A 1970 Corvette

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!

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.

I swear to god I was going to find an example not in a franchise I'm locked in for already but my usual anime watching routine is checking a bunch of episode 1s the first week of the season so I usually only find stuff when it's already started

1 hour ago, Moby said:

And I think I cheesed the last level because I could shoot everyone with the sniper through the invisible wall.

I swear it's intended since the walk up to that wall gives you a ton of sniper ammo, but it feels like a cheese at the same time. I think there are a few other walls you can do that with but it's such a set up for that one in particular.

1 hour ago, Moby said:

The gore wasn't that amazing. Enemies explode into gibblets, but they come out so clean and with these random colors that they look like LEGO characters exploding.

I thought the exact same thing, perhaps the unnatural type of gore fucks with people more but the lack of blood makes it a bit cartoony even putting aside the anime aesthetic for me.

1 hour ago, Moby said:

Lack of tutorials for some mechanics.

I remember having to google how to get out of the mech. And actually, there's a powerup you get that says it lets you fire grenades from the bolter shotgun, but it could always do that? What was up with that?

1 hour ago, Moby said:

I get one upgrade that says that if I "over doze" on O2, I get bullet time. I use an O2 canister at max energy and... nothing happens?

bro I had the same issue and just never used it my first runthrough, I thought I was going crazy. I think the thing is your O2 meter has to go over a certain threshold that is NOT your current max O2 (which is limited by your hunger level) so if you're letting hunger slip you may need multiple O2 canisters to trigger the bullet time. I just know it finally worked after I mashed the button when I was about to die to a boss that I hit a reload on.

The bullet time slows a bunch of your functions down as well so other than avoiding bullet spam it doesn't even help you with anything. 

1 hour ago, Moby said:

When you reset a level, some items don't return. I noticed that because when I was doing the tutorial, no bloodbags or O2 canisters were spawning until I died.

Pretty sure playing on Hard makes supply spawns have a chance to just not spawn. It's kind of weird since you still will end up overstocked with ammo almost no matter what. The upgrades you get from secret levels are absurdly OP man, I've never seen such OP stuff in an FPS that you just keep for the rest of the entire run.

1 hour ago, Moby said:

WHY is there a hunger mechanic??

yeah uhhh I have no clue, it's not like it's poorly implemented but you also just get food bonuses lying around all the time so it's just like a weird button you may have to press every five minutes to re-expand your max HP.

Start a denial of service campaign where you just attempt a login on someone often enough that if they get this issue they can just never log in.

I don't have a full picture of how Microsoft's fucked up byzantine login flows but from my job reviewing logs it seems like any authentication-related change on any kind of often-used Microsoft account generates like at least double digit login failures pretty much no matter what you do so maybe this is tied into that. Though that's for a local deployment with Active Directory accounts so if this is just cloud Outlook it may not be related at all.

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