Ross Scott

I can check this later, but I could swear I saw screenshot for something like this on mobygames.com when I was researching a game from the 90s I played in a computer lab that had a similar theme. All I remember was that it had good graphics (so VGA), took place in a suburban area, and you were testing the salinity of the local stream. I could maybe find out which game that looks like yours, but Mobygames.com has more or less ruined their navigation for me as it take FOREVER to load screenshots, so I can't really preview it. In the meantime Abandonia.com has a section for people trying to identify old games, you may want to post this there too.

Hey this is just some quick news: I am sick as a DOG right now. I feel like Pinhead from Hellraiser. I guess it's some kind of flu. I forced myself to finish the dialogue to the next Freeman's Mind on Thursday however, right now I'm just waiting on getting the sound effects back, then I'll finish the video and put it up right afterwards. All other video production is halted until I get well again, I've been in agony the past couple days. Once I am better, I'll do another FM episode (after the next one) and RGD as planned, but I don't see it happening for November anymore though. Also the forums are currently under siege by spam attacks. We're working to resolve it ASAP, but it may be a few days before it's sorted out. LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

I mostly find this annoying, but I agree in that some of what Google is doing doesn't make a lot of sense. Like I get why they're doing this, they want to compete with facebook, a lot of people already use gmail and youtube, so by trying to force everyone to use Google+, they see themselves as getting more marketshare and competing with them in the long term. But if they're serious about that, why not improve the experience? Instead it feels like the opposite direction. What I hate is all the Youtube UI changes that makes it a bigger pain to navigate. Some of the ones I've noticed: Check new messages: Old method: 1 click, one page load New method 3 clicks, three page loads Turn annotations off: Old method: 1 click New Method 2 clicks Change video to HD: Old method: 2 clicks New Method: 3 clicks Watch old videos on a channel with hundreds of videos: Old method: select page number back in time you want to go New method: click and load PAGE by PAGE until you want to get to where you want to be, no shortcuts. These are all objectively worse changes, it takes more time to get to where you want to go, but with the benefit of... nothing? A few extra clicks doesn't sound like much, but when you factor in it affects every video watched across millions of people, this creates an incredible amount of wasted time. Also that last change especially makes the process take exponentially longer. I'm really wishing there was an alternate interface I could install for this crap. I think it's more the concept that a company is willing to make changes that negatively affect users without batting an eye. So the more this happens, the more it establishes a precedent that this sort of thing is okay and will have no repercussions for them. So you and I don't really care about Google+, but what if the next phase was having an unskippable adblock-proof video ad before you could enter Youtube? Abuses of power is always a danger whenever you have a company in a monopoly position. Google currently has a de facto monopoly on video streaming. Sure there are alternatives, but nothing even close in terms of numbers. The idea is that the more people accept negative changes, by the time they change something you actually do care about, the precedent is so well established there's no real alternative.

Hey everyone, I have a quick announcement, one of the videos has won an award for the Machinima Expo 6 festival (no relation to Machinima.com)! I submitted "Stranger In Need" and "Civil Protection: The Tunnel" to it this year and they both made it as finalists, with "The Tunnel" winning one of the awards! It turns out it had some prizes, which I wasn't even aware of. It looks like I'll be receiving an award similar to this: It reminds me a little bit of the marker from "Dead Space": The people running the festival and the other contestants were all very nice. I encourage any machinima makers to submit entries to them the next time they run the festival, which I assume will be next year. I'm hoping it will get more of a turnout next year too, since the machinima community has become very fragmented in the past couple years. It's my hope that Gorilla Gong will help remedy that so that machinima as a medium is in a better state this time next year. I've gotten asked a lot if "The Tunnel" is going to get a sequel, since I think one of its biggest shortcomings was that I left it a little too open-ended. The answer is still I don't know. I definitely have ideas for a sequel, but the animation was so brutal for the original that it almost never happened. I'll almost certainly won't want to do another major video in the Source engine, but there's nothing to say I couldn't port the assets over to a new engine at a later date, so I'll see. If it does happen, I'm afraid it won't be anytime soon. In the meantime, more videos are coming out soon, I'll make a new post as soon as the next one is done. LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

That joke has been used a LOT now, I'd have to think of something clever to use a variant of it again. Besides, I figure he's sort of accepted it somewhat, like earlier in another episode "How did they get in here? Oh, they must have come in through the ceiling" like this is normal.

