I see how it is Shogun 2

I buy Shogun 2 on Steam for cheap and while I didn't expect an easy time of it I also did not expect the computer to play smart or at least smarter than it did when I last played a Total War game.  I get to the large island, take out a small clan and then everything turns to hell.  Civilians rise up and revolt and then the largest clans decide to attack me too.  Hmph.. 

Time to start anew.

The Coal Addict Confessional

A nice write-up here about someone determined to get some nice stuff on Steam.  The only thing I did to go out of my way for some coal was reload DEFCON and nuke Santa.  I don't consider that a bad thing either as DEFCON's a great game.  Santa was over Russia too and those dirty Commies don't deserve presents anyway.

Check the comments in that article for what one scumbag did though to get more coal. 

Addendum to Game of the Year

Worst game of the year?  How could I forget. Let's congratulate our winner, and still champion after 10 years.. Black & White!!

How does a game from 10 years ago get to be this year's worst game of the year?  By simply sucking across all moments in time at a quantum state of sucking.  Someday the Large Hadron Collider will have definitive proof of the Higgs-Boson and then at some later point there would maybe be a negatively correlated particle; an anti-Higgs I suppose, don't yell at me I'm not a physicist.  When they see that anti-god particle, they will see this game, a little hand slapping a cow in the udders.   

Games of the Year

Well, end of the year which means sites are putting out lists to fill up space.  Cracked of course calls that every day but no matter. 

As I actually pay for the games I play and don't get them free I think my opinion carries more weight to it since I spent my own cash on this.  These are the games that I played this year and what I thought of them. Best game first.

1. Portal 2 - I grabbed this on the Steam sale just last week for a meager $7. I might as well have stolen it from them given how good this game is compared to everything else this year.  No wow fancy graphics, no massive explosions, or even ridiculous guns. Just you, your portal gun, puzzles, and a maniacal computer system.  A wonderful transition from modern puzzles to retro puzzles and then back to modern puzzles all wrapped in an often dark humor makes for a fantastic single player experience.

The fact that the co-op mode in the game also provides even more hours of entertainment made this game leap right to the top of the 2011 list. 

2. Team Fortress 2 - Hey I said these were the games I played not necessarily ones that came out this year.  The fact that I was still playing this game, nearly three years after it came out, speaks volumes for the entertainment and replay value of this game. The gameplay mechanics, the team and weapon balance, the... aww hell who are we kidding anymore. It's all about some badass hats and painting those hats girly colors.  With this going free to play earlier this year, a new crop of cheap ass gamers got into the action as well.  TF2 remains the best team based shooter out there and it's free.

3. Batman: Arkham City - *PUNCH PUNCH BLOCK COUNTER PUNCH PUNCH*  Hell yeah it's good to be the Batman, even Batman knows that.

I never went through and finished up all the Riddler puzzles because I didn't get that bored with my real life but I'll rectify that some day.  Anyway, Arkham City kept all the fun and excitement of the first game while ramping it up to a larger venue and more bad guys.  Some people might have been put off by just how many bad guys you faced in a short amount of time but I really enjoyed the variety from his rogue gallery, even the short appearance of the Mad Hatter. 

Swooping across the cityscape, punching bad guys, and trying to perfect my combo moves makes this a sequel which is on par with the first iteration.  A wonderful send off for Mark Hamill who I understand won't be voicing the Joker anymore.  

3. Mass Effect 2 - I absolutely hated the first Mass Effect but as I pre-ordered BF3 the price point was right (meaning $0).  But Bioware culled a lot of the awful bits from ME1 and just focused on making more interesting characters -- or at least let me kill the ones from ME1 that I loathed -- a simplified inventory control, and kept the combat system streamlined and effective. This game was leaps and bounds better than ME1 and I eagerly await ME3.

4. Battlefield 3 -- I'm having such a love hate relationship with this game anymore.  I love it because it's Battlefield so some former military friends are all into this and we love working on teamwork and dropping Javelin missiles on vehicles and helos because seriously screw the helos.   But, when they aren't online the game becomes almost completely sterile as the lack of an effective team or squad VoIP makes an effective teamwork even in your own squad difficult.  At those moments the game mechanic resembles an MMO with you going online to hunt sewer rats for XP or whatever to grind out points for weapon unlocks. Kudos to them though for fixing the chat window by making it less intrusive.

