10000BIN
It's been already sixteen years of blogging and this nonsense has become a habit so I guess I wasn't going to stop quite yet. Probably my loved ones have been protected from my yapping thanks to me unloading that here for no one to actually read. Keeping that in mind I was trying to come up with some sort of a cover pic related to the number sixteen, and in no way did I want to use anything related to sweet sixten in here. Then it came to me that I could do something silly: according to discogs, Motörhead's sixteenh release waas a live album Lock up your daughters. My mental image of their work was that they did something like an album per year but the sixteenth studio album was Hammered that had never been high on my playlists, I opted for the total list. Also somehow related: vinyls are played at 45 rpm and I recently turned 45, this simply had to be an omen.
Last year's doings
Checking the logs I had completed nine projects in these twelve months, which wasn't bad at all. If you considered that out of the twelve months at least two were spent on anything but hobbying, such as vacations, going from place to place, and otherwise busy evenings. The remaining ten-ish month of evenings were kinda open for hobbying and that most likely was gently exaggerated. If all of these projects went through in a month and a bit, I did get to poke these things at a pretty regular average pace, which evens out the fluctuation caused by the excitement levels in different projects and their stages.
Air war machine(s)
Starscream
Starscream in his alt mode was the only plane for this past rolling twelve-month window. That was more than on many other years. Now I needed to buy his brothers to stand by him, lording over the skies. Maybe I could get to that in 2027 already?
Ground war machines
StuG III
These utterly unscientifically made variant choices most likely made this Stug a heretical one for serious people. I enjoyed the build, and the camo worked quite nicely after I fixed the red-brown parts. Probably someone also angrily inhaled some peas because of my cartoony lenses but I liked them and that's why I painted them that way. Panzerwerk's tracks were again awesome.
Hummel
Last Spring was full of rumbling of German armour as the long-awaited Hummel came to the top of the todo pile. It had the exact same tracks as the StuG but somehow I managed to snap both sets here. Luckily fixingn them was easy. Then painting the humanoids failed badly, so the half-seriously considered diorama got scrapped before it started. That was a shame because there was a healthy amount of nice accessories in this kit.
BattleTech
Clan Jade Falcon
With these three I took a step away from the classic OmniMechs and had three very distinct Points from the preexisting units in my Cluster, the main thing was to keep the weight classes in sync. In a shallow V formation we had a Kingfisher, a Nova Cat, and a Crossbow.
My 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster just getting mentioned, they couldn't get to and from the battlefields to show the freebirths and other surats who are the true followers of Kerensky, not without a transport of their own. Now the map-scale Overlord-C Quatrefoil stood ready for action.
Clan Hell's Horses
These horsies were more like hotrodders but I imagined if you called them that, you'd get an ER PPC blast into your sad face. The flames were lots of fun to paint but as a total rookie I made a couple of them a bit too obscure. This Star consisted of a Fire Moth, a Pack Hunter, a Nova Prime, a Huntsman, and a Cougar Prime.
Clan Diamond Shark
These merchant-warriors got to join my samples of Clanners with a full Star. 80% of their equipment was repainted IWM stock, only the Piranha was a new CGL plastic mini. The Points were a Cougar B, a Stormcrow C, a Piranha, a Stormcrow Prime, and an Ice Ferret E.
ISD's Devastators
Because I didn't get all hot and bothered by the idea of painting my Merc minis as examples of famous merc groups, I named a unit for my own self and designed the unit to be of a tolerably small size. No Regiments nor Army Groups, just a three-Lance Company at most.
That still had to be started somehow, this one was going to be the heavy-hitting brass knuckles of the Company - or if I became insane or overloaded with IS stuff, it could be elevated into a separate Command Lance but that wasn't on the list anytime soon. Thanks to life's randomness my unpainted 'Mechs had two Devastators that would give the funniness to my Company's name, and then I boosted them with a pair of Marauders.
