ICastFist

I started playing this game not expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised, because it's a solid game by itself, despite its age. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but overall the game is very well done. There is no nostalgia here, I never even saw this game on the few shareware discs of the late 90s that I had. I played the GOG version, but it's also available on Steam.

Keep in mind that 1996 was the year Quake and Duke Nukem 3D were released, so a number of less technologically impressive games were more easily ignored by players. It's also interesting to note that the game began development under Apogee, but ended up sold to Inner Circle, who finished the development.

The good stuff:

• Really good looking pixel graphics
• If you like violence and gore, there's plenty here
• Death sends you back to the last checkpoint with full health - the only setback is that you lose 20% of your cash and some enemies respawn. I never would've expected this mechanic in a game from 1996
• Levels will take around 15-25 minutes to finish the first time and offer a good variety of platforming and exploration
• Plenty of speedrun possibilities - jumping is much faster than walking, shooting while walking allows you to rapid fire by tapping a direction, dying can be a time saver.^[Judging from the times available at the archived Hall of Fame, a legit run can be done in 41 minutes and possibly less (#18 Locritani Nicola's time is 0:41:40). There are a number of sub 10 minute entries, which means there might be some exploits or level skips - or those fellas actually cheated and got away with it :)]
• Decent enemy variety
• Only bugs I've encountered were sound related, and only twice during ~5h of total playtime
• My overall feeling regarding level design is that they're well done for the most part, with some light puzzles and help from the friendly ape aliens. Only 2 times I really felt like I had no fucking clue of what to do or where to go.

The meh:

• I can't enter the hall of fame at www.alienrampage.com anymore :(
• The fucking camera not following you properly while you're jumping
• Money is only used to buy ammo, no shop sells health packs
• Action keys can only be remapped between CTRL, ALT, SHIFT and SPACE BAR.
• Couldn't get a XInput controller to work with the game, the analog kept reading/inputting up for some reason. The face buttons worked fine, tho.
• You're better off playing with the Numpad instead of the arrow keys - easier to aim. Also, the camera will only pan downwards if you're aiming down (1 or 3 on numpad), crouching won't do.
• Most of the free ammo you find on stages is to renew your bolter, which has regenerating ammo.
• The first boss is much harder than the 2nd, the latter is only hard because of bats.
• Saving is only between levels. Can't replay levels unless you load a game for that specific level.

The shit:

• Fucking bats
• No music. Not a bug or a version problem, the only bit of music in the game is in the short opening cinematic.
• Some levels are really asshole-ish in design, this happens more later on. Lots of leaping towards places you can't quite see. The last 4 levels have some mines that are like 5x3 pixels.
• Tiny enemies that swarm you will shred your face in no time
• Armor and Cloak powerups border on being useless, given how short their effect is (i think 15 seconds?)
• The levels where you pilot a ship. The last level even crashed the first time I actually beat it, after 20+ deaths.

Found this site a while ago. It's more or less a "museum" of free games made with tools from Clickteam^[the most famous game made with Clickteam Fusion 2.5 is possibly Five Nights at Freddy's]

Most games aren't exactly good, but it's good to see this kind of preservation, especially from a time when most such games were made with Flash instead

I guess the realistic "video just stopped" or audio desync isn't as fun on a screen

When going through the list by platforms, it will also list games that got relisted, though some lack the [RELISTED] tag but are being sold as packages with other similar games (Doom 1+2, Heretic+Hexen), as remasters only (Soul Reaver 1 and 2, Metal Gear Solid 2) or as a "final edition" with all updates and DLC as if it was a different game (Super Lucky's Tale, Street Fighter 4)

For every online-only game, the reason was a matter of publishers no longer being able/willing to keep servers running - Super Monday Night Combat is a peculiar case because the reason for the shutdown was that their netcode didn't comply with European GDPR

For single player games, the most common case is copyright imbroglio. There is also the case of Tax Heaven 3000, which was delisted from Steam before release, but it remains available on itch.io

The lists also contain the shovelware asset flip clones, like "The Last Hope" which surprises nobody when they get delisted, really.

