Little things that annoy the hell out of you

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Mischief Maker
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Mischief Maker »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:I just got a review that went into heavy detail on game mechanics rejected on GameFAQs:
A review should focus solely on the content of the game rather than the technical aspects of the game.
Oh, fuck off. The gameplay mechanics are the content.
Sounds like the mod was a big fan of Alien Hominid.

Quick, what's a good excuse to reject a well-written review I disagree with???

Feel free to repost it here.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Alien Hominid HD. Most other reviews focus on "haha funny alien shoots things". Because of the context of it trying desperately to be Metal Slug while not nailing the basics, I felt that it was more or less impossible not to review it without comparing it back to Metal Slug. I can't promise the writing is exactly exceptional (written in the deep throes of butthurt while having played it recently) but frankly I've read far worse on GameFAQs (that I've reported and is still somehow up).
Spoiler
Alien Hominid is a run 'n gun platformer (that originally started as a fairly basic Flash-based game) that tries to emulate the gameplay of the arcade hit Metal Slug, but is so amateurish in its execution that it honestly feels like the developers enjoyed Metal Slug but did not actually understand what it is about Metal Slug that makes it such a good run 'n gun game. Metal Slug was a smash hit in the arcades that spawned numerous sequels, featuring a cartoonish military aesthetic. The titular Metal Slug was a tank you could ride around, that would protect you from a few hits, and gave you some extra firepower. Metal Slug is rightfully regarded as one of the best run 'n gun platformers out there, due to its absolutely solid game design combined with gorgeously detailed artwork with tons of frames of animation, great sound design, and enjoyable levels. Metal Slug is a joy to play and should be experienced by any fan of this style of game, and because it was the very clear inspiration for Alien Hominid's design, this review will frequently compare the two. That's not to say that Metal Slug is the only run 'n gun series worth playing, and there are plenty other solid run n' guns out there such as Sunset Riders and Moo Mesa by Konami, or even various indie releases (such as REDPULSE, a relatively recent game as of the writing of this review). Heck, there are a few games that feel heavily inspired by Metal Slug such as Demon Front as well as Dolphin Blue that are highly enjoyable due to them being mechanically solid. Alien Hominid unfortunately is not worth playing, mainly due to how broken its core fundamentals are.

It's immediately clear when playing Alien Hominid that the game is designed around Metal Slug, with a few additional frills. You've got grenades to throw, and a shot that you have to button mash to fire (this was one of the few complaints about Metal Slug and I prefer it with a rapid fire setup). Tapping attack near an enemy uses a knife slash attack like Metal Slug, but you've also got a charge shot, which helps spare your fingers during bosses in theory, as well as the ability to jump on the heads of enemies to ride them around or bite them, and also the ability to dig underground, instantly becoming invulnerable to most attacks as you dig, whereby you can attack enemies from below for a short period of time, but cannot move until you dig yourself out. The shoulder buttons perform dodge rolls too, with forward rolling moving you under high bullets. You can also ride vehicles around, although due to their lack of health or maneuverability you'll generally not be able to use them for very long compared to Metal Slug's tanks. Unfortunately, much of this expanded moveset feels superfluous and impractical:

• Grenades have a strict 3 grenade limit, and you can't throw another one until the explosion animation finishes. They're also quite weak, and instead of mapping the button to a shoulder button so you can easily hold a charge shot while using grenades, it's mapped to a face button that's opposite your main shot. Compare this to Metal Slug, where grenades could be spammed very rapidly at close range for significant damage. The grenades in Alien Hominid end up feeling mostly useful for destroying buildings to get new weapons and a shield to provide some protection, as well as taking out the occasional enemy hiding behind cover.

• Enemies constantly spawn in Alien Hominid, meaning using the charge shot regularly can actually be riskier than trying to keep a constant stream of fire down to kill whatever's in front. The charge shot is handy for bosses though, but it seems with aggressive button mashing you can match or possibly beat the charge shot in damage, and on enemies that gives points per shot you get more lives by plinking them down with the basic shot.

