Valve is a legendary computer game company responsible for Half Life. Now they're a monolithic entity which is known for its online distribution/other platform, Steam. Every year Steam is the meta-location for sales where the prices are low enough to trick you into buying games you will play for five hours then forget. Steam includes a library that tallies up the amount of games you have, and the amount of hours you have wasted on each.
In late 2011, Steam began its ambitious Holiday Sale/Contest Event. The premise was simple but awe-inspiring: users would complete various trivial/useless tasks (known as 'achievements' in gamer parlance) in order to win various paraphernalia including games, coupons, and chances to win further prizes which were cunningly disguised as useless bits of coal. This was the first time in history that I witnessed and experienced achievements having an actual purpose, and an actual real-world benefit. This is the sort of thing that will either be forgotten in the dismal future of gaming, or will inspire a great upcoming era where interesting games are buoyed by thoughtful, interesting distribution.
The event got people to replay old games for the sake of a small chance at winning something. Each day there were a handful of new things to do, and once again the participants would be heartbroken to receive a free copy of a game they already owned, a useless piece of coal (which could be crafted into heartbreak), or a coupon which would be valid into March 2012. Now it was a generous decision to allow participants to finish achievements until the last minutes of the contest.
Well the event finished, and there is a draw which will take place on the 3rd of January, 2012. The winner takes every game available on Steam. Other prizes exist but are vague and generally related to wishlist fulfillment. I will say that it was an interesting and largely successful event, though when it started there were some hiccups with the Steam service and at times the company's servers were swamped with download requests and purchases.
Valve clearly means to be good to both the industry and its consumers, as events like the Christmas Sale 2011 show. Publishers sell a lot of units on the basis of sale pricing, and customers tend to buy things they would otherwise ignore, because the price (and season) warrant a bit of curious purchasing. Everybody enjoys themselves and content producers profit. On top of that win/win situation, Steam offered an interesting contest event which encouraged users to replay titles they may have forgotten about, in the exciting pursuit of prizes. Looking back, it was perhaps the best Steam sale thus far.
Showing posts with label Valve. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Valve. Show all posts
4/14/11
Portal Two
Well here's a new game that looks like it won't be a huge disappointment and an actual bonafide step forward for computer gaming. It doesn't matter if it's all hype, and the first game made the step forward, and this is just a polished, well-presented expansion pack building on it. We know it'll be decent. Episode Two of Half Life was worth the wait, after all. Portal 2 is going to make each and every gamer shit George Romero's pants. I was going to post an exciting YouTube comment I saw on an "Aperture Investment Opportunity #4", but YouTube Assassins have seen its worth and 'disappeared' it under more-liked comments than mean less.
The YouTube comment was noteworthy and to the tune of: "Who torrents a Valve game? They publish the only games worth playing anymore." That is not exaggeration via paraphrasing. It's true you should technically, if you are not lacking money for food or rent, pay for a Valve game. That is an unspoken rule of gaming. To break that rule is to become a troll, and risk the peculiar diseases of trolls.
But let's not lose sight of reality. We want this to happen properly, but in order to avoid heartbreak we should not get excessive. I'm going to let Valve tell you why Portal 2 is going to be worthwhile:
"Leave it to Valve to add a stock cartoon duo to a game that does not need them. And leave it to IGN to hype a game based on talking robots."
All I'll say is this: the robots, quoted out of context like this, give me a major Star Wars Prequel Trilogy vibe. Furthermore, who the hell is writing MSNBC's copy? It's funny to see Valve outplay two news sources with boilerplate, and that is why they are at the top of the establishment pile.
The YouTube comment was noteworthy and to the tune of: "Who torrents a Valve game? They publish the only games worth playing anymore." That is not exaggeration via paraphrasing. It's true you should technically, if you are not lacking money for food or rent, pay for a Valve game. That is an unspoken rule of gaming. To break that rule is to become a troll, and risk the peculiar diseases of trolls.
But let's not lose sight of reality. We want this to happen properly, but in order to avoid heartbreak we should not get excessive. I'm going to let Valve tell you why Portal 2 is going to be worthwhile:
All I'll say is this: the robots, quoted out of context like this, give me a major Star Wars Prequel Trilogy vibe. Furthermore, who the hell is writing MSNBC's copy? It's funny to see Valve outplay two news sources with boilerplate, and that is why they are at the top of the establishment pile.
2/28/11
Sorrowful Regrets from the World of Gaming
Thanks to Steam I regret buying games all the time. Years ago, when I had to travel to a store to buy a game, I occasionally had regrets as well, but I bought fewer games because stores never have sales, never have anything in stock, and Do you really want to be seen entering or leaving a computer game store? Steam solved all these problems. Of course, it also introduced new ones.