Like I said, in my twisted mind this unit of mine should be 12 'Mechs divided into three Lances. Because I was me, I really wanted to fill up one lance with Catapults only. The third Lance would need to be something lighter in weight classes, I had a load of those in my BTTracker without a proper home yet.
Fire Mandrill
During the Spring-Summer I got temporarily confused of my whereabouts and found myself in the Clan Homeworlds because one of my Forcepacks had a Howler that pulled four old minis from the repainting pile. Doing something as bright as these five was a lot of fun and quite a change, and I thought it was heavily inspired by the flaming horsies a bit earlier in the year.
Gray Death Legion
My unsuccessful attempt at fixing the Hummel's crew's uniforms gave me an idea for the grey stripes for the GDL. I painted these stripes more like narrow tiger stripes than wide bands some actual artists have done, but I did see some cow-like spots too so I was most likely in the clear with my stylistic choices.
Gaming
Of course I also spent some evening time also on the Steam Deck, and also sometimes when paint or glue was setting. More often I did that when I didn't feel inspired.
Cyberpunk 2077 && Phantom Liberty continued their devouring of my spare time as the Autumn rolled on, I had already completed most or all of the random tasks a year ago already and the map was pretty clera. That meant I had to continue along a main quest line, and of course taking a step forward took me into the rabbit hole of side- and subquests. Panam Palmer became my good friend, then I rescued both Judy Alvarez and the cop River Ward, both of whom I wooed. Silverhand was obviously pissed off because of River and that was just fun.
Some time later I had to continue along the main story again, but luckily taking another small step on that path triggered a trove of new sidestuff to be unlocked. I escaped with Takemura to a desert motel, and then I left him calling around and explored less urgent stuff first. At this point the DLC's Dogtown got unlocked and I started on the Phantom Liberty questset. I didn't check how long it actually took but I guess it took way over a month, checking every single corner and map marker. Dogtown was quite heavy for the Steam Deck, much more so than anything else in Night City or around it. I saved like an old Sierra adventure game enjoyer, and that way I managed to check all of the storylines starting from the most disgusting one and then reverting to key moments to make more interesting choices, finally locking the least annoying option as my canonical storyline. I sent my friend to the Moon.
After clearing all the long tails of the DLC story I returned to the main quest by starting Johnny Silverhand's Chippin' in quest, that took me to another side path. These were relatively quick ones. Then I got through both Rogue's and Kenny's quest sets and then I had to admit the truth: I only had one boxing match left and Nocturne OP551N, and I didn't like boxing so I went the other way.
Nocturne was the final main quest, and that had a couple of paths to choose from so I obviously played them each in turn as November turned into December. Either I was unlucky or was bad at guessing, I ended up checking the crappiest path last, unlike in Phantom Liberty where I managed the opposite. Well, I have now got rid of Adam Smasher three times, without autoupdates I'd have to do that one extra time and that also didn't appeal to me. No, I was not a fan of boss fights.
BioMenace Remastered
In December 2025 I bought the BioMenace's remastered version as soon as it was available and started playing it in January when I was completely through with Cyberpunk. This remaster had all sorts of awesomeness in it like a widescreen support, improved gfx, and I couldn't point the changes out just from memoery. I tried out the original mode and hoo boy, my memories had definitely gotten gilded! This new version was so much better and worked just about the way I remembered the good old DOS game did.
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| Another image you could hear |
The old shareware episode was played through pretty much from memory, the next ones not so much. A new fourth episode was completely new and a good one. Playing through the game took about two workdays' worth of time with all the getting lost and whatnot, making the dark evenings of January much comfier. I hunted for a few of the Steam achievements but I didn't even think of the last four, speedrunning the episode 25/25/30/60 minutes. Just the thought of that felt like a chore.
