Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-1496755-20181016182940

Coming back here always feels special. Like a second home. Or perhaps, a sanctuary?

Oh yes, mandatory updates, feels like you are hooked up to a MMORPG, even though it's a Single Player game. There are cases when updates can change so much about a game that the SP community would play several versions and thus create some sort of internal division. Diablo II is a great example of this, most notably in terms of people prefering the pre-1.10 or the post-1.10 game. This was the version that introduced a lot of profound changes, and generally made the entire game tougher (some folks didn't like that). So some would stick to the latest iteration of 1.09... but I was always a member of the post-1.10 group. But note that I have tried out the original 1.00 - for the sake of experimentation and as a "pilgrimage" to the game's roots.

Following the evolutionary path can be quite interesting indeed. The Betas reveal what might have been, then the intermediate versions show the final vision becoming more refined, the superfluos stuff being gradually removed. A game that I had known very well from the 1990's looked and felt pretty differently in its early 1.0 shareware release, featuring a surprising number of unique textures that were never seen anymore in later iterations (and a few sound effects that were never heard anymore too!). The game's final vision took shape in 1.2 - the first full release (the one I know), making the old 1.0 pretty obscure, even to a fan like myself. But since my current thing is about intermediates, I actually focused on the 1.1 release where most of these unique things were already gone and/or replaced, yet there were still some small remains of the old aesthetics - it truly is an evolving thing, a snapshot of the ongoing metamorphosis; almost ready for the full release, just needing a bit more adjustment. Exactly what my project is all about :)

A father with a cold is still better than healthy semi-cousins with a bad attitude, eh? I hope I can evade these things because I start coughing so easily... but then stop with great difficulty.

Heh, back in the days before sophisticated copy protection, you'd just unzip a game somewhere and it would be ready to go. Floppy-based stuff relied on checking codes from a manual, though this could be cracked. CD-based stuff was better protected - especially since most hard drives were not large enough to contain the entire thing anyway, which meant a cracked version would be deprived of cutscenes and music, usually. Some cases relied on custom-made data files containing only the bare minimum of data needed to run and beat the game, or even small dummy files to replace some of the missing content. Ah, the memories... It's kind of amazing that even Aftershock's team had a "traitor" within who'd leak their stuff.

Something else I've been doing lately - cleaning up my mailbox. I never deleted anything, so there were more than 12000 letters inside, gathering there for about 12-13 years. Normally I wouldn't care about old emails, but they do share the same capacity with Google Drive, so it's worth freeing up some space. Most of these letters are useless junk anyway - thousands of automated notifications about replies to YouTube comments, updates from old Wiki message threads, emails from Twitch, Facebook... all obsolete and useless now. Cleaned about about 8000 of them already and I bet there's still more. I'm also targeting old translation projects - some of them had hefty PDF files attached to them, lots of free space can be reclaimed from them. So the actual number of real and meaningful emails could be around 2000 or even less.