The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Gaming / Open Threads

How a week can fly by

You’ll have to excuse the lack of posts; last week killed me with extreme prejudice with Thursday leaving me want to carve someone’s guts out. Lots of drama, and the holiday hustle and bustle gets harder and harder to keep up with. I have a few late packages that haven’t arrived in the mail, but I did get what I do currently have on hand wrapped up and ready. Other than that I spent the whole weekend staying cozy, there’s something about cold weather and sore muscles that make blankets and controllers more inviting. I played a little bit of the Bioshock Remaster with a tweaked Steam Controller config, and I did pretty well. I’ve been wanting to stream that game, in fact I wanted to stream some Serious Sam Christmas mods the other night, but ran into issues across different Serious Sam versions (3 or 4 different versions that didn’t want to cooperate) and while they worked fine in single player I wanted to play with a friend. We could have played split screen, but I was pissed off enough from not being able to play that we just ended up fucking around on an asteroid for about an hour.

Yutram and I found out that if you die prematurely before a survival round starts your time score will be in the negatives. Other than that we had fun killing aliens in space, a therapeutic ending to what was essentially a stressful week.

All in an Overlord's day / Hobbies / Open Threads

Evening Open Thread

I’ve been doing a good job of wearing myself out these last couple of days. Instead of writing something here I was focusing on writing an ending for one of my upcoming videos with the help of Yutram and inspiration from a couple other things. You can also expect a Skyrim video this weekend, full of animated craziness. The New Year’s video is almost done too, just need to put a finishing touch on it before the final export.

My Christmas shopping is pretty much done for the most part. I’m at the point where I’m waiting for a couple items to show up, and then I can wrap things up and send them out… hopefully this weekend if the planets align in my favor.

Open Thread!

 

 

Gaming

The Christmas Game Hop

Well, we’re in the official holiday season. A time to enjoy warm beverages, holiday sweets, getting close with friends and family, and murder sprees!

I kicked off the weekend by playing a custom Left 4 Dead campaign with Yutram the other night, and wow…

Dick in a concrete drum

I’m pretty sure this was a troll campaign from start to finish. We didn’t get any good weapons until the end, and what really amused me aside from the 50 tanks hidden throughout the campaign was there actually being ammo in certain places, which we couldn’t use because we had only pistols… then when we got half way through the campaign we did finally get some Tier 1 weaponry, but suddenly ammo was scarce.

Derp

I also decided to tackle the holiday DLC for Painkiller: Hell and Damnation, and all I got was this lousy hat. Actually this was just a map that already existed in the game, but was redecorated and released as free DLC for the holidays. Defeating Satan Claus gets you that hat achievement. That was one of my favorite levels from the regular game, and given that it was free I can’t really argue about it either. It was fun all around.

You shouldn’t have.

I also hopped around different Serious Sam games and found a few mods here and there. I also went around Killing Floor 2 for a bit and got some holiday achievements. It felt therapeutic after a physically and mentally grueling week for quite a few of us at work, and playing these with spiked tea and eggnog was a nice little escape before returning to reality to do it all again.

Gaming / Technology

RIP Serious Sam Dedicated

What a Serious Sam 3 Server looks like.

I went through my normal rounds of checking on and restarting my collection of game servers, and when opening up VM3 I noticed a couple Telnet connections that I didn’t authorize from an IP address in The Netherlands. To people that don’t know, Telnet is often used for checking in on another computer on your own network or over the internet. Apparently Telnet is built into the Serious Sam games and can’t really be shut off with any convar or switch. You can get around this by uninstalling Telnet and doing a few other configurations to the VM, but to me the amount of fuss isn’t worth it for a server that only runs in vanilla mode (for some reason Croteam doesn’t allow dedicated servers for the moddable client). If I want to play Serious Sam with a friend my desktop and laptop PC’s are more than powerful as a listen server.

Oh well, while two servers may have to be put out of my misery I still have servers for Garry’s Mod, TF2, Quake III Arena and one each for L4D1 and 2.  This also leaves me room to experiment with other kinds of servers, when I find the time of course. Or even expand on some of the current ones.

Gaming / Technology

Music to my eyes.

After hearing from so many users about cancelled shipments it was nice to hear that I’ll be getting these; hopefully my co-worker got his too. I told him about the blowout when it happened and he immediately purchased. At that price it was hard not to.

Once these arrive I have some experiments that I’d like to run, see how well two Steam Controllers fare in couch co-op games.

Gaming

You Got Halo In My Linux?

It has been amazing watching what would be considered Console Exclusives finally giving PC Gamers long awaited access to titles that should have been sold across the board from the start.

I caught one of my British friends (MaddogSuperior) streaming the newly released PC version of the Halo Masterchief Collection these last couple of days, and I’ll usually leave Twitch on a 2nd monitor while I’m working on videos and stuff. The gameplay looked fun, but from what I also heard the input lag is quite terrible when driving vehicles. I’ll probably pick it up sometime down the road, right now it isn’t a big priority to me and I’d rather they work out any growing pains before I give Microsoft any money. Though I have to say I am surprised to see that at least the Single Player Campaign works nicely under Proton, which gets more and more awesome everyday it seems. It also seems that at least in Single Player you can mod the game to your heart’s content… moddable games are always a bonus for me.

Gaming2

My Brief Trip Through Some Borderlands 2 DLC

Over the weekend Yutram and I privately delved into some of the DLC of Borderlands 2. In an hours time we managed to fuck up a wedding, catch a bunch of worms, ruined the lives of a robot couple by stealing their wig for a quest that gave us fuck all in return, and collected tapes for an old perverted stalker. All in all a productive evening.

A face mask only a mother could love

I did enjoy the love potion quest. I never knew Baby Goliaths could be a thing, though I shouldn’t be surprised. I think the only thing weirder than the baby in this quest was the wedding itself.

I did at least manage to record it locally. I’ll go over it at another date when I sift through the terabytes of what I’ve already recorded, still chugging away on the Skyrim Hunger Games. Will probably start posting some teasers of that next week, after I unveil the second and final part of Super Bomberman R.

 

Gaming

Minecraft Is Blessed

Apparently the Vatican has their own Minecraft server.

Robert Ballecer, a Jesuit priest who has apparently carved out the name “Digital Jesuit” for himself online, has started a Minecraft server for the Vatican. Not to build it. No, just as a place to do all the normal Minecraft things that folks do but in a less “toxic” environment. Folks seem a bit surprised. The Catholic church doesn’t exactly have a pro-tech image so a Minecraft server probably sounds out of left field to many people. I’m not Catholic, but I did go to a Catholic school for four years. A Jesuit one specifically, even. If there’s one thing I know about Jesuits (but there are still plenty I don’t) it’s that this kind of dorky merging of tech and faith is extremely their thing.

I can’t say I’m entirely surprised; quite a few priests have been known to be connected to today’s youth, sometimes in more ways than one.. I would also like to assist the Vatican with making a Catholic Gmod Server. I already know of a good church (skip ahead to 2:50 to see):

In fairness, this shouldn’t be too surprising. The Vatican is known to have blockheads.