• Running around and biting enemies gives more points than shooting them, but enemies can shoot out your hostage, putting you suddenly in danger at close range.

• Digging is helpful for getting the occasional secret, and you become invulnerable the moment you start the dig animation, but you can't stay underground forever as you asphyxiate eventually. There are also several attacks such as grenades or tanks driving over you that can kill you while hiding this way, meaning it turns into a bit of trial an error. Sitting still also feels antithetical to this kind of game and isn't a terribly fun mechanic.

• Dodge rolling has no invulnerability and feels like a poor way of moving around to make up for your relatively slow horizontal movement speed. You move under high bullets by doing a forward roll, but forget that and accidentally try to do a back roll and you'll get hit by a bullet. I'd have rather seen rolling mapped to one button that always did a forward roll, rather than keeping a useless back roll in the game.

• Firing downwards in the air lets you float longer. Both Metal Slug and Alien Hominid have a single, floaty jump when you press the jump button, denying you from making short hops. Unfortunately, Alien Hominid's downward firing thing is a curse as much as it is a blessing, as it can mess up your jump timing to evade attacks if you're also trying to fire at something below you. I'd much rather see Alien Hominid have used a more player controlled jump height, where you can make short hops or jump as high as you want, closer to something like Mega Man. The player's hitbox in Alien Hominid is much larger relative to enemy bullets than it is in Metal Slug, and enemies are very aggressive with faster attacks, meaning dodging is generally quite a bit harder.

• The knife eventually becomes unsafe and enemies can outright block it, multiple times in a row in the case of the Area 51 mobs. There's really no reason basic mobs should outright be able to ignore your melee attempts, and what can happen is enemies can quickly shoot you at close range in between knife slashes.

The game tries to replicate Metal Slug by offering various weapons, such as a piercing laser or an acid launcher cannon that visually resembles Metal Slug's shotgun. However, most of the weapons barely feel stronger than your basic weapon on bosses. There's actually only two really useful bonus weapons for bosses, namely the spreadshot and the rapid fire purple gun. The best part about getting new weapons ends up being the shield, rather than the weapon itself. I'm not sure how many hits the shield can take. It usually seems to be 1 hit, but I swear I sometimes see it soaking a hit without breaking. Some weird collision detection maybe? Compare this to Metal Slug, where all the weapons are a genuine upgrade on top of the basic pistol. The shotgun in Metal Slug is particularly powerful, whereas its equivalent in Alien Hominid is strictly a downgrade due to its close range nature and lack of damage on bosses.

Alien Hominid's art by Dan Paladin is cute and amusing, but the actual use of the art in the game leads to some gameplay issues due to things like poor colour scheme choices, or the art not making it clear where hitboxes are for platforming. Enemy bullets flash purple and green, in a game where many background elements include these colours. The levels set in Russia are particularly troublesome, with purple snow and green trees, where the enemy bullets do not stand out as immediately well as Metal Slug's flashing light blue/orange bullets do on Metal Slug's generally grey and brown desaturated backgrounds. And this isn't to say anything of the relatively massive explosions that can often distractingly cover elements of the screen in Alien Hominid. The most significant examples of collision detection boundaries not always accurately matching the art I can think of include:

• There's a building under construction early on where you can climb some girders. There's a section where it looks like you can walk up an angled girder to a straight one, but you actually fall through the point where they meet.

• There are some sandbags piled up in 2-1 that look high enough to potentially block enemy shots, but shots just barely travel above them, meaning you're in danger standing on them.

• Early on you can drive a bulldozer into some buildings that block your way. If for some reason you're on foot and not in the bulldozer, the building still blocks you, despite your character clearing being drawn as standing in front of it on the pavement.

• The PDA Games minigame has really wonky collision detection, where you can walk your character into the sides of walls. The walls only have a physical boundary in their center, past where their outer lines are drawn.

