FH1 was absolutely brilliant. Compared with a racing wheel, it genuinely felt like the Forza Motorsport series had been let loose, literally.
Each subsequent FH release has just been… cool, I guess? The next four iterations weren’t really groundbreaking and it felt like map packs than new games.
The soundtrack has consistently been absolutely banging though
Yeah nah. Fuck you.
For context, this is worth a watch for some post Unreal and pre-GoW Epic MegaGames, and CliffyB’s autobiography is worth a read too.
I used to like Tim Sweeney. A guy who rewarded hard work and loyalty, and when a big paycheque guaranteed the company’s future.
Now, it’s just a content stripping studio that fucks over any notion of creativity or loyalty. Fortnite - a really decent shooter at it’s core - is just awash with lazy crossover MTX now, and I’m still fucking salty about how Save The World was left to die even when Battle Royale was bringing in megabucks.
To add insult to injury, there’s a trove of early MegaGames titles begging for a 3D entry, or even just another decent Unreal game that could make the world forget about HL3 for five minutes.
Fuck you Epic. There’s enough money and ideas to go around. They’re just not staying in the company and going into greedy bastard’s pockets.
Hey this looks brilliant actually. Like Dear Esther in hell. Nice.
Speaking of graffiti, some of the bantz scrawled on the walls of Thank Goodness You’re Here made me laugh. Great waste of a few hours.
Russian Roulette.
Test for nat20’s by using a semiautomatic handgun.
I can’t say there’s anything that really jumps out at me aside from maybe the presumably mirrored Super Mario World…
…but Argick running a non-Sonic game? Sure I’m up for that!
Sorry friend.
If your data was occupationally-sensitive or renders you vulnerable to financial ruination, it’s time to move to a recovery phase and see if modern data recovery specialists can work their voodoo.
Remember: never run experimental commands (you or a GenAI) in a live environment. See how it breaks things in a test environment first - if it shits itself, you may even get to learn how to fix it before running the instruction on live data.
Anecdote time! A good friend of mine drove his car to a mutual colleague’s place once because the wipers were about as much use as two chicken breasts on metal poles. He says to our colleague “Hey Foxy, I hear you’re good with cars, can you fix these wipers for me? The rubber seems to be in good nick but it’s not clearing anything”.
“Sure thing,” Foxy proudly announces, “I’ll get to work”.
Foxy strips the wipers down, one component at a time, before dusting his hands off and walking away.
“What’s going on, Foxy? The thing’s still in bits!” my pal says.
“No idea,” says Foxy, “not a fucking Scooby mate” and goes back inside, leaving his wipers and actuating motor in about fourteen pieces on the roadside.
So much for being good with cars.
git log --no-merge
Slightly off topic but:
Check this performance out and jump to 1:55 for a real treat for Q2 fans.
edit: mega flashy lights warning
I know it’s a cult classic, but I couldn’t get my head around the film, it didnt enjoy it at all. Perhaps it’s because I went in with the desire to see another J-horror in the vein of Ring or Ju-On or Dark Water etc.
I’m going to treat myself to an Ito box set after Christmas and read the visual novels instead I think, give it another bash.
Perhaps it’s because I grew up with adventure puzzle games and point’n’click games, but GameFAQs was always the nuclear option for me.
I much preferred the Universal Hint System - an approach more suited to nudging you towards figuring out the answer for yourself.
There’s no denying that it was (and is) a fantastic resource though. Hell, I’ve even written a guide myself. One of the last bastions of the 90s and 2000s WWW experience.
I got into Poets of the Fall in a big way after Late Goodbye. Their work is fantastic and they’re brilliant live.
I’m glad Remedy have stuck with them over the years, the Herald of Darkness song from Alan Wake II was a banger.
Looks like Petersen has been biding his time and has decided to go on the offensive. Why, I’m not sure - but good on him.
A few weeks ago he popped up a video on his YouTube Short feed which covers it well.
For those of a particular vintage, Petersen isn’t particularly popular because of his… experimental approach to Doom mapping. His YouTube is great through - he sets the record straight on Doom; speaks openly about the gaming industry; and also delves deep into tabletop gaming if that’s your thing.
I do quite like the self-awareness of Bubsy 3D being absolute donkey tonk. The redrawn sprites in 3D looks cool, let’s see if they learn the lessons from thirty-ish years ago.
Brilliant game.
Worth playing with the PS1 Descent soundtrack too for a different experience (or Descent Maximum as it was across the pond), it got me in to Type O-Negative too.
There’s been a pivot away from “classic” speedruns games over the last few years - I get that Doom or Sonic 2 or Goldeneye or other 90s games aren’t guaranteed a place every year, but it seems like the games that kicked off the speedrun scene are often overlooked these days.
That said, there is Quake, and there is SMB3 where I dont know who the runner is but that couch is a banger.
I was looking forward to seeing Still Wakes The Deep runs, but I find them really… unexciting, I think is the sentiment. Like the 2016 Doom onwards, the runs are technically outstanding, but there’s a lot of walking on invisible geometry with collision detection, or random tricks like railboosting in Doom that seems to break a game. I get that that is an entirely subjective opinion though, maybe I’m more suited to No Major Glitches runs!
I enjoyed that game. Not sure how it was ever pushed out as a full release rather than a Net Yaroze style special, but fair play to them.
Kurushi (as it was known in the UK and Europe) is like rocking horse shit now. A nice little treasure if you find one in your collection.
Mouse look was revolutionary.
I tried to play Half-Life Uplink with the right directions of looking mapped to 789, 4 and 6, 123. It wasn’t very intuitive.
That said, I played Quake 1 with lookup and lookdown bound to PgUp and PgDown, and Quake II on PlayStation with lookup and lookdown mapped to L1 and R1.
Looking back, that was a wild few years.
My job is half field based, half desk based. That, and I study part time too, so the simple unhelpful answer is the same: I don’t.
Recently I’ve taken to building a list of five or six games I’m interested in, booking a week or two off work in the summer, buying a month of Game Pass and just hooning through the games, and if I’ve got any time left then I’ll smash through some Doom WADs and that’s me.
Otherwise, I try and stay away from screens and try to read or run more.
Fancy new Wet Ass Filter