October 2017 – General Chat

1st October 2017

Have I mentioned it’s my birthday this month? Well, it is. One year older, one revolution around the Sun. Another 365 days gone. Used. Wasted? Experienced? Valued? Who knows.

What I can tell you is that since I heard Maggot Brain on House, M.D., there hasn’t been many days go by where I haven’t listened to it at least once.

For those that like Psychedelic Rock, here it is:

As you probably know, the site is now running on its own dedicated server. The site should be faster, at least it is for me. It’s also more expensive but I feel it’s worth it. A HUGE thanks to Mazur for setting it all up and continued help in configuring it. There is absolutely NO WAY I could have done it myself. Now that the move has been completed, I have begun updating some of the pages. You probably won’t notice anything big, but it makes the site better.

The Contact page is back and I have already begun getting spam, but okay, that’s the price you pay for making it easier to contact me. The submit page may also return.

I’ve also decided that I probably won’t be adding many videos. I feel the time is better spent elsewhere on the site. I will still do the occasional livestream but not many.

Right, that’s it for now.

What plans do you have for October?

Oh, did I mention it’s my birthday this month?

Featured image is from RoboEngineer over on Deviant Art and is today’s Half-Life Art in my Twitter series

31 Comments

  1. Details on this month’s Monthly Review Game Giveaway.

    There were 80 reviews with recommendations. I removed the 8 that were made for CAGED and are eligible, as that has its own giveaway. That leaves 72.

    I feel that 72 is a pretty good number, so have decided to give away 3 games this month.
    I used random.org to select the winners. I simply put in “72” and then count backwards. I did that three times.

    Winner 1: HQDefault won Dead Age for his review of Epistle3Ville. Thanks to Jan-Philipp for supplying the game.

    Winner 2: Tachyon won Agent Awesome for his review of Deliverance.

    Winner 3: rikersbeard won Ampu-Tea for his review of Epistle3Ville..
    Allocation of exact games is also a random choice.

  2. Happy Birthday, Phillip!

  3. So, I don’t think my question has been answered yet…
    I didn’t know where the header code was to review the villages, and when I clicked on the .txt link it sent me to the “Holy Headcrabs!” Page. Can somebody help?

    1. Unq

      Which Ville are you having problems with?

      1. DefendVille Two.
        I saw on Phillip’s post about moving to a dedicated server that he’d be fixing 404s, so maybe it’s just that.

        1. Unq

          OK, thanks. Yeah we’ll get that fixed. In the meantime you can use the BlackMesaDoorVille template at https://files.runthinkshootlive.com/review-templates/bmdv-rt.txt

          Just be sure to copy & paste the actual map/author names in place of the BMDV ones.

  4. Phillip, will you host a horror/halloween mapping competiton after the release of teleportville?

    Btw happy birthday my man, keep those years coming!

  5. I’ve got a problem with ep2 Hammer. I can listen to sounds using the sound browser, but they are silent ingame. According to the console output, the files are missing. So Hammer can find & play them, ep2 can not. Any ideas how to fix this? It’s quite annoying, as many sounds I need are missing.

    1. Try verifying your ep2 game cache on steam. If that doesn’t work try reinstalling.

  6. ohhh I’m making a mod for HL now but that might take a year or two, irl stuff has to be in prior

  7. What do you guys think about UberCrate?

    “Get access to new games every month with a subscription to Ubercrate. You’ll get 10 new games every month that are yours to keep forever. There’s up to $700 worth of games in each batch, and you’ll be entered into a monthly giveaway to win even more goodies.”

    Seems good value but I wouldn’t commit to buying as I hardly buy games but I can see it being popular.

    1. There is also Humble Monthly Bundle, which is cheaper and also has a lot of good games. You can also view which games were part of the previous months.

    2. I think it’d be too expensive. 10 games a month can’t be cheap.

    3. Joe Marini

      I would not recommend UberCrate to anyone. Their games are terrible, not one I wanted to play, and this was after three months. Their front page makes it looks like you’re going to get right games, but you never do – plus you also need to upgrade to some premium account to even get a chance at a decent game. Don’t waste your time with it – run fast, run far.