Blip.tv link (download will be up later) More Freeman's Mind! My apologies for a longer than usual delay on this one, you can mostly blame that on the Game Dungeon, which I actually wanted to get out in August. For the foreseeable future, FM will be getting a lot more focus in the future. Right now my goal is to get 2 more FM episodes out this month and another Game Dungeon, in that order. I don't know if I'll actually ACHIEVE that, but that's what I'm aiming for. There are a couple smaller things I'm working on that may show up later on, but Freeman's Mind is going to remain the priority for quite a while. LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

This is the last reply I'm giving on the topic on treatment of / equality of women, because I think I've made my position pretty clear and have tried to explain it pretty well. I'll try and address what you brought up: Dude, that's a huge part of sexism, I would say that's the first part of most people think of when sexism is brought up. It's a very loaded word. If I hear someone called sexist, my first thought is of someone acting like he belongs on the cast of Mad Men. This is why I'm making trying to distinguish between the two mentalities. While it may be technically accurate to call me sexist, there's a very large difference between someone who holds a door for a woman v. someone who won't hire a woman or thinks they should only cook and look after children and shouldn't vote. I feel like nothing you've said here shows that you acknowledge any difference between the two categories that can still fall under "sexist." This colors the whole conversation when you talk as though they're one in the same and makes more rational discourse difficult. And yes, you can argue sexism against men, but I feel like men have a large number of advantages already, so when sexism against them does occur, it's nowhere near on the scale that it occurs regularly against women. I treat that similarly as racism against white people, it's hard to take seriously most of the time except under really select scenarios. I never said this, you're putting words in my mouth. Because I feel like videogames are one area where women by and large don't have especially mature treatment as a whole (I'm talking averages, not all games). Games and movies that glorify violence almost by definition appeal much more to a male audience in general. To bring women into the violence fantasy and include them as targets of it feels kind of misogynistic to me. I think in order for violence against women to be okay in a NON-mature way, it has to be in a context that either appeals more to women, or to both sexes about equally. This is kind of a conundrum, since I think that most overly violent forms of media do NOT appeal to primarily female audiences. In fact I can't think of any movie / game offhand that's over-the-top violent, but has women as its primary targeted audience. But for example, one woman getting into a slapfight and hair pulling with another over sabotaging wedding plans in Pride and Prejudice (or Sense and Sensibility, I get those mixed up), yeah, I don't have much of a problem with that, because the context is meant more for a female audience anyway and it's not excessively brutal. CarnEvil is not that, it's 100% shooting things in a very violent way, which by definition means it's going to appeal more to a male audience. Because the repercussions of the average man being violent against a woman v. the average woman being violent against a man are night and day. Why are battered women shelters much more common than help for men in abusive relationships? Why are rapes of men by women extremely rare? Who kills more people, men killing women, or women killing men? I just can't take a slap in the face as seriously as a body in the morgue. By that definition, I consider women as a whole bigger victims and more at risk than men to violence by the opposite sex. From wikipedia on domestic violence: -Women are subjected to domestic violence more often and more severely than are men. A large study, compiled by Martin S. Fiebert, shows that women are as likely to be abusive to men, but that men are less likely to be hurt -According to a report by the United States Department of Justice in 2000, a survey of 16,000 Americans showed 22.1 percent of women and 7.4 percent of men reported being physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, boyfriend or girlfriend, or date in their lifetime -1 in 33 men and 1 in 6 women have experienced an attempted or completed rape against a partner. More than one in three American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped in their lifetimes. -Women are more likely than men to be murdered by an intimate partner. Of those killed by an intimate partner, about three quarters are female and about a quarter are male. In 1999 in the United States, 1,218 women and 424 men were killed by an intimate partner,[38] and 1,181 females and 329 males were killed by their intimate partners in 2005. For someone trying to champion non-bias, this blanket statement sounds colored AGAINST women. I think both men and women try to get away with things they shouldn't do equally. My bottom line is this. Women have plenty of disadvantages in society: -Long history of discrimination against them (this affects the present as well) -Glass ceiling effect -less pay on average for male equivalent -Physically weaker on average than men -More vulnerable to violence from the opposite sex -Many other factors I'm probably forgetting Like Vapymid was implying, I don't see 100% equal treatment to a group that's at a disadvantage versus one that's not as being equality. EDIT: I'm sure this nuance will drive some crazy, but I didn't have an issue with violence against Alma in FEAR because they completely dehumanized her in that game so that the only emotions are expressions or feral ferocity. I didn't feel like I was attacking a girl / woman but rather an other-worldly entity that just happens to be in female form. For me, it didn't feel like "her" so much as "it." Also while this is my last post on the topic (unless it pops up in another episode way later). I wanted to clarify that I'm not against violence portrayed against women in a mature manner. For example, if the PURPOSE of showing violence against women in a scene is to shock or horrify the viewer as part of the story, then I think that's legitimate. I may not like those scenes, but I can recognize the artistic merit to them then.

