looks. The dash and melee feel a bit anachronistic with how retro everything else is but it's pretty fun. Also the spreadshot MG's design is fucked up. There's even an AMV embedded in the game's main menu... which is weird.
• Cicadamata: Neon White clone with more terrible visual filter crap everywhere. Despite the visuals it seems fairly well put together, you jump around real fast to collect things then get out of the level. Enemies often have secondary functions as mobility tools which is pretty common for the genre. I question how they made everything so intentionally blocky but then went out of their way to give the robot MC design a round ass that you see every end of level screen.
• Marathon Server Slam™: Having recently played Marathon 2- actually let's not pretend there's any attempt at a throughline with this game, I mainly played because I was bored and someone asked me to try it. Uh.... It sure is a tarkov clone? I do not get the appeal of this genre at all tbh, it's like a marriage of the unfun parts of BR games (looting, incentives to ignore fighting, etc) with even more menuing downtime added between every match. The presentation is unique and the graphics are pretty interesting. I liked the atmosphere of the first area. The "heroes" design looked fucking terrible across the board but it may be intentional with the "more marketable Cruelty Squad" aesthetic they seem to be approaching. I'd say I liked the gunplay but it all feels really sluggish, like the game is at half speed for everything, maybe it gets better if you're kitted with high tier gear but there ain't no way I'm grinding stuff out just to approach an appropriate level of responsiveness in an FPS game.

If you've found any fun shooter demos in next fest I've not said above let me know so I can try them too :DDD

I upgraded my tablet last August and I definitely had a panic moment when I learned that the thing used mini-hdmi and usb-c. I had forgotten that my motherboard was just barely up to date enough to have a single usb-c port since I never used it and I just got an adapter for the mini-hdmi and it's been smooth since then. I learned during that time that usb-c is super common with a lot of tablets, even display ones, and that kind of rocked my world. I guess the creative segment of the market is way into usb-c. I guess I just hear "usb" and think "no you can't put a video signal over that, it's silly to assume so" but we're in the future baby

My older tablet was an XP-Pen one which had an all in one cable which I kind of prefer though. I think I can see why the Wacom one I have doesn't make it all in one, but I'd rather have the simpler cable management over the flexibility you get from being able to route them all individually

1 hour ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

And since it's my subconscious, I literally cannot elaborate.

Moby, get the inception machine

you better believe I rocked this title in mw2

2 minutes ago, Idiot Cube said:

"For great justice" is ironically unironically kinda awesome.

While it's anachronistic to say it, "for great justice" didn't need to go as hard as it did

I really appreciate that cats is at least polite with his greeting. What a standup guy.

Every time I watch this video I see "The Little AleInn" sign edit and I'm like "oh hey I've been there!" and I never rememeber that it's in the video 

I think the museum exhibit that had the most impact on me was the room that "simulated" being in observation range of a nuclear bomb test at the Nuke Museum here in Vegas.

I'm sure that it's not really that much nowadays, or even accurate to the actual experience, but 8 year old me really got the shit scared out of him by that one. 

Also moving made me realize I have a problem about keeping boxes for stuff. There were a few that I used to aggregate a lot of things I probably would need down the line (like my repurposed power supply box with random M.2 screws, extra SATA cables, blank plates, and stuff) but a ton of them were just empty, or perhaps even worse, had tiny pieces I would still want inside a box one hundred times larger. I didn't realize I had all these figure pieces until I was cleaning stuff up and now I've gotta find a better way to store them.

I also realized I super didn't give a fuck about yearbooks except for like one. It was funny finding a different one that just didn't have me in it at all due to a printing error, but not funny enough to keep. And all my high school ones were basically not signed at all because my group wasn't really like that (and we're still all hanging out today anyway). The only one I kept had entire pages written on by middle school friends who I kinda lost track of but I still really valued what we did back then.

I'm glad my brothers (who have recently gotten into TCG collecting... for some reason) didn't notice that I dumped thousands of YGO and MTG cards I had no interest in keeping because they definitely would want to "go through it all" even though I know any value they had isn't worth the time sorting them. Okay well the Plateau is worth money but I saved that and also it was a gift from a friend so I definitely could never sell it either way.

On 1/30/2026 at 8:06 PM, Huff said:

Really love your style dude, you gotta a follow from me, man who dropped Love Live S1 after 5 episodes. Seriously, it's cute tho!

I really do try to draw stuff other than love live characters to keep things varied but the postable stuff does skew towards it pretty easily

On 1/31/2026 at 10:38 PM, Moby said:

I forgot Corv is a decent artist.

