Y'know, this is the kinda morning where I look out my window at a half-barren patch of trees and something just feels correct. I love familiarity. I think part of the reason I still blog about shit, even when no one else does, is because it's my little way to keep the mundanity of the Web I grew up on alive. I've been reading a lot about old Minecraft versions—perhaps I'll spend the day drawing and playing that.

I own two second generation Kindles, neither of which work. They both have flat batteries. I've been wanting to have an e-book reader around for dinking with and maybe even reading more, and while I know e-book readers have gotten fancier since the late 2000s (apparently Kindles can now take ePub files :omegalul:), I'm not a big fan of e-waste, and they worked perfectly fine otherwise, so I'm trying not to buy a new one if I can help it.

Instead, I ordered a new battery. And everything went wrong.

Getting into the thing was a chore. The first step is to take the plastic bit on the back off so you can work the metal backing off and gain access to the battery. A lot of places will tell you to wedge a spudger between the metal and plastic bits, but they're flush on both my models and I didn't want to scuff up the outsides if I could help it. The real way to do it is to press your thumbs on both sides of the Kindle logo, slide them up gently onto the plastic bit, push down, and then push the plastic piece off.

The plastic bit came off easy, but being an idiot, I completely wore down the soft plastic spudger that came with the new battery trying to get the clips holding the metal bit on. (In fairness to me, this spudger really was a piece of shit. You could wear it down scraping it along a piece of drywall.) I then noticed I took out the wrong screws. Even when I removed the correct ones, though, I still couldn't make any progress with those clips! Eventually, I got the metal backing off using a small flathead screwdriver to push the clips down, because nothing else could fit in there and I was scuffing up both my hand and all the cards in my wallet thinking one of them would do the trick.

I mentioned that I own two of these units—one belonged to my older sister back when the Kindle 2 was new, and the other, I ordered used because that one's battery had already eaten shit. I opened up the first one, I guess out of curiosity if there was anything still on it, and discovered the original battery had swelled pretty dramatically. This is what they in the trade call a "spicy pillow", where a lithium-ion battery swells to the point of being convex, like a pillow. A mildly dangerous one. In my case, I can actually see what I think are glue strings where the outer cover of the battery was attached to the metal chassis.

This is where I discovered I ordered the wrong sized battery! The one you can easily find on Amazon is for a Kindle 3, not a Kindle 2, and Cammy didn't check his model numbers. While I was able to return the battery within a few hours for a full refund (Kohl's dropoffs sure are quick!), looking around, I discovered that the Kindle 2 batteries are so outdated, you can only get them as made-to-order parts with a three week to potentially six week turnaround time. I was able to get free shipping on the order, and it was roughly the same cost as the Kindle 3 battery I bought, so price isn't the issue. It's having to wait yet longer that's the issue, and with it being that far out, it's not out of the question that my order will just get canceled outright at some point. I've had it happen.

Worst case scenario, I'll just recycle these at the Staples I worked at (free electronics recycling to try and get people into the store, woo!) and order a later gen used Kindle or something. The new ones are much fancier with backlit screens, bigger batteries, and can actually buy books from Amazon—apparently these older ones are blacklisted from receiving downloads if attached to an Amazon account. I've never really looked at where else I can get e-books from outside of Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and toying with getting my own or friends' stories onto it, which probably doesn't help my inability to stick with the habit.

That said, I definitely think I could make use of a Kindle in the same way I use Pandora, as a way to try out books before I order proper copies of them. That appeals to me. I'll keep you posted.

This is a couple days old now, but I gotta post it here, it's big news! And I've been bored at work, and bored at work is ideal writing time. Two years to the day of my last Guitar Hero II chart demo video, I've posted another. It's for one of Connor's tunes off the self-titled MoriHime album I did a joke review of for my music recommendations sections, "Shooting Star". Check it out here.

I'd do a YouTube embed, but I'm trying to be mindful of retro PCs that don't swing that way. A screenshot will suffice.

I've been getting the warm gooey insides for GH2 modding again this year, but nothing compelled me to dive back in until Connor handed me some stems for "Shooting Star" and told me to go nuts. I figured this wouldn't just be a good way to indulge my love of modding probably my favorite game ever made, it'd also be good promo material for his record, so nuts I went.

