Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20171111143841/@comment-1496755-20180815175336

This reminds me, one of these days I have to translate and share with you a really cool joke I read about metal sub-genres... I'll probably do it a a blog post. Someone who is more familiar with the peculiarities of each sub-genre will probably find it even funnier.

Yeah, the comfort of the familiar is hard to leave behind. But then there's also this whole moods thing - I could play something all the time right now and completely forget it next week. Hard to tell what will happen next... Occasionally a mood swing will drive me to try something new, thoughi n most cases it swings towards the tried and old.

Heh, the only advantage of having a slightly older PC is that you have a valid excuse not to try some of the latest stuff, since it will run like crap and who wants that... In more recent times I have tried to broaden my horizon with regard to Doom 2 megaWADs and added a few more modern things to the collection, after a meticulous selection, of course. And yet, I usually feel more compelled to stick to the old classics I've known since the early 2000's, even if they seem dated in the yees of the contemporary doomer.

I know someone has talked to the fake persona, though (s)he has never answered any question under their real name. So there's still an element of speculation, though we have pretty solid leads about their identity. The only thing stopping us from making a decisive move is the fear that the person in question might be a psycho and start hunting us :P

Upraising definitely plays a role to an extent, though it probably isn't the sole factor. My folks like classic rock and some harder stuff, my grandparents were into classical music, so it makes sense for me to enjoy something like symphonic metal, which blends a bit of both. But then i also like a whole lot of other stuff too, which does not have fans among the rest of the family. Life circumstances probably play a role as well - a mechanical construct would easily enjoy cheap "popular" music while an outcast would gravitate towards the more emotionally powerful and "dark" music. Epica sounds somewhat familiar - perhaps I have a random song of theirs among my playlists.

A paleontologist or an archeologist - I had similar childhood dreams too. Though my idea of these jobs was probably pretty far from reality, e.g. my idea of being an archeologist was something morel ike Indiana Jones than the real thing. When it comes to dinosaurs, though, I am a good Christian and must inform you that their so-called "fossils" were put there by Satan to test our faith ;)

Renting a VHS was like a mini-Christmas, especially if it was a more recent movie. Still, I missed many things from the early and mid-1990's, but I am making up for this nowadays. The internet is a great resources when it comes to hunting down such old stuff.

Sure, we can play both vanilla and something more wacky, just for the sake of experimenting.

I suppose people like nerfing the game to emphasize its role as a power fantasy. Some people enjoy the feeling of being an unstoppable engine of ultimate destruction.

Yes, CD/DVD drives are seemingly starting to fade away nowadays, but I specifically wanted to have one - both due to physical copies of games and because my deep archives are on CD's (the oldest is probably from 2001).

It's really funny when some mods deliberately add some of the more annoying features of modern shooters, just to stress on the absurdity of some developments in the genre. I've seen Doom mods with loot boxes... or ones that give you a huge "You are hurt, take cover!" message every time you take a hit (and warn you to return to the combat zone, if you deviate even an inch from the predetermined linear path). It's like an ironic self-reflection.

Reminds me of your foray into 1994 WADs, which demonstrated how different versions can totally break certain maps because they were designed for a specific engine behavior that was subsequently altered. Or the way the Diablo II single player community plays several different patches because of how some things can be very easy and successful in one version, but be very hard or even completely impossible to pull off in another, mostly due to subtle changes that seem too small to really cause all this, but interact with lots of other small things in their own way... It will surely be interesting to see this hardcore server. Especially if we can get sveeral people to join.

Ugh, HD textures usually make things look worse - mostly because an old game is designed with low-def textures in mind and slapping those hi-res things on top looks artificial and forced. Besides, I don't always like the art direction the HD textures use. And even worse - an HD update is often accompanied by some other ill-fitting special effects, most often insane amounts of metallic shine/specular shading. Imagine a Quake where every metal surface is a painfully shiny mirror with lots of glare. And non-metal surfaces also have this "moist" shine to them, as if someone sprayed the walls with grease.

I have heard peopel complain about Skyrim's hand-holding, some have even claimed that the TES series was seriously dumbed down. I guess I'll see for myself sooner or later...

You have a point - a good RPG game should feel like a living world that you inhabit. And a little customization can make it even more enjoyable.

Not having to rely upon emulators would be great... but that would mean getting an actual retro PC with Windows 98 or something like that. At least there is development going on - DOSBox used to be a LOT more restrictive and bottlenecked when I first tried it out (that was at version 0.63, I think), so it was really hard to use it for more advanced stuff like Duke 3D or Quake. There was a huge breakthrough in version 0.70 that made such games considerably faster and more stable. More importantly - playable. This was the point where I started using it more seriously. And this process is still continuing - I believe there is a performance improvement in the SVN versions as well, at least based on my observations. OpenGL was a big milestone indeed. One of the main reasons the Quake 2 engine was designated as the "id Tech 2" (while the Quake 1 engine is the "bastard") was that it had full GL (and Glide) support from day one. And more importantly, all rendering modes are accessible from the same executable, whereas GLQuake is a separate thing from both the vanilla quake.exe and Winquake.

I know only one other mod that allows you to grab severed enemy heads and throw them as a weapon... Brutal Doom! :O