Continuing on with Half-Life 2. I had no problems with motion sickness in this game until I got to the level with the airboat, then it hit me hard. I had not adjusted the FOV yet, which is probably why it happened. Oddly, this old version of the game considers changing the FOV to be a cheat, and I had to set sv_cheats 1 in autoexec.cfg so that fov 90 would take effect. After that, the motion sickness mostly went away. That said, I still don't like the airboat, with its wobbly camera and clunky controls. Those levels weren't particularly fun to play for me.

On a slightly related note, the physics based puzzles may have been a novelty back in the day, but they feel kinda meh now. At times, it seemed like the developers wanted to showcase their shiny new engine, instead of creating a fun experience for the player. At least the shooting mechanics are great, possibly even better than in the first game. Every weapon is very satisfying to use and has a distinct feel to it. That said, I do miss the improved crosshair from the current Steam version which intuitively shows how much ammo is left in the clip.

I've mentioned the superb graphics before, but I have to specifically note how good the NPC facial animations look. Especially if you compare them to contemporary games like Far Cry and Doom 3. Back in 2004, the expressive NPCs of Half Life 2 and Vampire Bloodlines (which also uses the Source engine) blew everything else out of the water. Other games caught up eventually, but it was really groundbreaking stuff when HL2 and Bloodlines were first released.

Anyway, I'm still very early in the game, having just reached Ravenholm. I vaguely remember this area being a showpiece for the Gravity Gun, but not much else.

I find myself having a bit of motion gronk from using the - now common - larger display sizes of 27 and up, especially with third-person/first-person open-world games where I might be jumping down from heights or falling or flying through the air.

Ravenholm is mostly playable with just the gravity gun but towards the end you need some more firepower...
Besides that I got stuck in this area at the point where you have to go back to the beginning of the last part (which starts with the entrance to some sort of alley where you can run some barrels down the road) on top of the roofs. Just couldn't find the way to get up there for quite a while.
That's something that happened several times to me while playing HL2.
It seems leveldesign in general must have improved over the years because that's something not happening that often to me in newer games. Or it's me just getting old, idk.

Another thing is the very much varying degree of difficulty in HL2. Many parts are quite easy to play even with massive amounts of opponents and then there's these points in the game where you just think what the hell is going on. Especially the setting in this old prison (a bit after Ravenholm I think) where you have to defend your position between some cells and energy walls against a huge quantity of soldiers attacking from all sides for quite some time. You only got some turrets to set up but they are knocked out all the time and their effect is ... minimal. It's still unclear to me how to stand this with very limited ressources.

So I've been injecting Mechwarrior 5 directly into my veins.

I commented before how much was added, but even then I was barely scraping the surface. The other mercenary companies that can drop to assist or oppose you are connected to this whole intelligence gathering metagame with the Bounty Hunter, a rather mysterious figure from Battletech lore. It makes things interesting when you are about to wrap up a mission, and suddenly the music plays and the mercs send a transmission that they are about to pound you into next week. They haven't been a legitimate challenge for me thus far, but they definitely spice up a mission. Especially when your evac point changes because of them.

There are way more events, side quest, and small story missions than I remember. But I also have all the DLC so that probably helps. A part of me wonders if all the different meta-progression schemes they've grafted onto the game might result in it being too easy past a certain point when you've min-maxed a bunch of them. I guess I'll find out when I get there. It also marginally cheapens the skill level? Like in every other Mechwarrior game you just had to get good. In this one you can slowly grind up some buffs like pilot skills, mech upgrades, or higher quality versions of equipment.

You can punch now! I don't know how it took me that long to notice, melee is listed in your weapon loadout, but I guess old habits die hard. I wasn't punching much until I dabbled with a Dervish with maxed out SRMs, and it's just a blast to run up to some enemy at full speed, obliterate his back armor with about 20 missiles, and then punch a hole clean through his chest. Melee has always been a thing present in the Battletech rules but lacking from Mechwarrior, and it's surprisingly fun.

