Laco

There's a bundle of four PS3/Vita Cross-Buy games for $14.99/£11.99/€14.99 (less for PS+ subscribers) available on both US and EU PSN. The games are Lone Survivor, Thomas Was Alone, Proteus, and Stealth Inc: A Clone in the Dark. Anyone who's had PS+ for the last few months already has at least one of these, but it's still a pretty damn good deal for some sweet indie games. The discount hasn't kicked in yet on the EU store, but as soon as it does I'll be buying this just on the off chance I get a Vita anytime soon.

They do! "Daily Grind" is a one-shot high score attempt on a date-seeded level. (Though according to the brief video I saw you're allowed to practice the level before your scoring run, which seems to defeat the purpose a little.)

OlliOlli looks great. It's pretty silly, but I'm tempted to buy a Vita mostly to play that (and the PS+ collection I'm gradually amassing). Apparently it was originally going to be an iOS game, so I'm glad they decided to go with a device with physical controls.

Indie Gala is probably my least favourite bundle site just due to their busy and ugly site design. That said, they do have some pretty good bundles sometimes. The current deal is $5.20 for a handful of potentially-interesting Steam indie games, but, more importantly, they just added Deadly Premonition. Consider buying it for that game alone; $5 is 80% off normal price, and 50% off even the recent holiday sale! Also, the latest Humble Weekly, featuring Bohemia Interactive, is great. I usually like to just mess around in their games, which makes it hard to justify paying full price. Here there's 8 games for $6. Sadly the expansion to Take On Helicopters, Take On Helicopters: Hinds, is not included.

I beat two games in one day! First up, Evoland. Mostly it reminded me of DLC Quest, another game I finished recently. It's another parody/satire that criticises but doesn't end up doing anything interesting or different in terms of player interaction from the games it's criticising. The story is played a lot straighter than DLC Quest, mostly just ripping off Zelda and Final Fantasy wholesale, so it's disappointing that they bothered working so hard to make a mechanically and visually competent game only to abandon any hope of it being meaningful or even funny. Is it just lack of ideas? The one part I found kinda fun was switching between the 2D and 3D modes ("time travelling") to get around certain puzzley forest areas, which is also the only time the whole supposed evolution-of-video-games theme felt used in an interesting way. Expanding on those thoughts, I'm not all that comfortable thinking about the amount of time I've wasted spent on these two games, yet I've finished them while any number of brilliant games sit in my library unplayed. I'm sure this says something about my commitment avoidance or attention span or something, like it's easier to engage if you know a game is basically throwaway and only likely to take a few hours. I even spent an extra hour or so unlocking all the achievements I hadn't quite reached, so now it's 100% complete and I never have to think about it again. Also, this game made me realise just how much I detest random encounters. This might be a bit of an unfair example because here encounters are never any challenge at all, and there's no skill or party systems and thus no interesting decisions to make during battles. But still, they just strike me as an inexcusably inefficient way to design a game, in terms of interestingness per unit of player time. I could even see potential for them to be used to some effect, the way Monopoly isn't necessarily very fun to play but makes an effective statement with its systems, but nobody seems to do that; encounters never seem either fun or meaningful. I'm not all that familiar with the genre, so I'd love to hear of counterexamples! The other game I beat was Mighty Switch Force 2. God damn, the music in these games is unstoppably catchy. I have a few Jake Kaufman soundtracks in my workday background listening rotation, but hearing them in context is just the best. All the sound is amazing; I especially love the yell of "YOU'RE SAFE" as you kick babies to safety. I don't have much to say about these games, other than that they're great and I would buy as many as WayForward could make. I've never played any of their other games, though I backed the recent Shantae Kickstarter. I guess I'll start playing the original Shantae (eShop version), so I'm ready when Risky's Revenge comes out on Steam.

If you're talking about the current snow globe badge, there's no upper limit. The highest I can find is this guy, who has a level 1000 badge. http://steamcommunity.com/id/palmdesert/gamecards/267420/ Crafting that required 10000 cards, for a total cost of probably $2000+

