Thank Goodness

It's finally over.

Few things excite and scare me as much as the Summer and Winter Steam Sales. It was a relief to power up my laptop this morning and see that the old gray format was back. I made a solemn oath to my wife Aubrey that I might go a little crazy during the sale but that I wouldn't buy any more games until Christmas (WoW Pandas excepted). Also, I would plan a fancy date. She thought this was a pretty good deal.

To preface, some of these are premium purchases for free to play or other games that try to nickle and dime you. I figured if I was going to try them out, I might as well do it while I can get some cheap bonuses.

So, I present to you the list of games that I got this past week:

Portal 2 - $11.50 for two copies plus a copy of the original Portal. Gotta do that co-op!

Binding of Isaac: Wrath of the Lamb expansion - $0.75. I've already talked about how I like BoI. Expansion for less thank a buck? Yes, please!

Dragon Age 2 - $6. Six dollars. Seriously. I've been dancing around getting this game for a really long time but was kind of waiting around for the right deal. DONE. Also, this was through Impulse since EA pulled it from Steam. That's right, EA, I still bought this from a third party.

Stacking - $3.75. This is a game about Russian nesting dolls that was featured in Game Developer Magazine before it game out. Never really wanted to drop $15 for something I'd never heard of outside a magazine...and I didn't have to!

Trine 2 - $3.75. I've written about Trine as well. This is one of the games I had my eye on specifically for this sale. Looks even better than the first and still a lot of fun. Haven't had a chance to try out the co-op yet.

Dungeon Defenders - $3.75. I've seen a lot of hype for this game so I figured I ought to pick it up while it was cheap. I might should have done for the complete set. But whatever. Let me know if you want to play!

Age of Empires Online - $3.50 for bonus swags. I played a ton of the first AoE back in the day. Seems like a cool direction of an RTS.

Tribes: Ascend - $10. I missed the flash sale where this was only $5, but it was still totally worth it. This is a fun shooter. I shouldn't have waited so long to try it out.

Lord of the Rings Online - $25 for two promotional deals, one of Steam and one on Impulse. Okay, sue me this doesn't sound very cheap. A friend of mine is really into this game and while it is free to play, they really, really try to get money out of you in game. Anyway, he assured me these were good deals when I asked, so I figured what the heck? An MMO for $25 and no subscription isn't bad at all.

Fallout New Vegas w/ all the DLC - $10. I haven't played any of the games in this series, so this seemed like it was a great place to start.

Torchlight - $3.75. Lots of people were talking about this one while they were waiting for Diablo 3 to come out. Now that I've already been kind of tired of D3 for a while now, I thought I might try out a different take.

Bioshock & Bioshock 2 - $10. I probably could have skipped this one, but it's one of those games that I never really got around to that people talk about a lot. I'm so glad I got it though! I got a little way into the first Bioshock and it's creepy and awesome! Worth it.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell "Elite Echelon Edition" (What a name!) - $12.50. This consists of four Splinter Cell games: the original, Chaos Theory, Double Agent, and Conviction. I was pretty into the first two when they came out, so this seemed like a great way to get back into the series. Plus I'm pretty sure Aubrey will like them because you spend so much time sneaking up on and ganking people.

Last, but not least, Plants Vs. Zombies - $2.50. We got this for my Mother-in-Law. She freaking loves it. 

So there you have it, 19 games and one expansion for $106.75. Yeesh, that's more than I thought I had spent. Still, they were awesome deals and that really should last me for quite some time. The worst part is I had just decided to stick with one race in Starcraft 2 and get out of Silver league. So much for that. I've got a date to plan.

What you get?

P.S. Impulse is still doing a big sale on RPGs including Mass Effect 3 until the beginning of August. Might want to check that out.

P.P.S. The normal cost for all those games would be $346.

Delays

Hey all. Sorry to keep you in anticipation. I've been experimenting a bit with screen capturing and streaming and whatnot to change things up a bit. It's going okay, but slowly. Jamestown is more or less scrapped for now as I needed to do another take but I didn't actually enjoy the game the first time so I had no desire to do it over again.

However, I'm trying to get things set up so I can record myself playing with commentary (and hopefully do it for free). I just got some old Might & Magic games on gog.com that I'm pretty excited to play for the blog, so I shouldn't be much longer. Feel free to post in the comments if you have any ideas/experience in this kind of thing.

HBA - Jamestown: Delayed

The gameplay video of Jamestown is complete! However, it's going to require a second take which I probably won't be able to do until Monday, as today is my wife's birthday and we have plans for tonight. I'd do it now, but I'm currently at work.

In the mean time, check out this video of people playing cabbage basketball in Skyrim. If you don't want to watch it, at least skip the 3-minute mark and watch from there.


A big thanks to my friend Evan for bringing it to my attention!

Something new!

It turns out that screen captures take up a ton of space (over 1gb for just under 10 minutes) and it takes a long time to upload 1 gig onto YouTube. How have I learned this? Because I've just finished recording the very first video of myself playing a game and talking directly to you, the reader! Everyone knows of course that the only person that reads this blog is my wife, Aubrey, and she sounded pretty impressed with the idea, so I went ahead and did it.

The video itself and an accompanying post will appear a little later today. Be ready to be shocked and amazed at the wonderful feats of my incredible game play. And be ready to not be very impressed on a technical level. Turns out it takes more than one try to get up to professional level production quality, even when using free software! A second monitor wouldn't hurt either, but I'm not sure they make laptops like that. And who wants to pay for a docking station with two monitors? (Ooooh...that sounds nice.) However, I think it was a pretty good first shot and I'm excited to move onto a new phase of the blog where the readers get to see the game I'm covering in action, complete with commentary.

LawLS. Or LoL. Or League of Legends.

As the big mess about DOTA 2 and Blizzard Dota goes on, my only memories of playing the original DOTA in Warcraft 3 was playing a few times against bots and being told that if I played online people would be super rude and probably kick me out of the game. That wasn't very encouraging. So while I wait for the new versions to come out, I decided to check out League of Legends. It's free, so there's nothing to lose.

If you're unfamiliar with the gameplay, it's a hero-based RTS wherein your team of heroes (or champions) tries to kill the opposing team's buildings while they try to do the same to you. If you understood the jargon there, it's really not any more complicated than that. The "free"-ness only extends so far, however, as they obviously want to get some money out of you. But you can play almost comfortably with just the free currency you earn by playing and winning matches. Otherwise, you can buy points to get more playable characters, runes, etc.

Anyway, I'm having a pretty good time with it. There's some good tutorials in place and you can play against bots (for points) to practice up and try out new champions before going against real people. I've heard some horror stories about the community, but so far I've not had any problems at all (except for people with "Penis" in their nickname. What's up with that?). There's also a refer a friend program too, so if you want to try it out you should click on the link on my sidebar to join up! My nickname is MikeyH, friend me!

So yeah, I'm still not sure if I'll be picking sides with the whole Blizzard Dota/DOTA2 debate. Blizzard Dota will be free, so that's awesome, but it'll probably have less support and added features later on as well. DOTA 2 will be out sooner with more support and will probably be taken much more seriously in the esports community overall, but I hate how they stole a lot their character models right from Warcraft 3. That's kind of cheap. Either way, I'm sure they'll both be lots of fun. Here are some videos for them too:

I may have already posted this trailer here, but I love it so.

I wasn't able to find a trailer that had real gameplay in it, so here's a short gameplay clip of DOTA 2.