 

Speaking which, don't I own you a commission for those $10 you sent me for Warframe bling?

Oh yeah I was super busy the week that happened and it slipped my mind after I couldn't find a good reference on hand. I'll send something over sometime soon™

19 minutes ago, Huff said:

Well go on then lad, show us the fanart.

It's the middle one of Yukuri with a rose

And the post itself that they printed out. 

I'm definitely gonna try to get into some other ones moving forward though, this was unexpected (esp since the post only had like three likes which is about average for my stuff lol) and is probably a good excuse to try and do a more polished drawing more often. Since I'm lazy and usually just end up making sketches most of the time

Move the doomsday clock back a few seconds. I got fanart into an official love live stream.

I mean it's not competitive or anything, they just check the stream hashtag and print out whatever people posted, plus this is the newest group without an anime and only a few small performances so far so there's even less people going hard on fanart, but still. Wild to see something I drew put up with the voice actresses.

God DAMN I want to see the forklift safety video for THAT configuration. Imagine the cheesy recreation of workplace accidents when the forklift carries the gigantic cargo directly above the operator's seat.

I remember enjoying Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy in particular a lot in the late 2000sish era (enough to have got some compilation books of Pearls which had some fun commentary/notes written in with them too). And I mean of course Calvin and Hobbes, that's a given.

They're calling the live service game "seasons" for the Highguard "episodes" and I wonder if anyone's made the "damn another game that won't get to Episode 3" joke yet

It's way too easy a joke for it to not have been done yet

6 hours ago, Rynjin said:

What I mean by "planning to lose" is not that abilities create losing scenarios, but that a lot of characters' abilities are only useful if you are already losing. Sure the ice guy's ult is pretty strong, but mainly as area denial. Same with the wall.

 

If you're on the losing side, they help you "lose less" and on the winning side they help you "win more" but at the end of the day lose less and win more abilities in games are typically poor choices because they don't often convert losses into wins like more general use abilities.

 

For a card game analogy, it's kind of like pre-siding a tech card. This usually isn't going to be a good idea. If a card only works when you're losing, then having it can often convert winnable scenarios into losing ones. Opportunity cost.

 

Because most of the abilities are so tame, and the focus is on gunplay, the meta is likely to quickly calcify into only involving the characters who have either general purpose abilities that are always good (like the fire guy) or giant blowout power that can quickly turn the tide of the fight (...also like the fire guy, or the respawn lady).

 

Since the game is a hybrid of three game modes (CTF, Bomb, and TDM) the characters that excel at the 2/3 of the game that aren't taking place specifically inside the bomb planting rooms are going to be preferred.

I don't think I agree that the roster as a whole has a significant problem with that, though I can easily see it happening as the live service model demands adding and adding to the game. The worst offender of having abilities that are static and considerably less effective outside of a point room is Una, and I think she probably needs rebalancing or even just a different ult. I also think the bird girl and the sand girl might have too much utility spread throughout each phase of the game compared to others, but not to a design-breaking degree (probably just need to be subject to some rebalancing).

Honestly as I was typing up to this I did a lot of thinking and my opinion is probably sliding towards more negative over time, though most of my gripes that make me feel negative towards the game still stem from the micro of the game (game feel, how information is conveyed, quirks with the movement and inventory systems, basically the core FPS part) and not necessarily the macro strategy/gameplay loop. It's possible that I'm not seeing the forest for the trees, in a sense, but I'm honestly terrible at multiplayer FPS strategy and usually lean heavily on mechanics/aim over stuff like shot calling and making metagame plays.

2 hours ago, Gyokuyoutama said:

I literally do not know what the fuck Highguard is.

I just really wanted a new multiplayer FPS game to play but not knowing probably makes you better off in the long run.

1 hour ago, Rynjin said:

A hero shooter with some separate defined roles doesn't really work when the game is so set around a single mechanic: pick up the Shieldbreaker, take it to the enemy base.

I'm not reeeeaaally sure the roles are that separate and defined, though. The abilities are important and there are definitely differences in usefulness from phase to phase and attack/defense but the main method of fighting is still going to be just your shooting which is the same for all the characters. I mean like half the roster is just different flavors of zoning ability, a quarter is just a way to knock down walls without equipment, and then the remaining are actually unique support roles (and then sand girl who I suspect is the selfish solo carry in the roster). Even a team without a zoner can still deny an area with grenades well and a team without a wall breaker has raid items that do it too. I was kind of surprised that the abilities in the game were as "safe" as they were, the most interesting one is the spawn point ult. I do think that the meta will settle around heroes that are best within the CTF phase but I think that would be the case in almost any player count.

