The update is exciting to me because it contains so much stuff that hasn’t been available for the long time. In addition to nice fixes like real widescreen support, looking better at higher resolutions, and a variety of bug fixes, Half-Life now contains content from the Half-Life: Further Data and Half-Life Uplink CDs that came out at the game’s launch to promote it through video cards, magazines, and retail stores.
Half-Life Uplink was a CD released through magazines and hardware manufacturers that contains a demo for the game with all new levels. Half-Life: Further Data was released through retail stores and contains new multiplayer maps and skins, including a fan favorite skin I used to play as, Too Much Coffee Man.
There’s so other nice updates too. The game now includes the original models for Gordon and Barney from the Half-Life alpha as multiplayer skins, 4 new multiplayer maps by Valve developers, Steam Deck and controller support, and the original Valve logo video and menu from the 1998 release. Just a very nice update for a classic game that I’ve put so many hours into.
I don’t watch streamers too often but when I do, it’s usually of adventure games. It’s my favorite genre of game and I like watching people figure out puzzles or talk about why one doesn’t work when they come across a bad one. Luckily there’s a ton of great folks streaming adventure games and this list only covers a very small amount of them. Generally I find all these streamers to be relaxing and I’m not into streams where people are yelling a lot.
Emmxyzzy – Streamer from Australia that plays MS-DOS games, which includes a lot of adventure games. They translated the first commercial Czech MS-DOS game to English, The Secret of Donkey Island.
sonneveld – Another streamer from Australia that plays a variety of adventure games, with a focus on older games. They also helped translate The Secret of Donkey Island into English.
SummerB76 – Very chill streamer with a focus on adventure games but there’s also plenty of other fun streams like the ones for wine making simulator Hundred Days with her brother who makes wine in real life. Also a speedrunner of the new Colossal Cave remake by Ken and Roberta Williams.
pixel_turkey – Streamer focused on retro games, which includes a lot of adventure games. Also a great pixel artist
The Genesis Temple – Games historian that streams a ton of obscure games as well as games in other languages and live translating them as they are played.
robotspacer – Streams a variety of adventure games and has also been building an adventure game for the Macintosh using World Builder
Julia Minamata – Developer of The Crimson Diamond that streams development of the game every Tuesday night along with playing some retro games.
LotusLovesLotus – Indie game streamer that includes a lot of new adventure games and single player story-driven games.
PS_Garak – Every Tuesday night Ben, Sarah, and Grayson do a comedy stream where they play adventure games (both new and old) and go on fun tangents.
BogusMeatFactory – Variety streamer that includes playing a lot of adventure games and text adventures.
The Obscuritory – Video Game History Foundation member and owner of The Obscuritory website Phil Salvador streams incredibly obscure games on Wednesday nights.
Grundislav – Francisco González, the developer of the Ben Jordan series, A Golden Wake, Shardlight, and Lamplight City has been streaming development of his newest game Rosewater!
ivydupler – Video game voice actress for games like Whispers of a Machine and Unavowed streams a variety of games, with a focus on adventure games and the Nancy Drew series.
Conversations with Curtis – The lead actor of the FMV game Phantasmagoria 2 started doing interviews with the cast of the game at the beginning of the pandemic, which has evolved into doing streams of the game he was in as well as other adventure games, both old and new. Highlights include his streams with the lead actress of Phantasmagoria 1 and co-host Daniel doing a ton of interviews with classic adventure game developers. It’s also just been fun watching someone who is new to games developing opinions on the genre and correct takes like new adventure games being just as good, if not better, than classic adventure games.
A source port has been released for the 1998 FPS SiN by Ritual Entertainment. I tried it out last night and it seems to work pretty well. Features include:
A new Linux port
Better resolution support
Controller Support
Weapon radial menu
Gamepad-friendly virtual keyboard
Better menu/interface scaling
You can read more about the port here. The port requires the original files to so you’ll have to pick it up on Steam or GOG if you don’t own the game.
It looks like a massive update is coming to Myst Online tomorrow.
