Steve the Pocket

NO.

I'm guessing the issues you're describing are why Dr. Vance glitched out there at one point? I didn't see any other hiccups. In fact, Alyx's facial expressions looked more correct than they do on my computer; I swear switching to the Orange Box model back in 2010 caused some of her rigs to break. Ha ha, dass a good one.

He'll probably spot it when he gets out of Kleiner's lab. The designers intentionally funneled players into a narrow passage that looks out directly at a dramatic shot of it (with dropships flying out to search for him) despite it being visible earlier. Does it even support them? I was under the impression that it doesn't even support the left analog stick properly; it just maps it to WASD.

So, you're reliant on random chance to survive and even play a slot machine when you quit? Maybe you're Maabus. Maabus the Gambler. ...I'll show myself out now.

Umm, it's not? I believe this is the 2007/2010 SteamPipe version. Notice NPCs don't blink? G-Man's eyes are glowing? Aha! I knew the 2010 update glitched something with the facial rigs! I remember playing just after it came out and thinking "why does Alyx not seem to emote as much anymore? Am I just crazy?" And to this day I've never gotten any clear indication if I was right or not. But knowing that blinking broke is a step in the right direction.

What a world we're living in. Donald von Drumpf is president, the Cubs are World Series champions, the Ghostbusters are women, McDonald's has people waiting tables, and Freeman's Mind 2 is a thing that exists. Looks pretty solid so far; I've been wondering how you'll handle this game, since it's such a different style compared to the first — the most glaring difference being the presence of named, friendly NPCs who seem to mostly idolize Freeman. His delight at seeing the Vortigaunt slave was the first clue that this is gonna be good. That said, have you considered using the Half-Life Update mod rather than the vanilla game for the rest of these, if and when you get around to them? To my knowledge it's just a map pack that improves the static lighting here and there, plus some additional particle effects, so there shouldn't be any compatibility hiccups with what you use to record. I bring it up because I was reminded how wonky the lighting is in some places when you were in the room with Barney.

To be fair, A Tale of Two Cities — the book — is the most famous work of fiction about the French Revolution ever, and "the knitting lady" is a well-known character from it. So well known, in fact, that there was a story in Reader's Digest (I think) about an American who was visiting France and for some reason happened to need knitting supplies, but didn't know how to ask in French. So she made knitting motions with her hands (I tried just now and you wouldn't know what it's supposed to be by looking) and saying "Madame Defarge." It worked.

Oh, and that "fast mode" is hilarious. I was gonna say that if a game were made nowadays with a deliberately awful looking performance mode, it'd just look like Realms already does at max settings, but then I remembered that there are some Quake players who use "FPS configs" that look almost exactly like that. Like, literally no textures and everything. Either they've fallen prey to an audiophile-esque delusion that a framerate several times the refresh rate of their monitor could possibly do them any good, or they're still running on their original Pentium II for good luck like an athlete who never washes their socks.

I had the exact opposite interpretation of the ending — that it was all real, but they locked him up in the looney bin anyway because, well, would you believe a story like that? And I know I've seen that title card font before somewhere, maybe one of the Aladdin sequels? Anyway, if anyone knows what it's called, I'd like to know because it'd be a good answer next time someone asks what they ought to use instead of Papyrus.

I could see some evil modder remaking this game as a Portal mod or something. Really, any modern game engine would probably accommodate it without a lot of tweaking from the looks of things. And I've always had a soft spot for AdLib music, for some reason. Even though the only game I've played at length that used it was Monkey Island 2 (I had the CD-ROM version where the music didn't work in the first game, and the rerelease just uses raw MIDI). I've spent a lot of time searching in vain for OPL3 soundfonts or MIDI editors that run inside DOSBox or something so I could try my hand at composing some of my own. With chiptunes of various kinds being so popular, it's kind of amazing it's not easier to find.

Some of those dumbed-down mechanics... Geez, even BioShock still had different ammo types (multiple types per weapon, even!) and the need to reload! Actually, it's kind of interesting seeing how shooters have evolved since then; nowadays a game is seen as a throwback if it has universal ammo and no reloading. Even the new Doom has separate ammo for each weapon.

