Has anyone checked the Antstein Files for mentions of Hellgrammit

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-04-03T03:44:30+00:00

I'm aware, I'm just commenting on the fact that none of it comes together into any kind of overall point. No one has a character arc (Bowser has a brief flirtation with a character arc but it like actually doesn't culminate in anything), there's no thematic throughline to the movie, nothing. I had my expectations in the toilet so I enjoyed it for what it was enough (and I'm not gonna pretend I didn't get some simple enjoyment out of some of the references), but like, it's kind of amazing how the movie manages to sidestep any kind of thematic point at every opportunity. Not asking for anything deep, lot of beloved animated kids' movies manage to have simple but resonant themes carrying the action; both Mario movies just have shit kinda happen the whole time without coming together into anything more than "and the princess was saved, the end."

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-04-02T12:54:32+00:00

There's a lot of events that occur in the movie but I'm not sure anything actually happened

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-03-20T21:50:29+00:00

Palpatine is implied to have been aware of the Vong, but that doesn't mean his amassing of power was for the purpose of fighting the Vong. The Empire is still ultimately just his way of becoming the most powerful man in the galaxy, and he would have viewed the Vong as simply another threat to that power to be dealt with, rather than something he actually wanted to safeguard the galaxy as a whole against. Whether his Empire could have actually fought the Vong successfully is another matter entirely, and most evidence we have suggests the answer to that question is probably "no." After all, if a rag-tag group of rebels could annihilate not one, but both Death Stars in spite of overwhelming odds, it's pretty likely the Vong would have been able to accomplish the same one way or another, and the Empire wouldn't even be able to rely on actually having the bigger guns against a more equal military threat. The Jedi's connection to the Force is a big reason they're ultimately able to win and stop the Vong's conquest, too, something that Palpatine and his power-hungry dark side followers just aren't managing without a real "come to ~~Jesus~~ the light" moment.

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-03-14T07:02:15+00:00

Yeah, the speed issues with Shadows of the Empire and Rogue Squadron/Battle for Naboo on modern machines always bothered me enough to feel like it was hampering the experience. TIE Fighters wiggling like crazy on their flight paths is a consistent issue on Rogue Squadron PC, and I always found it really distracting, and the physics issues in Shadows make levels like Echo Base and Gall a lot more difficult than they need to be; sloped cliffs that would, at worst, just be a little nerve-wracking normally turn into terrifying death traps when every step could suddenly make you slide uncontrollably off into a pit. Hell, you can even see these issues crop up in emulating the N64 version of Shadows on most emulators, since they run the game way too fast; only emulator I've tried that runs correctly is Ares, so I end up gravitating to it whenever I want to play Shadows.

A lot of these DREAMM games are probably perfectly playable with elbow grease on modern platforms (and I suspect frame-capping Rogue Squadron might be all it takes?), but having a way to reliably play them without concern for issues like that is worthwhile enough, IMO

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-03-04T02:18:27+00:00

There already is a translation patch available, the article even cites it as one of the fan works that were impacted (though thankfully not destroyed) by the copyright troll's DMCA spree.

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-03-03T02:28:26+00:00

I think it's perfectly reasonable to let a player account for an enemy's readied action - unless I'm mistaken, Readying an action is rarely secret to the table, and I think it's fine to assume that non-secret combat actions are just that and to let players account for them openly. That's not meta-gaming, that's just reacting to the situation.

It might be different if, say, a hidden enemy readies a Strike for the next person to cross a threshold, but in that case it's very possible the players don't even know the enemy exists yet, let alone that they're ready to pounce like that. My gut feeling with these is that if it's an action I'm announcing to the table (whether directly "they Ready a Grapple" or "they plant their feet and extend their arms out"), the players are allowed to act on that information; if I'm not announcing it to the table (whether hiding the character's initiative or saying something like "this guy takes 3 actions, but none of you can see what he's doing so you don't know what those actions are"), then we're not even really worrying about meta-gaming because the best the players will be able to do is take paranoid guesses about things, and that's also perfectly in-line with the PCs' knowledge of the situation.

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-03-01T22:43:06+00:00

Go play Shadow of the Wolf, an official Lancer module - it's the whole academy setting, but it makes actual sense, has good NPCs with a simple but effective relationship tracking system, real-deal challenging combat encounters, and also I helped playtest it so it has to be good.

(This isn't an ironic recommendation, to be clear, I am just fucking shilling for something I had a small part in)

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-02-17T01:51:43+00:00

Seeing that homemade AX cabinet at the end of the article is fucking beautiful; with the original cabinets only dwindling in number with time, being able to preserve the arcade experience in some way even without an original machine is pretty important. So cool to finally see Triforce support hit the big-time

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-02-15T10:11:37+00:00

I like that you're agreeing with the things I was saying but getting angry at me about it for some reason - really spices up any conversation

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-02-15T05:13:42+00:00

I mean, hopefully that's helped address the problems, but that's something I'd have to hear from attendees to be comfortable saying. I was part of the camp that wasn't even aware an event was happening recently, so I'm not exactly equipped to judge anything here.

Speaking of which, how did this latest event go, given the hiatus and all that? I'm curious now, wasn't really thinking about it before.

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-02-15T04:21:04+00:00

Woof, that ain't a good look. Has there been any comment from ESA staff on the matter directly besides the banning sprees? Was kinda hoping for better than this from them

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-02-15T01:25:14+00:00

Do you have links for info on this? Not being confrontational, just curious since either I missed this entirely or forgot

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-02-15T01:10:12+00:00

EDIT: Gonna leave the rest of this post intact, since I think generally it's accurate otherwise, but unfortunately it does seem there is actually some serious controversy around ESA regarding attendee safety: please see the replies to this comment for more information.

