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2011 GYiR: Magicka

If I was actually creating awards or anything, this game would have received the “Rat in the beer bottle award for lack of quality control”.  Quite frankly, this was a game that the developers almost didn’t want you to finish since it was so bug-riddled that there was a section of the game my friends and I needed to download a developer provided save in order to actually move on from that point, and that was at least nine months after the release.

But, what the game lacked in stability, it did make up for in a very well-written and amusing storyline, as well as interesting gameplay.  The main premise of the game was that you could combine various elements together to make spells, and you did that while running around and using them to kill enemies.  Not the most complicated game in the world, but a game in which friendly fire was on and you could get back at certain people who did nothing but “accidentally” murder you was worth the price of admission.  It’s repetitive, sure, but the price point was cheap enough to make it a solid impulse buy, and I did manage to get more than that worth of entertainment out of it.

As of the last patch, they have apparently added real checkpoint saving into the game, which would probably make it a considerably happier experience if you do crash.  I had actually just finished it with a group of people shortly before that patch came out, but what can you do.

2011 Gaming Year in Review

Here’s a challenge for you: try thinking of ten really good games that came out in 2010 for PC.  Don’t worry, I’ve got time.  See how many you can think of, at least.

If you’re like me, you can’t think of many.  2010 was a bit of a weak year for gaming, with the one title that should have came out pushed back to 2011.  But, that meant a year chock full of great things for PC.  In fact, it was so good I even managed to play and beat over twenty games this year.  Twenty!  For me, that’s absolutely stellar.  In fact, in November alone I bought three AAA titles, and finished two of them within a week and a half of each respective title coming out (The third is a coop game in which I’m at the mercy of my partner, but I’ve made good progress with that game too).  And even worse, courtesy of that wonderful Steam sale that happened this month alongside with Christmas, I have thirty or so more games to play too, a lot of which are 2011 titles as well.    Point is, gaming this year has been very diverse and fun, and it’s a good excuse to get me to start writing for this site again.

So, for the next couple of weeks, I’m going to profile each of the major titles that I played and enjoyed this year.  I was tempted to do a Game of the Year thing, but really, all of the games I’ll be writing about are worthy of your money.  After all, everything I actually play and think is good must be good, right?  Right?  Right?

Unethical Game Design

Really fantastic video talking about video game addiction, and how companies are manipulating people into committing more time and money.

5 Inch Floppy: Unethical Game Design

I hadn’t heard of this series before, but I’m going to have to take a look at some of the other episodes he’s done. For more videos, check out the series here.

Reason #2 Why I Didn’t Buy BF3

From Destructoid’s review of Battlefield 3:

As well as proving an unnecessary barrier between player and game, Battlelog is simply poorly designed. Its unintuitive system makes a mystery of handling friend requests (you need to manually import your Origin friends, for example, by finding the correct web page) and obscures some very basic settings. It’s also full of useless “explanation pages” that seem to exist only to tell you how great Battlelog is and need to be manually clicked through each time they’re accidentally opened (which is easy to do, since the veritable army of links on every page can take you to all sorts of unforeseen places). Fortunately, there’s a prominant banner for the Battlefield shop on the main page, so if you don’t know how to send friend requests or set up voice chat, you can at least go buy yourself a T-shirt!  The Battlelog is a crucial, unavoidable part of the Battlefield 3 experience and it does nothing but get in the way. It’s a weird, proprietary attempt to turn a videogame into Facebook and it’s so forcefully imposed on the player that it chokes everything else. Once in a game, everything’s okay, but the overall experience is constantly hampered by this awkward, shoehorned “service” that nobody asked for.
Reason #1 is that I’m not a fan of the Battlefield series, but yikes!  I thought UIs and server browsers were intended to be as unobtrusive as possible?

When Indie Devs Go Bad

The words Minecraft, Notch, Mojang, and various other related terms seem to bring up a romantic like sense of wonder and awe in gamers.   The indie company that rose to fame on their now famous block building game is a company that to most people can do no wrong.  So, of course, when a big company like Bethseda sues them, people do generally tend to side with the little guys.  But in this case, is it a case of ignorance and assumption leading people to believe that Bethseda is in the wrong?

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