Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-1496755-20181119081008

I hope to have some good news this week, for a change. It's only Mondy and I already feel worn out - that's a sure sign that I need some rest. Besides, the year is almost over, there is hardly anything important left to do. December is pretty much a time to sit down and tell ourselves what a hard year it was. And then have a party on December 14 (the professional holiday of veterinarians).

Imagine if all those dance moves and other cosmetic stuff came from a thinly-veiled form of gambling, fueled by microtransactions. Still not joking!

Well, the fight with Hitler in Wolf 3D had several layers of symbolism according to the official hint book... so Quake, a more sophisticated game, aboslutely must have symbolism as well. The fight with Shub-Niggurath has to be the ultimate showdown of toxic masculinity vs. third-wave feminism, against the backdrop of social decay and voter apathy (that's why she doesn't have attacks of her own).

The thing about change is that one can adapt to it, but not prevent it. But change is scary, so some folks try to resist it, which causes even more turbulence. Instead, they should do what we do - we simply don't care about change, we just live in our dark corner of the internet, where it's always 1996 :P

You're that horrendous future tyrant, remember? In fact, I am starting to suspect that American McGee somehow predicted your rise to power, and this is what Chthon's emerging from the lava symbolizes. Whoa, it makes so much sense!

Heh, it's not unusual to find small errors years after they occurred. But at least they get fixed in the end, so it's all fine.

Aaaah, the small hours. Resurrecting the old nocturnal habits, in order to indulge in an orgy of insane gameplay, with a side dish of insane chat.

The level designers thought of everything. I wonder what would really happen, if you can get a monster into that teleporter at the right moment. The usual ending? A modified ending? Or simply a game crash? If we were good with editors, we could have staged it in a custom map.

You know that I've been messing around with PCem for a while, but now I have decided to actually play and beat a full game within this environment - make real use of it, not just experiment or use it to run 16-bit installers. I set up a Windows 95 system, installed a few old games that were specifically designed for it (they mostly work on modern systems, but with considerable workarounds and compatibility modes - and it's still far from optimal performance). They run perfectly so far, so I'm all set to put this emulator to some serious use. I want to see if PCem really is the better way to go than playing these things with workarounds, wrappers, and other tricks meant to bridge a technological gap that has grown way too wide. As an added bonus, I get to play them in the resolution they were meant to be played in (and which gives the best appearance), but which isn't even supported by my monitor. Most of these are so old that they require DirectX 3.0 - I installed 5.0, just to be safe ;)