All posts by Pike

This Weekend: Dancing CMC Edition

My new job likes to give me at least one (and sometimes two!) weekend days off so now I get to participate in these posts.  I know what I’ll be doing this weekend: Loads and loads of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.  Yes, the one from way back when.  I bought it on Steam sale and now I just can’t stop playing it.  I love how all these years later it’s still a great game.

Once I finish it I think it’s on to more RPGs, like Morrowind and New Vegas.  I’ve been on this random RPG kick lately, which I’m okay with.

What will you be playing this weekend?

The Damage Thus Far

So lemme put it this way: I smashed through my entire “Steam Sale” budget by Day Five.  Obviously this hasn’t stopped me from buying anything further, but let’s just say that I’ve spent a rather lot of money so far.

It has occurred to me that I need to buy a Spongebob Wallet.

Of all the stuff I’ve gotten so far, here are some of the ones I’ve been enjoying the most:

The Legend of Grimrock: Fun dungeon crawling oldschool RPG that eschews silly things like maps in favor of you bumbling around lost and attacking giant snails.  All of the charm of old dungeon-crawls from back in the day.

Train Simulator 2012: No, I’m not kidding.  This game is great.  Especially if you’re a sim game grognard who gets excited by the thought of playing a travel game in real-time, so if it takes an hour to go from Point A to Point B in real life, you’d better believe it will take you an hour to do so in game.  With “Simple Controls” activated, this game is in the vein of classics such as Desert Bus, except you can pause and do things like start and stop.  This is more endearing than it sounds and this game easily devoured three hours of my time right after buying it.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: A game which I haven’t touched since it launched almost a decade ago and I played it on the Xbox.  I’d really forgotten how much fun this game is and what was originally going to be an “I’ll dink around for an hour and feel some nostalgia feels” game has turned into several hours of a legitimate playthrough.  Let’s just hope Carth stops wanting to talk about his feelings at some point.  (He won’t.)

Orcs Must Die!: I’ve actually yet to play this one (the curse of buying so many games at one time), but my dear associate Mister Adequate swears up and down that this game is amazing and fun.  Considering his raucous laughter over Skype whenever he plays it, I’ll take his word for it.

What sorts of gems have you picked up with the sale?

Endless Space Redux

Mister Adequate has talked before about a little game called Endless Space, but we’re going to talk about it again because it’s just that good and because it was also just officially released!

Like any true 4X, Endless Space takes a little bit of time to get used to.  You’ll need to give yourself an hour or so to get used to the UI and how things work, and then you’ll probably need another several practice games after that to figure out how to not languish in last place in the score chart (hint: just focus on money, industry, and expansion.)  But if you’re willing to work at it and get past all of that, then you’ll soon find yourself faced with a very solid and polished space 4X in the vein of Master of Orion and Space Empires.  The races are wonderfully inventive, the tech tree is a delight to navigate, and on the lowest graphics settings it will run on most computers.  It’s very easy to find yourself sucked into the “One More Turn” mentality with this game, a true sign of a good turn-based strategy.

I Google Image Searched “space ponies” and found this.

Overall this is a game that is well-worth playing for a variety of people: longtime 4X fans will find themselves right at home, and people new to the genre will find this a challenging but rewarding gateway to the genre.  It may not be Master of Orion 2, but it might be the best homage to it thus far.

Happy 40th Anniversary, Atari!

When I first saw the above phrase on the Internet this morning I was rather taken aback.  Surely Atari isn’t that old!  Quickly I rushed to Wikipedia, though, where they confirmed it: “Atari was incorporated in the state of California on June 27, 1972.”

Now Atari didn’t invent the video game, nor did they invent the arcade video game or the home console system.  They did, however, popularize these things and prove that video games were a profitable and interesting thing to go into.  Pong was the first game to really take arcades by storm, and while the Magnavox Odyssey might have been the first console, it was the Atari 2600 that wound up in the home of so many kids in the early 80s.  It was certainly in mine.

Thanks to Nolan Bushnell and Atari, games went on to become first a cultural phenomenon and then the art form that they are today.  So stop and take a moment to reflect on the last forty years, and enjoy a slice of the cake:

*pokes microphone*

So we really fell off of the bus with updates here, haven’t we?  Sorry about that.  We got, um… distracted by our visit.  On the plus side we both have all sorts of new blog ideas now, and we shall return you to your regularly scheduled blogging in very short order.

In the meantime, have this article about a guy who played the same save file of Civilization II for ten years: Fate of the World: The Decade Long game of Civ II

Soooo… how have you guys been?