This game is hard. Normal and even Easy will absolutely brutalize players, even compared to Metal Slug's standards. Most of the difficulty comes from the endlessly respawning waves of enemies that tend to rapidly jump in and fire unexpectedly. Many bosses feature these respawning enemies, such as the early pudding boss where a key fire hydrant actually blocks your shots from reaching enemies that are behind it, meaning you can't even always deal with the respawning enemies. Though they only fire occasionally, it's just enough to seriously mess up your attempts at nailing down boss patterns. It's very easy for this game to fall into cheap deaths territory, far moreso than the relatively tame Metal Slug which is a difficult but entirely fair arcade game that allows you to play it at your own pace. Metal Slug has a time limit, but the time limit is very generous and enemies are not constantly respawning, so you can play it slower and more methodically if you want. Alien Hominid on the other hand demands lots of memorization to succeed without dying, and has no shame in throwing cheap deaths your way.

There's a couple of space flight levels that attempt to break up the run 'n gun elements but they're horrendously implemented. The controls are terrible, where you'll want to pretty much hold X and A constantly on the Xbox 360 controller. But you also want access to the B button as needed to boost thrust. Fortunately the game has unlisted mappings on the shoulder buttons (LT to fire, RT to boost) which are far preferable to allow you to feather the B button as needed. Still, the space flight levels control terribly, and generally consist of you getting swarmed while you eventually just run from everything using your ship's rear cannons, since it's way safer than trying to use the frontal cannons. The bosses in these levels aren't so dangerous as they are tedious, frankly.

As if to confirm that Alien Hominid is well aware of its unusual issues, you start with an unusually high number of extra lives (5) and a massive number of extra continues. It's almost as if Alien Hominid expects people to treat it like a credit feeding game, instead of a game that, like many quality arcade games, can reasonably be beaten on a single credit. There is an achievement for beating it without getting a game over, but to do so is frankly ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is the scoring system or lack thereof; you get points for beating enemies, but there's no time limit and infinitely spawning enemies, and there's multiple sections where, with a lot of patience, you can essentially milk enemies indefinitely and rack up a huge number of lives (every 1000 points awards a life). Metal Slug had some scoring issues such as randomized value point items and a scoring exploit where you could shoot a specific tank constantly for a ton of points until time ran out, but even these don't match Alien Hominid's scoring problems, where score is rendered irrelevant due to infinite time, infinite enemies, and multiple safe places to milk them for as much score as your patience allows (amassing a huge stock of lives this way is probably the key to beating it on one credit).

To its credit, some of the boss fights are genuinely fun, but they feel too few and far in-between. The core gameplay feels sloppy, making it difficult to take seriously throughout its 15 or so levels. And 2 of those levels are the obnoxious space levels which are annoying at best to play. The constantly respawning enemies almost everywhere are also frankly not fun to deal with due to how they constantly pop in and can instantly fire off a shot at close range at you, making the level designs feel like a bit of a mess.

The main game features 2 player multiplayer, and a few minigames are 4 player. Multiplayer adds a bit of fun to things if a friend's willing to play, but frankly you could also just play Metal Slug or any other more competent multiplayer platformer instead. Shadow of the Ninja for the NES is a great one with multiplayer for instance, Gunstar Heroes is another classic for the Sega Genesis that's also fun while being more forgiving. Alien Hominid has many small minigames, but I'd rather they'd focused on tightening up the main game instead of making these. Indeed, the massive quantity of level packs as DLC for the mediocre PDA Games is rather questionable. Does anyone really want to play an unimpressive multiplayer platformer with spotty collision detection when trying to jump on enemies when they could be playing something else with multiplayer? And there's no real excuse for the weird collision detection that doesn't match the drawn elements. If you want a 4 player platformer, please consider something like Micro Mages instead, a homebrew NES 4-player game with amazingly fun multiplayer platforming.