Heretic + Hexen
While waiting for the winter solstice I played something simple, something that wouldn't bother me over the deckless winter vacation. Heretic+Hexen was pretty recently released so I started by blasting my way through Heretic. I did play some Heretic back in the day but only a fraction of the amount of time I've spent on Doom, and mostly the shareware episode even if I bought the cd version and completed the full set at least once. It was pretty confusing to notice how much of it I still remembered just like that, at least of the basic episodes. Those new sets like the ones that came with Doom + Doom II were of course unknown to me and full of surprises. Faith Renewed, the new extra episode, was very stylish and you could see how mad (in a good way) the wad builders had become since the days of the original release.
Hexen was also still lots of fun to play, I had completed it once as Baratus the fighter, and now I was so pleased that each hub had a book that you could use to change characters however often you wanted to between Baratus, Parias (the cleric), and Daedolon (the mage). The first hub was just about as confusing as I remembered, but the next ones caused fewer "wherethecrapamisupposedtogonowandwhatdidthatswitchdotoday?" moments. Or I had learned something in the decades in between. After the main game I started on the original add-on Witchkings of the Dark Citadel but that got to my nerves pretty quickly, it was so full of tricks and gotchas. After that the brand new Vestiges of Grandeur promised in my mind something amazing, and the style was indeed astonishing. In the very beginning there was little wandering, but things got complex pretty quickly while I was hunting keys, detached heads, diamonds and other puzzle pieces all around the hub. Mix in with that a number of Heresiarchs and the Traductus-Menelkir-Zekek -fights and you got a recipe for plenty of annoyance-reducing breaks.
Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition
Back in the nineties I played RotT a bit, both single- and multiplayer but only the shareware version. It was pretty hysterical with the countless weird traps, springboards and flying discs, but for some reason in my circles it didn't punch through. RotT's Wolfenstein genes showed through in the worst way with the maps being very confusing due to repetitiveness and that you couldn't have a good clue of what was going on, and the "a [wall | pillar] moves" message was somewhat cryptic at best. I didn't remember what the DOS version's automap told but this new one at least highlighted them nicely so that was an improvement against running around aimlessly.
In about fifteen hours I completed the shareware episode The HUNT Begins, and the commercial version's four episodefuls of The Dark War. The retail episodes had boss fights unlike the shareware one: a general Darian in the first, Sebastian Krist sitting in a cannon-chair in the second one, R2-D2's angry cousin in the third one, and El Oscuro who turned into a massive snake (I dind't find a single egg so I only got the bad ending) in the last episode. After those I gave a shot at the other and newer campaigns, Extreme ROTT and The HUNT Continues but in the same run those were, like those in the Heretic and Hexen pack, way too trick-trappy and intended for experts. Maybe I'd give them a new chance sometime later.
All this worked perfectly on the deck, and somehow the game attacked my eyes much less than on a proper computer screen. I even tried out the map editor, which was a bit funky without an actual mouse but I got a compiling map built.
Robocop: Rogue City
Half-reliable internauts had recommended the Robocop game and I picked it from one of the Steam Sales at some point. This followed both of the movies and their world, the city was just about as awful as in the movies. All the shelves of the baddies were jam-packed with Nuke, and the eighties look with punks all around was evident from the first moments on. The discussions were amusing, I was laughing at an encounter in the early game where a trio of drug dealers were lecturing a newcomer, who was selling Nuke and whatnot below the market price, about the free market.
Mixed in with the main quest there was a bunch of sidestuff to do like giving parking tickets, reprimanding a graffiti painter, and other police-related stuff. The most fantastic fetch quest was "get a towel for a colleague who forgot to get out of the shower" and I couldn't take it as anything else but a mockery of generic fetch quests. The first boss fight was against an ED-209 and I was about to uninstall the game because Robocop was slower than a cargo train without wheels and ED was blasting away non-stop. I had used all my ability points to getting always more XP so I had to just cheese the boss instead of playing like it was meant to be played: I stood behind a blown up van, protected from ED but able to whittle away its hitpoints. All of the subsequent boss fights were simple and clear, and therefore much, much less annoying.