      1. I’m too old and infirm to run either fast or far, but I’m too poor to even consider such a service anyway.

        Thanks for advice though.

  8. Anyone heard of the Gamebanana Halloween Contest? It’s going on right now, and it’ll over this month.

  9. JamaicanDave

    Managed to grab Skyrim’s new Survival mode whilst it’s till free. I really enjoyed Fallout 4’s survival mode and Skyrim’s been begging for one for years. I expect what free time I have this side of Christmas will now be wasted on this.

    Only down side? Having to make an account for Bethesda’s shoddy Creation Club.

  10. Ugh.
    Because I’m stupid I had to redo my DefendVille 2 review about five times, and the last time, it just failed to show up. So I reposted it and duplicate comment alert or something! So can someone tell me if my review’s there?

    1. Unq

      Yep, posted now, thanks for letting us know. Sometimes comments just go right to the Trash folder for no reason at all – they’re not even flagged as spam. I know it’s frustrating but all you can do is let us know like this and we can restore it.

  11. lj4linux

    WHAT THE HELL IS GOING UP WITH STEAM???
    After the last updates when starting a mod it ask me for confirmation.
    Did anyone faced with such crap?
    This is NOT related to my PC because that happens on two laptops…

    1. Yeah, I think it’s a new Steam feature asking for confirmation before messing with launch parameters. It’s because technically, launching a mod is launching a game with the -game option set. Steam does this, too, when I set launch parameters such as -console or -autoconfig.

      1. lj4linux

        I tried to find a workaround on steam forums but that seems to be quite an old problem. On one laptop I use linux and steam for windows under Wine. I tried to start Steam under almost all Windows OS (XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10…). The same result… and that’s ANNOYNG. And what I don’t understand is WHAT’S THE POINT? I think Phillip could start a thread about Steam issues.
        What a bad weekend 🙁

  12. I’ve just got the chance to play Layers of Fear last month, which made me think hmmmmm, it seems to be heavily influenced by Afraid of Monsters.
    So I decided to replay AOM:DC with a friend over Sven Co-op – wow, this game is still incredibly good at creeping people out and driving you insane; abusing Half-Life’s awful flashlight system is a cheap but genius move.

    Spoiler: My friend DID freak out and cursed for some substantial moments.

    Also replayed Super Mario 64 just to see it still stood firmly against the time.
    Then I got the chance to finally play Mario Sunshine, and the fact this Splatoon prototype (not really) came from 2002 blowed my mind too.

    Glad I’ve avoided the new South Park game (for the moment); gonna wait and see if the DLCs actually make it better.

    Visceral died while Shinji Mikami made a spiritual sequel to Dead Space instead of Resident Evil, namely The Evil Within 2, and it’s great 😆

  13. Anon_1561973

    (Oh, this is Wise Person by the way. Didn’t realize I wasn’t logged in.)
    Ugh. Again. I hadn’t played a mod in a while (Toxicville), and went back to it. Steam said it was launching with the parameter “-game (insert toxicville folder location here)”, and I thought nothing of it…
    I use my windows key to get out of the game to do other stuff, but now it just does that thing where the game “stutters” endlessly, forcing me to manually restart my laptop. Did Steam update or something? Why is this happening?

  14. I don’t know if it’s gonna show up, but I posted about problems with Toxicville while not logged in (I didn’t notice). As mentioned somewhere else on this page, Steam is asking for parameters to launch the game… but I think this is messing with the game…
    I use the windows key to exit the game without closing it, but now it makes the game “stutter” forever. So I have to manually reset the laptop….
    Help?

    1. … don’t you love it when it stops happening? and then you don’t know why it happened?

  15. Can somebody recommend a couple really good Half-Life mods? Got the game the other day, I’ll probably play through it once since I just have to play a classic like that, but I mainly got it for the sake of playing mods and to complete my collection, so any neat mods?

    1. Look at the Hall of Fame section of this website

    2. Unq

      Hall of Fame is here.

      You can also look over the mods I’ve played for Classic of the Month, most of those are HL1 mods.

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