Oh hey

CHANGE OF PLANS.

Fuck Pandemic for a week, here.

Save 10% on TrackMania² Stadium on Steam

Trackmania²: Stadium's release date was leaked a few hours ago (official announcement tomorrow). Release date is in April.

TM² is now on steam. This is excellent, as the maniaplanet website is kind of shit. TM² through steam still requires maniaplanet launcher, which is fine. It just requires you set up an ID.

If you already own TM² in any capacity, just input your maniaplanet key into steam and you'll unlock the steam version.

ANYWAY. Stadium is in open beta for the next few weeks. Open beta is free. See link above. Don't need to prebuy to gain access. Just click download demo.

WE ARE PLAYING THIS NEXT WEEK. EXECUTIVE DECISION.

It's free. It's simple (Pure digital movement. Restart race. Restart checkpoint. That's all you have for controls).

Servers are full of randomly designed hilarity tracks that cycle every few minutes. There will be random background music.

It will be excellent.

Done! Can't wait to virtual puke in my virtual helmet doing my best to stay on the track.

oh man. i lost so much time to TM Nations, though i preferred the race mode to the time trial mode (more about consistency than perfection, i seemed to do a lot better at it). Really hoping i finish work early next week so i can get in on this.

EDIT: aand i have officially spent my first night playing this game far too late. For what it's worth, i created a GFF "group" (whatever that really means). To join it, all you gotta do is go to your profile, type in the info, and hit "subscribe".



And just when i had hopes that homework might actually ever happen again, having beaten Fire Emblem Awakening just a few hours ago.

Welp I don't know much about this game but it looks like you can use a custom horn sound so I'm in

I have been playing a lot this week. The two important things which i have taken screenshots of because they will never happen again are:





Looking forward to failing spectacularly in front of you all tomorrow.

(also, sorry for the lousy image quality)

Also, if you want to make your name fancy, here's how.

Man, haven't played in a couple days. Wonder if I'm still #2 in DE (out of 16, granted).

The variety of music on these servers is ruining me, I'm developing a reluctant appreciation for Flo Rida :(

enough of the music on servers is lousy that i just play my own. Only thing better than winning races? Winning races with Freebird rocking in the background.

Team Canada enjoying listening to the lamentations of everyone else's women all NIGHT, son.

Legit talk though for a moment; I fucking love this game. I dunno what you guys thought. Someone let me know! (Other than Pang, Pang sucks :( )

Yeah pretty much everybody but Hawkeye was as bitter and frustrated as me by the time we called it a night. 60% of this is probably due to the mapmaking community for this game being ten varieties of rare syphilitic dog dick.

I don't think I've been more mad and gotten as much a headache since when I played Counter-Strike way back in middle school. Game is frustrating due to how perfect you have to be to even place but mostly because the maps are either boring as fuck or made so poorly that if you fuck up in the wrong place you have to restart the entire race because the jump you want to make is impossible with the amount of track given from the last checkpoint (creepy penis overlap) you went through. Like seriously my head really fucking hurts. Really really hurts.

I'm glad you had fun, Skills, but for me that whole thing from its shit input configuration system to it's horrible race tracks to it just being a really suped up ghost-mode I'd rather not play it again. Out of all the tracks I played tonight I might have liked two of them. The one I got third in because nobody else was able to finish it and one other I can't recall much of. Where were all the neat tracks I saw in the trailer? Where were the looptyloops? Where was all the wall-riding? Shit was both frustrating and boring for the most part. I'll pass if we decide to play this and you can't guarantee that we play fun tracks.

I'm not much of a racing enthusiast in general, so I can't be the metric by which this game is declared good or not, but not being able to dick around with Skills times by being a nuisance to him or anyone else kind of made it not so much the best game for a game night for me.

It's not a bad game, it was just a bit limited in terms of interaction is what I'm getting at. I still had a good time trying it though.

I love racing games in the general case, though. I'm absolutely down for some Flatout or Dirt or even that goddamn ridiculous new Sonic racing business and if we do get some emulatin' on then Mario Kart is definitely on the menu. I'm sorry, but a "multiplayer" game where you can't functionally interact with the other players is walking a pretty thin line. The only way I could affect anyone's play experience was by making incredibly dumb jokes so they crack up when trying to get past map-ruining-excessively-demanding-jump-#17.

And yeah, it literally gave me a headache as well.

It's probably the sort of thing you and I will have to do on our own time Skills, since everyone else was getting fairly frustrated by the end - though if we can put together some sweet maps on our own little server then it might be worth another half a game night to some people. Now i guess i have to get the game because apparently we're rivals or something.

Also - 4th place going the wrong way? Awesome. Totally going to try that again sometime.

In that case, I apologize for wasting everyone's time. I didn't realize it was going to be so universally reviled.

The fan made ones do go back and forth, yes. There's some tryhards who create some serious crap (there's a lot of cases where a booster at a checkpoint could make all the difference), but I've also experienced some very good ones that aren't frustrating.

Fair enough that it's no one else's bag though. Unfortunate. :(

It's rare that we have a universal dud, so what are we playing next week?

Well, failing any other ideas we can always slaughter more blacks. Other than that maybe we should just make March the month of Skill-Based Games.

March 12: Starcraft
March 19: DOTA 2
March 26: Counter-Strike: GO

I refuse to support Blizzard in any way shape or form unless it's a new Lost Vikings or Rock & Roll Racing. If you guys play Starcraft then I'm out unless there is a way I can get the game for free and go into spectator-mode and chat with you guys.

If we do brood war I'm sure there's a way to do it. I don't know the big name servers all that well but heck, if I recall correctly there's an option for one of us to host it anyway.

Starcraft 2 on the other hand needs constant attention from battle.net so that's would be quite hard without buying it.

Yeah, supporting Blizzard with, like, actual money was never really on the agenda, I'm not a monster.

Let's improve all of those.

Starcraft --> Homeworld
DOTA 2 --> Frozen Synapse
CS GO --> UT 2K4

Or 99. Or RTCW. Or any flavour of Tribes.

All better calls. (Seriously fuck you DOTA what is this. Bad taste month?)

YouTube Video

Fuck, we should still do Homeworld.

It is the shit.

AFTER SERIOUS NEGOTIATION, A SERIES OF WELL-CONSIDERED AND THOUGHTFUL COMPROMISES HAS BEEN REACHED. I PRESENT THE FINDINGS OF THE ELDER CONCLAVE:

SERIOUS SAM HD: FIRST ENCOUNTER

HOMEWORLD

SWAT 4

Looks like pretty much everybody owns Sam, but if you don't, just, christ, I'll just give it to you, how did you live up to this point. Homeworld/SWAT will require some sketchy ISO shenanigans (and SWAT might be squirrelly on modern systems, I'll look into it).

MARCH: SORTED.

It'll take me a week and a half to come up with proper Homeworld solutions to a few issues anyway.

NOTE TO SELF WHEN READING THIS POST IN THE FUTURE:

- Widescreen Mod
- Works fine out of the gate on Win 7 64.
- GameRanger for games or maybe it'll be sortable via IP only? MUST CONFIRM
- Getting game itself to people.

Serious Sam HD should be fun, with like 16 people actively shooting everything at the same time. Or 8 people, I forgot.