Erkki

Just finished Ctulhu Saves the World. TLDR: Enjoyable old school JRPG (I think) with a funny twist (as is probably obvious from the title). Hahahahahaha. I kept playing in hopes it would be over quick and I could go back to Skyrim or something. But it took me a whole week! 12 hours total. It was quite enjoyable, and I wouldn't play a longer JRPG nowadays -- actually the length was good. And it was funny as well. There were some things annoying though: All of the dungeons were mazes, more so towards the end. Ok, they weren't complicated mazes (usually 1-2 paths to the end and some dead ends with treasure), but it was still an annoying waste of time to move back and forth through them and check if you got everything (there are no maps). Related to this same mazeness -- in the latter dungeons I spent so much time on the first level or two combing the maze for treasures that I had all the battles. This game makes you have a certain number of random battles in each area, from 10 to 50 I think, and 250 or so in the overworld. When you've won that many fights in an area, you don't have to fight no more, but can choose to, from the menu. So I often had all of my required fights in the first level of a dungeon due to the mazeness. And I wasn't going to just start fighting more to add even more filler. That made the latter levels of dungeons be about nothing else than navigating the maze and picking up the couple of treasures.

So it turns out that some guys, one of whom might be Alan Kay (probably the inventor of half the things you are looking at right now), are reinventing the whole of* personal computing in less than 20 000 lines of source code. And they are doing that by applying science! That is truly astounding and that's why I posted it here. Because it's science, and it's astounding! * not the whole of I doubt that what they manage to do in 20 000 lines of code is close to all of the functionality that we are using our computers for (obviously it doesn't include all of the video games! ), but I still find this pretty remarkable. A TCP/IP driver in 160 lines of (probably quite readable) code? That's batshit crazy.

Actually I remembered another game I'm looking forward to in 2012: Fallen City

YEAAH!

Whoa! Confirmed!

Are you saying there'll be a spiritual sequel to Far Cry 2 implemented as a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod?

The Witness Dead State Thief: The Darkness inside the Shadows: The Fourth One These would probably be enough for me for 2012, considering my big collection of purchased but unplayed games. But there's also Metro: Last Light STALKER 2 (probably won't happen, at least in 2012) Risen 2 Overgrowth Dishonored SpyParty Hitman Absolution Monaco Kenshi GTA V (2012?) Diablo 3 BioShock Infinite Crusader Kings 2 Far Cry 3 .. and more. These were probably in order of excitingness

I just finished it. It's certainly a game! And not a bad one. I probably missed some stuff so I might replay, or try the Sandbox mode. Anyway, it is a little bit crap. Worse helicopter controls than GTA IV! It might be possible that there's a way to build better machines that I didn't learn, but generally the machines control like shit (includin the non-custom versions that you get blueprints for). Then there's the aspect that you are not given much direction and many times I was quite clueless about what to do next or what is cause and what is effect until I realized that pretty much all the time you should follow the current mission that is displayed in the bottom of the screen (but you don't need to). On one hand, it seems like poor design, but on the other hand, I love to occasionally play a game that doesn't hold your hand every step.

So, did anyone win anything from the Steam sale raffle?

Man, I thought the defense mission was impossible until I remembered the manual controls, and had to rethink the macro design after already having implemented some reactors. Even then my pipeline got clogged at one point and I had to add additional controls to turn off Plutonium production completely at the earliest point. In the end it required very exact timing of switching the manual controls, but worked quite well. That's half the game done, I think, and it's getting really difficult already.

Aargh. I'm kind of burned out on games now, after the Steam sale. I played over 20 games, even if some for a really really short time, in order to get the achievements. Yikes! I also grew my backlog. So not counting any earlier backlog (which is still rather long) only including things I got since September or so, I have these to finish: Skyrim - 100 hours played, expecting at least 50 more Witcher 2 - want to finish a second playthrough joining the other side Dead Island Batman: Arkham City Red Dead Redemption: The Zombie Expansion SpaceChem - I think I'm almost half way through, getting really complicated now Cargo - Quest for Gravity Toki Tori The Cronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena Trine 2 Divinity II L.A. Noire P.B. Winterbottom Orcs Must Die! At least some of them are something I'm not compelled to finish and I'll probably just nibble on occasionally: Dungeons of Dredmor Cthulhu Saves the World HOARD Avadon: The Black Fortress Super Meat Boy Binding of Isaac Flight Control HD Universe Sandbox EDGE Oh god... It feels like this will take a whole year to conquer. I hope 2012 won't see any new games released.

I completed 29, won't bother with the F2P ones. I was hoping there'd be a bigger discount for AssCreed Rev -- it was still 5€ more than a physical copy

It's already 2012 (have a happy one!), but I may have to add SpaceChem as my VIDEO GAMSE OF THE YEAR to take a position on the pedestal besides The Witcher 2 and Blocks that Matter. It's seriously good. I mean, really really good puzzles. But I'm actually not sure if it's for everyone. It's actually less about space and chemistry and more about programming factory robots. It might be a stretch, but I think I could probably assess someone's programming ability by looking at their solutions to some of the levels in this game. Also, I can't wait until someone comes up with a Monad reactor (but it probably wouldn't be useful because the game seems to have very strict limits on the number of reactors you can use).

Aah. I didn't realize they don't stack. In that case, they suck.

Haha. crafted a gift and got 50% off Valve.

Ah, nevermind. It just took some minutes to register. Got 33% off Valve

Crap. I did one of those other achievements that weren't in the Gift Pile page yet. (Hoard). Now it appeared there, but it doesn't register I played the game again for a bit to be safe and did burn some additional thieves, but no luck

Wait, http://steamcheeves.com/ lists some more achievements that aren't on the Great Gift Pile page in steam. Do those qualify for gifts/coal as well?

Man, the only achievement I can still do without playing those Free2Play games is Super Meat Boy. Which seems utterly and completely impossible. And I've 7 coal left so if I craft it I won't enter the raffle. Hopefully there'll be a couple more achievements I can do when the last ones are revealed. But I'm pretty happy with the gifts so far -- so far I've been able to trade for 2 games I kind of wanted to try but didn't want to buy: Hoard and Avadon.

But maybe they have some kind of plan with this, other than knowingly giving us discounts that are less than the current ones? Maybe they want to go further with this trading thing, and want people to have stuff in their inventory. Or there actually will be sales during that period, and adding your coupons will give you a further discount. Anyway, are we seeing iPhone-like app prices coming to the PC? At least for non-AA(A) stuff. I mean, I just bought 8 games for 18€. There are so many sales now that if I'm not Über-hyped for a game, I'll wait for the next sale. And the sales give me big enough collection of games to play that I don't have the need to buy yet another game the day it comes out.

Ok, Wordfeud installed! Username is t4ffer.

Do you want to trade Avadon for Sol Survivor?

I'll trade you -50% of Trials2: Second Edition + -25% Stronghold for the Oddworld coupon, if you want. I also just got Sol Survivor, not yet sure if I wanna trade it.

I finally gave in and bought some stuff from this sale. I hadn't bought many indie games in a while, and since they were all so cheap (and had holiday sales achievements)... But for getting some more achievements all I've gotten is more coal SpaceChem is rather good, though!

Looks great! Also, is it me or are the forums faster now?