Presence

I noticed this on steam today: The Original Strife: Veteran Edition

For most of us, duke3d was the next big thing after doom, and of course it compares very favorably. Duke has better design with some real variety and a lot of use of color, as opposed to doom's castle castle castle bloody castle bloody castle tilesets. The sounds were crisper and the weapons felt a lot more punchy. The build engine was also much more inclusive of 'little touches', from interactive sprites to special events.

I heard with Half Life motion sickness has to do with a nonstandard FOV. Half life 2 caused me and many others horrible nausea on the airboat level. I'm the mirror of you for what causes it though. Watching someone else isn't bad. When playing, it's far worse. I think it happens because I'll be inputting commands, expecting certain output, bang into something, and then the screen jerks all over the place from formerly smooth movement. Dino run was particularly bad for me for some reason. You'd think I'd hate super hexagon, but no, love that game.

I'm not saying you should or should not, but weren't you going to do a follow up piece after 10 game dungeons?

You know, I think the version of Flash might cause horrible lag. For example, Homestar runner lags on my hex core machine, but was smooth on the lab computers at my college years ago. It might be that an older version would be lag free.

As opposed to non-escapist fantasy. I've actually read non-esacapist fantasy. Like, where the heroine and her spunky sidekick die of thirst in the ventilation ducts while escaping their oppressive society. That's a real published story. I avoid stories like that like the plague, unless the antagonist is some kind of walking pile of charisma.

Kongregate has a 'cinematic mode' for their flash games, which blacks the website and increases the flash window size, and they do have Union City. I'm not sure how this would influence recording though.

Crystalis was the game that wowed me the most when I first played it. It was the first action/rpg I played, and they did a great job of avoiding a lot of the worst jrpg moon logic. Wounded npc? Just use the same healing item you'd use on yourself. Imposter npc? Stab it. Between the disguise spell and the forward moving plot, there was quite a lot of bonus dialogue too, and you'd even get special Easter eggs if you tried the right things. The only bad things were having to level grind to be able to damage bosses and having to gear swap to use special abilities. Oh, and they gave enough of a damn to make a real intro and a real ending. Play the nes version, not the gameboy color one.

My best friend once figured out a Game Genie code for SMB3 that flagged the air as water so you could swim through it. That was a blast. Sadly you died when touching actual water.

When I was a stupid brat I thought that it looked like a stupid Stephen King ripoff. Now that I'm a stupid adult I think of it more as a very decent Lovecraft and David Lynch mashup. I've seen about eight Carpenter films, and this and The Thing were the only ones I really liked. The man frustrates the hell out of me. He makes exactly the kinds films I want to see. They tend to have pretty intriguing concepts and some good black humor mixed in, so I keep watching them, and then most of the time I don't like them as a whole.

*Happy campers* are right to like the game, but it's not obscure. It regularly shows up on top games lists, the fandom is loyal, the remake is faithfully done and freely available, and it hasn't aged too badly since it's got pixel graphics and great music.

I always thought this comic was a pretty interesting take on why people make low budget horror in the first place.

The Mist is more of a novella than full novel. The movie is remarkably faithful to it, although the novella closes with I preferred the movie's end; I think it shows respect for the viewer when characters aren't saved from hard choices by ambiguity or deus ex machina. Poltergeist...I watched that three times when I was like eight and I liked it, but I didn't think of it as a particularly 'scary' movie, except for the Honestly I didn't find it any more unsettling than a comedy like Ghostbusters. Both had one memorably scary scene and end with the evil going away till the sequel.

I may or may not do Patreon. My main concern with it is what extras I can offer without it digging too much into time and sacrificing other things. Besides, I'm still stretching the donation from earlier this year as far as I can. I thought even considering Patreon before finishing FM people might seem as greedy, although I really am making the money count. Well, you could just set it up quietly and not initially mention it except putting a link on the donations page. That solves most of your concerns right off the bat. It's not asking if you're not asking. As for rewards, not everyone needs them. People donate for many reasons. I don't know what percentage felt the same, but I donated mostly to show solidarity against Machinima and in gratitude for already created content. In addition, I like FM, but I actually prefer the game dungeon. I know you made some promises to help spur donates, so certainly you should keep them, but they weren't why I gave money. I just like Patreon because I can set it and forget it.

Hey, Ross, I'll bet you 1 dollar per video submission you can't put up a Patreon page. Edit: I actually have no idea how that parses out, I'm a bit tired. I'll commit to give you money for each video is what I'm saying.

I think I still have the Diary of a mad? man somewhere.