What exactly was so 'scary' in his post? There is nothing whatsoever inherently bad in autocracy, it is a perfectly normal system which emerges naturally in big heterogeneous countries - otherwise they are torn apart by infighting (see e.g. ancient Rome starting from Caesar, Russia starting from Peter I etc). If you actually believe that Stalin/Kim Jong-il/ were man eating monsters loathed by their own people then you've watched too much American propaganda. You're right — they were man eating monsters beloved by their own people. Because all those people who got sent to the gulag, or whatever the Chinese and Korean equivalents of that are, were just dissidents who were endangering the Almighty State; who wouldn't be supportive of that? I'm sure the average Trump voter would be in favor of the same thing happening to the people they don't agree with. (And, truth be told, if there were a proposal to do it to them, I wouldn't be able to drum up the willpower to lead a campaign against it.) Doesn't mean it's the right way to run a country.

I'm wondering where you got that diagram of the Big Six Media Companies, because just off the top of my head I can think of a few mistakes. One, GE has never owned Comcast; they had joint ownership of NBC-Universal for a few years, but then sold off the rest of their stock to them. So it'd be Comcast who belongs in slot #1 (and you can add DreamWorks at the bottom of their list as of this year). Two, Viacom and CBS never really split up; they're still under the banner of National Amusements. Three, there should probably be a slot for Sony somewhere, even though they're not a US company, because of how many "American" media companies they own — in particular, they're the only ones that still have a hand in the music and/or video game industries. Finally, and this might just be a matter of the diagram being out of date, Disney sold off Miramax around the same time they bought Marvel. THE MORE YOU KNOW!™ (The More You Know is a trademark of NBC-Universal-Comcast-DreamWorks, Inc.)

Your "reality TV astronauts" quips reminded me of an episode of The Big Picture that Bob Chipman did once, where he lamented that the defunding of NASA and the shift towards privately-funded space exploration would probably mean the next giant leap for mankind would be taken by a crew of reality TV contestants aboard the USS Mountain Dew. I'm half-quoting, half paraphrasing here. My takeaway from that was that that would at least be an amusing premise for a work of fiction — basically hard sci-fi with the merciless satirical wit of a Douglas Adams book — and I still stand by that. And... huh. I used to say that the idea of naming sequels by just tacking numbers onto the end was stupid, and that the easiest way to show other people how stupid it is would be to try doing it with a book and see how quickly they'll laugh at it. I was not aware that a celebrated author already unironically did it and got away with it. So that throws a bit of a monkey wrench into that.

I gotta say, right on about the approach here. I've been saying for years that starting online petitions is literally worse than doing nothing because they encourage people who want to make a difference to sign those — and then think they've "done their part" — instead of doing something that actually works. If I could make a suggestion, I'd say maybe forward this along to Jim Sterling, because he's pretty much Consumer Advocate Numero Uno in gaming circles. Who knows, he might devote an episode to promoting it. He's big on the "boycotts don't help anything; making noise might" angle I'd do it myself, but it would probably mean more coming from you directly, since you're the kind-of-well-known video game person. As far as avoiding buying games from the "evil" game companies, I doubt it really does anything to send a message, but anything that results in them getting less money has to be a net positive for all parties involved. And ultimately, refusing to get the game at all is probably better for this than piracy for two reasons. One, it's stupidly easy to find out how many people are pirating their games — they just have to pull up a torrent tracker. So they probably can tell the difference between a game that's pirated to all hell and one that just isn't selling, regardless of whom they choose to blame at the next meeting. Two, piracy can still result in additional sales indirectly; if you go tell your friends about this amazing session you had last night, they might be encouraged to pick it up. Frankly I don't see how it's so damn hard. I've never bought anything from Ubisoft or Konami, and I haven't bought an EA or Warner Bros. game since Mirror's Edge and Arkham Asylum respectively, and I don't feel like I've missed out on anything important.