I'm just continually impressed by the degree to which this game has redeemed itself. I don't think it's very often a game undergoes the long, hard work it takes to turn itself around. I can only really think of a few off the top of my head, most notably No Man's Sky and to a lesser degree Diablo 3. I know with Mechwarrior 5 I see a lot of common sentiment that it's the modders that "fixed" the game, but I'm playing with very minimal mods, Better Spawns and a UI Fix for 32:9, and it's incredible.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-10-01, 08:47:

clueless1 wrote on 2024-09-28, 10:19:

Eye of the Beholder I
Fallout (barely a DOS game)
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands

EOB I (and by extension II) and Dark Sun are great AD&D games, and I suggest you give them another go.
Fallout (and by extension Fallout 2) are amazing games but the tone and material here is definitely not to everyone's taste so I don't think they will grab you if you weren't charmed the first time around.

The single save slot on EOB1 is what killed me. I saved myself into a dead end. And it pissed me off enough that I didn't want to start over.

I actually got good vibes from Fallout as far as story and mood went. The interface is what stopped me from playing. I got to a place where I had to give a sick person in a tent a bottle of medicine, and couldn't figure out how to give him the bottle. Finally I looked it up and it was some bizarre sequence of left and right clicking that was so obscure that I bailed on the game.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-10-01, 10:31:

On a slightly related note, the physics based puzzles may have been a novelty back in the day, but they feel kinda meh now. At times, it seemed like the developers wanted to showcase their shiny new engine, instead of creating a fun experience for the player.

I remember thinking that even back when it came out, since a number of the physics puzzles do seem extremely contrived.

That and the overly linear pathing in the level design. Far Cry was the superior FPS game back in 2004.

Finished the Orc campaign of WarCraft: Orcs & Humans yesterday after finishing the Human campaign earlier, thus I have now completed the game. Believe me when I say that's something I really did not expect to be ever able to say!

The Orc campaign was a bit more annoying overall but not as much as it first seemed. The longer range of archers didn't end up mattering all that much after the first couple levels and even the insane healing of priests turned out to be just a couple special groups on two or three maps that had been hand placed there to be a nuisance. The priests the enemy actually trained itself weren't nearly as bothersome, they did heal others but not as obnoxiously as those groups and were easy to deal with.

It was the priest invisibility spell that annoyed me far more than heal, I wasn't terribly happy about how enemy troops started just appearing out of nowhere in the middle of my gold train of peons, going directly after them paying no heed to anyone else. Add in woeful path finding and how peons don't continue what they were doing after automatically running away after getting attacked, spreading all over the place and just stopping there I sighed so deeply a few times the large change in air pressure in the house probably caused structural damage.

But I had a good time with it overall. The game is simple and the control scheme is clunky, but it's charming as hell. I imagine driving a Ford Model T would be similar, steering sucks and your back and ass are probably going to be sore but I bet you'd still have a good time driving one!

Congrats on Warcraft 1! That's one of the few older titles I didn't have the resilience for. A fine accomplishment imho.

Namrok wrote on 2024-10-02, 03:39:

Congrats on Warcraft 1! That's one of the few older titles I didn't have the resilience for. A fine accomplishment imho.

Thanks! All this time I had been certain I wouldn't have the resilience for it either, I guess I'm somehow now better able to deal with "patina" than before.

If so that would be great, would open up games that I've been avoiding in the past thinking I wouldn't be able to enjoy them.

clueless1 wrote on 2024-10-01, 22:23:

appiah4 wrote on 2024-10-01, 08:47:

clueless1 wrote on 2024-09-28, 10:19:

Eye of the Beholder I
Fallout (barely a DOS game)
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands

EOB I (and by extension II) and Dark Sun are great AD&D games, and I suggest you give them another go.
Fallout (and by extension Fallout 2) are amazing games but the tone and material here is definitely not to everyone's taste so I don't think they will grab you if you weren't charmed the first time around.

The single save slot on EOB1 is what killed me. I saved myself into a dead end. And it pissed me off enough that I didn't want to start over.

I actually got good vibes from Fallout as far as story and mood went. The interface is what stopped me from playing. I got to a place where I had to give a sick person in a tent a bottle of medicine, and couldn't figure out how to give him the bottle. Finally I looked it up and it was some bizarre sequence of left and right clicking that was so obscure that I bailed on the game.