Guys, Testosterone leads to more muscle development, men naturally have more. It's really as simple as this. In a lot of traditional farming communities, you have men and women working equally hard, but the men are on average still stronger because of their biology. I'm not debating this point further, if you don't believe me, fine. My problem with this is it doesn't distinguish between the sexism like I'm being accused of (giving women more benefit of the doubt, me personally not wanting to see violence against them) v. I guess traditional sexism (thinking women belong in the kitchen, they shouldn't vote, that they can't handle higher education, etc.) which I don't ascribe to. I think you're lumping these all together equally, but the latter causes much more harm to women, whereas I'm not sure what the harm my view causes to women is. What is the harm that comes from my way of thinking, especially since society itself is sexist (glass ceiliing for women, average less pay for them, men have to register for the draft, women do not, women only just recently have been permitted to enter combat roles in military, etc.)? I think most of the black crime statistics are a result of poverty areas, institutional racism, and by how much gangland activity (which is culturally driven in some areas) can skew averages. That's not a topic I want to get into here though. If you don't like the statistics however, I can say from my own personal experience, I've known FAR more violent and overly aggressive males than females in my own life however. That's not really a quantifiable thing however, so that's why I was using the statistics.

Hey a quick update: The site is temporarily down as we're switching it to a (hopefully) faster host. It's not dead at all, we're trying to make it better.

No, you're just crazy. 1. I ended up having this discussion with someone else. Basically it's instinctual reaction on my part more than anything, though I have some thoughts on it regardless. While it may be technically sexism, I don't carry the same attitudes people normally think of as sexist, for example I don't think women should be denied rights or held back in any way they're capable in. I'm NOT implying what you said about them always being incapable and weak. I probably would imply that are on average more deserving of sympathy than men however. As for the double standard on violence, look at prison statistics. Men are approximately 9-10 times more likely to commit violent crime than women. Women are on average, far less violent than men. The ones that aren't are more of an exception rather than an equal standard. If the game was handling this topic in a mature manner my attitude might be different, but in my opinion most games that portray violence against women aren't especially mature. 2. I think you're arguing multiple points here, one of which I don't disagree with, another I disagree with dramatically. I think because I do play a lot of abandonware, what are the "extremely rare circumstances" for you are much more common for me personally. I don't have much of an issue with how companies price their games and I agree people shouldn't treat access to games like they're a right if they don't agree with the publisher's price. I actually don't even have an issue with copy protection, though I personally don't like online-authentication systems for non-multiplayer games. What I hate, hate, hate is when IP owner pig-headedness intentionally kills old games off that they're no longer collecting any money on anyway. I equate this as essentially book burning in the name of profit and think it should be fought by any means necessary, with pirates often being the last line of defense of games going extinct. To be clear, I'm not advocating that old games that are still being sold should become pirated. They're still making the game available, so it's not dead, thus I don't have a problem. 3D Realms is an example of this. If Midway was still selling CarnEvil cabinets and getting money from them, I wouldn't have gone and covered this game because of that. 4. The larger point here was that piracy can severely hurt brand new games as a lot of companies get the majority of their income within the first couple months, if not weeks. If a game is still being sold years after the fact, great, but a LOT of games have slipped through the cracks over the years. Neither side is really in the right or wrong. It's wrong of the pirates to hurt the game developers, and it's wrong of (some of) the rights holders to snuff out games or make it impossible to keep them functioning after a certain time period. Well I agree this is not on the same level as making people starve, but I think it's part of the same spectrum of attitudes. It's destroying culture in the name of profit, which I find immoral, I can't think of any justification for it, I think that trumps copyright law, implied ownership, almost everything, unless the original author was deeply ashamed of it or something. I see this as superseding laws; if preserving culture that would otherwise die is illegal, then I think it's the law that's wrong, not the practice. Moreover the people who shut this stuff down are almost never the actual creators, but rights holders that bought a company going bankrupt. Again, I think destroying culture in the name of profit is never moral, no matter what the law says.

Client Logic. It's still there apparently! https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Client+Logic&ll=35.993437,-84.226738&spn=0.00612,0.008256&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&fb=1&gl=pl&hq=client+logic,+oak+ridge+tn&cid=0,0,4880591513570323383&t=h&z=18

It's from one page of the manual that I was able to find. This is only a map of the first course, not the full game by any means. Also I appreciate the gesture, but I think I may stick with making the thumbnails for now, the way I've been doing it I think looks okay and hasn't been especially difficult.