You want to know how nuts I went? I asked Connor to record himself playing the guitar part and used that as a reference for not just left-hand fretmapping animations (so where on the neck the in-game guitarist places their hand), but as a reference for which chord shapes they should make with their hand as well. I went and upgraded my custom camera cut code for this—now, instead of having to place notes on specific MIDI pitches in the TRIGGERS track in Reaper like I used to, which is slow and annoying and takes an extra pass at the chart that I usually don't come back for, I can place custom text events in FeedBack, my normal chart editor, as I'm working on the chart itself. I also don't usually use this many flares, but I wanted to go big, not go home, so the whole venue lights up real bright on those big hits.

I am so pleased with this chart, days later. This may be the best stage I have ever authored for GH2! Nah—it is. It just is.

What's been great even outside of how well the chart came out and how much fun it's been to come back and work on the game is just how positive the reaction has been to its release. With the sole exception of a GH2 meme chart I did (ironically my last posted chart video in 2022), this video has been the fastest growing video in the history of my channel, hitting 120 views in the first day of it being up, and tons of comments too. What that tells me isn't just that there's still interest in my modding work, even after what happened with MiloHax, but that there's more interest than ever in it.

You ain't seen nothin' yet. B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen n-n-nothin' yet.

Summing up impel

impel is funny. It doesn't officially count for a mission pack, and you can tell because it uses all custom textures that mimic the textures of the original game. This was common for unofficial paid expansions back in the day—you weren't redistributing id's stuff just because your levels worked with Quake, but the textures you use in a level get embedded into the level file, and if you're using id's textures, that is their property. As a result, Aftershock for Quake and the like all had brand new texture sets prepared for their levels so they could sell them.

I actually rather like how impel looks! They're not amazingly unique textures, obviously, but they're appealing and they're used well. Thing you'll learn about impel is everything comes with a catch—so while they're good textures, it becomes clear that they were only developed with the original GLQuake engines in mind. To condense a big Quake source port history lesson, GLQuake (so the original OpenGL-accelerated build of Quake) was notoriously rushed and buggy, and "fullbrights", the sixteen colors on Quake's custom palette that always render at max brightness, didn't work right in it (they'd render at normal brightness like any other color). When they converted their textures into their WAD makers for use in their level editors, they only ever tested these in GLQuake—and the WAD maker (or maybe even the texture maker himself!) mapped some of the colors in the textures to those fullbright colors, leading to unintentional glowing spots on some of the textures, especially in dark corners of the levels. I guess I'll have to fix those manually if I ever want to use them myself (and I really might, I like their overall style).

impel's levels are decent—with the catch that they are pretty questionably designed at times. Health and ammo gets annoyingly scarce sometimes. I hate having to rely on infighting or outright skipping fights just to survive. There's a box room in one of the base levels a few in, and normally, large stacks of boxes hide gadgets and ammo. I hop in behind the boxes, only to discover there's not only no goodies, but it's also a softlock. You cannot get out of this fairly large space without noclip. The impel developers didn't consider this. Another badly designed spot that sticks out is the start of one of the levels where you're immediately attacked by a rottweiler—and then a fucking fiend spawns in seconds later with a chance of telefragging the rottweiler. That's very much not how nice levels are built. This probably makes it sound like impel is badly put together, and I wouldn't necessarily agree with that, it's competent—it's just that all the stuff that sticks out days later are not exactly positives.

impel has some new weapons which range from mildly fun to absurd and somehow useful. The Napalm Gun is just a Grenade Launcher with no bounce, and it causes the enemies to glow and take residual flame damage over time before gibbing. Not bad! There's an electrical weapon sorta like the one in rogue that causes enemies to be spun around as you hit them—that one was a little odd. Finally, there's this fucking harpoon gun that's the silliest thing on the planet. The javelins don't even stick in the monsters and it has an absurd kick, but this thing legit saved my ass a few times in tight spots, even against shamblers. It uses your rocket ammo pool, which makes sense, given it's basically a Rocket Launcher but without the explosions.

The tongue-in-cheek story of impel is that Shubby's highest minion, the Dark Reaper Legond [sic], has taken it upon herself to target you for bringing her down in Dissolution of Eternity (uh, I thought we killed Shubby in id1?), and naturally, she's the final boss of the game. Amusingly enough, however, she's just a woman? Literally just a bionic woman. She's fast and shoots rockets and tries to pull you close to her. Other than being a fast, annoying damage sponge, she wasn't too hard to beat. It was those fucking juggernaut things (giant indestructible robots that lumber around the base levels) crowded around the arena that were a bigger pain in the ass, but she still went down first or second try.