You can always manually backup your save in EOB, and yes the game does have several stuck states you don't want to save yourself into 🙁 Sorry to hear this.

And yes the UI of Fallout is pretty archaic for a 97/98 game. Fallout 2 has seen some QOL updates in that regard but it's still notoriously clunky. I don't think there has been a UI replacement for these games so far, like EXULT for Ultima etc, which is sad.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-10-01, 10:31:

Continuing on with Half-Life 2. I had no problems with motion sickness in this game until I got to the level with the airboat, then it hit me hard. I had not adjusted the FOV yet, which is probably why it happened. Oddly, this old version of the game considers changing the FOV to be a cheat, and I had to set sv_cheats 1 in autoexec.cfg so that fov 90 would take effect. After that, the motion sickness mostly went away. That said, I still don't like the airboat, with its wobbly camera and clunky controls. Those levels weren't particularly fun to play for me.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2024-10-01, 13:19:

I find myself having a bit of motion gronk from using the - now common - larger display sizes of 27 and up, especially with third-person/first-person open-world games where I might be jumping down from heights or falling or flying through the air.

I found HL2 fine, and most newer games too - there are some, like some 3d jump/puzzle types where the swirling camera is too much though. From back in the day i always got a motion sick feeling from playing SiN! Still did when i tried a while back, not sure what it is about that game.

ChrisK wrote on 2024-10-01, 13:41:

Another thing is the very much varying degree of difficulty in HL2. Many parts are quite easy to play even with massive amounts of opponents and then there's these points in the game where you just think what the hell is going on. Especially the setting in this old prison (a bit after Ravenholm I think) where you have to defend your position between some cells and energy walls against a huge quantity of soldiers attacking from all sides for quite some time. You only got some turrets to set up but they are knocked out all the time and their effect is ... minimal. It's still unclear to me how to stand this with very limited ressources.

that's true about HL2, i like the game a lot but it does feel like a bunch of different games plugged together at time, including difficulty. I also wanted to spend a bit ore time early on in the game, before the "rush to next location" levels begin

gerry wrote on 2024-10-04, 08:13:

From back in the day i always got a motion sick feeling from playing SiN! Still did when i tried a while back, not sure what it is about that game.

All the game logic was still 10hz and everything got lerped

This Half Life 2 discussion reminds me of my first time playing it. I had to play it in 15 minutes sessions because I'd get terribly nauseous. Back then I had no idea about the FOV stuff, so I just thought it was me. Still ended up loving it.

Played some more Half-Life 2. Hurling buzzsaws and exploding barrels at zombies with the Gravity Gun was cool for a while, but it got repetitive around half way through the level. Also, I think there may have been a couple of areas in Ravenholm where enemies kept (re)spawning out of thin air, not sure. And oddly, I had forgotten that fast zombies existed in this game.

Next up was Highway 17. Another nausea-inducing driving section with the same wobbly camera and clunky controls, joy. But this time, there are enemy bugs that infinitely respawn from underground, yay! Also, I had to look up how to flip the buggy over, didn't realize you need to use the Gravity Gun for that. Anyway, I decided to take a break here. This just isn't fun for me right now, maybe I'll pick it back up at some later point. And thus Half-Life 2 returns to the backlog.

It feels so weird saying this, but gameplay was not Half-Life 2's strong point IMHO. People went nuts over the environmental story telling, and I think it was one of the first games that scratched that "game theory" itch with so much never being explained explicitly, but being in the background in art direction, scenery and NPC conversations. But to me the gunplay was manifestly worse than the first game, the enemy AI was dumber, and the different units of the game felt completely disconnected from one another, and large sections of the game (physics puzzles, buggy, boat, Ravenholm to a lesser degree) just felt gimmicky. The plot, such as there was one, just seemed to waffle about sideways from cool distraction to cool distraction, and never made forward momentum. Literally a single plot point occurs in the entirety of HL2, and very little else happens in the expansions minus the climax/cliffhanger from Episode 2. It's fitting that the game never actually got an ending, because hardly anything happened to begin with.

