Steam has a bundle of Far Cry, Far Cry 2: Fortune's Edition, Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon for a shade for $42.48 for those who are interested - it's up for the next 2 hours or so.
I'm having more fun with Dragon's Dogma than I thought I would. When I initially played the demo, I didn't like it, but I was coming off of playing a LOT of Dark Souls, and I kept comparing them (and Dark Souls is in my all time top 3 games). Now that I've been away from Dark Souls for a few months, I saw Dragon's Dogma on sale for $13 on Amazon and gave it a shot. Now I'm 20+ hours in and really digging it. The world is big and sparse, and traveling at night is difficult, so exploration has a sense of urgency. You want to keep exploring, but you know if you're out at night, you can die very, very quickly (especially if you stumble across a boss-ish monster on accident), but towns and camps are kind of far apart, so you have to be careful. The story has been decent so far, too, but I am barely into it, as I've spent a lot of time wandering and exploring (I just reached the main town and started the quests there). Now I just need to finish it by the end of July, as once August rolls around I have two-a-days for football then school starting August 12, so I won't have any time at all.
You guys know how I feel about Fallout: New Vegas (1270 hours logged and counting)... Steam has, on sale, the Ultimate Edition, which includes the Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues and Lonesome Road DLC's, for $4.99. It's easily 100+ hours to finish, a bargain for that price. If I didn't already own it (via upgrades and DLC's), I'd buy it. Buy and download it. Now.
This Steam sale is absolutely raping my wallet. $60 on a game? Better be good. 10 games for $9.99 or less a piece? FUCK IT LETS ROLL THEM DICE! I'm gonna be buying shit every single day at this rate. I've been doing a lot of catching up, I guess - finally got The Binding of Isaac, which is fun if less RPG-ey than I like my roguelikes. Also got Dungeons of Dredmor for like $5 with all its expansions, which is a goddamn awesome roguelike dungeon-crawler. It has dozens upon dozens of skill trees with near-infinite combinations, a loot engine that rivals Diablo, random dungeon layouts, a solid sense of humor, and it's turn-based which sometimes *really* hits the spot for me. Castle of the Winds was probably one of my most-played games growing up (which, if anyone still runs Windows XP or something, is totally worth downloading because it's great and free now), and Dredmor is definitely a very very solid and wildly replayable (I've lost like 15 characters so far and I'm not even mad!) successor to the roguelike genre. Picked up Torchlight 2 for $5 because I sure do like loot, and it seems so far to be great in all the areas that Diablo 3 fell short in. Recovered KOTOR II (lost my disc ages ago) for a measly sum, got Dust: An Elysian Tail just now because someday I might have a 360 controller to play it with, AND The Witcher 1 and 2 for less than $10 combined, because even though my PC can't run it very well now I'm about to upgrade and it'll be so goddamn worth it. I guess all told I don't think I've even spent $30 yet, and I've gotten probably 200 hours or more worth of games. All I need is Rogue Legacy to come on daily for 50% off and I'm done and satisfied. Goddamn. If Steam box comes true and is as good as it seems it will be a glorious, glorious day. Also just saw that X3: Terran Conflict is selling for $3.99 (I got it for 7.99 a week or two ago, fuck me I guess). If the idea of a space sandbox game that lets you work up from being a poor pilot in a shitty fighter to owning entire sectors of space with factories, mines, weapons facilities, a trade empire and a fleet of capital ships to obliterate anything and everything appeals to you, it's highly worth the purchase.
I had someone tell me today that Radiant Silvergun "wasn't that good of a shooter". Has there ever been a beating inside a GameStop? Because there was about to be one. Whoops, had to fix my statement. It was Radiant Silvergun. Me and this other guy in the store were talking about shooters and Ikaruga came up. I mentioned how it was the spiritual successor to Radiant Silvergun and the clerk piped up with his stupid, stupid opinion.
For those not quite paying attention, Steam sales are the reason that, on the PC, people don't care if they can't trade/sell their games. They don't even care if the games require a web connection (seriously, what's the last computer you saw with no internet?). None of it matters, because the games are cheap. Dirt cheap, if you wait long enough. And still superior to their console versions, if you have the hardware. At $5 for a best-selling AAA title, you can throw in all the DRM you want. I ain't even mad.
