I’ll be straight with you - I never played Ricochet. I was just doing the joke from that one guy who asked Gabe about it that one time. But the fact you ported it to the Source engine is honestly really cool.

I mean who hasn’t at least once?

When bike guy - or child, or elderly person, or wheelchair-bound person, the people who are also also walking on the sidewalk - goes around the van, how do they get around the van? Where do they go?

You were very careful to lay out every single detail for a small child like me, but you left out that one specific detail. Why was that? Was it somehow detrimental to your point?

Do you actually not understand how the cyclist is endangered in this scenario? Do you actually need that explained?

Cool story. Not really relevant to anything I said but cool nonetheless.

Ricochet hasn’t recieved the love it deserves. We’ve been waiting on Ricochet 2 for decades. The fans need closure.

I can see how you’d think that if you didn’t read it or pay attention to any of the pertinent details.

That’s a beautiful name.

I probably said it too dramatically, the kinds of people that need to hear it will just knee-jerk dismiss me, but seriously think about the phrase “normal names are required for the functioning of society”. What a wild-ass thing to say. Required why? Is society really that fragile? Sounds like maybe it should be replaced by something that can handle the occasional mildly spicy letter. Mine isn’t even that spicy, it’s like whole-egg-mayo levels of spice.

Nerds can be so freaky.

If cycling wasn’t so dangerous and given lower priority there would be many more cyclists and fewer cars. We see this wherever town planners make this change.

Less car traffic in general is better for everyone, even the drivers. It doesn’t matter if you think that cyclists are annoying or holier than thou. It doesn’t matter what kind of people they are at all. They could all be assholes, that doesn’t change the fact that cars are bad actually.

I think the word “deliberate” might be a little strong, because it’s not one person’s choice alone. It probably is laziness, but the way the road is made makes the lazy choice the one that screws over everyone else to prioritise cars. They could leave the van in the middle of the road, but drivers would get angry, so they make a subconscious choice.

Cars are large, cumbersome, dangerous objects with horns on them, and the road’s design centers them. If you park in the middle of the road, cars are so space-inefficient that you cause a traffic jam and people get upset and honk, but nobody’s in much more danger. If you block a pathway for pedestrians and cyclists, they can get around, but it’s much more dangerous, especially for children and the disabled, but most of the time the delivery driver isn’t forced to deal with that fact. Those people are much less visible.

So the result is that the mode of transport which causes the most problems for the people around it is also prioritised above all others. Decisions were made at the city planning level that put cycle paths together with cars. There are much better ways of doing things, for instance separate paths, with bollards so cars can’t just leave the road. You could make delivery vehicles smaller and lighter, with dedicated delivery bays. You could narrow roads and slow them down to disincentivise inner-city traffic, and encourage the use of bypasses, and subtly teach drivers to expect frequent stops in town.

No they’re not. They’re required for us to be catalogued and managed by a state, to our detriment and the enrichment of the ruling class.

“Normality” is a fucking scam that keeps your imagination in check, so you never look outside your assigned box and realise you don’t have to belong to anyone.

You have no idea how much genocidal violence has been done to condition our society to accept a dystopic phrase like “normal names are required for the functioning of society”.

Your mind has been caged.

The combat may not have been the most interesting versus basic grunts, but it never got stale. I’ve never played another game where the core gameplay changed so much so frequently.

Physics interactions -> Basic FPS -> Fan Boat -> Mounted Gun -> Gravity Gun -> Zombies & Traps -> Car -> THE CRANE FIGHT -> Rockets & Gunships -> Ant Lions -> Ant Lion Minions -> Turrets -> Resistance Squads -> Striders -> Super Gravity Gun

Honestly the HL1 combat may have been somewhat more challengjng, but it was a grind. Fights were often just frustrating. I’ve abandonded playthroughs because I didn’t feel like spending another 10 hours beating my head against the endless amounts of enemies just to get to the end of… whatever I was doing I forgot.

HL1’s big innovation was never removing control from the player just to tell the story. Beyond that they also had some interesting AI behaviour and weapons. It was a game with old-school length and old-school difficulty.

HL2’s big innovation was the physics engine, and they played with it in so many ways, while polishing every other aspect of the design. They kept the gameplay tight and did something just long enough to explore it and then they moved on. They never forced you to hang out just repeating the same loop over and over to pad the length.

This is the one.

As someone with a very mildly unusual name, I can tell you that it doesn’t matter whether a system could or could not meaningfully represent the name. Often the people or systems just refuse to acknowledge any deviation from what’s expected. Sometimes databases are written to enforce arbitrary grammatical rules that make my name impossible to write, or the people using the systems will just “correct” the “error” without telling me. I don’t mind that much but our normative systems just love to homogenise us.

Ah, that’s why it’s a bunch of symbols that make no sense, thanks for the clarification.

Wait did you edit this image? That’s some effort you’ve put in.

Yup, second this. GoPro is the Gucci brand, but you can get stuff that does 90 to 100% of what they do for considerably less. You’ll need to do a bit of research in sports communities to find out which ones are good, they will have opinions. Also FPV quad hobbyists will know a lot about them, especially which ones are light and tough.

You’re just repeating the justification for patents with zero skepticism and apparently no awareness of how they actually get used.

Hell, I said the following to you a day before you made this comment, and you haven’t replied. Are you happy to just ignore the counter arguments then?

Edit: the fact both this comment and the other one just got downvoted with no reply would indicate they are in fact not interested.

I don’t see it that way. The systems we have in place now are the alternative to just sharing. The secret-keeping monopolistic behaviour of capitalists is preserved by things like the patent system, because they lend the appearance of legitimacy to an illegitimate system.

If you want to see the horror of the patent system, you juat have to look at the millions it killed in the pandemic.

The covid vaccine was developed by public and private researchers and paid for by the state, with a promise it would be made open source to allow anyone to manufacture it and hasten the end of the pandemic.

Bill Gates was one of the fucking vampires who blocked the open sourcing efforts, so poor countries couldn’t manufacture it, allowing the pandemic to run unchecked in those places and of course mutate and inevitably make its way back to wealthier countries for yet another outbreak that actually makes our news because it affects us. The patents killed people.

These companies were funded to do it. There’s no way they wouldn’t have worked on the vaccine otherwise. The pandemic showed us what governments can do when a crisis actually threatens the status quo and they’re forced to do the bare minimum of solving a problem. We didn’t need patents for it, just the will.