Alien Hominid HD for the Xbox 360 is a widescreen remake of a game originally released on multiple 4:3 aspect ratio consoles. I haven't played the original Gamecube or PS2 releases so I don't know if anything mentioned here only applies specifically to the Xbox 360 release, but from what I've seen of gameplay footage, most of the issues apply across all versions of the game. I've beaten Alien Hominid on the standard difficulty, thanks to the aid of using a lot of additional credits.

The only reason I can say you'd want to play and own this is to unlock the additional character in the Xbox 360 version of Castle Crashers. Made by the same developers, Castle Crashers as well as their later BattleBlock Theater are far more competent games and actually worth checking out. I've put a lot of playtime in Castle Crashers so it's not so much that they're bad developers as it is that Alien Hominid simply isn't a well-executed game. It's a mediocre first effort, one that tries to capture the essence of Metal Slug, but fails to show an understanding of how Metal Slug's refined gameplay managed to make it a smash hit. Alien Hominid's issues with its game mechanics unfortunately leaves it feeling a bit like a cheap, amateurish attempt at a Metal Slug fangame, rather than a properly polished game that can stand on its own. 4/10

(I've added a bit that wasn't present on the original review submission about the knife to the above, and also corrected an error; I actually forgot the space levels allow you to fire and move using the shoulder buttons because it's not listed in the level's tutorial, despite the shoulder buttons being the superior way to control the space levels so your thumb is free for the B button)
Last edited by BareKnuckleRoo on Fri Aug 21, 2020 1:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by BIL »

I'll index it in R2RKMF if that's ok. :cool: edit: cheers, added!
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Steamflogger Boss »

The idea of gamefaqs having standards after having read complete drivel in many reviews there for years is hilarious.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

I know, I know, I was being naïve I guess. Something stupid like that was bound to happen eventually =P
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by mycophobia »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:I just got a review that went into heavy detail on game mechanics rejected on GameFAQs:
A review should focus solely on the content of the game rather than the technical aspects of the game.
Oh, fuck off. The gameplay mechanics are the content.
wow that is insanely retarded
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Sumez »

Reading the review, I have a few things in regards to the moderator's comment I could see being sensible to change.

Like, it does delve a bit heavily into the precise workings of mechanics in ways that can actually make the point a little clouded - stuff that could probably be summarized in a more elegant way to make the same point. Eg. the text about the number of grenades, animations, and button mappings in regards to them, is stuff most people would be likely to glance over because it's a lot of information at once, before the reader knows what to do with it. It's tied to the point, but the amount of detail might not be necessary.

This is only the kind of stuff I'd comment on as an editor for an actual publication though, and at best it's still only a guideline to help improve how it communicates its point, not a concise list of do's and dont's.
It's the kind of stuff I'd go over myself, trying to improve something I've written if I give it more than a few passes. But honestly, I probably wouldn't care about it for a review on a site like GameFAQs. And it's definitely not a requirement for them either - most reviews on there are of such an awful quality you can read through all of it and still have no idea what the writer really thinks about the game. I think it goes without saying, but this review of Alien Hominid is perfectly good, gets a bunch of important points across, and is far above the general standard for the website.

I've said it before, probably in this thread, and I hate hate hate how nearly every reader review on GameFAQs does that terrible 80s style segmented review where you devote an even amount of time time to an arbitrary bunch of attributes like graphics, sounds, gameplay, "replayability" and "fun factor" or whatever. It's such an awful structure that hurts any attempt of replicating the feeling you get from playing a game. And hell, if the sound design is of absolutely no signifance to its qualities, why devote an entire segment to it? I don't care what the reviewer gives the graphics on a 1-10 scale (not an average), I can see what it looks like from screenshots. This stuff never did any good for any review.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Yeah, I recognize that it's not well proofread and is written expressly with the assumption that the reader is familiar with Metal Slug, which doesn't make it good for a general review. It's written as a "this is attempting to be some kind of Metal Slug clone, and here's why it's bad both on its own and in the context of a Metal Slug clone". Ah well, fuck 'em, I tried.

