Year in Review ~ 2013: Year of the PC

Well damn.  Only four days left in 2013, which is hard for me to imagine considering that I remember at the beginning of the year thinking about resolutions, none of which I kept.  I had planned to write 10 songs this year and paint "more" miniatures.  None of that happened.  What I did do though, was become more deeply rooted in PC gaming and I read more books (including comic books a la The Walking Dead).

2013 began with my computer in the shop after spilling a beer (again) onto the keyboard.  I gave the first two games in The Elder Scrolls series a go, two posts which seemed to be pseudo-popular with our target audience.

Looking back at what I've written, I noticed that the first half of the year I dedicated a lot of time to 3DS play while the second half of the year, there was very little in the way of 3DS games that I reviewed.  Of course not to forget the PSP, of which I only reviewed a single game the entire year.  And yet, I still like the PSP as a gaming platform, I don't use it as a portable gaming platform as I do with the 3DS.  I've noticed that I predominantly play the PSP whenever I'm home, which then presents the dilemma that since I'm at home, why don't I just play one of the many PC games that are gathering dust on my hard drive?

But really, 2013 was The Year of the PC for me.  My PC games library grew from something manageable to something that I'm surprised hasn't started reproducing on it's own.  And actually, reproduction has occurred with a couple of the games through Steam.  In one of the auto updates, Anna added an "Extended Edtion" without my knowledge.  Left 4 Dead 2 Beta became something that sparked questioning throughout the Steamverse for a week or two.  You're welcome Linux users.  Company of Heroes was released with a "New Steam Version" and since I haven't played any of those games from one of the Humble Bundles (back before they became an every day/week/month sale thing).

It was also the year that I visited both Kickstarter and Indiegogo a few times to back games that I wanted to see made.  Two Out of Three Ain't Bad, but I really would have like to have seen Shadow of the Eternals be made and Precursor Games stay around as a game development company.  I will see Beyond the Sleep and Darkwood come into fruition sometime in the coming year, so I am happy that at least two indie game companies are able to see their vision.

I will sometimes think back about what the mission statement that Dr. Potts and I had for when we created our little space here in the electronic void.  In our pre-production days, the thought of doing predominantly "retro games" was an idea that looked very tasty, and looking back throughout the year, I 've realized that that is something that I have not personally done a lot of.  I blame my lack of components that allow my SNES and N64 to be played on the schnazzy HDLEDC3POTV that sits six and-a-half feet from me.

I also found myself watching more-and-more over at LoadingReadyRun.  I guess I just have a thing for Canadians:  Nathan Fillion, John Candy, Caroline Dhavernas, Dave Foley, Ryan Reynolds, Jewel Staite, Conklederp.

So I'm now going to cut myself off before I continue to ramble on more than I already tend to do (thanks Dad).

Happy New Year everyone.  I don't want to say "Hopefully 2014 will be. . ." because I thought 2013 was a pretty damn good year as far as years go.  It wasn't the all time greatest year of the year, but that would be rather hard to beat.  Now, I don't want to make any promises, but in the coming year, look forward to more reviews that are/will be at least 6 months behind the release date of the game, or if you're lucky, it might be upwards of 20 years late.  But that how we do here.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Hanging Out With No One But Me

Foruming Exclusivity

First of all, sorry for not having this up yesterday and while I'm at it, sorry for not having something up last Friday.  Now, on with the show.

The Last of Us came out a short while ago (Well, almost a month ago) and from what I've heard about, it would be a game that I would love.  Something about a post-apocalyptic world (and the title suggests something akin to The Road) which if done correctly, will get me pretty much every time.  Once I started hearing good things about The Last of Us is when I tried looking the game up on Steam.  That's when I found out it was a PS3 exclusive.  That's also when I became annoyed.

Console exclusivity has been a thing since the beginning of video gaming so the concept/practice is anything but new.  Personally I find it to be annoying, especially if there exists a game I would like to play, like The Last of Us, but I do not own a PS3 and the two people I know who do own them probably wouldn't be too keen on having me sit in their living room for the 14-20 hours it would take to complete the game.  Which then makes me wonder how often people buy a gaming console because a particular game is not released on any other system.  I understand the draw/appeal when a console is launching, but for exclusivity this late in a console's life, I can't see as a selling point.

Admittedly however, I did buy a PSP because Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions was coming out and I bought a PS2 from Doc Torpotts after he won one from a Coke bottle cap back in 2005 because I wanted to play the upcoming Final Fantasy XII..  All the other systems I've bought (Nintend0) were because I liked the company and liked the games that were being released, exclusive or not.  And, while it's true that I do have a number of exclusive games (Eternal Darkness, The Legend of Zelda, Shadows of the Empire, Timesplitters, Bushido Blade, et cetera), I bought the games long after I owned the consoles.

