Posting this since I had some trouble finding it
https://thewikion.neocities.org/wiki/banners.html

Wanted to share this interesting video / channel

To be fair, I don't think other animals like random people petting them either.

Oh MAN I played a lot of GunZ. I actually did learn how to kstyle half decently, and the game gets really boring when you do; everyone is invincible most of the time from the block they get during butterfly, and the only loadout you see is dual shotgun. It's basically a game of tag where everyone is zipping around trying to shotgun each other in the back and kills hardly ever happen. I would regularly make new accounts and level back up from 1 just so I could play against people that were using different loadouts :omg:k:

Movement tech is definitely a fun feature in competitive games even when it's unintended, like wavedashing in Melee and bunny hopping in Quake. It's just so funny to me that GunZ caught on because it launched so massively broken and exploitable that the skill ceiling ended up being huge. It was like a contest to see who could out-exploit their opponents. It's the kind of thing I can't really picture happening again, but it was a ton of fun in its heyday.

I remember that lol, interesting perspective you have. Most people miss kstyle and thought it made the game more '1337'. Yeah man it's interesting to see how exploits make things more workable so to speak. I don't think there will be another game like it, since it was unintentional.

Oooooooooooo! I loved Puzzle Pirates! I used to play it with a friend who was in some major crew (I used to just operate the bilge pumps). I even asked my parents to get my birthday present in doubloons one year

I had a cool all black outfit and my own lil sloop, and I even had a house in the slum that I converted into like a fancy speakeasy/poker club! But then there was this kid who was pestering me for stuff, so I was gonna troll him and pretend to trade my stuff and then cancel, but I accidentality clicked accept and he stole all my stuff

I really liked the group chats where everyone would stand in a circle to talk and the circle would get bigger and smaller as people joined, that was a great big of game design; you really felt POWER when your circle grew to be the biggest

It was a good game, same with dubloons I think lol.

Yeah, I remember my sloop also. I had my own crew at one point and it wasn't too bad. I remember really enjoying leading gunning, and being a senior officer in a fairly large crew. Unfortunately, that crew got sold like in a merger with a larger crew, and because I hadn't grinded a certain amount of reputation I was demoted to a general pirate, not even an officer. I was fairly pissed and eventually quit after that.

Back in the day crews were pretty polite and friendly. Same thing I remember with guilds in other MMOs. At some point all groups became kinda toxic and nowadays if I ever play games (I don't), I'll basically just ignore any requests to join groups / guilds etc. Only exception is I'll join whatever group exists for communities I'm already a member of. Still, you get spammed constantly to join people's stuff when you login now if you aren't affiliated with anything (on most games I've visited recently). It's really a hostile landscape. I think things were better when not everyone in the world was on these things and there weren't so many tryhards.

LOL, sorry you lost your gear. That greenie must have been really happy. Yeah, the circle mechanic was good. One thing that was unique about this game was that there were (and still are) a lot of (biologically) female players (at least, who were open about their gender), which I remember being pretty rare compared to other MMO style games at the time. I liked that it was something different than your stereotypical violence game and I enjoyed that the game culture wasn't sexist.

Your average puzzle pirates player

Additionally, something quite interesting about this game is that it is the only one I know of that is managed as a nonprofit, and it still returns a profit every year.

Speaking personally (and very cheekily), I think if personal sites on the retro web want to add ads, they should play up the retro angle and present them in a more dated style. At least then it'd sort of be on brand, and I'd get a good chuckle out of it.

Last thought: As long as we don't go back to pop ups with sound being the norm, I'm a happy camper XD

such a good idea! do old-style banners at least. xD definitely no to the pop-ups. that is one thing i do not miss about the old web.

Properly formatted neo-retro banner ads probably would add to the aesthetic (basically larger site badges)

I think this is cool, I'd like to do my own -- do you experience any annoyances with maintenance or is it easy to maintain and filter

- because the original software is in japanese and it's a bit obscure, it's a little hard to find english support for it... i actually spent a day translating all the japanese comments in the files T_T
let me know if you have any further questions!!

That's pretty cool, have you uploaded your version of the translated documentation anywhere? I'd like to mirror it also. A lot of interesting things on the web are inaccessible due to localization issues (e.g., Chinese internet is pretty much splintered off from the West).