Is Abyss of Pandemonium worth playing? Yeah, I liked it. I'd say it's worth one playthrough, but not two. The levels look nice and are decently designed except when they're not, the new enemies and weapons aren't anything too special, and the sparseness of ammo and health definitely made me resort to cheating once or twice. I don't know how much it cost back in 1998, but I've definitely played better custom free levels from that time—one for the curious and Quake completionists only. impel did get a free 2.0 reissue in 2008 (I presume for the tenth anniversary of its paid release) that proports to patch some of its bugs, and it's a very conservative upgrade. I noticed a few visual bugs fixed, but the fullbrights issue with the textures remain, nothing was rebalanced, and the softlocks are still there. It's definitely the way you want to play impel, but I was disappointed. Don't expect miracles.

Like I said in my writeup for Dissolution of Eternity, the big disappointment with all the mission packs is the lack of integration between them. Neither rogue nor impel use hipnotic's stuff, and when they each have improvements to the core Quake feature set in breakables, rotating entities, earthquakes, and so on, it really makes me wonder what one big mission pack episode or two would feel like. I know Quoth and Arcane Dimensions have probably taken every idea from the mission packs there is to take, but still—they felt different and unique enough to me that I'd certainly like to see more where that came from.

Hope you enjoyed my several thousand words about each of the Quake expansions! I have actually a few journal posts queued up about my creative happenings this month—things are picking up again. Thanks for your patience.

Whoops! I meant to have this posted days ago! Sorry to leave you all hanging on the next installment of "Cammy reviews Quake mission packs", but such is life. I'm busy and I worked a nine hour shift today.

Summing up rogue

I was pleasantly surprised—I remember hearing from somewhere that Dissolution of Eternity was the one with all the annoying traps, but it was a pretty smooth playthrough throughout. hipnotic is definitely the objectively better pack, but rogue is fun too. One of the most striking things about it is the texture theme—rogue actually uses a cut id1 Aztec temple texture theme (and as someone who has a copy of and has worked with the original id Amiga Deluxe Paint texture sources, I can confirm a lot of these are OG). I hate the idea of things going to waste, and these look great, so I'm happy Rogue Entertainment was finally able to bring them to light.

In fact, lemme rave about the look of the levels some more. I love these kinds of compact, multi-level temple levels. My first attempt at a Quake level was supposed to be a weird lava temple, and it kinda sucked! I mean, I find it charming as hell, but I had no idea of texture themes and I doubt I'd even beaten id1 by that point. I was just enamored that much by the idea of making my own Quake levels, and I suddenly had access to a level editor and zero regard for human life. So yeah, this sorta ominous half-buried temple thing is my jam, and I think rogue nails it. I've heard some people describe it as visually flat, and I think that's a bit unfair. It's true that it doesn't usually have the wow factor of hipnotic's setpieces, but it's clean and compact and flows really nicely. By this point, modders and mission pack developers alike had figured out how to build good-looking and well-performing Quake levels, and rogue is a good-looking and well-performing pack, and that's good enough for me.

As with hipnotic, rogue adds some new weapons and enemies, and these are another big sticking point for folks that I actually liked a bunch. For one thing, you get lava nails, which are tracked separate from your normal nails and completely ignore armor (in deathmatch, in singleplayer they just do more damage). In other words, they take health off the enemy as if they had no armor, and give a nice, satisfying sizzle as they stick in the flesh of your targets. Nice! rogue also adds "multi-rockets"—which shoot four rockets per shot, you'll be surprised to hear. These admittedly make rogue pretty trivial to play through, but I'm one of those people who uses Quake like a stim toy, and I like it when I can breeze through things.

For new enemies, easily my favorite are the Hephaestus, the mini-Chthons. One of id1's two bosses is Chthon, a demon that rises out of lava and lobs fireballs at you, and while you can't kill the first one with your rockets (you have to use lightning bolts in the arena), these, you can, and they're such a striking, fun fight that I wish I had access to them in the base game. There were also the Egyptian Guardian enemies, these Poseidon-looking motherfuckers with lasers coming out of their tridents, and they're tough enough that the game likes to use them as mini-bosses, a couple protecting specific portals between levels. They were fun to fight.

