Demo Driver 8: Alien Breed 2: Assault (#249)
Stupid waist-high guardrails!
Do you know how many games there are on Steam? A lot. And there are a lot of demos out there, too, so many that you could use them to blot out the sun. Assuming the sun could be blotted out by game demos stored purely on hard drive space. That metaphor got a bit tortured, but I checked; at the time of this writing, there are 407 demos on Steam. So I’m grabbing one at random and playing through the demo, no matter what.
This week, I rolled 249, which set me up with Alien Breed 2: Assault. The title does not exactly inspire visions of breathtaking originality, but a stupid title doesn’t make for a bad game. So after Steam’s usual ridiculously complicated initial setup process, it was time to jump in and see about shooting the heck out of some aliens. No, I hadn’t really looked at the description on the store page, but be fair; with a title like that, there was only one game this was ever going to be.
Telling Stories: Getting back to roleplaying
Don’t call it a comeback; I’ve been here for years.
Yes, we had a blip last week, but I’ve been writing about roleplaying for the past four years, and I’m not about to stop now. So I’m picking up where I left off with Storyboard, still doing my best to give people a place to read about roleplaying, a weekly place for suggestions, ideas, and guides, and every so often a link hither and yon that leads to an archive trawl which will include readers telling me that I am a monster for doing this. Won’t that be fun?
I really hope you think so.
Now, while I could pick up exactly where I left off (and was initially tempted to do just that), the first installment really does deserve a little more grandeur than that. So let’s talk about getting back into roleplaying when you’ve been out for a long time. Maybe it’s been a while in your game of choice, maybe it’s been a long while period, maybe you roleplayed around a kitchen table years ago but now you’re jumping into roleplaying in an MMO for the first time. Whatever your situation, let’s talk a little bit about getting back in when you’ve been out of the game. Read More…
An Open Letter to Electronic Arts
Maybe the ad campaign could employ a variant of the Citadel discount speech from the second game. “I’m Commander Shepard, and I purchase all of the games starring myself via the official Electronic Arts distribution service.”
Hey, guys! So I hear tell you want to kill Steam.
Well, okay, that’s overly harsh; you just want a sweet piece of that digital distribution pie. And who can blame you? There’s a lot of money going through Steam, and if I were a big company I’d be looking for a way to pick up a few extra bucks down that road. You’ve made a good opening move by cutting ties with Steam and putting both Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3 exclusively on Origin. It’s really a good start toward getting a foot in the digital distribution market, and considering how much I like having some healthy competition here, I’m all in favor of it.
Tolerance Levels
I would really have liked to include a screenshot of the upcoming DAII DLC, but we don’t know what that looks like yet, so have a mage in a Guy Fawkes mask.
In the beginning, the designers didn’t know what they had. Well, okay, they knew what they had: a game that you played with a computer. They just weren’t sure what to do with it.
Pong wasn’t really the first video game, nor was it the first one to answer the question of “how do we make money off of this?” It was just the first one to do so in a successful fashion. You fed the game a coin, you got to play. When one of the two sides reached a predetermined score, the match was over, and if you wanted to play again you had to feed the machine another quarter.
Get Over It
There are no doubt many images that I could use to memorialize Star Wars Galaxies with more dignity. That’s kind of why I picked this one instead.
First of all, I want to state for the record that I am unexpectedly sad about the fact that Star Wars Galaxies is closing down. In every respect, I can understand why the players of the game would be sad and unhappy with this turn of events. I have nothing but sympathy for the feelings of those affected by this shutdown, because really, there’s no way to frame this as anything less than sucking.
That having been said? It’s done.
Sony has told you guys that you are not going to win this. There’s no question, there’s no last-ditch rally to save the beach from Evil Mr. Shutdownington or whatever. Sony stepped up and said “guys, the petition thing, it’s sweet, but it is also totally pointless.” And yet the desperate requests to spread the word continue, as if somehow if you just got enough signatures it would somehow alter the space-time continuum and the companies would change their minds.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 