The only part of Half-Life 2 that made me feel woozy was crossing over the bridge girders to shut off the force field. Even at 1280x1024 it gave me a very uncomfortable feeling that I didn't get over until I had done it several times . And getting knocked off and falling to your death because you took hits from a gunship is especially aggravating.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-09-30, 11:39:

Started replaying Half-Life 2. Of course, I have the game on Steam, but I decided to replay it in its original form using the Collector's Edition under WinXP. That version of the game still installs Steam, but it doesn't require an internet connection to run, so it's retro friendly. Once installed, it works fine on a fully offline WinXP system. No third-party utilities or DRM removal tools are needed.

I decided to give this a try myself. I installed the game from the Collector's Edition DVD.

Unfortunately, the game is tied to Steam. It won't log in without an account and it needs internet access for that.

How did you go about getting it to run offline with no internet connection?

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-10-06, 01:36:

I decided to give this a try myself. I installed the game from the Collector's Edition DVD.

Unfortunately, the game is tied to Steam. It won't log in without an account and it needs internet access for that.

How did you go about getting it to run offline with no internet connection?

You may need a specific (older) build of the Collector's Edition from 2004 for this. Only that version works out of the box, without an internet connection. If it helps, when I type in version in the console I get build number 2153.

Note that the game will require you to install Steam from the disc, and that's fine. However, it won't ever prompt you to log in or create an account. After Steam is installed, you can disable it from auto-starting on every reboot via MSCONFIG. Be sure to install both HL2 and Steam in their default folders.

P.S.

You can get other retail versions of Half-Life 2 to work without Steam as well, but the process is much more involved. More details in this thread.

I'm continuing my journey through Mechwarrior 5. One funny thing happened. The 32:9 UI mod I'm using broke Arena Fame in the new Solaris Showdown DLC. Luckily the mod tools are freely available and easy to use, and I wrote myself a new mod reimporting and correcting the screen positioning of the asset that handles Arena Fame. I think the 32:9 UI mod was authored before the Solaris DLC, so it basically backported an outdated version of that asset over the DLC's. At first it seemed like I broke it worse than before, because blank screens kept popping up. But then it happened even with all mods disabled, so I figured some unprocessed queue of Arena events were being worked through, and after mashing the space bar for about 5 minutes I was all caught up. Now everything works perfectly.

I'm coming up on 3030, having started in 3015. The Fourth Succession War is gearing up, and I'm on retainer with the Fedcom forces to participate, so that should be fun. You can tell a lot of love went into this. The news feed is just a constant scroll of the in universe perception of events you'd have read about in the Grey Death novels, or the Warrior Trilogy. It actually makes me want to go back and read them again.

I'm finally scraping together some assault mechs, but none I'm really wild about. A shitty variant of an Awesome with LRM15, 1 large laser and 1 small laser. Come on, everyone knows the Awesome with 3 PPCs is the best Awesome! I got a Cyclops, a mech I'm familiar with but have actually never seen in another Mechwarrior game. I'm gonna fix it up and give it a spin, but I'm skeptical. It does have an AC/20 though, so we'll see. I actually ended up with a pair of Warhammers that are way better than I've felt they ever were in other games. The twin PPCs work pretty well at long range, provided you are good at leading a target or picking your shots well. In medium range the SRM6 and 2 medium lasers can work alright. Then at short range a pair of small lasers and two machine guns will absolutely chew up vitals if you managed to punch through armor as things got closer. They are armored well enough, and have a good enough speed to boot. Kind of an OK all rounder, though as I'm encountering more assault mechs and upper end heavy mechs, they could use a bit more concentrated oomph at a particular range.

Crysis 2. Have been playing this game over multiple years. I'd play a little, get distracted and save, continue from said save six months to a year later. So probably around six to seven years now. I think I'm nearing the finish line? Anyhoo... loved the original Crysis and Warhead and I had heard the second one was just meh. TBH... I'm loving it like the first. Looks drop dead gorgeous imo even though it's pushing towards 14 years old.