Guys!

As you know we are unofficial GoG.com mouthpieces because they sell loads of great games, but this is a particularly special one.

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. $2.99 USD. You know what you do.

Pike keeps this picture handy.

Earth Defense Force

As Pike and Mister Adequate are together “in real life”, to use a term, we shall be co-writing today’s blog post!  Obviously one of the first things we decided to do upon meeting up was to play some vidya, and we opted for a game that Mister Adequate brought along, called Earth Defense Force 2017, for Xbox 360.  It was the first time I’ve played it, but Mister Adequate has played it quite a lot, so we will start with him giving us some background on the game and his experiences with it.

where to buy Lurasidone Mister Adequate

I first heard of Earth Defense Force in an old issue of Edge magazine, which was reviewing the second one in the series – 2017 being the third – and though it was Japan-only at the time I was instantly taken in by the review which glowed with positivity. Some years later I saw EDF 2017 on Amazon and after confirming it was indeed the same series, I quickly purchased it and found it was even better than Edge had felt its predecessor to be.

EDF 2017 is a B-game. It is low-budget in every respect, from graphics to voice acting, and there is no reason for it to be considered anything other than a second-rate effort from a studio who had neither the budget nor the expertise needed to meet their ambitions.

Except, of course, that it is a sublime piece of brilliance that is incredibly difficult to put down. Despite (perhaps because of?) the low-budget nature of the game it is gaming in a classic form. There is little outside of the main point, which is shooting gigantic aliens with stupidly powerful guns, and what is there is so hilariously bad that it endears rather than repels. The core gameplay however is just immense fun, and the desire to collect all possible weapons drives you to keep playing and playing, as any good system of rewarding players does. In years of enjoying this game I’ve never grown bored with it – it is for all intents and purposes the progeny of classics shooters like Galaga and Space Invaders, and gaming is better for it.

Now I shall turn you over to Mrs. Pike Adequate for her opinions on the game, which she has only first played a couple of days ago!

where can i buy Pregabalin online Pike

The beauty of EDF 2017 is that it puts entertainment first and… well, I’d say it puts everything else second, but it really doesn’t because everything else just doesn’t exist in the game.  Powerups appear as flat sprites, the in-game physics are ridiculous, vehicle controls are about as terrible as you can get, and yet the game never ceases to be fun.

There is no story here because the game doesn’t need one.  Giant bugs are attacking.  So are giant robots.  And giant cyborg dinosaurs.   You have guns and your job is to go shoot them so they can drop more guns.  That’s it.  You do this for 56 levels or so and it’s beautiful.  This is gaming in its very purest form; a shooter without a big fancy budget or any semblance of realistic guns.  It doesn’t attempt to be anything other than what it is, and what it is is unabashedly fun.  Especially in multiplayer.

In other words if you’re looking for a simple, fun, and gloriously mindless multiplayer game, look no further than this one.  It is worth far more than the couple of bucks it will probably cost for you to pick it up.

Okay guys!

Pike here!  Mister Adequate has made it all the way over here to the colonies and we’re busy gathering up some games to play.  We went to GameStop the other day and picked up several classics for cheap, including TimeSplitters and Shadow of the Colossus, and then we went to another GameStop and… were promptly turned away because apparently we don’t look like we’re over seventeen and Mister Adequate didn’t have his passport with him.

Our face was similar to this.

I mean, maybe it’s good that we look young, but anyways.  We’ll go back today with proper ID and scoop those games up.  In the mean time we played some Metal Slug and Crazy Taxi and an arcade.  Anyways, we do apologize for the lull in blogging, but we’ve been… well… preoccupied.  Ahem.

Two Important Things!

Okay guys!  We’ve got two important things this morning.

Firstly, Syndicate is on GoG for $3 USD.

Secondly, thanks to some happy surprise events that caught both of us off guard, Mister Adequate is going to be coming to the USA for a few weeks early next month!  This means that Pike and Mister Adequate are going to be together for a little while.  Hotseat Civ, Hotseat SMAC, and hotseat… um, other stuff are already in the plans, but what else should we do?  Give us ideas for all your best multiplayer games for PC or Xbox 360.  Heck, if we can get a hold of more GameCube/PS2 controllers, give us all of your best multiplayer games for those, as well.

Discord's body is ready.

And now comes the hard part; the impatient waiting for the next twelve days to pass.  Oh, and also talking myself into cleaning and tidying up instead of playing Victoria 2.  Perhaps I can do both at once…