Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-1496755-20181001170750

Speaking of helpless, I got a broken cupboard door and I seem to be completely unable to fix it myself. Luckily, my grandpa is pretty bored during the day and is often looking for something to do, so I'll ask him for some help on this one ;)

I started preparing the Glorious Eternal Database for its journey... this week is the worst time for distractions. Not that it stops people. At least everyone is back to work, so I won't have to take anyone else's duties.

The great thing about PCem is that it uses actual ROMs to emulate the motherboards and video cards, which adds quite a bit of realism to the whole thing. You know, I actually recognize some of those startup screens - we must have had a PC with such a motherboard in the early 1990's (major nostalgia blast here). Greater realism means that you might have to bother a little more with drivers, though, whereas stuff in DOSBox just magically works and is pretty flexible. So both programs have their strong sides and preferable uses.

I know of at least one instance where Nightmare is hidden even harder, nearly impossible to find without a walkthrough, or unless you are insanely observant...

Well yes, the only way to play WoW sequentially nowadays is to rely on private servers, and choosing the right one is no easy task. None of them are at the original's level of quality, though a few come pretty close, but only because their staff is made up of crazy dedicated nerds.

One of the big reasons for the Quake engine to be a "bastard" of sorts... Quake 2 made a huge leap forward by having GL support from day one. And all modes from the same executable. No wonder it was designated as the official "id Tech 2" engine. Plus, the GL support itself is much better than Quake's, with colored lighting and a few other tricks that were pretty impressive for heir time.

I know of a few games with solid corpses, but they usually obstruct movement very little (perhaps their collision boxes aren't very big) and usually often the option to be gibbed. This is a decent way to handle it.

Actually, I think having a good life increases the probability of being negative... cause people with horrible lives usually have lots of stuff to distract them from looking within. And looking within yourself is probably the scariest and most darkness-inducing thing one could do. Constructs require constant distractions precisely because they can't handle introspection. This chasm is too deep for them. I'm glad to say that living on my own is pretty much an immunity against distractions. The only exception is the phone, though people call me rarely.

Mmmm, yeah, it probably felt safer for them to stick to the model used by the main game. Quake works well as a shareware game - the first episode offers a nice mixture of styles and smooth gameplay to get you hooked up on the game and make you hungry for more. And then we have Episode 2 that crushes your hopes and dreams in its dank decaying dungeons :P

Chthon warrants some deeper investigation. He's a more unique kind of boss with a bit of specific scripting, so it is possible that he can't be placed just anywhere. Does this apply to old Shubby too? Does killing her always end the game, or it happens only in that specific map?

Only thing that somewhat annoys me about Daemon Tools is how pushy it can be about buying its paid versions, as well as the presence of a bunch fo features I wouldn't use... but apart from this, it gets the job done perfectly, way better than that limited thing I used to have before.

This sort of info, about levels and who made them, is probably found in hintbooks and the like. I know Wolf 3D's hintbook featured some bits of trivia and sometimes various comments from the id Soft staff. Don't know if a strategy guide for Quake would include such stuff, though. The champions of game documentation were probably Infocom during the Zork-like text adventures era - their games included all sorts of crazy additional materials, sometimes entire in-universe booklets, brochures, letters, coins, badges, plastic cards... pretty elaborate stuff, considering the simplicity of the games they accompanied.

Another feature of some 90's strategy guides - some sort of in-universe narrative to keep the reader interested. It's a whole character biography, even though your in-game character is called Kamikaze and is a crazy guy who shoots his teammates. Not crazy enough to avoid registering at the front desk, though :P

God bless shovelware, I guess. But hey, this was the early internet era's way of preserving so mcuh stuff for posterity. Just download it all and throw it on a CD, someone's gonna pay for it.

Q2 has turned out to be the "gift that keeps on giving", eh? Somehow I am not very surprised that they stole from toehr maps... I guess ripping off their customers just wasn't enough to make Q2 look really badass!