If anybody here played the Fall From Heaven II mod for Civ IV (and shame on you if you didn't!), the lead designer of that is the guy responsible for Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, which is on Steam sale for $14 right now. The Civ mod shifted the setting to a fantasy one with hundreds of new units (practically every single one of the 15+ factions had 80% faction-unique units), including heroes that could level up and find artifacts and stuff, a magic and casting system, world events (like summoning an angelic or demonic faction that you could then take control of, an Armageddon countdown that actually summoned Four Horsemen and various other cataclysms when it got sufficiently high), exciting mechanics (the demonic faction, for example, spread infernal corruption to all of its territory that replaced the terrain with rivers of hellfire and stuff), religions that came with their own world events, units, and heroes, and all kinds of other crazy shit. I dumped hundreds if not THOUSANDS of hours into Fall From Heaven II (if anyone is still playing Civ4, or at least has it, DOWNLOAD FFH2 NOW because it's 100% better than Civ 5), and so of course, learning that the guy who masterminded, oversaw, and coded most of that mod published his own game, I bought the fuck out of it as soon as I saw it. AND IT'S AWESOME. It's basically a big budget fantasy Civ mod with a few key differences - it's much more RPG-style and customizable than Civ is. You can use the prebuilt factions and leaders, or you can, in-game, design your own faction with whatever traits you want and whatever visual style you want. You can design your leader, who is an actual unit in-game, from the ground up - visually, abilities, traits, equipment even. Then when you get in-game, you can design your own units (if you want, it's not necessary), from visual style (hair, clothing, armor, colors, beards, whatever) to abilities and traits and equipment. If you need infantry units that wield clubs, carry shields, and specialize in small-scale battles against archers? YOU CAN MAKE THEM! Or whatever! You can pick their strengths and gear and all that stuff! It's really cool! Then if you end up playing against your faction in a future game, you could very well see those same units coming after your archers. There are also a ton of quests, with rewards ranging from money to badass new gear for your hero/generals to wield. ALSO it has actual battles instead of the autoresolve of the Civ series - when your army bangs into some enemies, it takes you to a separate turn-based tactical battle map, on which you maneuver your units one at a time like Final Fantasy Tactics (or the Heroes of Might and Magic series, apparently, but I've never played it), so you can take advantage of your heroes' and units' badass skills and spells and stuff. Anyway, if an RPG-leaning fantasy Civilization game with a fuckton of customization, quests, artifacts to discover, magic, actual battles, big monsters like dragons and shit, and all kinds of other cool shit sounds like your cup of tea, give it a shot. It has a dumb name but it's sweet.
Currently playing through Red Dead Redemption. I like the setting and all, but I'll be damned if the game doesn't feel kind of lifeless. Like it's just one big set, and all the actors (me/the NPCs) have no script. This is, of course, in between the story missions. I like the cutscenes but there's not much in the way of mission design. Follow this NPC, escort this NPC, kill these guys. I guess Rockstar's whole model of game design - "fuck around until you want to advance the story, then go to this waypoint" - just feels dated to me. Assassin's Creed does the same thing, but getting around in Assassin's Creed is really fun - climbing buildings and navigating the rooftops is cool to me, and there's various treasures to find, towers to scale, etc. Getting from point A to B in RDR, by comparison, is just riding a horse. And if you don't want to ride a horse you can fast travel via stagecoach, or campsite, or death warp. It's really not a compelling world in that sense. These are a lot of the same problems I had with GTA4. It's a reminder for me not to expect anything revolutionary from GTA5, anyway. Radiant Silvergun is godlike. Amazing soundtrack. If any of you like shoot-em-ups and haven't purchased the HD remake off Xbox Live Arcade, shame on you. The description of this video talks about the game in depth:
II will always be my favorite as it was the first one I played. It was so cartoony and bad, definitely unbalanced, but god it was so fucking fun. Probably one of those games that its original version wouldn't even work on a modern OS.
So the new Super Smash Brothers coming out next year will have the Animal Crossing villager as a playable character. Prepare to burn.
Capcom asking for fans' input on future UMvC3 changes. Should be interesting. Off the top of my head Zero and Vergil need re-working, Sentinel needs to get put back into where he was pre the last patch and Tron needs her invulnerability back on her flame assist.
People started talking about Smash Bros and for 10 seconds I really asked myself "What system would that even be on?" I wonder how WiiU sales are doing, actually I'm not wondering, because I can't seem to care enough to Google it.
Nintendo shit the bed with it. No big first party releases to prop the system up really hurt. After it was released, there were about 8 launch titles, and that was it, for a solid 6 months. It absolutely destroyed any momentum a new system launch should have. They desperately needed a major release to coincide with the WiiU, but without one people didn't have a reason to buy it. I think once they start to release some new games from their key properties (Zelda, Smash Bros, Mario, Metroid), they'll see sales start to pick up from fans that need to play the newest Zelda or Mario. Once sales pick up, they'll see more third party support. As of now, 3rd party publishers aren't even bothering with the WiiU because of the poor console sales.
For old school PC gamers, the Rise of the Triad remake came out today and looks awesomely good and bad simultaneously. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.apogeesoftware.com/products/rise-of-the-triad" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.apogeesoftware.com/products/ ... -the-triad</a>
I'm just gonna go ahead and leave this here... http://www.autoomobile.com/news/red-dead-redemption-2-pre-order/10020096/
Irrational Games' Ken Levine talking about Bioshock Infinite and the future of gaming in general (lots of Bioshock Spoilers)
Man, if there's one thing I don't want to read, it's Ken Levine's take on the future of gaming. This is the same guy who made a game where you help a civil rights group, then betray them for a bunch of racists because hey, both sides are equally bad, right? Talk about games as art.