The average hdd size in 1999 was probably roughly 2 gigs. The savegame from the video had 2.82 megs of data, but due to cluster tip waste was using 7.92 megs of disc space. So those 20 or so savegames Ross has would've eaten something like 5% of an average hard drive with unusable empty space alone. I mostly loved this episode and personally like the game dungeons to run long. I don't what the consensus is, but if I wanted some two minute "review" consisting of quick cuts and lots of swearing I can get those anywhere. I vastly prefer these longer and more thoughtful commentaries on obscure games. If you think I wouldn't watch an hour long commentary about Below the Root, you'd be very much mistaken.

There is no compelling reason a save should need more than one file, except perhaps to hold player generated content such as screenshots. I guess maybe if the individual files were split by game area because they were somehow getting too big to hold in memory and were loaded on area transition. This is just a crazy outlandish idea. Large numbers of files would create all the problems of unfixable fragmentation and waste the tips of more clusters, both of which would have mattered during the time period involved. Even a bad programmer should know not to do this. I have to imagine someone had a brain fart and thought that exploding the data would somehow auto-magically make fragmentation not matter, or some debugging flag was left on when it shipped. Wouldn't have been the first time.

It's used in the Berlin Interpretation, which seems to be the interpretation you're arguing for and that I think is too exclusive. I also argue that cheese isn't an anvil because purple is more dense.

I feel like one could use the same kind of logic to say Super Mario 64 isn't actually a platformer. I did read one argument about roguelike combat needing to be non-modal that I rather liked.

You uh, should say what those aspects are.

It was next on my list of games...till I finally played Kotor. Now I'm much less likely to buy it. If Kotor's insufferable morality system represents Bioware at its best, I'm not playing any more Bioware.

It's a procedurally generated game with random maps, encounters, and item drops, widely different starting builds that aren't well balanced, turn based movement, combat that is effectively turn based, a save system that doesn't work against permadeath, and is user tagged as roguelike in steam. Call it a "roguelite" if you must be pedantic, but my terminology is not very wrong, if it's wrong at all. The only meaningful differences are that it's not tile based and I don't think you can't dig through your inventory for consumables that grant last minute attempts to save yourself. It is very like Rogue.

Assuming by "overrated" we mean "popular/common/selling well" and "definitely bad" 1. Dragon Warrior One. I have no idea how kids ever got though it. I think it still holds the record for grindiest game I ever played. It took about 8-12 hours going in a circle in the last castle to get the exp to reach the dragon lord. The series improves, but one was horrid. Two was ok. Three was good. Four was a flat out classic, and I must say Nara and Mara's outerworld music was quite beautiful for a NES game. 2. Pitfall I. It's just maze wandering till the timer runs out. Admittedly that was in and of itself fancy stuff for the period, but I still didn't see the point. Pitfall II on the other hand was among my very favorite Atari games. 3. FTL. It's beautiful and has variety, but it's the paragon of everything that's wrong in Roguelikes. It boils down too much to rote memorization and luck to justify the rave reviews. 4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I finished this for the first time like four days ago. Kind of wish I hadn't. When people praise it, I usually seem to hear "It's a completely finished game." Well, I guess. It does give the full Star Wars experience. That being said...I don't know how anyone can tolerate the ethics system or the dialogue choices, especially towards the end. Most of the endgame conversations I really wanted a dialoge option: 1. "You're being stupid. Why are you being so stupid?" After being dismayed by both Kotor and the Baldur's gate games I may refuse to ever play another Bioware game. 5. The Longest Journey. I wanted to love this game so much. I got like a third of the way though. It was brutally trite to me. College level liberal arts essay trite. Let me guess the plot: Actually half/full dragon or something, no meaningful plot branching, can't choose to help the "bad" guys, some deus ex machina at the end keeps her out of a light beam for a thousand years? The cosmos really, really loves you, just not enough to do anything concrete for anyone? Am I close or should I give it a second chance? 6. Double Dragon (nes). A fantastic opening theme and a pretty good level up system did not compensate for the lameassed traps near the end game. Being perhaps the single glitchiest game for the nes does win it some nostalgia points though. 7. Star Control 2. Nah, I'm just yanking your chain. Star Control 2 is one of the greats. 8. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade game. I'm not saying I didn't like it as a kid, but it was a quarter sucker and the actual gameplay was meh. 9. Magicka. Some games are objectively bad in their single player context; this is one of them. That's an approach that doesn't really leave much room for fun debate though. 10. Minecraft. I don't like games without a win condition, but that'd be more of a scholarly debate thing, i.e. is a game you can't win a game etc. A pile of legos can bring much fun, but that doesn't make them a well designed game. Underrated games: Almost anything by Epic Megagames.

I'd give you a can of beans a month on patreon. Just saying.