The only other review I'd ever submitted was for Streets of Rage II's GG port, and again, it mostly goes over the mechanics changes from the Sega Genesis/Megadrive to the handheld port and why they're flawed (and also discusses the GG port of the first game which was nearly unplayable; the GG port of SoR2 is an incredibly vast improvement over SoR1 GG). Fun, but in many ways flawed. I felt like I wrote it in the same way as the AH review so looking back I'm surprised it got accepted. But maybe it was less scrutinized cause nobody gives a shit about handheld ports.
I've said it before, probably in this thread, and I hate hate hate how nearly every reader review on GameFAQs does that terrible 80s style segmented review where you devote an even amount of time time to an arbitrary bunch of attributes like graphics, sounds, gameplay, "replayability" and "fun factor" or whatever.
Agreed. This is quite possibly the worst way to write a review, which makes it obnoxious that it became standard in magazines and such.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Sumez »

Another thing that bothers me is overdoing pointless personal anecdotes - the Moo Mesa review you posted is incredibly bad with it, but at least it kind of serves a purpose (it demonstrates that the reviewer's only experience with the game is a single sitting on an arcade cabinet in the wild). Some times it's as bad as a pointlessly eloquent description of how excited they were to receive their review copy, or reminiscing about the time their friend group was playing the game every second Saturday or whatever. And I'm sure I've been guilty of writing in some pretty bad ones here and there back when I did actual magazine reviews, but I'm not exactly proud of it.

And I get what people are going for. I've been involved in some review editing at one point, and for that specific publication we were pretty centered on creating a common voice, and making reviews come across as impersonal and objective as possible. The idea was to give it that professional edge, but I got bored with it very quickly. I think the personal touch is important in a review. I want to know the reviewer and where they are coming from. I want to know their perspective and whether it matches mine, or provides a different piece of insight.
And I enjoy the flavor. Not everyone can be as flavorful as BIL passionately describing the intricate murder sprees of Metal Slug, but I think what lifts a solid review from being a good one to a really memorable one is whether it's enjoyable to read.

But don't give me grade school style essays about your shaking hands as you're inserting your precious cartridge. It's narcissistic and formulaic and adds absolutely zero review to your review. You're the only one that cares about it. Skim the fucking fat.

There, rant over :lol:
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by WelshMegalodon »

Why Video Games Are Nowhere Close to Being Taken Seriously as a Medium: A Thread
Indie hipsters: "Arcades are so dead"
Finite Continues? Ain't that some shit.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Udderdude »

I sure do love having to wrap every one of my search terms in 15 different layers of quotes before Google actually gives me the results I'm looking for, and not a bunch of ridiculous nonsense that doesn't even have the search terms I fucking searched for in it.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by BIL »

Skype's default and apparently unchangeable ringtone, an obnoxiously cha-cha-ing "remix" of the old, amiably sterile one. Seems pretty well-hated, MS haven't done shit in response. Time to see about tearing it out at the roots, good job you flatulent cunts. -_-
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by TransatlanticFoe »

I love the dramatic sense of entitlement in that thread, that not being able to change the ringtone renders the application completely non-functional. I suppose we're into generations of people who never had a landline phone that loudly goes RING RING. RING RING. as their sole means of communication.