I would complain about the way the sale effectively ends a day early, but really, the next summer sale is probably going to arrive before I get around to playing any of the cheapies I would potentially have bought today. I started building up a big backlog when the Steam sales started in earnest back in about 2010, and every sale it gets bigger and I'm reminded of all these games I bought years ago and have never played. Ah well, even with a giant Steam library (1200+ games, and growing faster than ever) I spend far less each year than I would if I bought a dozen full priced console games. For being able to have every game installed at once and play anything instantly whenever I want, that's a pretty good deal. This sale, I picked up: Anachronox Deathtrap Dungeon Bit.Trip Runner 2 Bit.Trip Fate Toy Soldiers The Stanley Parable Urban Chaos Startopia Pool Nation Guacamelee! Sacraboar Ace Patrol You Don't Know Jack Pack 7 Grand Steps Lilly Looking Through Nihilumbra TrackMania² Pack Sacrifice Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 Final Fantasy VII How to Survive Endless Space + Disharmony Cook, Serve, Delicious! MirrorMoon EP Castlestorm Doom 3: BFG Edition Deadpool Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Long Live the Queen Wizardy 6, 7, 8 Sang-Froid: Tale of Werewolves Magic Duels of the Planeswalkers 2014 BioShock Infinite Season Pass Interstellar Marines Valdis Story: Abyssal City Delver ... wow, okay, that's a pretty big list. All up it probably cost me about $150, which for half a dozen games I'm really keen to play, and a big pile of others I'll get around to someday, is just SUCH an unbelievably better deal than buying one and a half copies of whatever big budget console release. Steam sales really do spoil us terribly.

There's a pretty enormous number of things in this sale. It's a real shame that the storefront is so slow and awkward compared with, say, Steam. The percentage discounts aren't even displayed anywhere; some things are amazingly good value while others are nothing special. My picks from this sale (games I was interested in, that I didn't already own via PS+, that are never going to be released on PC, and actually had a decent discount) are: The Last of Us - 60% off - AU$35.96 Burnout Crash - 60% off - AU$5.78 Ni no Kuni - 67% off - AU$11.86

After using Miiverse on my 3DS exactly once, to post a screenshot from SM3DL, I have to agree. It literally took two or three minutes just to load up Miiverse, post the screenshot, and get back to the game. I understand it's probably tough to fit the client into whatever tiny amount of RAM is reserved for the OS while a game is running, but in its current state I'm just never going to use it again. By the way, for anyone in PAL regions who's interested in the Guild games, everything bar Aero Porter is 37.5% off until the new year. I just picked up Liberation Maiden for AU$6.50, and I'm vaguely considering Bugs vs. Tanks too. (I already have all the others).

Oh cool, it's out! I'm not all that fussed about Miiverse generally, but at least it's a step towards someday having the potential for a sensible unified account system. I'm also looking forward to being able to take and upload screenshots from any game. Also, from the patch notes: Sweet. I never, ever use the camera, but I'm forever hitting one of those buttons accidentally.

What a weird seed today. The structure of the early levels felt really different to normal, lots of disconnected rooms. I think this is the first daily I've played in the morning immediately after the rollover, which is at 1am here, before going to sleep. I think I'll avoid that in future, I probably play worse and it means I don't have my afternoon ritual to look forward to.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at with the weirdness of the store. Every indication (apart from "Cross-platform play", hidden at the bottom of the features list for the Vita version), is that the two versions are separate, but they're not. I only bought the discounted Vita version, but now both are marked as Purchased in my library.

In PAL regions Spelunky on PS3+Vita is currently half price, or less for PS+ subscribers. I picked it up for AU$9.32. They just added the daily challenge mode to this version, so if you're remotely interested there's now no excuse. (In news that will surprise nobody, the PSN store is really fucking weird. It's a Cross-Buy game, but two separate entries show up in the store.The above blog post doesn't even mention it's on PS3, and the PS3 version in the store is full price. If I were Sony I'd be promoting the shit out of Cross-Buy ("Two games for the price of one!"), but they seem determined to hide it away.)

Enhanced Steam adds a Library page to the website When I'm shopping for games, I usually use the site because I get all the goodness of whatever browser I like, with multiple tabs, proper fullscreen, keyword search, etc. I have the Steam client running most of the time, but I mostly only use it for actually playing games and chatting with people. But then, I always prefer browsing and shopping in stores through a regular browser, even on PSN. If the 3DS had a web store, I'd use that exclusively.

By the way, anyone who's a heavy Steam user and cares remotely about saving money should install the Enhanced Steam browser extension. It does a bunch of cool stuff, most notably on each game page show you the current and historical lowest prices across all store sites that offer Steam keys. It also displays icons everywhere on the site showing what you own, what's on your wishlist, what you have coupons for, what your friends own... pretty much everything. It'll even do complicated stuff like work out how much you save in a package if you already own some of the games in it. I discovered it a few months back, and it's become hard to live without. (Though making it so easy to find good deals means my backlog has been increasing at a higher rate than ever... such is life.) I was surprised by how many devs / publishers were part of the recent sale. Usually there's a small but noticeable number of holdouts that don't lower their prices much or at all, but this time it felt like 90% of games were at least 33% off for the whole time. I guess Valve is able to just show people the money.