The final boss of the game is, well, a dragon. Wholeass just a dragon. You'd think that alone would be an upgrade over Armagon, but honestly, I found it to be one of the most unfair fights in all of Quake, not necessarily frustrating, but certainly one that took a ton of attempts and save-scumming. It takes place in this cool as fuck lava canyon, but you're not gonna be able to make much use of it because of the dragon's unavoidable, speedy projectiles that pretty much require you to take refuge in the spawn area. If you think the Anti-Grav Belt (another cool but underutilized rogue idea) evens the odds any, you're a fool. It actually makes it much harder to land anywhere that isn't directly in lava and change directions quickly to avoid Dwaggie's shots. Anyway, hit it with enough multi-rockets and it dies and you'll discover all of the cool pickups and powerups that would've been very useful for evening the score, had you not been chickenshit from being browbeaten into hiding and getting only cheap shots in during the fight. Ah well.

As much as I did and do enjoy rogue, and as much as I recommend it, hipnotic is definitely designed a lot better (outside of traps—rogue does actually decent traps like swinging blades and not CBT like that fucking rock tumbler tunnel). rogue introduces a ton of new content, monsters, and weaponry that barely get used, I always had 100 normal rockets in reserve, and secrets, I eventually just stopped looking for because they were laughably obscure. I suppose some of it adds replay value, but I always got the sense, for as much as I liked the look of rogue, that it would be a lot better had someone else been designing all the maps.

In fact, the most perplexing thing is that rogue doesn't use any of hipnotic's upgrades. There's a part in one of the later levels where you have to throw two levers to lower a drawbridge, a clearly good use of hipnotic's rotating entities! Instead, they're generic sliding func_buttons. I yearn for some way for the two packs to be combined, their new weapons and enemies and technical upgrades in tandem to make for a truly unique and brand new Quake singleplayer experience. I also am just happy with what we got. It was fun, and it kept me at Quake for another week or two. Nothing's ever perfect, but Dissolution of Eternity is still just as much worth a spin or two as hipnotic was, even if you do have to cheese a dragon to finish it.

Ah, man, I think I'm getting better. When the journal goes quiet, you know I have zero desire to write shit for it. I took a week off of some of my vices, and I'm starting to save money again after using them to finish off my student loans. It's not perfect still, still a couple things haunting me even as I write this, but I've got lots creatively that I'm feeling comfier with and work especially is very calm right now. By mid-February, I will have $10,000 banked up, and I'll be around $23k in savings or so by my one year mark here. This place is gonna make the next five years for me financially possible, and I can write journal entries on the clock!

I'll discuss all that more in time, but I figure it's time to dust off the journal proper with something more fun: I played all the Quake mission packs recently! I've only owned them for like over half a decade now (or at least, uh, had copies of them?), and I've become fuzzy for the idea of gaming through time again, beating games as they came out and seeing the rapid march of technology and design innovation, so now seemed like an ideal time to finally get through them.

I started with the base game, which I'll call id1 for my ease of typing, and then moved onto Scourge of Armagon, hipnotic for short, then Dissolution of Eternity, rogue for short, and finally I threw in the unofficial third mission pack Abyss of Pandemonium, or impel, for shits and giggles before I moved onto Quake II. (The shortnames all refer to the company that worked on each game, id Software, Hipnotic Interactive, Rogue Entertainment, or the Impel Development Team. I'm just so used to calling them by their shortnames that I regularly confuse and mix up their real names.) I intended this to only be one post, but since I wrote so much (well over 3,000 words!), I'll be splitting it into three parts.

Summing up id1

Quake as a game starts a lot better than it ends. I breeze through the shooting galleries of the first three episodes, enjoying their weird level layouts and how I have everything memorized, and then Episode 4 presents a certain roadblock, and that's because the entire episode was designed by Sandy Petersen. Sandy's work is divisive. He was originally a tabletop RPG developer with a background in games like Call of Cthulhu, and id brought him on for Doom and ultimately Quake. Some folks, like NewHouse, really like his inventiveness. His focus was on strange and unique level setups and gimmicks, not action like the rest of the team. Other folks find his levels to be the most obnoxious of all the classic id levels to play because said ideas don't usually translate to fun gameplay.

