Saturday!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlxisN-FSwI&w=420&h=315]
When Steam does that sale thing where they offer a classic game for 90% off and it was one that you never played back in its heyday and you figure… why not? It got rave reviews 10 years ago and two bucks is two bucks.
So you buy it and you download it and you start it up and it immediately crashes. You check the forums and you see, oh, it was never optimized for Windows 7. You try a handful of the suggested fixes and, of course, none of them work.
And you realize that, seriously, you should have checked the forums before you flushed two bucks down the toilet. But, hey, it was only two bucks.
And then you forget about it.
Well, Titan Quest was that game for me. It recently (like, yesterday) got a big update and it works now! Holy cow! It’s a diablo clone which basically means you wander around a map and click on things until they fall down. There’s a random number generator involved and, sometimes, the things drop weapons, armor, or treasure when they fall down. Sometimes these things are better than the things you’re currently using and that makes it easier to hit more things and make them fall down.
There’s a theme about how these things are happening in the time of Greek/Roman mythology and so the things you’re clicking on are mythological creatures such as Satyrs and Medusae and the like.
And it’s always awesome when you can say something like “Hey! As it turns out, I was *NOT* ripped off after all!”
Because two bucks is two bucks.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission.)
Far Cry 4 was that game for me. I sprung for the full expansion packs too. Probably 60+ USD. D/L the game, hours later I find out I need a QUAD core cpu. Welp, little old pc is only dual core, so not for me. Two years later, or more, I finally spring for a new machine. Should have read the info more, but now, I’m good.
Now if I could only get my old printer to work on windows 10. ARRRRRGReport
After inadvertently launching a massive “franchises: reboot or new property” thread, I felt morally obliged to purchase SUPERHOT, which was just released.
For those who haven’t been introduced, let me explain – no, there is no time, let me sum up. It’s a FPS with no story and no (well, extremely stylized) graphics – what it has is an aesthetic and a mechanic.
The mechanic is that, when you’re not moving, nothing is moving (or moving only trivially). So, basically, fights go like Neo and Trinity in the lobby on the way to rescue Morpheus. You can literally dodge bullets, and in the time your pistol takes to chamber the next round, you can read the body language of your next target.
The aesthetic is a retro cyberpunk – similar to Max Headroom, only with DOS rather than manual typewriters.
Since there’s no story to speak of – no narrative, just an arc of progress, the main campaign takes about two hours of game time (how much real time it takes depends on how many times you fail and restart). Full price (or a 10% discount, which is what it is on now) is about 20 bucks, which makes it about the same as a first-run movie unless you really love it and go on into “endless” mode a la Diablo 3.
I’ve only played a little less than an hour, but I’m taken with it so far. IMO, the mechanic works as advertised. It’s a FPS with no twitching whatsoever – just the opposite, in fact – you might even get too much time to think about your next move (but then, that’s part of the aesthetic).Report