If you thought this MMO was dead, or never even knew about it, I don’t blame you. Uru came out in 2003 and while it did alright critically, it was a big commercial flop and nearly killed Cyan. The online portion of the game was quickly shut down and was unplayable until Gametap paid to revive the game and have Cyan create new content for it. Eventually this ended too and Myst Online was shutdown again until Cyan brought it back again for free on their own servers, which are kept up by donations. It was essentially the same game as the one at the end of Gametap’s run, static and no new content, until a few years ago when Cyan started adding fan content. While it will never be a massively popular game, it does receive regular updates now and seems to be getting a big one tomorrow. I’m not sure if this will include the Descent Expansion update that has been in development for a long time, which uses content from Myst 5.
If you’re a Myst fan but have never played Myst Online, give it a shot! It’s a bit clunky and dated, but I think it still looks nice for a game from 2003 and there hasn’t really been anything like it since then. Plus you can play it entirely for free here.
I was listening to the University of Michigan’s radio station doing their weekly local music show last night and if you have a local college or public radio station, consider checking them out and supporting them if you don’t already. I discover so much more through the curation at radio stations I like than through algorithms.
Some of the stations I like are listed below and can be listened to online: WCBN, University of Michigan’s radio station as mentioned above. There’s a lot of great local music that’s highlighted and a nice variety of other stuff too.
WPRB-FM in Princeton, especially their yearly Christmas marathon hosted by one DJ over 25 hours. I’ve discovered a lot great music local to New Jersey as well.
KEXP in Seattle has a lot of great live performances and I like their morning show.
WFMU in New Jersey is where some of my favorite shows like The Best Show got their start.
Gobliins 6 has been officially announced through this Facebook post, with it looking like a crowdfunding campaign planned for the beginning of next year. An extremely brief preview of it was shown in an interview a few months ago and seems to feature the two characters from Gobliins 2, explaining why there’s only two I’s in the title this time.
This is very exciting news for me since I thought Gobliiins 5 was a very nice revival and the thought of getting a new Gobliiins game every other year seems very nice.
With a major narrative game convention happening now where an organizer got angry with people asking for a mask mandate, just a reminder that any convention could do one and protect people from covid and other things if they really wanted to. Smaller conventions like Narrascope, Protospiel, and my local zine fest do them, larger conventions like PAX did them when they cared. So it’s possible for a convention of any size to have one and if you won’t do it because your team can’t enforce one, what makes you think that you can enforce any other safety rules and should have the convention in the first place?
If this blog has been quiet lately, it’s basically because I got really into building a Plex server for streaming my collection of movies/tv/music. It all basically kicked off because of the Bandcamp fiasco and realizing that I should probably have all this stuff backed up. I already had a few SSDs from my dad, who no longer wanted them, so I bought a docking station and started throwing stuff on there. Realizing I had a lot of room leftover, I then started ripping my entire cd collection. Seeing that I still had a ton of room after that, I’ve start putting my film and tv collection together, mostly from ripping my dvd and bluray collection, something I’ll probably be doing for quite a while.
While most of the media on my server had come from my physical collection, I was surprised at how many various places digitally I had accumulated music from. Sources include Bandcamp, Amazon, Itch, Humble, iTunes, Steam, and GOG since I listen to a lot of video game music as well. I also had some movies digitally from various kickstarters I had backed, that brief period when GOG tried selling films, as well as that period where comedians were selling DRM free specials for $5. This seems to have died out, which is a shame because I really enjoyed having DRM free movies. There aren’t really many places where you can pick up DRM free copies of films and tv shows but I did stumble across a few places like Rifftrax, Drafthouse Films, Internet Archive for public domain films, Found Footage Festival, and Vimeo.
I’m not really sure what comes next for the server. Probably buying larger hard drives, but I don’t think I’ll have a machine just for the media server since this is just for my home. It’s still been a fun project though and a nice way to revisit my physical media collection.
While ScummVM is the go-to emulator for LucasArts adventure games these days, there’s another one people should consider using. DREAMM is an emulator focused on LucasArts games that relies on low-level emulation instead of reverse engineering, providing a more accurate emulation of these games over ScummVM. The emulator was created by Aaron Giles, who previously worked at LucasArts and created many of the Mac ports for their games. You can hear him discuss the emulator here.
In addition to it providing more accurate emulation for LucasArts adventure games, having a focus on LucasArts games means it supports a lot of games ScummVM never will, like Yoda Stories, Rebel Assault 2, and Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion. You can view the complete list of games it supports here.