5. Civilization 5 -- An excellent way to burn a few hours in an evening with a friend.  The gameplay becomes repetitive after a while and there was quite a bit of a learning curve involved. The biggest issue for us was that until I upgraded my PC the time between turns could be measured in minutes as the computer AI made its moves.  Nothing that an i5 core and 8 gigs of RAM couldn't fix though.  We had a lot of fun with this but after a few months we set it aside.

6. Starcraft 2 -- RTSes just aren't my bag but hey it was Starcraft 2 so why not.  I really only played the single player and I definitely don't have aspirations to join some league and compete against Koreans. But the single player was just fine and continued the SC1 story well. At least from what I remember of it. 

7. Serious Same: Double-D --  Guns Guns Guns!!!  A short and sweet game for about $8.  Only this low because it's such a short game.   Tack on another 10 levels and you got a challenger for top spot.

But yeah, that's a cue to inline some Robocop because why not!  Don't ask me about the video quality, I just pulled it from YouTube.

8. BRINK -- Biggest letdown of the year.  Poor character design, unnecessary customization options, a confusing GUI implementation, and a terrible character switching mechanic which required you to leave a server to switch body types.   This was a disappointing entry by SplashDamage but I hope they learn from what didn't work in this game and rebound with their next title.

Games not fully played or played at all so no judgment yet

RAGE  -- Steam Sale for $15. Seems like a good price point.

Shogun 2 -- Steam sale for $10.  Another good price point.

Saints Row: The Third - Not playing this yet has made me sad.

Serious Sam 3 - Not playing this yet has made me physically ill and probably less of a man.

Steam holiday sales

So Steam has gone bonkers with the sales this week offering more than half off even titles that have only been out a few months. $15 for RAGE? Sure I'll do that.  

All these sales and installing of new games presented a technical question which I fail to see why it hasn't addressed by Valve yet.  I don't see a way to tell Steam where to install the games so I can't have games load on multiple hard drives. In my case I install all of my games on a SSD drive.  I know, I know I should put the operating system on the SSD and everything else on standard drives but I'm doing it backwards because the SSD has already been warrantied replaced once when I had the OS on the SSD and I don't want to reinstall Windows again.  

I know Origin allows you to pick where you want to install stuff so I don't see why Valve can't get with it and offer this as well.  So this all resulted in uninstalling Team Fortress 2 from my PC, a game which had nestled in quite comfortably on my machines for several years now. 

Anyway, Portal 2 for $5, Shogun 2 for $10, and RAGE for $15 are some pretty great deals.  Of them so far I'm having the most fun with Portal 2 because the co-op play with a friend is a great break from BF3 murder simulation.  I actually stopped playing RAGE because I think Santa will be bringing me a new monitor for Christmas and it's just a damn good looking game and I want to soak all the detail in which is a bit difficult to do on a 19" LCD. I'm uncertain why people were complaining about the paper thin ridiculous plot. This is id we're talking about here after all.  

Diablo 3 Beta

Received a nice little surprise in the email the other day about getting into the Diablo 3 beta so here goes.

Fought through the beta. It lets you get to the first major dungeon boss "Skeleton King".

One big change I've noticed -- or at least I think it's a big change -- is that you can not use all of your spells/arts on the skill tree.  Instead you have to go to an altar in town or often at dungeon entrances and choose which spells you want to equip to use.  As you progress in leveling you get the opportunity to have more spells enabled.  You're also given the change to choose passive attributes that will always be active (more health, better resistance, etc) at certain levels.  So unlike the skill tree of D2 where you chose a path and were stuck with it, you're given spells which you then select to use. I didn't see a way to buff up the skills to, for example, make more attack dogs work for me or things like that.

The demo lets you get up to level 13. I made it to level 11 I think but I'm uncertain what creatures or areas I might have missed because I thought I explored everything.  I'm in no mood to grind and see what opens up for me at level 13 either. 

No bugs or performance issues from what I could see so it seems pretty polished.  As in D2 I'd prefer to be able to zoom out further but not really a huge issue since visibility was pretty low as I never found torches or anything to illuminate the area.

New definition of vacation boredom

Going back through Batman: Arkham City and trying to get all of the Riddler trophies. There's over 400 of them.