I regretted buying Left 4 Dead 2 after I learned it is not allowed to play without a microphone to scream into, and that if you try death squads will be sent to your house and your game will be sabotaged. Fortunately, in December 2010 (a much simpler time) the game was on sale, so I only spent 4.99 to shoot zombies with computer controlled idiots. I am not spending the minimum of 29.99 for a decent headset, or even 8.99 for a decent desktop microphone. I don't like to hear squeaky-voiced nerds and apathetic stoners when I play games. I don't like to get involved in defending girl-voiced game players from creeps. I just want to play a goddamn game and enjoy it for its own sake, with at most an optional social aspect. This is why I never played WoW, and also why Blizzard can suck it.
I bought Blue Shift, the Half-Life add-on, because it was cheap and I wanted to savor the nostalgia of the old Half-Life engine, which brought me so much fun when I was young. I regretted that purchase as soon as I entered a suicide elevator and had to check the internet to see how to progress further. You can search for Blue Shift + Suicide Elevator on Youtube and find out what I mean. It took 2 hours to beat, but was honestly worth the low, low price because I just wanted to hear the old sounds, see the old models, and die the old deaths while shooting the old guns.
I kind of regret buying Borderlands, but it was enjoyable enough for a while. It's just that the game has so little character or anything that I question playing it all. Will it make me bland? It doesn't help that Borderlands is also linear as hell but still makes you run around like a little cockroach – which is interesting, because it blends the worst aspects of linear and non-linear games, proving once and for all that the openness of a game does not really matter unless the game is generally superior anyway. It also has the worst, blandest, simplest, most annoying bosses since Dungeon Siege.
Then, this weekend, I had the ultimate temptation. Steam had 75% discounts on all Command and Conquer games (made since 2007 by EA, not Westwood [R.I.P]). Now the detail that they are all newer games is what made me question my urge to consume all of the games without thinking. Red Alert 3, when I researched it, had shitty animation, shiny graphics, and slick, soulless 3D nonsense. At 4.99 it might have been worth it.
But instead, I got Command and Conquer 3. Tiberium Wars. Sounds good, right? It looked marginally better than Red Alert 3, and I want to know how the series was doing in undeath (it ended sometime between 2003 and 2005). Well I've sobered up and thought about it and Fuck that stupid game. I regret it, and I regret being gullible enough to believe for a fatal minute that it would be enjoyable to play.
The cutscenes are for a dramatist to critique, and only serve to make the game more expensive to produce. The music is a steep let-down from what CnC used to offer. The interface is so hideous, bland, uninformative, finicky and featureless that I barely know how to repair or sell a structure. There are twice as many buttons as there need to be, none of them look like they do anything, and they're hard to see properly among all the action.
Oh there's the second point. The game is so busy with everything that you get the feeling it is holding your hand and pulling your leg at the same time. Even the main menu has a hundred moving parts and very small buttons to click upon. Objectives are presented in clumsy video clips, with wobbly 'recon' camera shots. Special effects take over half the screen, so you lose units all the time, and the color scheme makes it even harder to find anything. The cursors look like they were stolen from a Win95 theme pack. All of the buildings have moving parts and wheels and shit, and in a CnC RTS too much movement means that an older gamer, like me, is constantly thinking that one (wheeled) building is a tank, and that my tank is an enemy, and that I'm going blind or am visually retarded. The game is busy.
This is obviously a game from way back when gaming really started to get retarded, opulent, and unplayable. Generals was kind of distracting, unclear, overproduced and annoying in exactly the same way. What is so strange is that the gameplay really hasn't changed, but the interface and presentation make the game harder to play. The default shortcut keys are sadistic and unresponsive and unhelpful. An expensive and carefully planned attack goes to shit in seconds and all I see is smoke and little bastard missiles flying all over the place. When did every other attack have to be a missile? Why do I need to buy 6 riflemen in a group? This is not Command and Conquer, this is Generic RTS for the generation who can't chew with their mouth closed but can run three different computers at once while social networking.
This is my latest regret. I could've gotten drunk, or close to drunk, for the same money I spent on a game (and expansion!) that will continue to annoy me if I play it, and continue to bother me if I don't get entertainment out of it – and all the while I will think that I had enough games and enough regrets last week and I even knew better than to buy a game I was pretty sure would be a disappointment. So it's unfair for me to say "Fuck Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars" and I should say, "It's a game that is disappointing, annoying, and a botheration as well as of limited entertainment value. But you might like it, you cretin."
Nothing feels right when I play this game. Five or six missions later I can't even defend my base properly, and I get angry and go to my blog to complain. I was never great at RTS games but a few years ago I could play well enough to finish campaigns. I never had a problem with Red Alert 2 and it has a lot of annoying missions where all kinds of trickery and attacking and action take place and you have to deal with things. Who killed this series? When did every game get so self-involved and joyless?