Oh. I should probably follow up my post about Nitemare 3D with this caveat, since I'd forgotten about it: You'll need to jump into the config file (in your AppData/Local/DOSBox) and set the CPU cycles to a fixed number, since this game runs like a slideshow with auto. Probably for the same reason the Windows version does! I went with 10000, which is probably overkill but didn't cause me any problems, at least.

"If"? Look just a few posts above you.

So basically like their involvement with the Left 4 Dead series and Portal 2?

@20:37 "TAAAAAAAAAANK!" That is all.

OK, here are a few obscure old games I'd like to toss your way. First up: Nitemare 3-D, an early Wolfenstein clone that was ostensibly a follow-up to the Hugo series of freeware graphic adventure games. It's interesting in that it's another old game that's not actually abandonware; the creator still sells it from his website for, last I checked, $12. A bit steep, but hey, the Exchange wanted $40 for the original Spyro the Dragon so it's all relative I guess. Still works out to 60 cents per level once you account for the first 10 being shareware. A word of warning: What you get is the installer for a 16-bit Windows version that won't run on anything past XP, but it sucks anyway; what you really want is the DOS version, which you can get by opening the folder where it installed to. It works fine in DOSBox for me, music and all, and comes complete with semi-tolerable mouse control (the mouse replaces all four arrow keys, so you'll be nudging yourself forward and backward a lot as you try to aim). If you get hopelessly lost, as I finally did in level 12, the Windows installer also sticks a map viewer in your Start menu. Now that I know you've covered Commodore 64 games, here's one I loved as a kid: Bristles. It's an arcadey sort of game where you're a house painter getting attacked by flying paint cans and things. Not much else to say about this. And finally... *fanfare* ...Pickle Wars. You're living on a pacifistic earth-like planet that gets invaded by aliens that look like giant pickles. Humanity's only hope is to retrieve the cache of weapons your civilization discarded ages ago. You must fight through a series of side-scrolling levels armed only with a Salad Shooter, which is surprisingly effective against them. I don't know if this was a promotion for Salad Shooters, or what the hell. Apparently this is also not abandonware and also costs $12 for the second and third episodes. Bizarre coincidence. Seconding this, now that it's available on GOG.

Die Höhlenwelt Saga does look intriguing. I happen to know someone who is German and likes point-and-click'-em-ups; she's played the Deponia series and recommended them to me (something I have yet to follow up on), and she does fairly regular live streams of video games, I believe. I could probably convince her to put together an English-language Let's Play of some sort. Probably the good old fashioned text-and-screenshots format would be ideal, since it means she wouldn't have to translate on the fly, but I dunno where one would put such a thing. There's no central archive for text-based Let's Plays that I know of besides the Something Awful one.

Man, I never knew Half-Life had its own Lost Coast equivalent. I wonder why Valve never put it up on Steam in some form, as like a freebie for people who had the base game. If they were still keeping tabs on their GitHub, which I know they're not, I'd suggest it. I mean, they patched the original music back into the expansion packs because somebody managed to finally get their attention and asked them to. So does this mean if Ross ever gets around to covering Half-Life 2, he'll come up with a way to shoehorn in Lost Coast?

Yeah, nothing from this episode or 51 seemed familiar to me either. Not even the Amnesia: the Dark Descent-esque alien cobwebs and disco balls full of snarks, which you'd think would be a more memorable setpiece. I have a more vivid memory of the Lambda Complex itself. Funnily enough, I was close to this spot in my current playthrough myself; it would have been a fun surprise if I hadn't picked this evening to get caught up on the series. :doh:

Shephard's Mind already did the missing steering wheel gag. And when I saw that episode, I thought, "Man, this is a perfect example of why this is the inferior imitation. Freeman's Mind wouldn't have treated the graphics that literally." ...Awkward!

Is there any fandom that doesn't give people that impression, though? There's a point at which "It'll just make us look bad and do more harm than good" doesn't make sense anymore because they've already seen that kind of behavior from literally everyone else on the Internet. Hell, they're a YouTube channel. YouTube has maybe the most obnoxious userbase of any site on the whole Internet, or at least the ones that normal people use on a regular basis. People getting mad at them for something they actually did is probably a step up from what they normally have to deal with.