There are many times that The Giant Bombcast or other video game podcasts have led me to discover games I wouldn’t have otherwise considered: Peggle, Saint’s Row the Third, Assassin’s Creed, and The Witcher. But there was one time they did me wrong: XCOM: Enemy Unknown. They made it sound like it was just an exercise in frustration in which you died at every turn and it since it was made by Firaxis, I thought it was just going to look like Civ. Nothing wrong with that, but I already had Civ. But Dan got an extra copy at some point and gifted me this one. It’s been a blast and I’ve loved playing it even as it has started to kick my butt as the difficulty ramps up. If I had more time, I’d be playing this game A LOT.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
Assassin’s Creed was the first game series Vinnie of Giant Bomb convinced me to try by talking about it endlessly on the Bombcast. The Witcher is the second. (This is why I miss his voice on that podcast so much) It has turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would. It’s based on the Bioware engine of the time, so it plays a lot like Mass Effect 1. The story is good so far and full of nice little jokes. You can watch my progress (I’ve been recording it for Extra Life) on this Youtube playlist.
Civilization: Beyond Earth (7 hrs): This game was a great evolution on Civ V. I enjoyed that they continued with the same sense of humor. I also thought they did a good job evolving things so that it felt different enough. It’ll probably take a few games before I get the hang of all the government options.
Super Mario Galaxy (1 hr): Just wanted to get past the opening section on my emulator so I could not have to repeat that silly story section again if I even want to play some SMG. Also wanted to test the USB sensor Dan got me for Christmas.
This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.
Civilization 5 (5 hours): Still haven’t caught up on the blog posts. Still entirely consists of games with Dan and Dave. Dan gifted me the latest expansion pack during the Winter Steam Sale, so I may fire up a solo game. Time will tell - I still have a ton of indie games from Humble Bundles and even games Dan gave me for my birthday last year like LA Noire.
[caption id=“attachment_7503” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Back to the Future: The Video Game - The Pseudonym Fun of the series continues[/caption]
Back to the Future: The Video Games (5 hrs) - As is the usual situation with these types of games, I figured out I had to get to the 1920s about 2 hours before I had triggered the right series of events that would allow me to get there. Got to see the sense of humor of the writers as I ended up meeting the high school principle’s sister who’s just as crotchety as he is. Apparently Doc is in trouble for starting a fire. Other than that I don’t know much as I wasn’t able to play very much of the game beyond the first 1920s scene with the principle’s sister.
[caption id=“attachment_5805” align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Saint’s Row The Third: The Ho Boat[/caption]
Saint’s Row the Third (14 hrs): I got a lot of video games for my birthday and Christmas (mostly on Steam). So I wanted to finish up the last narrative game I had started before playing those games. I played a few missions in Saint’s Row The Third. As I had surmised before, the loose narrative based mostly on archetypes and stereotypes made it extremely easy to jump in. It wasn’t like in Mass Effect or Final Fantasy 10 where I couldn’t remember why I should be caring about these characters. The missions with the VTOL planes (STAG missions) were pretty hard.
Civ V (11 Hrs) - talk of the expansion pack made me want to play some more Civ. I played a scenario and then I played a regular game. I had a blast and I can’t wait to buy the expansion pack.
Peggle Deluxe (5 hrs) - Worked on some of the challenge puzzles
Team Fortress 2 - (3 hrs) - played when the Pyro pack came out. Really enjoyed the new mode.
Civilization V (75 hrs) - What can I say about this game that I haven’tsaidalready? This is the series that made “One More More Turn…” famous and it still works today. If I were to start a game tonight, I would not go to bed at a reasonable time.
To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest - a new one for me. I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory. It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started to become comfortable with domination victories. I ended up with a score of 2679, a score I have yet to best. The way the ending is now structured makes it easy to miss the old charts and graphs they’d always make you click through. So on that first game I missed out on finding out what historical leader I compared with. And, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access that. Other thoughts from this first game include that the construction pace feels a bit slower (like less buildings units built in a game) and Dan concurred once he played his own games. Great people now make their buildings outisde the city. This makes using them to make their special building more of a strategic process than in Civ IV. Great artists make monuments and those could end up obliterating a farm or some other tile modification. A final fun bit of art imitating life: in this game the Americans had taken over middle east.
?At first I ridiculed achievements/trophies. The idea that grown men and women (and, heck anyone over 12 years old) would care about getting these achievements enough to continue playing through their games until they earned them all seemed ludicrous. Then, I acknowledged it was a fun way to compete with friends in games that are otherwise single player experiences. In time I came to understand the idea behind achievements, both for compulsive people and regular folks. From my non-scientific observations, it appears that people who play video games tend to be more likely to be compulsive people. The video game companies figured this out and then realized that if they created trophies for all kinds of situations in a game, that most people would keep playing until they got all of them. Perhaps this would keep them from trading in a game long enough that it would kill the market for used games.
[caption id=“attachment_3621” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civ 5 tells me I need to set some city production”] [/caption]
Interestingly, the game appears not to pop up and tell you to choose city production, you have to notice that in the bottom right, same for science and so on…..At least it doesn’t let you skip a turn before you worry about that. So I actually like it better. It was far too easy to say you’d deal with something later and then forget. And all the messages queue up there for you to read. I used ALWAYS lose track of those in civ 4. Especially since they used to appear when I was busy on something else and disappear before I could act on them. And here’s what it looks like when you decide to what to build.
[caption id=“attachment_3606” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civilization 5 choosing the game to play”] [/caption]
The opening movie is AWESOME. Most of the visuals were from the trailers, but the frame story was great. Best intro thus far. I decided not to play the tutorial first since it appeared to be for those new to the Civ franchise. I chose Wu Zetian of China since I’ve been playing the Chinese almost my entire time with Civ IV. She has the “Art of War” which makes Great Generals spawn more often. Also the Cho-Ku-Nu unit (like Civ 4) and Paper Maker. I did a small continents map. And I made myself Settler, marked “for learning the game” so I figure it’ll be tutorial enough. And a standard game pace. I REALLY like the new menu system. It’s very well done. Sounds like Leonard Nimoy is still the narrator. I love how it describes my ruler and China in history. Pretty awesome. I let the wonderful narration read out before I “begin my journey”. I take a while to look for the screenshots and it comes up with hints. Pretty awesome. The Chinese music is great. Here are some screenshots. Another post later. Right now I want to play and the game gets annoying (freezes cpu) if I alt-tab out of it to get the screenshots.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Everything but the RAM”] [/caption]
14 Sept
Sometime in my junior or senior year of college I came across a book about building my own computer and resolved to do it. My tribulations with my Dell computer were enough to convince me that building computers with generic parts was the way to go. Later experience with my Emachine and the inability to tack on a DVD-writer (because they had blocked the slot with a metal mesh) confirmed this was the case. Just under five years ago I was finally able to do this and built my [first computer](/2006/01/03/new-computer-built/ /2006/01/07/building-the-computer/). I can’t believe it took me four hours to put that first one together. Nowadays, if things go well, it takes about an hour. In the time since then I’ve built 8 other computers. Of course, those weren’t all for me. I also built Dan and Dave’s newest computers, my father-in-law’s computer, his sister’s computer, and a bunch of others.
Back to the Future: The Video Game - The Pseudonym Fun of the series continues[/caption]
Saint’s Row The Third: The Ho Boat[/caption]
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