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| Chekov's Robocop 2 |
As the mechanical law enforcer did not bunny hop or run, the game was full of robotically stomping around and around. Few of the lawbreakers got arrested, most got american-policed with a clipful of bullets in their brains. Robocop's default Auto 9 pistol had unlimited ammo and you found modifiable chips for it so you could upgrade and swap them around for different kinds of fights. When that one just didn't cut it, there were limited-ammo pickups from pistols to automatics to shotguns to grenade launchers and even the Cobra autocannon from the original movie. Of course the baddies also used these against you and that's how you got them: from their cold dead hands. The heavier ordnance meant that you couldn't just march in and execute everyone, sometimes you had to hide behind corners.
Blood: Refreshed Supply
In the Spring I continued my nineties-shooting spree with another Build remake. The four-episode Blood was something I played in my teens, this one also had an original add-on campaign and a couple of newer episodes (Death Wish & Marrow). I spent something like fifty hours on these but I had to admit that after the original Blood the extra episodes were, again, mostly too "haha, gotcha!"-filled like RotT and I simply didn't enjoy griding through them.
Noticing getting fed up with that sort of gameplay I decided to check out something completely different from my long backlog of Steam library. I took a look at the list of games I had mostly got as bonus items from bundles I had bought for one single game or so, and kept my eye open for things that would a) work on the deck and b) could be interesting. There was a number of those.
Papers, Please
As an Arschtotzkan passport inspector I stamped people's passports. The rules and regulations changed daily, and as my salary was based on the amount of applicants processed, being slow, careful, and meticulous meant starvation, but declining acceptables or allowing entrance to wrong people came with warnings and fines which also meant starvation or even death (to me). Some rebels made contact and if an official asked about it, I once made the mistake of telling the truth and got taken camping. That made restarting the day and denying knowledge.
In the end I managed survive along with one family member for the whole cold month, and escaped to a neighbouring country with them. Someday I'll try again and check what other storylines there are to be found.
Human Resource Machine
HRM was a programming-themed puzzle game by the makers of World of Goo. The funny thing was that some of the levels got optimally solved on the first attempt even in the very end, while some took a good number of poking around to even solve them in the first place. The more mathematical problems weren't my forte.
The Bridge
A physics puzzle that just flew nicely and beautifully for the first three levelsets, but then I got stuck in a level in the fourth group as I just couldn't get the two separate gravity directions aligned in a loop. I couldn't get further along, so I gave up instead of swearing ':D
Guacamelee! Gold edition
The name alone told me I probably wasn't going to complete Guacamelee, in the very same way I gave up on Teslagrad and some other semi-recent 2d game. The game itself was incredibly pretty and good on the ears. To my gentle surprise I found the energy to beat some minibosses and the multistage arena fights way further than I thought I would, because in between those the actual levels were lots of fun. I dropped the deck from my hands when I got into yet another multistage fight where I should've memorized every move by heart to get a bit further in the story. That started feeling like work, and I uninstalled the game which was a pity because I really liked the game outside those arenas (and boss fights, you may have noticed a pattern).
Dark Forces remaster
Four games later I returned to something that was going to be quick and fun to play through, and I remembered the remaster of the original Dark Forces, and I went for that even if I had just completed the original original only a few years ago. The maps were as maze-y as they have always been but I had a good time.
The top of my backlog
I barely got started assembling the plane that Project Assistant I had asked for before the summer vacation started. My worries were baseless, the 1:144 scale plane did not require much time on the assembly line. What was totally unpredictable was their painting interest, I could make no predictions. I mean, there was still that Kamov and the tiny ISD model from years ago, both missing their finishes.
Airbus A320
Of the fifty pieces most of them went into the landing gear and the engines. The biggest excitement here was the fitting of the parts, and how much adjustments were needed. Most importantly the artist's ideas and plans were in a complete freeform mode at this point.
The obscure future
While I was finishing up the Hummel I was thinking out loud that I could try out a larger-scale airplane in a future. Just poking at the very much smaller scale Airbus I got more into the idea of it. That worried me a bit as I truly was an armour modeler at heart.
