Monday, January 9, 2012

Steam Autumn Sale 2011 Pick-ups



With a big backlog already, especially of Steam games and the big Holiday Sale coming up, the last thing I needed around Thanksgiving time was a third fully-fledged Steam sale this year. Gabe though, obviously thought otherwise. Who was I to argue?

Day 1: Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Critical Mass €1.12
Cthulhu Saves the World & Breath of Death VII Pack €0.68
I-Fluid €1.25
Insecticide: Part 1 €0.74
Madballs in... Babo:Invasion €2.24
Musaic Box €1.24
The Oddbox €3.74
Roogoo €0.74
Turba €2.25

Day one's purchases were mostly heavily discounted indie games I've had my eye on for a while. I know the conventional wisdom is to wait for daily deals, but if these were dalies later the savings would only be a matter of cents. I'm particularly interested in trying out Cthulhu Saves the World here. Any coverage I seen of it makes it look awesome, though I can't help feeling that I should get around to playing FFVI and Chrono Trigger first for a bit of context. Not too difficult as they've both been languishing in my backlog for about a year.

The only daily I bought on day one was The Oddbox. Last I heard Stranger's Wrath still wasn't fully patched, but for that price, I'm willing to take a chance on on, in the hope they'll get it running properly at some stage. Am I crazy or is the plan to update the Oddbox version to HD version from PSN at some stage too? If so, this could work out pretty well for me in the end.

Day 3: Friday, 25 November 2011

Eversion €1.00
Garry's Mod €2.49
The Mawesome Pack €2.99
Serious Sam HD: Gold Edition €3.99

After skipping day two, I went on to grab the Serious Sam pack from the day three's deals. I've actually had the original versions of both games for a few years now. Quite enjoyed the couple of hours I put into The First Encounter, but now do I pick back up from where I left off there or switch over to the HD version instead? Ah, First World problems.

Eversion looks like a fun, little retro throwback for €1, though I hear it gets kind of weird later on.

I'm not sure I'll get a whole lot out of Garry's Mod - fiddling around with level editor-type stuff isn't really my thing, but €2.50 was certainly the cheapest I've ever seen it going for, so I decided to give it a go. It'll stop me mulling over it's purchase every Steam sale, if nothing else.

The Maw, I've heard mixed things about and I'm not really as big a fan of Twisted Pixel as most people, but €3 for the game and all the DLC seemed like the right price to try it out at.

Day 5: Sunday, 27 November 2011

Doc Clock: Toasted Sandwich of Time €1.25
Red Faction II €1.69
SiN + SiN Episodes: Emergence €3.00
Unreal Gold €2.49

I rounded off my Autumn Sale purchases with Doc Clock: an interesting-looking little puzzle game and a trio of old-ish first person shooters.

I bought the original Red Faction in the 2009 Holiday Sale, only playing it at last a few weeks ago. For the most part, I enjoyed it. It's a pretty competent shooter, taking a lot of inspiration from the original Half-Life. Of course the big gimmick is the G-Mod stuff and whenever I busted through a wall with explosives it never failed to feel a little magical, even ten years after the game came out. Whoever came up with that sequence with the bomb at the ending though can fuck right off though - easily the most frustrating bit of gaming I've had to force myself through in recent years.

Red Faction 2 fared a bit less well critically, but with most of the criticism seemingly levelled at the its short play time, I don't think I have too much to worry about after paying less than €2 for it.

The SiN + SiN: Episodes pack seemed like pretty a good deal at €3. I really don't know much about either game. I remember seeing SiN in a feature on upcoming shooters in an issue of Arcade once and I've often heard Sin Episodes tossed around as an example of the failure of episodic content, but that's about it. I'm having a bit of trouble getting SiN to run at the moment, so maybe that's the way things are going to stay. :D

The original Unreal is something I've wanted to pick up since I first laid my hands on a PC in 1998. I remember reading an article at the time on the gaming section of RTE's teletext service raving about the graphics, which got me quite excited about it at the time, but running it on an outdated 486 with no graphics acceleration wasn't really going to fly.

