Comments

16:10 here.

Yeah the elevator was the best one. The guy stopping to take pics of the hanging body parts makes you wonder.

It's got a lot more in common with modeling programs now. I hear it's based heavily off Modo.

Strider is a good baby name. Just throwing it out there...

Congrats!

How do we know you didn't just get bored in the middle of the shoot and run off to visit a strip club?

It came with the case Disco, same as Link to the Past. The games are outside of the box so I can actually play them. All my SNES and 64 boxes have a plastic protectors though, just so they don't get damaged. I'll grab pictures some day.

If you had bought a heap zeeba you could be selling them off for $300 a piece right now. The price hike for resellers is absolutely ridiculous right now.

I have Samus too, and her Prime Gunship. And my brother recently got me a freakin' Xenomorph made of nuts and bolts. Don't really have much else, but I could always use more stuff for my geek shelves (every shelf).

I had a LEGO Mindstorms kit growing up, but it's long gone now. ;(

I agree with Suture about Brutal Doom. It messes with the pace and flow of Doom in ways I don't like, and the excess gore becomes very boring quickly. It also chucks a lot of weird 'next-gen' features in there like a bloody screen (so real!) and lens flares galore that stand out like a sore thumb. Lots of stuff that just sort of gets in the way of the core gameplay.

But you may like it, it puts less emphasis on controlling crowds or rooms, and more on the 'visceral' act of killing individual dudes. I'm a vanilla guy when it comes to old school shooters.

EDIT:
Also I totally forgot about that Heretic chicken thing. That was amazing!

Bateman will help you cut that cake.

Still a bloody great game, and definitely not a corridor shooter! The level design is sort of semi-non-linear and largely abstract. Lots of wide areas to demonstrate it's speed and maneuverability (I think there's about 3 hitscan enemies in the entire game, everything else can be dodged with skill). I really miss this style of level design.

"Corridor shooter" makes me think of games that are literally funneling you down one path. There are levels in Doom way larger than most modern shooters, which is pretty strange.

Smart move using a source port too, the modding scene has been really good to Id games. I like playing their games as vanilla as possible, just with better modern compatibility, no new out-of-place bells and whistles.

Tested the monster_generic/roach idea, and it sort of works, but you're stuck with a giant bounding box and the roach bleeds human blood/gibs a giant skull.

monster_generic 'Take Damage' > Relay (kill monster_generic) > Multi Manager

Roach disappears, leaves a big red splat when you whack it, triggers the manager. Not totally ideal. Bloody Goldsource!

Rats might be a better choice.

I'm fuzzy with Goldsource, so insult me if this is stupid, but when you say the roach code is incomplete and won't trigger on death, is that just with the monster_cockroach? Can we use a monster_generic with 'Take Damage' to trigger it, or something like that?

Sounds fun, I'm looking for good excuses to fool around in Sledge.

All I can think about watching that time-lapse is that they look like hungry toy robots eating away at the asphalt. I'm an idiot.

It's no TSE, but it's a fun enough game with a mate. I really dislike the modern shooter elements in it, and the fact that the first third of the game is a bad Call of Doody parody, but once you get out of the city it becomes close enough to classic Sam.

There's some decent stuff on the Steam workshop to make it a little more wacky, too.

I have higher hopes for Sam 4, the developers have already confirmed multiple locations and no Egypt. If they put the crazier gun designs back in and get straight to the punch, I think I'll love it.

Edit: and yes, the C4 is a really good addition, I had a lot of fun with it.

There's also this game, where you play as a Pomeranian (among other animals).

4 days? You did this in 4 days?

You are insane.

I like how you can use the generator spinner things to get up to the catwalk quickly.

Played this a while ago, it was good fun.

You guys know what's up. I completely agree. I can't play most AAA games for long these days, they're just far too on-rails. Always pushing and never just letting you be.

JeffMOD: If you haven't played them yet, I highly recommend The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches. I've just finished the last one. Great DLC with some level design that totally surpasses the original game.

Sean Lock is great. Mad but great. Only ever seen bits of his stand-up, but I always love him on QI, and I watch 8 Out of 10 Cats for him and Jon Richardson.

Just sent you an invite, I'm free right now.

My computer is probably considered higher end, so I can't help, but I hope you get this sorted without having to remove those lovely refract effects!

I gave this a shot a while ago, didn't actually finish it. The moving light section bugged up on me big time and the Thing (I get that reference!) would appear and disappear at random, instead of when it logically was supposed to.

I love the mood, and the awesome, awesome film it's alluding to, but it was too buggy and the puzzle gameplay was too "safe" and predictable to really enjoy.

