One in a million chance to ask such a niche nonsense rando and expect an answer, but… does anyone have a clue what the green machine in the blurred background on the shelf is?
The (likely) wheels on top look like a press, kinda like I’d expect from a rubber vulcanizing press. The side covers look like it’s either geared or belted. The side opposite the beefy lever arm looked like a motor to me at first, but that doesn’t make sense for the lever arm IMO.
I don’t know the guy or reference, but that looks like an electronics lab with prototyping capabilities; something I do as a hobby too. The machine might be related to screen printing, toner transfer, photo lithography, a film based solder mask or even multi-layer composite stacks for printed circuit boards, based on my limited knowledge. It would be fun to know what that is exactly.
He’s Gabe Newell, the founder (and I think still CEO) of Valve Software.
Former Microsoft employee that started up a small game studio in the 90s. They took the Quake engine, modified the balls off of it, and used it to make Half Life, an FPS game that revolutionized the landscape forever with things like real time in-engine cutscenes that wove the story in through the gameplay, and through how advanced the enemy AI seemed. It also featured a ton of miniscule details requiring some clever coding to pull off, which really added to the atmosphere.
They also made the Steam gaming client, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Dota 2.
He’s not involved with the day to day much anymore. Pretty much retired in (I think) New Zealand now.
Very nice guy by most accounts. Was still responding to fan emails semi-regularly around 2010, and was one of the main voices in the dev commentary features in their games up through the Orange Box (Half Life 2 Ep 2, L4D, Portal, TF2).
No no no. I want a bunch of little tiny plastic and cardboard pieces that take forever to arrange and pack up when I’m done. I want text that’s too small to read. I want a rules book that I need a degree in to properly interpret. And only ever want to play during the handful of times a year I can get everyone around the table together.
I enjoy the convenience of digital games. I don’t like having to figure out which case my kids put a game in because they sure as shit don’t put them back in the right one.
More like level 3 bandits appearing out of the woods and smugly threatening to mug me when I have armor made by a dwarven hellsmith and am holding the sword of Dragon Agony.
The bandit looks at me and thinks “Yeah. This guy is going to get it.” as he brings up his rusty shiv.
Another stupid form of this is when they level up with you. The bandits sudddenly have armor made of daedra foreskins wielding flaming dragon bone swords and are level 9 gazillion.
Both ruin the immersion but it’s easier for me to justify bandits being fucked in the head than it is justifying them having turbo rare shit all of a sudden.
Seriously? Maybe it’s just cuz I was a poor kid who had to play the same games a shit ton but I went through at least 5 different disks in my time that I can think of just from playing them too hard.
Something closer to to 50 for disks that were scratched from other shit, though that’ll include music CDs and DVDs too
The only disk that I ever had get destroyed because of my own incompetence. Was a copy of the first season of Stargate SG one, it was actually the first disc of that season. And what happened was I left it outside of its case, in an area that allowed the sun to go across it every single day for about a month and a half.
It discolored the disk, and also made it unplayable , had to buy a new one.
That was fully on me.
Many of my games that I played in the late 90s and early 2000s I would play over and over and over and over again, never scratched them.
I feel like the only kid on the block that didn’t have trouble with the water temple.
What ruined my life in OOT was Shigeru trolling and vaguely hinting that the rumors of a triforce you can obtain in the game actually existing so I wasted years looking for it.
lemmy.world
Gorące