Sale Total: €32.90

If I did my maths right, the total of all that comes to €32.90 - certainly more than I've spent in past Thanksgiving sales, but this is the first really conventional one they've done with store-wide discounts as well as daily deals. I thought they really delivered a nice selection of deals this time, especially on older stuff like SiN, Insecticide, The Maw etc., stuff I've been interested in for a while, but that never seemed to drop much at sale time. Overall, I'm pretty happy with my haul to Euro ratio, my ever-increasing tower of a backlog: less so.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Archive Raiding: On a WAV of Mutilation

Last month, I waded into the sewers of my PC-abusing past and dredged up a bunch of really dumb, early photoshops for all to see. Having done that though, it'd be a dereliction of duty on my part if I didn't go back and do the same to set of WAV files I made around the same time.

We're going to start off with a bunch of mostly uh, "comedy" skits, made in 1999 with sound clips from the couple of PC games I had at the time. After that we're moving onto my year 2000 output, mostly made up of of unused samples for later inclusion in horrible dance music, one even featuring a rare vocal appearance by a certain JiliK (doing an exceptionally poor Scottish accent).

Only heard by about two other people ever, the following represents pretty much the entirety of my adventures in sound editing. Lister discretion is advised.

Siren Fest



Last Modified: 15 August 1999, 15:32:42 | Download

A cacophonous little ditty made up entirely of siren sound effects from SimCity 2000. Kind of ambitious for a first effort, I guess, but the shareware version of Cool Edit 2000 I was rocking at the time certainly made things easier. Man, remember Cool Edit? Ah, the 90's.

School Explosion



Last Modified: 20 June 1999, 17:53:16 | Download

Another wav constructed entirely of SimCity sound effects, this was my interpretation of a school being blown to smithereens. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to leave the country before the anti-terrorist squad find me.

Army Dude



Last Modified: 11 August 1999, 18:27:06 | Download

Constructed using sound files from Atomic Games' Close Combat, this is some 4chan-level shit, the exact details of which I'll leave to your imagination.:D

Sheep Gets it From Army Dude



Last Modified: 20 July 1999, 15:34:04 | Download

Can love bloom, even on a battlefield? Not when it's of the ovine variety I'm afraid.

Super Mario Bros. Theme...Remix?



Last Modified: 11 July 2000, 15:35:24 | Download

Starting off with a wav file ripped from a SMB ROM, this may be the worst, laziest bit of remixing known to man. Why I haven't been offered to helm a current day Ministry of Sound compilation remains a mystery.

Haemorrhoids



Last Modified: 25 November 2000, 17:47:12 | Download

This is a live recording (on an over-sized karaoke microphone) of me and a mate goofing around, making a sample to be incorporated in some terrible dance tune at a later date. Prior to this, I had taken a recording he made previously and danceified it, which he was quite into, so here we were going for round two. The dialogue here was all his idea. I've got a feeling it might be referencing something, but I still have no clue what.

Sadly, I never got around to using this in anything. Well, apart from...

Hemorrhoids (Remixed)



Last Modified: 26 October 2000, 19:07:16 | Download

...this, I guess.

Mr. Mackey



Last Modified: 08 August 2000, 22:20:06 | Download

Another slightly remixed, unused sample. This one's derived from a sound clip that was available on the South Park web site in 2000.

Tata for Now



Last Modified: 16 June 2000, 17:29:46 | Download

I've mentioned before that I started listening to Limp Bizkit in 2000. Well, here's a sample of the man responsible for said unpleasantness, then Radio Kerry DJ, Kieran Horan. I was really into his show at the time and every night he'd sign off with "TTFN - tata for now and, of course, YTYTK - you're to young to know", which I thought was pretty damn cool.

I was determined to record that sign-off somehow, to use in the basic-ass music mixing program I was toying around with at the time. Much to my dismay, I didn't have a whole lot of opportunity to do so as he was moving shortly to another station, one that I wouldn't be able to pick up. After several failed attempts, I finally managed to grab the only half of the sign-off he did, on what may have been his last RK show, by pushing my ridiculous karaoke microphone against my Walkman headphones and cranking the volume to the max.

After all that effort, this is the first time I've used this recording anywhere, for anything.

---

And that's it, at least for now. Just like my Protoshops (TM), all this stuff kind of came to an end in mid-late 2000 as I got more and more invested into my crappy little web site. I will get back to that shitty dance music I've mentioned several times at some stage, but that's going to take a little more preparation and a lot more of this. Till then this is DJ JiliK signing off. R-r-r-r-r-r-r-rewind!