I think this is cool, I'd like to do my own -- do you experience any annoyances with maintenance or is it easy to maintain and filte

For me, it's 50/50. I'm older now so I look back on how the web used to be with rose colored glasses. But also, the modern web really does suck. You have very little control over self expression, everything is owned and operated by a few international conglomerates, censorship is everywhere, everyone hates eachother, etc. The trend seems to be to lobotomize tech and reduce the awesome computing power we now have to 30 second videos of nonsense.

I think the question isn't whether the modern web sucks, but whether the old web was actually any good (or if I'm just being nostalgic)

This was probably the quintessential 3rd person shooter, I don't think it will ever be surpassed. Crazy that it was so good because of an unintended glitch. I never got super 1337 and learned Kstyle properly, but I had a lot of fun playing this game. Anyone else?

I'd play it again but IIRC its networking is p2p and has a fairly sketchy underground hacker scene associated with it. So I'm staying away for the time being.

Anyone used to play Nexuiz? I love this game, probably my favorite FPS. Sadly, all the servers are dead now. It's pretty much empty, just a few bots

Ok, let's say the bots are talking about snowboards and ice cream. It would be like this

Bot 1:ice cream? god I love ice cream!
Bot 2 : ya , my favorite flavor is vanilla
Bot 3: Ya, that stuff is good, sometimes I dream about snowboarding through a valley of vanilla ice cream.
Bot 1: Ice cream? god I love ice cream!

_and it would repeat._

But in all seriousness, it was a fun game. I miss being able to log in and actually have players. Back in the day when I just had an athlon II and was installing Linux Mint for the first time, this is all I was able to play.

Anyone remember that game? I logged back on earlier this year and was surprised that my account from the 2000s had the same password I originally set (which ofc I changed, lol). Sadly, my characters were all gone. But I'm impressed that they've managed to keep that game running virtually untouched for two decades, and that my account still existed. I hadn't logged in for probably a decade. It's more than you can say for most MMOs, even WoW.

It has interesting aesthetics. They aren't quite as nostalgic (IMO) as the typical 90s and 2000s neocities aesthetic. It doesn't look dated per se.

Gameplay isn't dated. But it has a strange and sort of uncanny feeling. Also I'm too old now to lead a pillage and be able to sit at the computer for hours on end without taking a break, going outside, etc lmao.

Hmmmmmm, dialup aesthetic It made an intense noise that was not very helpful if you wanted to sneak online without your parents knowing..

Also also those routers are made by USR, that's the company that made all the killer robots in I,Robot

Lol, I don't think I ever sneaked online without my parents knowing. I miss neopets, though. Some really great pixel art and banners, I enjoyed that you could create your own page with html and css.

Id love to hear how your project progresses though. I always though if I had a big house (or a house at all) it would be fun to have a per floor terminal system for storing recipes and notes and stuff! Something like this but just in home (although you could also connect it to a server and then your friends could have terminals too and you could make your own mini bbs)

Using something like this!

That's cool, I like it. I've wanted to make a LAN service library portal for old VHS and books. Not too much space ATM sadly :/ so probably just gonna add some more stuff to my networking area on my rack. I started out trying to use koha, but it seemed really bloated for my use case.

It's also difficult to have a dialup soft modem as they can't get the tones right(?)

Is that really true? Im dont know much about dial tones, but a software tone should be pitch perfect?

I need to find the source, IIRC there is some problem with tones

I like payphone aesthetics, I have an idea to install a self designed VOIP payphone outside of my house or business. However, there are a few problems with this idea. Firstly, it probably violates various zoning laws or permit things. Secondly, in the case of a residential area, it gives a pretext for strange / unknown people from the street to approach my house on a regular basis. Probably for a commercial space it makes more sense, since it could be used to invite people to the place of business.

Physical analog phone-lines (rather than digitized VOIP lines) sadly are no longer in place in many places. I'm curious if we could have an alternative form of internet using analog lines again (a stronger version of dialup)

I really want to try to beef up my phone space, but it's difficult to do this without increasing the risk of toll fraud and other problems. Still, it's worth doing (interactive IVR for my site, a payphone IVR when I eventually get a space where it is safe and acceptable for me to install an art payphone, basically IVR used for artistic ideas either in a physical or virtual space (e.g., choose your own adventure game that is only accessible from that phonebooth, perhaps as part of an ARG))

An interesting story about a person who maintained a phone booth on his property that a lost child used to phone home.
https://news.yahoo.com/lost-child-uses-local-minnesota-174654952.html