Skip navigation

Tag Archives: Gaming

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?

Why People Hate DRM

All the stink that both Diablo III and Ubisoft are causing on the “always-on” DRM made me have to double back on my opinion of it. And actually, an article by Ars Technica released yesterday actually helped me change my mind from being neutral on the matter to being against it.

Yes, I used to be on the side of “When the hell aren’t you connected to the internet, so what’s the problem?” camp. Everywhere I am, I have Internet access, even to the point of I can turn my phone into a hotspot. Hell, I don’t even have to worry about caps on either landline or mobile. I have no reason to care if I’m connected to the Internet or not, because it’s so incredibly easy to do.

But, over the past couple days, I’ve noticed more and more just how problematic DRM is. It doesn’t make life easier for those who buy it, it complicates matters and punishes you for buying the game. The truth of the matter is that pirates will always find a way around DRM in games, music, and movies, and will end up with a product that, while illegal, is incredibly easy to use. Read More »

Terraria Review

So, after my lengthy semi-bash on Terraria last time, I figured I would do a proper review to give a full set of impressions. All in all, it really isn’t a bad game – I can admit that I got my money’s worth out of the game and got a lot of enjoyment out of it, but will happily concede that the game itself has huge fundamental flaws that it shares with Minecraft.  Like its other pixelated brethren, it suffers from three things: A wonky difficulty and “fun” curve, a lack of tutorial that forces you to look up information, and an excess amount of repetitive tasks.  This doesn’t necessarily make it a terrible game, as the good parts of the game make up for it to a degree, but it’s certainly something to consider if you’re looking at buying the game.

Read More »