All Kinda Classics

 Found out you could get the original Unreal  and  Unreal Tournament  legit, for free, on Linux. Awesome! Took me a little over a week to shoot through the first game's campaign. I'll hit the expansion pack next week, probably. Pros: Epic managed to build an engine to rival (if not surpass) the Quake (2) engine. After over a decade of everyone else being the "other" choice next to the idtechs, that's pretty impressive on its own. The "OS" style top menu. These were really in vogue for 5 or 10 years starting in the mid nineties. I love them. With a little theming they can stay reasonably immersive, and they're so much more convenient than individually navigating a half dozen poorly labeled menus to find what you want. Or just not having menus at all anymore... It does the "long string of organically connected levels" thing better than anything else I can think of for the time period. (And most after.) The outdoor environments still hold up t...

Where are all the million other girls who want this job? Who are those women in the title sequence? Are they the million? Why is everyone amazed when she comes back to work after the montage where she's in like 15 outfits? I assumed it was supposed to show time passing, and that she wore those outfits over the course of a couple weeks. Why does no one in the whole movie act like a functional adult? Why do I care that she broke up with her boyfriend? They both obviously hate each other.

  Chapter 2 Still chugging along with copyworking this. I don't think I want to do the normal bonus, summary, commentary format for these. Chapter 2 shows a great quirk of (especially in this era) fanwork/amateur writing. Weird attention to  some  details, but not all. The are a lot of typos, spelling mistakes, grammar errors, etc. Not enough to be unreadable, but more than in chapter 1. But, there is enough weirdly specific attention to detail to do things like change the fake computer being used to take notes because a different character is doing it. There's also a lot of weird floating in around in the narrator voice. Not just the (marked) head hopping, but bopping between a close and far third for the same character. The smores at the end are good. No rape. The internet made me think someone was going to get raped like twice a chapter. Aki's yamiko is still sexual, but not rapey. I totally forgot Aki (Sailor Beauty) was second, I thought it was the reporter girl (Shi...

1999 was an amazing year for FPS games. I played some Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament tonight. They both still hold up (honestly, better than a lot of modern shooters). I think what I like about them the most in comparison is how hands off they are. Id and Epic both just let you go nuts with skins, mods, etc. and play your game. No 12 layers of anti-cheat/DRM, no grinding to unlock guns. You install the game and you're on the same level (stat/gearwise) as someone who started a decade and a half ago. And you can still play, even if it's over 2 decades old.

 Why don't operating systems come with games anymore? Windows sort of has Solitaire still, but it's a bloated mess. Chrome has the dinosaur game, I guess. MacOS has Chess, which I guess is the realest game. I think most Linux distros ship with at least a couple by virtue of their desktop environment. I think my KDE install came with Mahjong, Solitaire, Minesweeper, maybe one or two more. I don't think any of the BSDs include the old bsdgames by default anymore. The internet leads me to believe OSX used to, back when it was closer to FreeBSD. Here's the list: https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/BSD_games Rain is obviously the coolest: I dunno. On the one hand, Windows is so bloated these days, I get trying to cut stuff. On the other, I think at least a couple of decent games is good "out of the box" as part of a complete system. If we're pretending your OS is anything other than a web browser opener.

 Tried some Quake 2 today. Probably my least favorite of the "retro id" (however we're defining that) set. It's even darker than Quake 1, and in way that doesn't really make sense. Q1 is doing the gothic horror thing, Quake 2 is... I dunno, aliens haven't invented the light bulb? The enemies are all aggressively spongy. I'm never really sure if they're actually "tougher" (in terms of amount of HP), the guns just suck, or what. The nailgun<machinegun is probably the most noticable. Other than that, it kind feels like it's stuck midway between the old Quake/Doom run n gun as fast as you can feel, and a slower, semi-tactical one. There's kind of an inventory system, but it kind of sucks. Compared with Jedi Knight 2, which came out the same year, it feels very limited. I don't think some of the original Quake design decisions (no use button) really sort the new feel, and it's held back by that. It's probably the game that I...

 It's a classic! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePZeyh5q9R8

 Nethack (is amazing, go play it) was on 3.4.3 for 12 years.  I don't remember exactly when I started playing, but suffice to say that it had been the current version for several years when I discovered it, and by the time I (mostly, I always wandered back for a weekend here and there) it would still be the current version for several more years. We spent about 10 years on various 3.6.X (there was never an official 3.5 series). And now we jumped all the way to 5 (because Nethack 4 was already kind of a thing). What a time to be alive?