What are you playing this weekend/these days?


Just finished HL: Blue Shift. Not a great expansion. Rather annoying in places. And I forgot how bad torchlight is in those old games. There was a lot of squinting involved, complemented by the bad monitor I have to use at the moment. And apparently there's no subtitles :(
 
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Just finished HL: Blue Shift. Not a great expansion. Rather annoying in places. And I forgot how bad torchlight is in those old games. There was a lot of squinting involved, complemented by the bad monitor I have to use at the moment. And apparently there's no subtitles :(
I actually played it a long time ago, when it came out, and I remember it as a fun game. I played many expansions for Half-Life 1. Maybe it was the shiny helmet.
The Dreamcast port also contained this expansion: https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_(Dreamcast_port)
 
I found the expansions of Half-Life very interesting because them shared the same story, and happens at the same time, but with different point of views, also in every expansion there are visual connections to the main game (or to the other expansions), so you can understand better what is happening in the main story while your actual character is doing alternative things.

Half-Life - is the POV of Gordon Freeman.
HL: Blue Shift - is the POV of Barney, the policeman that can be seen punching a door at the start of the main game.
HL: Opposing Force - is the POV of one of the military men sent to attack the laboratory.

There were also different great fan projects that continued the trend, I'll list only the best two that I remember, but there were more:

HL: Point Of View - is the POV of one of the aliens that appears at the laboratory, and it's DEEP, damn this game adds a lot to the lore, even more than the official expansions, it starts in the alien world and you can see how it was managed.
HL: Azure Sheep - is the POV of another Policeman trying to save a colleague. It has a connection to the previous "Point Of View MOD" as them share some same locations where, well, in both MODs you can see the other protagonist from the other point of view ...
 
I played HL2 today. I can't tell if it's overrated or not. I don't like it as much as Portal but it is very pleasant. I'm downloading the Dreamcast version now. I hope it will be more pixelated than HL2 on PS3. I'm really into pixelation.
 
Heh. I also started HL2 again today. The recent offer on steam included both episodes. Not sure about episode 1, but definitely haven't played 2.
BTW this is free, short and sweet: ...and apparently "no longer available in [my] country": Transmissions: Element 120.

It's it about a shrinking universe?
If it is I haven't noticed. It's been a few years since I've read about red shift in sci-fi and only just got double meaning in the title. It had always been the shift of the security guy in my mind, I never had a second thought. :)
 
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I've recently re-discovered Midwinter (the DOS version). An early first-person open-world game that I guess could be seen like a proto Far Cry (2+). Set in a post-apocalyptic world covered in snow you play some kind of militia member who discovers that a general is attacking the local federation of free cities.
Your goal is to travel to the enemy HQ and blow it up before the advancing enemy units capture some strategic buildings around the map. But you start the game with only your pair of skis, a sniper rifle and a few grenades while being chased by an enemy unit of about 60 (from what I've read) vehicles with homing missiles. You can evade them and make your way to the enemy HQ (by skis, snowmobile, handglider or most likely a combination of these) while evading the other enemy units but it's not easy. To raise your chances you can recruit people (up to 32 characters, each with their own stats) and wage some kind of guerrilla war, sabotaging factories, slowing down enemy units, etc.

The game is played in 2 in-game hours increment. Once you've recruited more people, you can play each one of them during these two hours and then you advance the time. So there's a mix of first-person action (mostly skiing/driving/gliding around and sometimes trying to shoot down enemies) and strategy (deciding how to best use your troops, where to ambush the enemy, what to sabotage, etc.)

It's a bit difficult to get started but once I was able to get my footing I had a lot of fun. The skiing/driving/gliding part is pleasing (even if the controls are a bit dated). Your characters need to eat and rest and avoid injuries (or heal each other and/or rest if injured) which really helps build the atmosphere of trying to survive in a hostile environment. My main problem so far is the combat, maybe it's because it was meant to play at a lower FPS but most of the time I hardly have time to find the enemy vehicle (due to technical limitations you only face one vehicle at a time) before I'm hit by one of their homing missiles.

I really like the FPS/survival/strategy blend and would be interested to see a modern take on it.
 
I played HL2 today. I can't tell if it's overrated or not. I don't like it as much as Portal but it is very pleasant. I'm downloading the Dreamcast version now. I hope it will be more pixelated than HL2 on PS3. I'm really into pixelation.
HL on Dreamcast was looking sharp for that time. The VGA cable allowed 640x480 resolution.
So not sure how blocky you like your pixels.
 