I think that 5v5 has merit, but I also suspect it would actually slow down the CTF phase a lot since it's harder to get a clean wipe and gain momentum with two more players and you'd see those rounds go to the overtime auto-raid more often. Potentially a 5v5 version would have better stalemate breaking abilities since characters could be more specialized but that's just speculation.

I think that they wanted every character to have merit on offensive and defensive sides (that's why ice guy's ult is actually probably one of the better offensive tools imo despite being a "defensive" class) BECAUSE of their intended design where the gunfighting is the main focus of combat with abilities supplementing it. I also think that the CTF side is where that's strongest since pretty much all abilities are fairly close ranged and you can just mount and run away pretty much instantly from most abilities including ults. So I'm not super sold on the roles creating losing scenarios, even though I can agree that there's a gradient of utility on that front

Played a bit of Highguard. A couple alone and a couple with a stack. I'll just kind of vomit out my first impressions. Definitely missed a few things but this post is already way longer than the average one I make anyway.

I think it's pretty interesting as a game format, and I think there was a decent amount of refinement that was done to it in order to make it work better, but man can the game DRAG on. I can't imagine what prototyping games were like when a back-and-forth game will be 35+ minutes long, before they shortcutted a ton of things and tweaked the base health systems.

I think this game is kind of hopeless without communication, since the format has so many avenues to winning/losing you're never going to be on the same page as someone without comms. This is a pretty big problem but it's a problem a ton of team based FPS games have so idk on that front. It probably has it worse than a lot of other ones even when a ton of streamlining to systems like looting and economy have been done, but it's too early to say. If Finals (a game I consider a bit on the goofy side without a particularly competitive game format) ranked gets people as heated as I've seen, jeeeeezas Ranked in this game is going to be a fucking bloodbath.

The base maps are very small and once people memorize spawn areas I think this game will have a spawn camping problem in situations where attackers have a big momentum play, but maybe that's shrugged off as intentional / the game ending faster due to a skill difference, not sure. It's gonna feel terrible to be on the receiving end tho

There's a lot of tiny issues I have with game feel, incoming damage sound cues are way too low and hitsounds aren't prominent enough for my tastes, makes fighting feel floaty like Overwatch did for me where you're not even sure how you received damage or how steadily you're dealing it outside of shield cracks. Despite how much they hyped up the sound design of weapons, I feel like a lot of them are a bit too airsoft sounding to me. Balancewise some weapons seem blatantly better than others but it's too early to say on that front. 

There's not an option to switch between crouch toggle and crouch hold. This is a game made by the fucking makers of Titanfall, and they didn't give that option. Did I miss it? How the fuck did this happen?

I don't like the mounts, but they're probably a necessary evil for the map design they opted for. Better than vehicles would be at least, vehicles in FPS games by and large suck (former PS2 infantry veteran here btw). It's extremely easy to accidentally your speed if you're not careful with what movement keys you press.

There's a lot of bugs that I think people will point to in bad faith as an example of why the game itself is bad, but I will say a few of them fucked up the experience for me. One was being assaulted by a "you're out of the battle go back!" when using the Pharah ult that makes you fly up and shoot stuff while in a cave. One was the loot goblin passive that summons a guy with loot, but it put it in the ceiling and locked me out of a high tier armor loot. The worst one is spawning off a zipline during a raid fucking kneecaps you if you are holding basically any movement key as your character will leave the zipline at 1000mph and crater  for all their HP value.

There's several "this shit again" issues that literally existed in Apex Legends, they had to go back and fix them, and they're just back in this game too as if nobody learned a lesson. Ziplining is faster if you spam jump while doing it, several damaging abilities/items don't have visual differences between friendly and enemy despite one killing you and another not killing you, scans are annoying and at times unavoidable if you're spawning during a raid, etc. Also no pellet spread hitmarkers which is sad, I liked that feature in Apex.

I like Leon Kennedy but most of the other characters are flatlines for me. They'd need to be built up like they did with Apex characters, but who knows if that will work out. Generally don't care for any aspect of the aesthetic of this game, but I already said that back when the first trailer dropped.

I suspect a lot of people's perf issues are due to the options menu for it sucking and not telling you to restart the game after changing them when you NEED to do that, but I'm not certain on that. There were still a few areas during multi-ult spams where my 3090 couldn't keep up when all things except textures were set to "low" which is... not ideal, but may be me needing to put everything INCLUDING textures on low, idk.