Lovecraft said "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." and I like to think he knew what he was talking about!

We are scared of what we can't see and don't understand and nothing conceals something better than darkness. That's simply why it's used, and it works. Flashlights or lanterns aren't just there to help you see, they're extensions of your character. Tools for him/her/you to try and make sense of, and fend off a world that's growing increasingly alien.

As for jump scares, there's a reason they're used, but it's not an excuse. Our lives are (typically) built on routine, and when something disrupts it, that's when we panic. It works in games, too. Sadly it gets taken too far, with now-predictable jump scares breaking up long periods of silence or puzzles. I completely agree that it's stale and annoying.

I believe it's possible to make a game where you spend days just going about your usual routine, with the game learning and planning ways to destroy that. The best horror games I've played, and films I've watched subvert those ideas. A horror game set in sunny, everyday locations would at some point have to flip those comforts on their head. It may be possible to avoid it with some inventive thinking, but I haven't seen any game do it yet.

For an example, Silent Hill. This is a fog-filled, living, breathing town. Not the people in it, the town itself. It looks into the very being of it's visitors and punishes those who deserve it with manifestations of their deepest shames and fears. Surviving on the streets, exploring and learning, becomes routine. Almost comfortable. Then the game plunges you into the Otherworld and all bets are off.

It literally subverts the typical horror landscape by throwing you into something unpredictable even by horror standards. And yet it's still dark and grungy. But don't pick out the darkness and use that as an example of it's quality, look at the psychological tools it employs. I hadn't heard of those maps until now, so I'm going to give them a shot and see how they fare, thanks!

Fear is being out of your comfort zone. It's not seeing or understanding the threats ahead of you, and not knowing when an end to the madness is in sight. I love it.

Been following this on Steampowered and Interlopers, it looks incredible. Can't wait to play it.

I wish I could bloody well model!

On the topic of horror games:

FEAR is fucking terrible.

There are much better games out there to draw inspiration from. Games that deal with terrifying ideas in subtle, disturbing and deceptive ways. FEAR is the horror equivalent of a jack-in-the-box.

Mine.

I think I can do a bit better.

Paste Special is a great tool for complex, curved geometry. I used it with the clip tool to make this monster tunnel eons ago. It's fun to experiment with.

There we go. Hope it was a good one!

So does mine after trying to decipher that.

Charming.

I second the Worms Armageddon invite!

Played up until We've Got Hostiles.

This mod is so. damn. awesome. It's so true to Half-Life, but mixes it up in fun little ways that keep it fresh. I'm laughing and having a blast with this more than I would in most AAA titles.

Way to go, BM team.

Soon there will be a big BM on my desktop. I have waited for this day.

Not bad. You should never create a normal map from the diffuse map, though. Take the time to create a proper height map. Paint in the sunken areas, remove the lighting highlights.

I've had my ears flushed before. The 'bowl' afterwards was... not a pretty sight.

I know that heightened sense of hearing, it's feels pretty amazing.

And those who what? And those who WHAT!?

There are files that reference a number of classic 1.6 maps that never made it to CS:S, and some CS:S favourites like assault. The current theory seems to be that they're planned DLC.

And I agree with Archie, the maps are too inconsistent at the moment. Maps like Italy and Dust have received very nice makeovers, while some like Train and Nuke remain butt-ugly and with mangled layouts (shorttrain). The new maps are also pretty mixed. Lake and St Marc have excellent atmosphere, but Sugarcane is hideous. Bank and Safehouse would be nicer if they weren't spoiled with blurry textures, small layouts and lazy skyboxes.

Ignoring that rant though, the gameplay is very fun. The guns feel great, the new character models are excellent, and so are the new voices.

Yeah, the areas still made it into the game. A lot of the other ideas didn't.

I really don't know why they removed all the little destruction bits. It wouldn't have been hard to make a prefab vending machine/physics blind set/dumpster/whatever else that they could use around the game for continuity.

The combat looked a bit more 'punchier' in general. He's taking pot shots with the SMG and killing metro cops in one or two hits. That gun feels much more useful than the hose we ended up with.

So many things promised in those videos that never made it into the game. I hope they use a lot of these ideas in whatever the hell the next Half-Life game ends up being.

AI that adapts to barricades. More clever, subtle physics traps like the rooftop bin. Characters that actually react to you staring at them, and screwing around with their stuff. The AI in general seemed much more reactive and interactive. Shame it was all a scripted ruse.

You have to wonder if this thing ever ran over any cats during it's testing.

I'm sorry, I'll see myself out.