HL on Dreamcast was looking sharp for that time. The VGA cable allowed 640x480 resolution.
So not sure how blocky you like your pixels.
When I was young I had a radio shack TV with SNES connected via RF. All my (rich) friends had there's modded for scart and used monitors. The difference was clear... The envy has not subsided.

I ran HL2 on rpcs3 yesterday and it was the same, indistinct pixels. I can live with it tbh.

Maybe I'm alone in my love of pixels. Will try DC + OSSC soon.
 
Finished the original Alan Wake. I like Remedy's style. Thinking about going back for a nightmare difficulty run to learn the full story. But that's gonna be a piece of work since you die so quickly and the enemies are damage sponges. Which makes the combat less fun for me since your weapons feel so weak. Hm. Maybe watch a video of that and play Quantum Break instead.
 
It's an amazing music based game I highly recommend. Locking on to enemies creates a tom sound and firing is a snare drum! And it's beautiful.
In Japan, a special hardware called the "Rez Trance Vibrator" was sold for that game. It was a small rectangular USB device that vibrated in sync with the music.
 
In Japan, a special hardware called the "Rez Trance Vibrator" was sold for that game. It was a small rectangular USB device that vibrated in sync with the music.
I have the Dreamcast vibration pack. It's very satisfying.
 
I played HL2 today. I can't tell if it's overrated or not. I don't like it as much as Portal but it is very pleasant. I'm downloading the Dreamcast version now. I hope it will be more pixelated than HL2 on PS3. I'm really into pixelation.
It was really a game of the era, the physics of the game was novel at the time and the Physics Gun made for some fun gaming. The story of the game itself while I really liked it, most people measured it against the first game which likely was a losing battle.


Currently I've been replaying Cyberpunk 2077 on my new Linux gaming machine, now that it can properly handle it. This time I'm doing more of a Netrunner build vs my first go where I decided I'd just cut everything with a Samurai Sword.
 
The thing I really don't like about HL2 is it's a wartime game and seems like Ukraine/Gaza/Beirut. Bombed buildings make me sad. I'm going to play a less realistic game next.
 
Completed HL2 today. Is it pretty good but really a GOAT? PS3 has the worst graphics of any edition it seems. Story didn't blow me away. Levels were all kinda uniform intensity and I didn't really dig the environments. 8/10

Actually I think the PS3 has kinda bad, mushy graphics. I'm considering getting a component cable and using OSSC to line-double. I'm hoping lower resolution but crisper overall. Any opinions on this?
 
What HL2 does really well for its time is its tangibility. The physics, precise hit detection and audio as well as the character interactions make it so immersive. Maybe the next Half Life game was Alyx because it was the next leap in immersion? Meh, I'm waffling. If not, Half Life Next will have near-realistic skin feedback combined with input in the form of a clothing item. Still waffling.

I've gone back to a year-old Wasteland 3 savegame. I was in Steeltown. Was carrying weird weapons, couldn't remember why. Ended up slaughtering most of the workforce of this systematically misled and yet critical enterprise. Turns out those weird weapons were there to pacify and not-kill the workers. The decisions are weighty. Combat is fun. Gives me chuckle now and then. Good game.
 
What HL2 does really well for its time is its tangibility. The physics, precise hit detection and audio as well as the character interactions make it so immersive. Maybe the next Half Life game was Alyx because it was the next leap in immersion? Meh, I'm waffling. If not, Half Life Next will have near-realistic skin feedback combined with input in the form of a clothing item. Still waffling.

I've gone back to a year-old Wasteland 3 savegame. I was in Steeltown. Was carrying weird weapons, couldn't remember why. Ended up slaughtering most of the workforce of this systematically misled and yet critical enterprise. Turns out those weird weapons were there to pacify and not-kill the workers. The decisions are weighty. Combat is fun. Gives me chuckle now and then. Good game.
I guess just like the difference between old i486SX@16MHz and newer i486DX2@33MHz computers was massive in the past but now it usually hardly makes a difference for gaming if you have a 4 core or an 8 core CPU.
With games I have a similar feeling, the delta between how games perform and feature-wise is usually not that big anymore. But because of this it's also harder to get the next immersive experience. I liked HL Alyx but it wasn't the same feeling as playing HL1 for the first time.
I think it's one of the reasons there is no HL3 yet, as Valve thinks the game would fail if it doesn't meet this unrealistically high expectation. Duke Nukem Forever also had super high expectations, while most people just want to play some Duke without waiting a decade or more.
 
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