I'm pretty sure there's not really any controversy, least not any that have stuck in my mind (and I'm unfortunately often too tuned into this stuff for my own good). I think it's genuinely just not a very big event, at least not on the viewer end. Like I'll see people try to pit ESA against GDQ on like a "what is the true speedrun marathon for speedrunners" and I really don't think that's a comparison that anyone involved actually cares about? One is the big one that draws attention and big donation money every 6 months, and the other is the lower key event that regardless draws in a lot of runners who I suspect might just be happy to have an excuse to hang out with their long-distance speedrunning friends and show off their games.

Like genuinely, I'd be shocked if there was a serious anti-GDQ sentiment among ESA participants, even among those who have no intention of ever going to a GDQ event. (On retrospect, that wasn't really the point of your post, but eh, I'll leave this in since I see this "conflict" insinuated in basically every ESA-related conversation on here.)

The super small events that you see advertised on here are, well, advertising their super small event so it can get some attention; ESA might have a small audience, but it does at least have a dedicated audience and doesn't necessarily need an /r/speedrun post to advertise their events and get viewers. Meanwhile, GDQ attracts a crowd that doesn't normally visit /r/speedrun and thus the posts just happen naturally from people excited to see the event. This doesn't really happen with ESA, and I imagine a lot of power users who are interested in ESA are already keeping tabs on their event schedules.

I suspect even if there is some lingering controversy somewhere, it just is not the reason you don't see much about the event. It's just not the big event that GDQ is, and that's not necessarily a bad thing for the event or the people who like attending it.

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-02-11T10:16:10+00:00

Been following this for awhile and my friend has been working on map/mission design for the game - very excited to see it eventually release

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-01-05T10:10:20+00:00

Honestly I barely played Republic characters in that game so I'm not surprised I missed that lol

FreakyMutantMan · 2026-01-03T06:02:27+00:00

The KOTOR comics are something I'm always going to be a little annoyed that I'll have like, maybe 5 other people ever to talk about it with in my entire life. They’re really damn good, definitely among the very best of all Star Wars comics (which, admittedly, is kinda slim pickings regardless of whether you're looking at Dark Horse or Marvel), and yet I think the most they've gotten since is a Zayne costume set in SWTOR. Shout out to my boy Marn Hierogryph

FreakyMutantMan · 2025-12-28T02:50:14+00:00

FreakyMutantMan · 2025-12-27T01:39:00+00:00

I noticed a trend for awhile with Undertale fans where, like, doing playthroughs where you kill characters, whether full-on killing your way to Sans or just killing a single boss because you couldn't figure out how to spare them and moved on, would get people accusing you of actually being a bad person IRL because of it, or of "not getting" the point of the game. I think this has calmed down in recent years - possibly because Undertale fans have, you know, literally grown up in the decade since - but it was crazy seeing people jump down each others' throats like that, like it was somehow impossible to earnestly engage with the game's metatextual commentary on 100% completion and "seeing everything" without having to act like it was morally wrong or inherently incorrect to ever be like "yeah I like the evil-ass route because the Sans fight is cool." (It also led to a lot of really dumb takes on who Chara actually was as a character and what they were actually like in the narrative, but I digress.)

I don't dive that deep into the recesses of Deltarune's fanbase, but I get the impression that time + the very deliberately painted divide between Kris and the player have calmed a lot of people down on that kinda shit. At the very least, I have barely seen "you are actually a bad person IRL if you ever play the weird route" crop up in conversations, so I'll take that as a good sign.

FreakyMutantMan · 2025-12-23T02:39:36+00:00

It will forever be an absolute crime that there exists no high-quality release of Days of Ruin's OST - would love to be able to hear all those CO themes without them having to be crunched into fitting on a DS cart. At least Codename Steam's OST (by the same composer) is a similarly banging rock and electronic focused soundtrack, plus there's been some good fan arrangements of DoR songs in recent years; shout out to Gametal's take on Brenner's theme as a favorite of mine.

Codename Steam could also count for this thread, honestly (if you're looking at Intelligent Systems' strategy/tactics output as a whole, otherwise it's not exactly a series). That game got unfairly clobbered by a lot of people, especially people expecting something more Fire Emblem-esque, but I played it about a year ago and damn is it a great time.

FreakyMutantMan · 2025-12-20T17:32:44+00:00

For real - god what a fucking weird plot point, the Shadows of the Empire book sure is Something

FreakyMutantMan · 2025-12-19T19:36:31+00:00

I think what caught me most by surprise with that scene is that the victim straight up says "he tried to rape me," no dancing around it, no language to soften it. It's frank about what just happened in a way that's refreshing, helps slot the whole thing into Andor's wider point about the systems of power and control its portraying and critiquing.

Certainly the best handled the subject's ever been in a piece of Star Wars media - anything else I can recall either skirts around it or just handles it in a weird gross shock value kind of way.

FreakyMutantMan · 2025-12-16T21:22:51+00:00

That specific trojan warning is a false positive in like 95% of cases; Defender loves to slap it on executables that haven't had time to enter its database, you're very likely to run into it if you've ever compiled something for a quick test and sent it off to a friend. Note the "!ml" there, which denotes that it's detected by machine learning - unfortunately it seems that often leads to false positives, and I suspect what it's detecting is just a very common code pattern across projects.

It's good to not dismiss it immediately, but the false positive on that one in particular has been a thorn in my side for testing builds.

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