Episode 4 starts out pretty decent. I like E4M2, The Tower of Despair, with the windows that open up in chunks and the focus on miniature sections of the level that act as teleporters to bigger sections of the level. See? Good ideas, Sandy! It's really E4M6, The Pain Maze, and E4M7, Azure Agony, that live up to their names. Overly long, too many spawns (exploding, very fast moving bouncing blobs), all ambush encounters in tight quarters, thus negating the usefulness of your explosives, no thanks. I skip through most of that shit. Worse yet, the final level, Shub-Niggurath's Lair, is just a long, annoying line of shamblers up a cliff face with an admittedly fun subversion in how you actually kill Shubby: not with your firepower, but with a well-timed telefrag, just like is fun to do to people in deathmatch.

On the whole, it's a little bit of an unremarkable end to one of my favorite games. Let's see how the mission packs do at solving that.

Summing up hipnotic

Scourge of Armagon is the mission pack I have the most experience with. I've almost made it through it a few times, but this time, I really wanted to see it through to the end. I'd say it's the strongest of the three. Both of the official mission packs add onto the base game in their own way, and hipnotic adds rotating entities, gravity fields, earthquakes, and a nice variety of weapons and enemies to make base levels (which the entire first third of the mission pack consists of) more satisfying and difficult to play.

hipnotic is similar in story to Half-Life 2, where a force called Armagon takes over Shubby's existing invasion infrastructure with aims of attacking Earth, and it's up to the jannie who swept it up the first time to sweep it up again (as jannies are good at). Spoilers! But the fight against Armagon is actually pretty decent for such a simple game like Quake. It feels like a throwback to Wolfenstein 3D's bosses, where you enter an ominous, open arena as the boss makes his presence felt, and unlike Shubby, sitting there like a pulsing pustule until you pop it, he is very fucking aggressive with his rockets, so brush up on your circle-strafing. It's fun! A good boss really helps to punctuate an arena shooter, an exclamation point on the end, and Scourge is probably the best of all the official bosses in the Quake universe.

Visually, hipnotic is a nice step up from id1. I can't fault how bad the texturing in id1 is, because it had a first of its kind level editor and the game was meant to run in 320x200 anyway, but hipnotic definitely polishes up the bases some with particle force fields and big showy multi-part doors. The bases about halfway through start to take on a mining camp feel, complete with cave-ins and sudden lava pits twenty feet below you--some pretty memorable stuff. The later levels are cool too; it's pretty hard to forget Ancient Realms, HIP2M1, with its cool non-linear multi-level castle (and now I've been in some real ones!), the gigantic working clock and that Jesus mural that fires lightning at you in The Black Cathedral, HIP2M3, the elevator ride over the shores of Hell in HIP3M1, Tur Torment, or all the coffin iconography into the third episode.

For new monsters, you get the centroid, a cybernetic scorpion with a nail attack apparently also known as the Scourge (yes, the Scourge of Armagon, roll credits) and gremlins, tiny lizard fuckers that steal your active weapon (annoying) and revive dead enemies (fuck you). I didn't find any of the new weaponry or power-ups all that exciting or useful. As cute as the idea of the Horn of Conjuring is, summoning a monster to fight for you instead, usually they just get stuck on the scenery downstairs instead. I did like the rapid-fire laser cannon, with its pleasing firing rate and silly pew-pew noises. Really, none of the gameplay additions in any of the mission packs can touch the loadout and enemy variety of the base game, but a couple of those fucking weird teleporting nail scorpions definitely help to break up the monotony of 200 dudes with shotguns and laser guns.

hipnotic isn't perfect, of course. Given what I heard online, I expected rogue to have all the really annoying traps, but hipnotic's are far worse. Anyone who's played it remembers the rock tumbler bit in HIP1M3, The Lost Mine, and if you haven't played it, when you find it, save right before! You will be reloading that save over and over, as dying in it is completely random, and you need to get through it to finish the level. There's also the spike mines, which are effectively gigantic and even more dangerous vorepods. They lumber towards you through the air, and you better hope you can wipe them off like boogers on the scenery, because otherwise your limbs will be in different dimensions. I fucking hate spike mines. All my homies hate spike mines.

Scourge of Armagon is definitely worth a play and maybe a few. I had a lot of fun with it, and there's plenty of cool sights to see that elevate Quake's otherworldly feeling with more actually recognizable locales like churches and mining camps. You gotta at least sorta have the feeling these are real places, or else they just feel like game levels. hipnotic is good at that, not in a way that makes it feel realistic, but in a way that makes it feel like the real world, but desecrated, turned odd and warped. Good expansion.