Alyxx Thorne

I am!

I don't know, never seen that logo before.

I should be more active lol

Personally I feel both Half-Life 1 and 2 are essentially gameplay driven games. The story is integrated fully into the gameplay itself with the fact there are no cutscenes, no text to read, and the only exposition you get are via characters you meet. While I enjoy the story in these games, I do feel it takes a bit of a backseat to the gameplay most of the time. When you hear people talking about Half-Life 2, it's seldom the story that's the talking point. It's usually the physics engine, the puzzles, the various gameplay elements and such. I think it's because there really isn't much of a story. Things just happen as part of the gameplay and the story is more just there to provide set pieces and give the levels a structure and purpose.

I'm not sure if Ross covered this exact topic, but definitely covered the topic of whether having games on a service like Steam, Origin, Uplay etc. would count as owning a game, when the game would become unplayable if Valve ever decided to remove Steam for whatever reason. Nothing lasts forever, and that's the issue here. Selling games on Steam wouldn't be THAT far fetched considering Steam already has a firmly established second market where people can trade. I think it boils down to more of an issue with Valve being unwilling to let people actually have ownership over what they buy on Steam. This is why I originally supported GOG as most of their games are DRM free. But with their Galaxy launcher now being a thing, it seems they are going the same route as Valve. As far as I know you can't resell games on any modern game distribution service.

It seems Valve doesn't really care about TF2 anymore, which is a shame considering it's one of the most highly played multiplayer FPSs of all time.

Well it would make sense for a scientist to do stuff like that. I can just imagine his brain is just trying to make sense of the world and he's using science to just... cope.

https://www.gog.com/game/normality A pretty obscure adventure game that I don't see enough people talking about. It was kinda interesting for the time for utilizing a 3D raycasting engine similar to Duke 3D or Doom, but with a traditional point-and-click interface. It plays a bit like System Shock for those who have played it, just without any actual shooting. Some of the puzzles can be a bit hard to figure out, which is one of the reasons I think this game never got much traction. The CGI has also aged in both the best and worst ways, with it being a fairly early game to utilize motion capture and... it looks about as janky as you imagine it would. Excellent voice acting though, and the graphics are the real show stealer. Highly worth checking out.

Loved this video. I never heard about this game and it's easy to see why. Seems very middle-of-the-road in terms of those mid 2000s games that flooded the market. I was getting strong Final Fantasy vibes from the writing too, which is not a knock against Final Fantasy but its writing tends to be very... like that.

I've gotten the ENFJ-T Protagonist every time I've done this test. Which is interesting because I don't see myself as extroverted that much, even if I clearly am.

Bumping threads is fine if you have something to add. We're not locking threads here as per Ross's instruction, so more discussion is always welcome. I agree though, I don't think it came from bats. I'm not sure about whether it was artificially created either, there's a huge lack of evidence for that. It does seem to have come from Chinese caged animals from what I originally gathered, so that seems more likely. The conditions these animals are in are horrendous, with lots of possibility for viruses to fester. Thing is we've seen coronaviruses before. It's not a new thing. It's just that this one is different enough that we didn't have any good defense against it, but the vaccines definitely helped with that.

8/10 New avatar, rate it

Welcome back!

Bright (Netflix) Aside from the racism being a bit blatant, I really enjoyed it as a Shadowrun'esque look at how society might be like if magic was real. But it seems most people just agree it's a bad movie.

What an absolute classic album.

Lethal Guitar is a programmer who has taken on the task of making a modern source port of Duke Nukem 2. For those who do not know about it, Duke Nukem 2 was the game that came directly before Duke Nukem 3D and like the first Duke Nukem, it's a side scroller. It has Duke kicking the ass of a race of aliens called the Rigelatins. After being abducted while being interviewed on a talkshow, he is imprisoned by the aliens who want to use his brain due to Duke's combat prowess. However, thanks to his explodo-molar, Duke breaks out of his cell and starts kicking ass. The source port adds a lot of quality-of-life features to the game, such as the ability to quicksave wherever you want, proper widescreen support (even up to ultra widescreen) which expands the view considerably. Another new feature added is smooth scrolling, which removes the jittery movement of the original game and makes the game feel a lot more smooth and modern. It currently has builds for Windows, Mac and Linux and is still in development. You can check it out at https://github.com/lethal-guitar/RigelEngine/releases

I think Fallout 4 is an excellent game. The combat in particular feels extremely satisfying and I love the crafting you can do. The mod scene is also thriving and you can tailor a LOT of the stuff in the game or add your own content. That being said I do not think it works well as a Fallout game. The writing is pretty bad, and the look of the game just doesn't fit into the established canon. But yeah, it's definitely not a bad game.

Even when buying physical copies, in most cases those games are tied to a service like Uplay, Origin or Steam... We're kinda screwed at this point.

Also bought Tiny Tina's Wonderlands on Epic, as well as Rayman Legends and Ultracore on Switch.

Please try not to doublepost or make posts purely to post links to your stuff.

I've more or less permanently switched to Linux and so far gaming has not been a problem for me. Most modern games run fine with Proton/Wine through Steam or Heroic Games Launcher for Epic and GOG. I run Windows XP in a VM for some older games that either don't have Linux source ports or straight up refuses to work through Wine but that's a very small number of games. Naturally you won't get the same performance as on Windows so if that's a big concern then running Windows games natively is of course the better option. But I just can't stand Windows anymore so I'd rather take the performance hit since the compatibility has become so high at this point.

Technically not a giveaway as it is a free game, but fair enough.

Duke Nukem II via the Rigel Engine source port on Linux.

Redneck Rampage