Ooh, yes. I'd argue that Excitetruck was the best Wii game, best here meaning the one that played most closely to the console's strengths. Everyone knows about waggle in swordfighting and flaky shooting and a whole lot of other things, which mostly seem like difficulties with absolute motion detection or one-to-one control. But the relative motion sensors in the wiimote are really precise, so tilting to steer and position your truck just right before landing was something that could only have been done on Wii. I'm still really annoyed that Nintendo never released Excitebots in PAL regions. Like, really, with all the mountains of shovelware that's getting released for your massively popular console, you just can't be bothered translating this finished game that barely has any text into a couple more languages? I eventually played it through... means... and it's my second favourite game on the system. But that was the thing that stopped me buying Nintendo games for a few years.

Me too! Yesterday was my worst ever daily, today was my best. Weird.

Oh my god, today's challenge. I've never died on 1-1 in a daily before. hammerpants, I'm so glad I didn't watch your video before doing exactly the same thing on my run. From his score I bet Nachimir did too. I'd love to see more aggregate stats from the dailies, like totals for each cause of death. Something like Trackmania's 1K project or Super Meat Boy's replays showing everyone's attempts simultaneously would be incredible.

Like, Agent Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan? Hey, he's the mayor in Portlandia! Nah, it's my real name.

Cool! I don't think I'll bother with Bootcamp; I use this machine for too much to bother rebooting just to play specific games. It's been kinda nice not having to use Windows at all, while overseas away from my main gaming PC. I, uh... I've never watched Twin Peaks.

I've played every daily challenge since starting a few weeks ago, but none of my current Steam friends owns Spelunky! So if anyone wants another challenger, add me: http://steamcommunity.com/id/lachlancooper/ I haven't been recording my runs, but I'd like to start if I can get it working. (This is complicated by playing on a Mac through Wine, which works totally fine in game, but the Retina display seems to mess with recording software).

Ooh, I'd like to play this too. I'll never not want to try a music rhythm game, and the trailer does a good job of making the split between CG and stop motion ambiguous.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure: "See how long you can last against an infinite pack of wolves or a limitless stream of bears." Call of Duty®: Ghosts: "Give your soldier a sniper rifle and he'll behave like a sniper, and an SMG guy will be more run and gun." Sniper Elite Nazi Zombie Army 2: "Revel in the return of the infamous X-ray kill cam as your bullets purify the putrid insides of the undead in slow motion." Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you... Video Games.

Yeah, there's a handful I missed that I'd still like to go back and try someday, Nuts & Bolts being one of them. Most of the exclusives I did play that I'd have been sad to miss were on XBLA, stuff like Geometry Wars 2, N+, Rez HD, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie (hmm, remakes). The only full-release exclusives I loved were Dead Rising, Crackdown, and PGR4.

Chalk up another one for fairly suddenly losing all interest in anything Xbox. I'm mostly a PC gamer, but for any console game in the last six years, given the choice I'd always get it on 360. I really loved XBLA during its golden age (Braid, Rez HD, Rare's N64 remakes, Limbo, Pac-Man C.E.). I love the controller, and even kinda ashamedly liked unlocking cheevos. I own a total of 70 games for 360 and XBLA; compare with my 13 on PS3, which are mostly exclusives. Sometime in the last two years, actually using the Xbox to play games became an enormous hassle. Just seeing what XBLA games were installed seemed to mean digging through five-pages-deep menus. Buying games on the store was so much effort that I couldn't even find Spelunky (aka best game of the last decade) at release, and made the conscious and almost painful decision to wait for it on PC. It would have been the last Xbox game I bought. It feels like every single UI update, starting with the NXE, has made the console worse and worse to actually use, while revealing more and more clearly the real, depressingly unimaginative reason Microsoft set out on this enormous multi-billion-dollar decade-long enterprise in the first place: to sell ads and subscriptions. Well, congrats guys, you did it. Now I'm a PS+ subscriber, strongly considering getting a Vita and PS4, use my 3DS all the time, and haven't touched my Xbox in over a year. I sort of regret choosing 360 over PS3 for so many games. Despite the... fallout (3), the death of GFWL feels like a huge cause for celebration, because it means nothing more will be stuck with it in the future. I don't know how the Xbone is going to fare, but to me it feels like this generation contained both the unexpected rise and unexpected fall of MS in games.