Now onto message boards.  I get message boards.  I get why they exist and why there's one up for almost every company that says they care about how they interact with their fans/the public.  I've posted on a handful of message boards, each time thinking that the experience will somehow be different and I wouldn't be as much of a thread/post killer as I have been in the past.

Turns out this is still the case.

Back in June I joined the forums for the Shadow of the Eternals game that Precursor Games is in the process of developing.  I started posting pretty early on in the forums and all was going well.  Then I didn't visit for a couple of days and when I returned, it was that lost feeling I used to get when I went back to school after being sick for a couple of days.  Threads had taken off, new topics six to seven pages in had started, developed and been completed.  In other cases, I would add my thoughts to a thread and the thread would then die/not be replied to.  I'm not saying it was a bad/negative/insulting response, it just happened to be the end of the conversation.

This kind of thing has happened a number of times before, on the Reaper Miniature forums, the IMDb message boards, the Draconian forums and even the [Enforcer] forums.  And then there's Reddit. . . blarg.

Often times, I don't respond as I become very self conscious about what is being said and how my response will be over analysed.  There's a part of me that would like to be more active in forums, especially with companies that I really like and would like to promote, but often times I get distracted or forget to visit the forums and when I came back, I would feel disconnected from whatever the discussion has been about.

Maybe this is just me sounding sorry for myself, but it's been something that I've been thinking about recently, especially with the games that I've helped fund via kickstarter and Indiegogo, each having a forum/message board/discussion area.  I just don't have the time/energy/chutzpah to be as active as I want to be with all the things/people/places that I like.  As it turns out, time is a commodity.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Leave It All To Me Because I'm Feverish, Devilish and Irrelevant

Browsing The Horrors of Steam's Greenlight District

Because I feel that I haven't talked enough about horror related video games in the last post, I'm going to be bringing them up all over again, but this time in a slightly different light.

Around the end of last week I was browsing Steam's Greenlight section upon realizing that I hadn't looked at any games since the area was first launched.  I will admit that I'm a bit shallow in that if the thumbnail title and title of a game doesn't look/sound interesting I won't click it to find out more about that game.  I admit that it's not the best way of finding new and interesting games, but that's they way my brain happens to work and it's a little hard to try and rewire to look for and think differently.  I feel like this is the argument for bigotry, but that's something else entirely.

Back to video games.  Horror-esque video games.

The first game I came across was Among the Sleep.

After finding out more about the title, font and art, Among the Sleep is an POV horror game where you play as a two year old in a world that seems to move in and out of a dream world.  That alone sold me to support their project.  At the moment they are $16,329 short of their $200,000 goal and have four days remaining.  Check out the video and support if you think the game and people warrant/deserve it.

The second game was Darkwood.

Darkwood is a top down adventure horror game in a randomly generated open world.  The game is also permadeath, which could understandably be a turn off to a lot of gamers, although the creators say/hint that some of what you do will be carried over in subsequent playthroughs such as looting your corpse.  The game trailer, which is "pre-alpha" looks pretty damn good and terrifying.  The group is currently fundraising over on Indiegogo and they're 23 days out and have 23% of their goal, so a pretty decent start and plenty of time to go. 

The third game is titled The Forest and doesn't have so much of a title screen as it does a logo:

The Forest can be found on Steam's Greenlight page and is an action/adventure/simulation/horror game.  I don't feel like there are enough of simulation/horror video games out there and come to think of it, I can't remember ever seeing a game described as "simulation/horror," but I tend to be somewhat sheltered so that may be the case.  The trailer give glimpses of things that you can do in-game, such as cut down trees to build a shelter and it feels like this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the simulation part goes.  I have hopes, high or otherwise, for this game and I hope to see it "greenlit."

The one game that doesn't fall under the horror genre that I looked a bit at was a game called Realm.

Realm is a point-and-click game that looks absolutely beautiful.  In their promotional video, the creators point out several things that people do a lot of in point-and-click games, such as "CLICK ALL THE THINGS" and trying out everything in an overloaded inventory to see if it has an effect on the object.  I like their approach and I would hope that their game gets fully funded on Kickstarter, but with only eight days remaining and the project still needing £131,152, (that's $200,551 for us Yanks) the end doesn't look too good at the moment.

Lastly is the "sequel" of sorts for Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem that I brought up last Tuesday, Shadow of the Eternals, which now has an official Kickstarter campaign going.  This will bound to cause a bit of confusion as there was already an existing crowdfunding campaign going directly through the company.  The official word is to donate (if you want to and haven't already) through the Kickstarter campaign, which as been adjusted to include the amount already taken in from the first week of crowdfunding.  

That's it for me, for today.  Friday I'll have up my review for the free-to-play-download game, Papers, Please so come back for that and everything else that we'll be posting during the week.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Time Again