I definitely don't agree with a lot of common complaints like the maps being too big and/or needing higher player counts; the "playable area" of the no-man's-land is very focused by the objective and care package drops, and there are a LOT of things that compress it further like tele-to-base and spawn-on-flag-carrier mechanics. I feel like a lot of these are coming from people who wandered around aimlessly instead of even attempting to form a strategy for the looting phase. The base maps would absolutely not hold up to more than 3v3, they're very compact as is and it'd just be a clusterfuck without a ton of redesigns. 

The general bandwagon hate isn't really deserved, but it's also partially the studio's fault for releasing such a bad trailer and then saying nothing to control damage while people stewed in vitriol for two months. But if anyone actually thought that Half-Life 3 has a chance of being released still, and is mad that Highguard's trailer was there instead... lol, lmao even

Overall this game is rough around the edges without being unplayable, but I think it's also going to bounce off the casual audience due to the main game format being full of things that get in the way of jumping into a game and just shooting people until you win. I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. I was surprised at how rough some things were for this team riding the laurels of making these popular/beloved shooters. I think the match concept is kind of an interesting amalgamation of a lot of different adjacent FPS game styles, but I have concerns about how it will play when people all know what they're doing (currently nobody knows and games are usually fast steamrolls or extremely long stalemates), and no individual phase is really that "perfect" type of game that I love a lot, despite the blending coming together well enough.

I pick 16 with no knowledge of a single character on the chart, crazy meta position if 15 is actually vacant

Seems about right. They've been making more mistakes with packaging and sending the wrong products, it feels like it happens every set now in one way or another. Not really surprising when they're printing sets back to back to back without stopping.

I've seen tinfoil hat theories that a lot of these "oops we shipped a set that hasn't released yet" incidents are to drum up news about upcoming sets or do spoilers ahead of time, but I think it's easier to attribute it to incompetence still

Had a dream about a first episode of an anime. Vampires living in a secluded manor were being attacked by some kind of unknown force/assailant (stylized like these shadow figures in long cloaks that had crazy long bladed weapons, kind of ambiguous if they were normal people, supernatural creatures, or something else entirely) and the main character was trying to figure out what was behind it. Found a human girl wandering the gardens of the manor as the cliffhanger for the next episode.

What was funny is the MC was a boy who must have been turned at a younger age, and he was totally a genderbent mashup of Neru from Blue Archive and Mao from Gakuen Idolmaster. So a vampire mashup of two of my favorite characters, that's like triple corvbait.

You can see an artist's hastily sketched rendition below:

3 hours ago, Idiot Cube said:

Hey at least you got mentioned. I guess Huff doesn't appreciate my concise, no-nonsense reviewing style.

He's just putting together a monumental counter-reply I'm sure.

5 hours ago, Silent said:

looked up Deadzone and it got me itching for an FPS roguelike. Only one I can think of is Heavy Bullets which I haven't played in over a decade. Or BPM I guess but that has other shit going on. Might look into this in a sale or something? Seems like Rynjin liked the co op aspect at least, maybe that makes it more palatable.

Deadzone hits a nice quality level that a lot of other similar games don't manage to quite reach. Lots of little gamefeel aspects mainly, but it adds up imo. I enjoy the varied roster of weapons and how pretty much every single one is viable, and I think I prefer the weapon system in this game to the more borderlands-inspired random gen weapons since they have more focused design and defined roles/styles. A lot of the nitpicks I have don't really come up until you get into the higher difficulties anyway. Actually one of the bigger complaints that is relevant to the first runthrough is some enemies having attacks that hit your FPS directly, but that's probably an issue with my settings being too high.

On 1/1/2026 at 9:34 PM, Moby said:

- Hylics:

What in the goddamn?

[...]

- Hylics 2:

What in the goddamn?
Definitely an evolution, at least.

I love this too

On 1/1/2026 at 9:34 PM, Moby said:

- Corruption of Champions:

God I swear I could never reach the end of this game. I feel like there's a general lurch where I couldn't keep focus to actually progress around the swamp area every time.

Actually since I'm on that topic I have a very poor handle on what R-18 games I've played due to the acquisition methods being so varied and basically none of them being Steam (well they might be on Steam but uh... Yeah... you know how that is), but I'll talk about the ones I know I played this year (there's no way I can remember when any of these were released so I won't even try):

pr0n zone:

I know I missed several but I can't be assed to remember. At least two of the three I can remember were good.