Patrick was the man that actually started coding what would become Warcraft: Orcs & Humans before "real" development began. Some highlights:

• The main motivator for the game was "Dune 2, but with multiplayer"
• While there were plans for making it a Warhammer game, most of the team was against that idea, wanting freedom and being burned out from previous work with DC
• The name "Warcraft" was idealized by Allen Adham, who wanted a game series of historical conflicts
• The game originally allowed you to select as many units as you wanted, but that was later limited to only 4

Part 2 - https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-making-of-warcraft-part-2
Part 3 - https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-making-of-warcraft-part-3

I don't think I've ever played a game that has infuriated so much me with little things as much as this one. There are just SO FUCKING MANY little things that feel wrong that it really fucks up the experience.

I don't remember exactly when or where I got it, possibly a Fanatical bundle. Cheap game, good looking, "mixed" rating on Steam. "Can't be that bad". Indeed, it's not "that bad", but it's infuriating in the amount of little things that are kinda bad, that bad or really bad.

Now, the game is really good looking, the pixel art is a joy to see and the Castlevania SotN influence is extremely obvious, down to the double jump wing-flap and "ghosted" silhouette. Also, one of the characters, Allure, is like a cross of Alucard with Zero from Mega Man X. The control is great, though there is a big reliance on dashing for avoiding damage. In later dungeons, there's also a significant player skill requirement to get past some asshole-designed traps.

Some of my biggest gripes:

• Game has no pause, it acts like a permanent multiplayer server.
• There is zero in-game information for a LOT of important stuff. This is so bad that I only learned about certain features by reading the game description - like how raids are only supposed to happen every 7 days - and fucking patch notes, and even those can be stupidly unhelpful, like this absolute gem: 200% increased Floating Island. Buildings you can place on the town don't have a description, so other than the obvious mines, you're on your own to find out what each building produces or does.
• I still have no clue what Spirit does. It's one of your stats and that's it. Doesn't increase your hp/mp regen, doesn't increase how much you heal with magic, doesn't increase damage.
• Missions are all over the place and sometimes make no fucking sense. Hell, one of the very first missions asks for 30 flowers and 30 spores. The problem is that you only get 1, maybe 2, when you harvest them, and there are NOT 30 of them in the forest maps. Whenever the mission asks for a specific monster to be killed, prepare to wait forever for respawns and RNG.
• RNG will ruin your day when it comes to finding certain monsters or items. Watermelons are a low chance drop off chopped trees in the jungle. Milk is another item that's hard to come by due to low drop rate and you'll need 20 for one of the missions. Clay and Sand only drop from specific monsters and, despite being somewhat common construction materials, there is no building that collects them automatically - but you can still get osbidian mines!
• Inventory auto sorting sucks, the only consistent thing is that it puts consumables first, crafting materials second, equipment third. Other than that, it's whatever wherever, like how wood will be stuck between Topaz and Sapphire, while Amethyst goes way below on the list. It doesn't even stack together the same item. If you have a 23 and a 4 stack of wood, auto sorting won't make it a single 27 stack.
• Maps are uninteresting and have nothing worth exploring, no secret anything anywhere. They're also an OPTIONAL, completely linear progression. You automatically unlock new portals by leveling up. Oh, you have to mentally learn where each portal takes you, nothing is labeled
• Relics. They're little things that will sometimes appear in specific places in certain maps (yes, even this is fucking RNG dependent). They give small, permanent bonuses to your stats. The problem is that you lose ALL of them on death. They can reappear, if RNGesus deems it funny to see you losing it again within a minute.
• Crafting interface is fucking awful. Want to make 99 iron ingots? Gotta click the + button 98 times, then click "Craft". You can't see any recipes that you cannot make at the exact moment you open the menu - if you're not near an anvil, you cannot see the list of armors and weapons, period. The only "sorting" here is by tier
• You get absolutely no heads up about incoming raids. A purple health bar just shows up in the top middle of the screen when one starts and that's it. If you're too busy doing a dungeon or fighting a boss, fuck you.
• It takes like 14 or 21 in game days to even get the first raid and, judging by the achievements, the vast majority of players never even bothered to go that far into the game.
• Dungeon traps are 1-hit kills and their collision boxes are slightly larger than their actual sprites. Enemies will often walk around spikes, harassing you while you are unable to deal with them unless you kill yourself trying to kill them
• Elevators. They're sooooooo fuuuuuuuuckiiiiiiiiiing sloooooooowwww. There aren't many, but the few that are there will annoy the hell out of anyone
• Balance gets worse as you level up. From level 35 and onwards, nothing makes sense anymore. Equipment affixes/suffixes become less and less useful, as many of them are static numbers, like +50 atk, when simply changing ONE item from tier 8 to tier 9 can give you a 100atk boost. Armor values are the only ones that seem to grow little by little as levels advance.
• Imagine Diablo 2 loot drops, but worse in just about everything - lower drop rates, unhelpful extra effects, less time .
• Most dungeons' mythic loot is no different from heroic loot and tier 8 instead of 9.
• The witch boss always spawns a pool in front of her, making it near impossible to beat her with melee characters. There are many other situations where melee characters get shafted by asshole design and almost none where they shine over the ranged characters.