Blip.tv link I've been awake for about 35 hours, and only had 5 hours sleep the night before that, so thinking of things to say is getting increasingly challenging. Enjoy the Halloween episode! I made it on time! I'm not sure if it was the best trade for sleep though. I would like to sleep. This one was an experiment where instead of making it more review oriented, I decided to attempt a full playthrough of the game. It combines some of the style of Freeman's Mind and RGD. It may have been a mistake, I'm not sure. It seemed to have more disadvantages compared to RGD or FM individually. It certainly took a long time to do. Anyway, this is quite an exciting game to cover regardless. I was definitely channeling some of FM when talking about Rickety Town. Unless it becomes wildly popular, this will probably the last episode of RGD for a while. I'm pretty much just going to focus on Freeman's Mind starting in November. I'm pretty sure I need to sleep first though. If you're scared of clowns you shouldn't watch this episode at all. LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

This is just a quick post before the video release tomorrow. I've received some requests from a few people wanting copies of the maps used in "Civil Protection: The Tunnel." I only made the one outside The Tunnel (from Shadow of A Doubt). The rest (and edits to mine) were created by Andrew "Nicadeamas" Dehnart. If you use any elements of these maps in any of your projects you must include him in the credits somewhere. These maps are unsupported, don't ask me for help on them, I didn't bother organizing them. There are some random test maps in here too. They weren't meant to be playable maps, just used for shots in the video. They were mostly created for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (though the outdoors one was in Episode 1, otherwise the grass looked screwed). A lot of them use assets from other games / mods (Zombie Panic, Fortress Forever, Counter Strike Source, Dark Messiah, etc.). Honestly this stuff is a mess to go through, but if people really want it, they can dig through it. These are all uncompiled VMF files. Here's the link: All maps for The Tunnel (7z archive) LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Whether the IP is alive or not doesn't have much bearing on whether the game is staying alive or not. On the contrary, dead IPs are much easier to transition to abandonware, whereas if an old game is sharing the same name as a new one in the franchise, the company can sometimes try to shut it down because they perceive it as a threat to their own product because of search results (or lawyers might anyway). So say Atari released TDU3, some suit might decide the name "test drive 3" will confuse people from their new product and seek to shut down references to it since they don't profit on that. While I'm mostly just going to extend it to games on the show, this "profit trumps all" mentality I personally feel like causes an amazing amount of harm in the world, and that games are just one small sliver it manifests itself.

I'm pretty good at delivering on promises when deadlines aren't involved. Awesome, though there's no rush on this, I'll be happy if it ever happens. PRESS F6 TO RETURN TO THE ROAD

I really am trying to cut it down to just the material I think is worth saying. Some things I left out of this one: -I couldn't figure out how to reverse the damn car (or IF I can) -The steering still sucks with joypad input, though it MIGHT not suck with a steering wheel with low sensitivity (though I didn't have one to test) -The steering still sucks with low CPU speeds. It's slightly more manageable, but you still get the jackrabbit acceleration starts plus then you have a DELAY to your steering, it's horrible. (I probably should have mentioned this one based on some of the comments, a few people think I'm ignorant now, I added an annotation to mention this). -I'm not outright condoning piracy, but I'll side with the pirates every time if it comes to a game being killed v. respecting IP owner's "rights." For better or worse, this is going to be a reoccurring theme on the show when relevant to the game. -I found a link to the manual and the Cape Cod expansion, but they were both broken. You know, I was actually thinking it's possible with stuff like google sketchup, it might be possible to generate the data some other way, there would just have to be some consistent points that you were "measuring" from. Like if you established one vertices was at the top of the mountain, and kept that as a reference point for the next shot. The resolution might be too low not to have gross inaccuracies trying to stitch all that together though. No, that's more or less what I've been doing for RGD lately, sorry. I won't (or I don't THINK I will be) be distracted with other projects though, so it should go much faster than usual, but not at that rate. I like actually having time to exercise, plus an hour of free time, etc. I had 3 hours sleep when I posted the episode (had a little bit of sleep since then), it's going to be an intense few days for me up to Halloween. I will be covering one of the best games for Halloween ever made though, so that's a plus.

Blip.tv link Well in my quest to cut down the time on the episode, things completely backfired and this became the longest one so far. Also, it gradually started taking more of a stranger and angrier turn than I was expecting. Nietzsche said if you gaze into the abyss long enough, it will gaze back at you, so I guess on that note I'm starting to feel like I'm made out of vector graphics. It didn't get so bad that I considered just burning the computer instead of releasing the video though, so here it is! While it is kind of intoxicating being able to release videos this fast, I have been working on it practically nonstop since the last one, so I'm afraid this rate of videos won't be normal in the future. I do have plans to get one more episode out for Halloween though, after that, I'll be focusing pretty much exclusively on Freeman's Mind for a while. Videos! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS