dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

My account is so old I have (or had, before they normalized the format) a four digit steam ID. I “owned” Half Life 2 for like four months before it released thanks to getting a code free in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro back in the day. For a short and glorious flash of time in the summer of 2004, I was guaranteed a copy of the most hotly anticipated game ever, even though nobody could play it yet, and also owned an example of the fastest video card on the planet. Damned if I didn’t mow a fuckton of lawns and reinstall Windows and Outlook an a horde of septuagenarians’ computers to afford that card.

And no, they do not stop asking about your age.

Neat, but.

Even HL: Alyx left us with just as much of a cliffhanger as the end of HL2 Episode 2…

Given that I’ve consistently pirated Windows since I was tall enough to reach the keyboard, I am positive have never been in compliance with the Microsoft ToS. Somehow, I’m not too worried about it.

Sure, but it’s up from just a couple of years ago when Linux was sub 2%, and was hovering around only 1.5% in, say, 2020.

Y’all need to point me towards one of those tiny Linux systems. I have an old no-longer-bricked Toshiba Satellite that somebody gave me and I got it to boot again, so I slapped Mint on it to see how I liked it since I’ve never messed with that distro before. The only problem is this sucker is a dog, it’s only got 2 gigs of RAM and a pokey 5400 RPM platter drive in it. The thing sits there and thrashes swap constantly even when it’s doing nothing, and when Mint is creating one of its automated system image rollback things it’s completely unusable. I’m surprised the laptop platters don’t escape their casing and bore into the Earth like a drill bit.

I found that it will… eventually… load and run the latest FreeCAD build and once it’s going it’s actually not bad (awful screen resolution and single touch only trackpad notwithstanding). But getting there when taken altogether takes about 20 minutes…

I’ve always considered the six switch variant more iconic, but my six switch one is also the one I’ve got that doesn’t work. So there’s that.

INB4 “But Mario Bros. DX already exists.”

I dig how the graphics have been reworked and tile size reduced to provide roughly the same field of view as on the NES.

I think the best way to approach Spiritfarer is as a somewhat cryptic expression if its core conceit: Thanklessly doing a bunch of repetitive chores for dying relatives who mostly act still like dicks towards you for your trouble, and bending over backwards to structure your time and living space around catering to them. The only reward for hard work is more work, and ever more specific and petulant demands. This inevitably evolves to all of your obligations piling up to the point that there literally aren’t enough hours in the day and your progress in your own life (or your boat) grinds to a halt. And when they finally die you’re stuck dealing with all their stuff, forever.

It’s an interactive metaphor. And while hilarious when taken as a whole, perhaps from the perspective of it all being an elaborate troll, it actually makes for a kind of lousy video game.

As much as the rest of the game is an exercise in tedium and complete disrespect of the player’s time and intelligence, the thunderstorm event in Spiritfarer is pretty rad, and definitely one of its high points.

At least the first time. The charm wears off after the 9th or 10th time you do it just because you need to grind for the one material you can get from it, and only from it.

The cartridge connector is not proprietary. It’s just a commodity off the shelf card edge socket.

Google Opinion Rewards app.

Unless Google Googles you. I used to use this, but I have apparently been permanently silently banned from it with no explanation and no recourse. I did nothing wrong or disingenuous as far as I can tell; It simply kept asking me – presumably based on my location – how my experience was with retailer X, Y, or Z was. Always stores which I had not visited but simply gone near, and I truthfully answered that I did not go to those places and it’d give me thirty cents or whatever, but then one day it just stopped offering me surveys at all, apparently forever.

So I guess this flags the magic Google algorithm that I am worthless as a consumer and the app no just longer does anything on any of my devices anymore. It loads, it displays, but it never presents me any surveys. It squatted there on my phone completely silent for six months, so I uninstalled it. What a crock.

Also, I’m sure they’re spying on you all the time through that app. Obviously it tracks your location, and Satan himself only knows what else it reports back to them. I think I’d give it a miss at this point. I’d rather pay $2 of real money for some app versus having Google snooping around behind me all the time just to get something for “free.”

But yeah, Torque Pro is worth it. I use it all the time. So is Alpine Quest. Those are the only two paid apps I ever use on my phone.

Shitpost level reply: Any of the Gradius games.

One of the power ups you can buy is literally to dispense friends (options) which follow you around and shoot alongside you. You can crank out as many as you want, at least within reason. And in some of the Parodius games they are literally little dudes. Or depending on your character, little octopi, cats, or penguins.

Obviously no one’s seen it happen first hand. It’s a projection based on what’s known about the materials and how they’re made. Burned CD-R’s have definitely been out in the real world for people to learn how short their lifespans can be, though.

Nobody could “prove,” for instance, that the Voyager 1 could stay operational in deep space for 47+ years when it was launched in 1977, but the engineers could still predict and they launched it anyway, and it did. I don’t think your argument really holds water.

Don’t conflate a mastered CD with an aluminum data layer with a recordable CD-R or CD-RW, which use organic dyes that have a significantly shorter lifespan.

A properly manufactured CD can last 200+ years if it’s stored in a dry environment free of UV exposure and high levels of moisture.

Even a quality CD-R can’t really be expected to retain all of its data integrity for much more than 10 years.

Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software.

Worse, this thing from Sony was on music CD’s and not even games.

The Sony Rootkit debacle is one of the reasons that I still will not do business with Sony in any of its guises, for any reason, no matter the price. And believe me, I have a long memory.

I would wager someone with an MBA got their knickers in a twist about “PC being the most pirated platform,” did that thing like in cartoons where the dollar signs in their eyes turn into cents signs instead, and decided to just 86 the whole thing because they were deathly afraid that a couple hundred people who never in a million years would have paid for it in the first place would download it off of Kazaa or whatever was popular back then instead of giving Rockstar any money.

Just a guess.

In that vein, maybe Power Washing Simulator?

The new port is not perfectly fine if it randomly crashes to desktop all the time.

Oh, and I also forgot to mention that several of the achievements are still bugged and don’t pop, which has been a known issue since release and still hasn’t been fixed. So yeah. Bethesda is gonna do Bethesda stuff.

You can still have a “vanilla” experience using other source ports. That’s what, e.g. Chocolate Doom is for. Except it may stay running on your PC for more than eleven consecutive minutes at a time. So if that’s what turns your crank, go for it. You’re right – not everything needs to be GZDoom and Brutal. But other options definitely exist, and I recommend any of them over what was shoveled out officially. You can even have a pretty durn vanilla experience in GZDoom if you want to, while still retaining much broader support for mods than the official release. Me personally, I can’t do mouse control with no vertical look. It made me seasick in the 90’s, and it still does now. That’s a deal breaker. I was a keyboard-only player in the DOS era.

I will also add that if you are going to play the new Sigil expansions or Legacy of Rust, they’re virtually impossible on Ultra Violence and Nightmare without mouselook. These maps were clearly designed with a modern source port including mouse aim in mind, and this was apparently shitcanned later in development for some unfathomable reason. Like, why even leave the crosshair there, then?

I will also add to this that there is absolutely no reason to buy the “new” re-release of Doom and Doom 2 that’s out on Steam now except to rip the IWADS out of it to put in a source port – any other source port – rather than the garbage it comes with. And only do so if you want the new Legacy of Rust episodes. Everything else is, er, readily available online. And has been for decades.

The new NEX based engine these run on now is maddeningly inferior to basically every open source Doom engine port currently available. In addition to not supporting vertical mouse look at all, “for authenticity,” (but by default it slaps a crosshair on your screen, which the original didn’t have…) it also looks like garbage on modern displays and crashes constantly which is something that baffles me. Running Doom ought to be a solved problem by now in 2024, but this fucker crashes on me more now than it did on my 486 back in 1994. It’s buggier than a trailer park mattress in a swamp.

I recommend GZDoom, personally. You can add Brutal Doom to make the gameplay experience significantly more bombastic as well, if that sort of thing appeals to you.

Well, as others have noted I think “cozy” is probably a loaded term in this context. However, I will throw these recommendations into the ring also: The first couple of Serious Sam games, and also Painkiller. Both of them are firmly in the “murdering tons of dudes” genre, and are significantly less tactical than the likes of Medal of Honor/Call of Duty/Battlefield.

That is to say, not at all.

There is none of that sucking your thumb to regenerate health, popping out from the chest-high walls inexplicably strewn everywhere taking potshots with your gun like a hillbilly jack-in-the-box. Rather, their gameplay loop involves herding and managing a massive horde of enemies, prioritizing your targets, and keeping yourself moving. Like a sheep dog with a chaingun.

People try to call the original Doom games a horde shooter. They really aren’t. These two, however, definitely are.