Reduction in user customisation is a growing trend in modern software though, so I am slightly pleased to see people annoyed by it.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Specineff »

BIL wrote:flatulent cunts.
This made me laugh more than it should have. Going to borrow and use it sometime soon.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Blinge »

Sumez wrote: I've said it before, probably in this thread, and I hate hate hate how nearly every reader review on GameFAQs does that terrible 80s style segmented review where you devote an even amount of time time to an arbitrary bunch of attributes like graphics, sounds, gameplay, "replayability" and "fun factor" or whatever. It's such an awful structure that hurts any attempt of replicating the feeling you get from playing a game. And hell, if the sound design is of absolutely no signifance to its qualities, why devote an entire segment to it? I don't care what the reviewer gives the graphics on a 1-10 scale (not an average), I can see what it looks like from screenshots. This stuff never did any good for any review.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by copy-paster »

Sengoku Strider wrote:Games that don't scroll until you reach the edge of the screen.
Another list of my "bad gameplay mechanics" imho. Seriously why? There are games with the player not centered on the screen during scroll (Contra hard corps, NGIII) but not as extreme and still give you visibility.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Specineff »

Muscle cramps while you're sleeping. F them and whichever demon or deity saw it fit to make them happen.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by vol.2 »

Why can't any company make a vacuum electric boiler that doesn't rust?

Even the good companies like Zojiroshi and Tiger use nonstick coated steel that eventually wears off when you descale it, and the cheaper stainless steel ones are made of shitty SS that rusts in less than a month.

There are plenty of SS kettles and I've never had one of those rust on me, so I know it's possible.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by null1024 »

BIL wrote:Skype's default and apparently unchangeable ringtone, an obnoxiously cha-cha-ing "remix" of the old, amiably sterile one. Seems pretty well-hated, MS haven't done shit in response. Time to see about tearing it out at the roots, good job you flatulent cunts. -_-
I like how one of the answers is "windows doesn't let you change anything in the folder where the file is stored even as admin, so boot a Linux liveUSB and replace it that way".
Really goofy that in the year 1998+22, it's such a hassle. :lol:
There's no real technical restriction, just an unusually high artificial one.
Come check out my website, I guess. Random stuff I've worked on over the last two decades.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by BIL »

I eventually disarmed the 1337 admin restrictions on the folder, but found only a bunch of exotically archived code. The solution I arrived at - open the archive with specialised viewer, find the file it's pointing at, replace it and repack the archive - seemed doable, but also liable to break something and cause far more problems than just dampening the fucker in volume mixer, so I left it. 2020. Image

I wouldn't even mind if it weren't such an obnoxiously peppy, go-get-'em ringtone. I use Skype mostly for work and checking up on elderly relatives, neither's typically a jovial occasion. What the fuck ever happened to beige? Totally underrated aesthetic, time and place for everything, etc etc.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Specineff »

I have to use Skype because of *ONE* single friend that somehow refuses to use Telegram or Discord. And it drives me insane how sometimes it will deliver a message with delays of up to 30 minutes, making it seem a greeting was never returned, or as if I had ignored one of the friends who later moved away from it. Or how about showing people as offline for hours despite them being logged on all that time? Sometimes a log out and restart fixes it, others it's necessary to shut it down and start it again for any "queued"/delayed messages to get through.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Udderdude »

Just had to clean a disc I bought off eBay. Some stupid store had slapped their stupid sticker on it, and when I took it off, underneath there was a bunch of gunk that spelled out the word "VOID" left over on the disc. Took me half an hour with a bottle of isopropyl and some cotton balls to clean it off. Yuck. I can't believe there are still stores that do stupid crap like that. That's some 90's bullshit that I thought died out decades ago.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by vol.2 »

Udderdude wrote:Just had to clean a disc I bought off eBay. Some stupid store had slapped their stupid sticker on it, and when I took it off, underneath there was a bunch of gunk that spelled out the word "VOID" left over on the disc. Took me half an hour with a bottle of isopropyl and some cotton balls to clean it off. Yuck. I can't believe there are still stores that do stupid crap like that. That's some 90's bullshit that I thought died out decades ago.
yuck.

bit of clean advise. try vegetable oil on anything non-porous like plastic (basically anything but paper).
most adhesives have a chemistry that is soluble in oils and they will just float away without much fuss. you can then bathe them in iso to remove the film. it's generally less aggressive than scouring with iso.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Mortificator »

