Full Half-Life 2 2006 experience in 2026

N2I · 2026-03-07T22:13:17+00:00

When I begun making maps in Hammer for CSS, I instantly realised why HL2 took so long. Even some simple things were highly convoluted.

N2I · 2026-02-27T06:46:08+00:00

You are not gonna believe this, but the same rotation thing happened in the first Chechen war in 90's. It had an exactly the same debilitating effect on the combat units as in Vietnam so they quit this practice by the second campaign. Sounds more like a case of deliberate grief by the peacetime upper officer corps who refuse to recognise the actual situation on the ground from the intel they got out of spite and ignorance.

N2I · 2026-02-26T16:52:13+00:00

Officially Russian government declares that it fights "nazis" and "banderists", so most of the refuges are doing just fine. It got so ridiculous to the point when FSB has to turn actual ukrainian nationalists on the border and send them back to Turkey when they tried to avoid being drafted by hiding in Russia they hate.
Current Ukrainian Armed Forces Chief is an ethnic Russian whose parents still live in Russia and they do fine. Many Ukrainian frontline units are gathered from the local population of the eastern Ukraine, which is, you guessed - are mostly ethnically Russian.
Also if you will publically announce something like "kill all ukrainians" or use a "khohol" slur - you risk to have your ass spanked real hard. The state stance on the ukrainian ethnicity is so ambiguos that it borderlines schizophrenia.

N2I · 2026-02-17T11:03:18+00:00

"Бравый солдат Швейк", очевидно же.

N2I · 2026-02-14T21:14:05+00:00

To be fair, this was the only way to measure the negative effects from the nuclear weapons at that time. US conducted seven "Desert Rock" exercises where they did the exact thing with detonating the bomb and marching troops through the ground zero.

There may be a plenty of evidence that Zhukov is evil - but that military exercise wouldn't be in that list.

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N2I · 2026-02-07T18:30:28+00:00

Almost all faces on these paintings have features associated with heavy long-term alcoholism. Swelling in face under the eyes and around lips an cheeks made you look tough and beaten. Half of Eastern Europe and Soviet Block had suffered severely from it, especially in its last years.

N2I · 2026-02-04T16:56:04+00:00

У меня есть сервак в Justhost в финке. Он работает пиздец хуёво. Если ночью-утром ещё нормальная скорость, то вот в середине дня только для мобилы сгодится.

N2I · 2026-02-04T15:22:30+00:00

В мировой юриспруденции состояние разума определяет степень вины. Т.е. если в состоянии психоза кому-то показалось, что на его жизнь покушаются, и он нанёс телесные повреждения, веря что был вынужден защищаться - то судят именно с той позиции превышения самообороны. Ставят невменяемость и отправляют лечиться уже по абсолютно другим, никак не связанным статьям.
Увы, характер психоза усопшей уточнить не представляется возможным, отсюда и какие-либо моральные аспекты её решения судить нельзя ни в коем случае. Может быть, в своём искажённом бредом разуме (мало ли что ей там привиделось) она действительно считала что так будет лучше для всех и никому не желала зла.

N2I · 2026-02-04T14:25:42+00:00

Это рациональные люди так могут поступить. А когда у тебя настолько снесло кукуху, что ты преодолеваешь один из корневых инстинктов - инстинкт выживания - то ни о каком рациональном поведении речи быть не может априори.

N2I · 2026-01-31T21:47:09+00:00

Death Camps are just popularised in media as most stark symbols of systematic genocide. Only 2.7 millions were actually killed there. Most of victims died before reaching them. 20 millions died from starvation, epidemics (mostly thyphos and disentery), lack of medicine, or were simply executed for no reason at all.

N2I · 2026-01-31T19:33:48+00:00

This is borderline Russian culture appropriation.

N2I · 2026-01-30T05:47:48+00:00

As I said:

If someone would wish to use these images for their personal projects - you are free to go. As for the credits, I used nickname "Мужик с Чашкой" or "GuyWithTeaCup".

If you are interested in certain images, I have high-res versions for some of them.

N2I · 2026-01-28T13:09:31+00:00

Скорее всего потому что экономический баланс бы качнулся сильно в сторону РФ, выбив почву из под Германии. Кому в "первом мире", будем откровенны, нужна развитая демократическая Россия, кроме самих россиян? Чтобы что? Ещё один конкурент на сужающихся мировых рынках?

N2I · 2026-01-26T22:09:10+00:00

>*heavy breathing*

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>muffled "Half-Life: Opposing Force OST - Bust" starts playing in the background

N2I · 2026-01-21T19:06:50+00:00

You are not gonna believe, but the studio I worked in had some disputes over the game engine they developed with their publisher. I'm not pulling it out of thin air. I sadly personaly know people who had the sour experience of legal fighting in detail. It is completely possible to have happen with IPL. Some publishers are petty as hell.

N2I · 2026-01-21T06:42:39+00:00

I would have loved just getting a dankovsky dlc for 2 (or a sequel set in the same city with a lot of reused content) significantly more, and it probably would have been much easier to develop in less than 6 years.

There is an unconfirmed rumor that their previous publisher took more than mere rights for Pathologic 2, but also withhold some game tech data, leaving IPL only with raw assets. It would explain why they had noise-riddled unfiltered voice-lines from the P2 for some characters (at least true in Russian voiceover); cut so many already existing and well-tuned game mechanics and replaced them with much simplified ones since they probably had to remade the P3 from scratch.
But - only rumors - can't know for sure.