The game was abandoned less than a week after the 1.0 release in May 2022. A 1.02 patch was promised in June but never delivered. During the early development, it was marketed as something inspired by Terraria. It seems that any Terraria influence outside collecting resources has all but evaporated.

I have more gripes, but the ones above are those that I think are the most annoying. Like I said, there are just so many "little things" that it builds up the annoyance into full frustration.

One thing that didn't make the list but is worth mentioning is the amount of translation errors in PTBR: there are lots of words that were left in english. I understand the economic reason for thinking in english first (selling in USD is 5x more profitable) but come the fuck on, the entire dev team is Brazilian.

Asking because my gf has ADHD and she told me that, the first time she took ritalin (methylphenidate), she thought to herself "So this is what it feels like to not have ADHD?"

That got me thinking, is there a drug that has a similar effect on autists, that allows them to experience what is it like to "not have autism"?

I mean, every market has 2 or 3 whole aisles dedicated entirely to cleaning products and each seems specific for one thing only. I feel like some soap with a disinfectant is enough, but most people I know do a whole 3 stage cleaning ritual - soap (and rinse), disinfectant (and rinse), bleach (and rinse to finish)

A 12 year old ted talk with moral philosopher James Flynn. He also mentions how university students in the 50s would go to their parents and grandparents and try to argue using hypotheticals, which never worked. I also noticed that "concrete thinking" is common among children, which is probably our human default.

When you think about it, it makes sense that most people thru history wouldn't need to bother with hypotheticals, those ideas would be so far removed from their reality that it made no sense to bother thinking about it.

"Right at the peak of our last pandemic, Founders Fund hosted the first Hereticon, a ‘conference for thoughtcrime.’ Our thinking was simple: dissent is worth protecting. Most new ideas are wrong, or useless. Some are even dangerous. But from science and technology to business and faith, progress is a history of persecuted weirdos, so that is where we stand, and that is what we celebrated."

Reading through the article's summaries of some of the talks, I really feel like humanity is beyond fucked up

One of the few good pieces:

For the overwhelmingly Silicon Valley audience reading this, just a thought: maybe you’re not autistic, you’re just an asshole.

Another piece on the event - https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2024/11/13/i-attended-hereticon/

I get why some people would resent academia, since no matter how much you try to avoid it, it has lots of internal politics and is influenced by external politics as well. Even if you had good data and good arguments, "problematic" topics could be vetted instead of attempting to discuss them. On the other hand. doing this kind of event where it just feels like "dissent for the sake of dissent" doesn't really help, imo.