Blinge wrote:
Sumez wrote: I've said it before, probably in this thread, and I hate hate hate how nearly every reader review on GameFAQs does that terrible 80s style segmented review where you devote an even amount of time time to an arbitrary bunch of attributes like graphics, sounds, gameplay, "replayability" and "fun factor" or whatever. It's such an awful structure that hurts any attempt of replicating the feeling you get from playing a game. And hell, if the sound design is of absolutely no signifance to its qualities, why devote an entire segment to it? I don't care what the reviewer gives the graphics on a 1-10 scale (not an average), I can see what it looks like from screenshots. This stuff never did any good for any review.
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by null1024 »

Slow drivers.
I'm not talking a little slow either, I'm talking "less than 40 in a 65, in a leftward lane, flashers off, nothing in front of them for miles, and it's night".
Had to deal with that shit coming home tonight, and it's not like I could go around easily either. As I started to slow down, people started to overtake on both sides from behind, and I couldn't slow down as quickly as I'd like with another car behind me.

At least nothing happened. I slowed down without the guy behind me hitting me, waited for everything behind me to pass, and then made the pass around the slow moron in front. Still annoying.
Come check out my website, I guess. Random stuff I've worked on over the last two decades.
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vol.2
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by vol.2 »

null1024 wrote:Slow drivers.
I'm assuming you're in the US. This is a huge issue. Our roads basically don't work because people don't recognize or obey the rules consistently. This is because driver education in the US is a complete farce and they are more interested in getting people to buy cars and tires than they are in our safety.

I do not typically subscribe to "conspiracy theories," but I think it's the tire industry and the automotive industry. It's a huge conspiracy that goes back to when the highways were built and support for public transit was purposefully discouraged. All it takes is money to pay lobbyists and to line to pockets of dirty politicians and officials.

It's a very, very deep issue that has been going on since the 1800's:
Spoiler
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If your interested, you can look into the American Streetcar Scandal. There is a movie about called Taken For A Ride. It goes over the Highway Lobby and the illegal things they did (some of which they were held accountable for). This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. The coalition of automobile and tire manufacturers in the US is responsible for the laying of roads through neighborhoods and making huge parts of American cities unlivable and many other things.
You will find that many people are actively attempting to discredit the movie and make it look bad. The Highway lobby is alive and strong.
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Blinge
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Blinge »

Meh und muh buddies had been enjoying Fall Guys until recently.

but now there's so many hackers that you get them in your game more often than not.
They float above the survival games so they don't get knocked off ever..
And race to the finish line in seconds.

There's no longer any point in playing.

What's interesting is when a mate of mine came 2nd to a guy fly-hacking. That means he's the defacto winner. In a real life event, obvious cheater gets disqualified, and 2nd becomes 1st in the eyes of anyone there.
However because the game doesn't explicitly say it, it still feels like my friend didn't win.
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Mischief Maker
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by Mischief Maker »

GOG has stopped making announcements for all its new games/expansions. Did you know Parkitect got a new DLC last week? You wouldn't if you were a GOG customer!

And it's not like their current site design isn't full of wasted space.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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WelshMegalodon
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by WelshMegalodon »

GOG? Aren't they losing money?
Indie hipsters: "Arcades are so dead"
Finite Continues? Ain't that some shit.
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vol.2
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Re: Little things that annoy the hell out of you

Post by vol.2 »

From what I understand, they've got a lot of business issues. I've read some pretty scathing accounts of toxicity in the workplace and poor management.
They once upon a time had a reasonable community, but their corporate culture (or whatever culture) seems to
have eroded everything.
They also have stopped releasing new older games for the most part. I still check their site pretty regularly and have a filter set to check every game pre-year-2000, and there have only been a handful of meaningful releases over the past few years.

I'm still hoping that they get their shit together, but maybe it's too much to ask.
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