I regretted buying Left 4 Dead 2 after I learned it is not allowed to play without a microphone to scream into, and that if you try death squads will be sent to your house and your game will be sabotaged. Fortunately, in December 2010 (a much simpler time) the game was on sale, so I only spent 4.99 to shoot zombies with computer controlled idiots. I am not spending the minimum of 29.99 for a decent headset, or even 8.99 for a decent desktop microphone. I don't like to hear squeaky-voiced nerds and apathetic stoners when I play games. I don't like to get involved in defending girl-voiced game players from creeps. I just want to play a goddamn game and enjoy it for its own sake, with at most an optional social aspect. This is why I never played WoW, and also why Blizzard can suck it.
I bought Blue Shift, the Half-Life add-on, because it was cheap and I wanted to savor the nostalgia of the old Half-Life engine, which brought me so much fun when I was young. I regretted that purchase as soon as I entered a suicide elevator and had to check the internet to see how to progress further. You can search for Blue Shift + Suicide Elevator on Youtube and find out what I mean. It took 2 hours to beat, but was honestly worth the low, low price because I just wanted to hear the old sounds, see the old models, and die the old deaths while shooting the old guns.
I kind of regret buying Borderlands, but it was enjoyable enough for a while. It's just that the game has so little character or anything that I question playing it all. Will it make me bland? It doesn't help that Borderlands is also linear as hell but still makes you run around like a little cockroach – which is interesting, because it blends the worst aspects of linear and non-linear games, proving once and for all that the openness of a game does not really matter unless the game is generally superior anyway. It also has the worst, blandest, simplest, most annoying bosses since Dungeon Siege.
Then, this weekend, I had the ultimate temptation. Steam had 75% discounts on all Command and Conquer games (made since 2007 by EA, not Westwood [R.I.P]). Now the detail that they are all newer games is what made me question my urge to consume all of the games without thinking. Red Alert 3, when I researched it, had shitty animation, shiny graphics, and slick, soulless 3D nonsense. At 4.99 it might have been worth it.
But instead, I got Command and Conquer 3. Tiberium Wars. Sounds good, right? It looked marginally better than Red Alert 3, and I want to know how the series was doing in undeath (it ended sometime between 2003 and 2005). Well I've sobered up and thought about it and Fuck that stupid game. I regret it, and I regret being gullible enough to believe for a fatal minute that it would be enjoyable to play.
The cutscenes are for a dramatist to critique, and only serve to make the game more expensive to produce. The music is a steep let-down from what CnC used to offer. The interface is so hideous, bland, uninformative, finicky and featureless that I barely know how to repair or sell a structure. There are twice as many buttons as there need to be, none of them look like they do anything, and they're hard to see properly among all the action.
Oh there's the second point. The game is so busy with everything that you get the feeling it is holding your hand and pulling your leg at the same time. Even the main menu has a hundred moving parts and very small buttons to click upon. Objectives are presented in clumsy video clips, with wobbly 'recon' camera shots. Special effects take over half the screen, so you lose units all the time, and the color scheme makes it even harder to find anything. The cursors look like they were stolen from a Win95 theme pack. All of the buildings have moving parts and wheels and shit, and in a CnC RTS too much movement means that an older gamer, like me, is constantly thinking that one (wheeled) building is a tank, and that my tank is an enemy, and that I'm going blind or am visually retarded. The game is busy.
This is obviously a game from way back when gaming really started to get retarded, opulent, and unplayable. Generals was kind of distracting, unclear, overproduced and annoying in exactly the same way. What is so strange is that the gameplay really hasn't changed, but the interface and presentation make the game harder to play. The default shortcut keys are sadistic and unresponsive and unhelpful. An expensive and carefully planned attack goes to shit in seconds and all I see is smoke and little bastard missiles flying all over the place. When did every other attack have to be a missile? Why do I need to buy 6 riflemen in a group? This is not Command and Conquer, this is Generic RTS for the generation who can't chew with their mouth closed but can run three different computers at once while social networking.
This is my latest regret. I could've gotten drunk, or close to drunk, for the same money I spent on a game (and expansion!) that will continue to annoy me if I play it, and continue to bother me if I don't get entertainment out of it – and all the while I will think that I had enough games and enough regrets last week and I even knew better than to buy a game I was pretty sure would be a disappointment. So it's unfair for me to say "Fuck Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars" and I should say, "It's a game that is disappointing, annoying, and a botheration as well as of limited entertainment value. But you might like it, you cretin."
Nothing feels right when I play this game. Five or six missions later I can't even defend my base properly, and I get angry and go to my blog to complain. I was never great at RTS games but a few years ago I could play well enough to finish campaigns. I never had a problem with Red Alert 2 and it has a lot of annoying missions where all kinds of trickery and attacking and action take place and you have to deal with things. Who killed this series? When did every game get so self-involved and joyless?
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