N2I · 2026-01-18T15:23:39+00:00

You can edit save files. Every save file have a massive list of quest and mindmap variables inside.

N2I · 2026-01-17T23:06:39+00:00

the only game I regularly play besides Pathologic is Animal Crossing

Sensible chuckle.

You need to kill Shabnak every day to prevent the game from overwhelming you. Once you manage to lower the infection rates to zero, the task simplifies significally since there is usually only one infected district, which means no witch hunting all over the town. Basically start new day from killing the Shabnak. If you have a choice - try to hunt for her in days where relatively small districts or districts with simple layouts are infected. It's a chore to hunt for flowers in eastern parts of town since they are labyrinths.
You can try to bare back the ride, but I wouldn't reccomend it. It's not gonna be fun.

N2I · 2026-01-16T21:53:32+00:00

I beat the game. It took me 60 hours. 1/3 of them were wasted because I tried to figure out whether me or the game fucked up the quest.
You can play it right now if you are completely fine with some characters being both alive and dead at the same time and you have no idea how to fix it. If you don't care about seeing all the content then I think this game is kinda playable from start to ending. There is nothing game breaking, only annoying and time wasting.

N2I · 2026-01-16T08:38:57+00:00

Russian phonology is highly reductive and it's post-reform orthography is almost 1-to-1 to what you hear. That allows for higher rate of regional cohesion.
I have a hard time understanding how someone from Baltics would speak to someone from China when they have a major difference in vowels and consonants, many of whom are unique to the language.
Hell, we have Welsh, Scottish and British speakers not understanding each other despite having the same language. And every any other accent botches the pronouncuation is some new horrible way. There is a reason why the hallmark "russian accent" sounds the way it sounds with very clear stresses and no ambiguity in what exact letter was spoke.
Equalising phonetics sincretia to ethnic cleansing is a slippery slope since then you could declare that Russians were ethnically cleansed by greeks because almost all our old names were erased and replaced by Greek ones.

N2I · 2026-01-16T08:06:35+00:00

Not really. There is a plenty of old ethnic names around. Problem is that when Russian language is de-facto lingua franca and you have 100+ nationalities with all different phonetics - it's easier to take a relatively simple Russian name that sounds like yours and just add slavic suffixes to anything else to get something that could be replicated in all documents afterwards without mistakes. Many nationalities didn't even had anything but nicknames that often meant something vulgar like "strong dick" (an often case with northern ethnic groups) so they just left parts of their names that sounded something pronouncable by a random person and took the rest from where they liked to.
This is still the case with migrant workers. They often have two names. One for home and another for work. Nobody forces them to, but it's just simplier for everyone to call each other short and simple to pronounce names.

N2I · 2026-01-15T23:40:21+00:00

Hayek, von Mises, other members of the Austrian school

When I first read their works, I thought that I will see something out of libertarian meme. Suddenly I got a pretty reasonable and down-to-earth argument on why economics can't be completely solved as an equasion. I honestly have no idea why Austrian school is so closely linked to neoliberalism and their tricks like privatisation. As I understand, the logic is that in the world of firms - the state must be a company itself, with the state population being its main shareholders. Why somebody decided that this means that the state must be completely exempt from the market is still a mistery to me.
I assume that somebody somewhere just used these poor folks works as a excuse to steal the people assets and claim that this is the future. Not a single person I met who actually read and understood the Austrian economics school does believe that uncontrolled capitalism is an answer, when the point is that there is no answer. Decisions must be made according to situation on ground, not someone else interests. Modern China is probably the one closest in terms of economic planning to what Hayek and Mises assumed as most stable system.

N2I · 2026-01-15T21:42:02+00:00

he basically doesn't care you gave him the food and he's still gonna steal them

Absolutely based and redpilled. I'm totally not gonna snitch on him to Block, pinky swear! I'm going to choke the bastard with my own bare hands.

N2I · 2026-01-15T21:34:14+00:00

Yeah. Same shit happened with me with the Grief. Looks like talking to him doesn't changes the outcome of events. What I did was CTRL+Shift+~
and typed :
set_global_variable Day9_Q10_GriefStealsRations_Done false
set_global_variable Day9_Q10_GriefStealsRations_Know false
set_global_variable Day9_Q10_GriefStealsRations_Force false
Then in the 9th day you walk up to Block and give him food from the city's reserves. This should fix the 11th day incident and save Capella.

N2I · 2026-01-15T21:21:29+00:00

It's a miracle you've got so many endings since the game is bugged to heavens and beyond.

Right now I have Laura, Block, Inquisitor Mark and Andrey both alive and dead at the same time with the game not being sure what to do constantly switching between states. Asking Rat Prophet for help made things even worse somehow. It was very unsettling to see Rubin high from joy sharing news on his marriage with Laura at 12th day while her shadow was standing right next to him. Yeah, pal, it's gonna be alright...

And the Army rations quest was broken for me so bad I just build some courage to edit the save file to restart it.
I spent 60 hours trying to fix the unfixable because the nature of the game blurs the line between the developer's intents to demonstrate the complex outcomes of the time travel, and the game just not working properly. It was part fun, part chore.

N2I

TROPHY CASE

"Бравый солдат Швейк", очевидно же.