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Oh god dammit, i think this stream probably just finally sold me on Crusader Kings II. Or it would have if the Steam sale hadn't just ended. Gaaah.

It doesn't have to, i'm just saying that it's not just a remake.

I'd be into doing some Serious Sam co-op.

It's not just a remake, it's going to be a story-focused game with a pre-defined party of characters, there's going to be a class change mechanic and a bunch of other new systems. There's also going to be another mode in the game that really will be like an HD-version of the original game, keeping the oldschool party-building and minimal-narrative intact. It sounds like it's basically going to be two very different games in one package, it doesn't sound like they're just shitting out a lazy HD update.

Mighty Switch Force 1/2, Pushmo/Crashmo, most of the Guild games. A lot of other things too, really a lot. Enough that it's becoming difficult to easily sum it up.

I think i'm warming up to the game a bit, but i'm also definitely having more fun with Infinity than the core game. It escalates to some pretty crazy stuff quite quickly, just goes straight to dozens of enemies and massive missile swarms.

I bought this and its score attack spin-off in the Steam sale. It's... Ehh, it's alright. There's a lot of small elements about its overall sense of style that come together to make it seem like the game is desperately trying to emulate the aesthetics of the Homeworld games, so that's kind of a weird thing. As for actually playing it, it's just an extremely simple and slow moving space sim. Everything just feels like it's moving so slow in this game, even when it plainly isn't. The mecha stuff is fun, but the game puts some pretty hard limits on how much you get to use that form of your fighter. I like what it's trying to do, i wish it could offer more, but it's seeming pretty dull so far.

Final day of the sale, so what did everybody get? I ended up with - Amnesia: The Dark Descent Borderlands 2 & Season Pass FTL: Faster Than Light Left 4 Dead 2 Portal 2 Serious Sam: The Complete Pack Strike Suit Zero: Mega Bundle Surgeon Simulator 2013 System Shock 2 The Walking Dead Ys Origin and Ys: Oath in Felghana All for not much more than the price of a single retail game. That feels pretty awesome.

It is, at the very least, better than Serious Sam 2. The first few levels of BFE are brutal though, it's not good. I honestly don't hold it against anybody for giving up on the game, feeling like they gave it an honest shot. Still, it gets better, i do like it a lot. There's some really great levels in the second half of the game. (Don't expect really wacky scenarios of the sort that you'd see in Second Encounter, BFE is closest to the original game in style.)

I think you might be giving the game a bit too much credit. Even so, I definitely think the game is trying to poke at modern shooters with the way the game starts out so narrow, very gradually and quite impressively pulling back the curtains on what it actually is. The thing is, you just get into this really foggy territory with stuff like that. Emulating bad design to make a point doesn't make it enjoyable to play through, the facade goes on too long. Still, i really actually do like SS3 a whole lot. I'd maybe even put it about par with the original game, because once it finds itself, it's pretty fantastic. (Though, to just put it out there, i'd say that Second Encounter is probably the best game in the series.)

Shadowrun Returns is out in four days, and should that game show up for sale as a product that is in any way complete, not all of the big kickstarters are running into problems.

I got this in the Steam sale, i'm really liking it. Being completely honest, the game doesn't make a great first impression. It feels like it's trying to poke at how linear and narrow shooters have become, but it does so by being exactly that kind of thing, and even when it finally starts opening up, it immediately throws you back into an extended, darkly-lit corridor sequence. The game really doesn't get going until you're about three hours in, at which point it just gradually keeps ramping things up until the end, and it's a long game, so it still gets a lot of time to be the thing it's good at being. All of the little things people were freaking out about, like ironsights, executions, reloading, and sprinting, none of them really change anything.

Keiji Inafune's Bugs Vs Tanks game.

I may have it wrong, but i'd assume that any stages with random elements or layouts that would favor one side over the other are generally excluded from competitive play. Apparently Melee was actually the second most watched Stream at Evo this year, with a simultaneous viewer peak of something like 130 thousand people. (More people were watching Melee than SSF4AE!) Overall, Evo had something like 1.7 million unique viewers this year. I completely missed the live streams though, so i've been slowly going through the archives to watch the finals at least.

Attack of the Friday Monsters, the third Guild 02 game, is up on eShop. It looks cute, has anybody played it? Also, SMT4 is out, that's kind of a big deal.

Well i pretty much got everybody killed without trying for it. Are there multiple endings? What i saw was just hopelessly bleak, it was great. 3 and 5, those are god damn great episodes. I thought 4 was pretty mediocre, and it just killed me that 2 went for the most obvious possible story path.

Well, episode 5 was fairly devastating.

Wait... What? Really?

Some googling led me to some forum posts with a solution, i had to manually move a save file to a different directory. The game was saving the file recording my choices to the wrong folder or something. It's a really, really shitty game-breaking issue, because this is the kind of game i want to recommend to people who aren't normally gamers, but people who aren't normally gamers would never bother to sort out a technical issue like this. I talked to a few friends about this, and they all had similar stories about this game.

Just bought this in the Steam sale, my save isn't importing from the first episode to the second, not happy about it. If this issue is as common as it seems to be, i'm wondering how exactly the game has been getting such a free pass over it.

Started episode two of Walking Dead and it didn't import my choices correctly. In fact, every one of my friends i've talked to has had the same problem. Why was this game getting such a free pass on such major problems?

Wait, what? How long has Steam even been running? I signed up just a few days after HL2 was released, and that's still only closing in on 9 years.

I see this story so much, people coming to HL2 after-the-fact and not really getting what the deal is. It's hard to pin down why, and i'm not sure there's anything i can say that will change the experience you're having with it. (Well, maybe one thing. Stop trying to shoot the manhacks. Everybody tries to shoot the manhacks. They don't have to be tedious to fight, use the crowbar or the gravity gun.) I personally think it probably boils down to both HL games having been on the outermost bleeding edge of significant trends in FPS design, and years later seeming somewhat less impressive surrounded in the context of what they influenced. I think it can be hard to objectively look at HL2 as a product of its time when so much of it still seems so modern. That game is nearly 9 years old, but there are things about it that still surpass the standards set by modern games. (For example, i think the attention Valve gave to character animation is really, really remarkable and casts significant shame on many current titles.)

On your recommendation, i organized a Portal 2 co-op playthrough with another who had never played through its co-op campaign. You're right, it's pretty fantastic.