On Shortness: Max Payne for $2.50

Ahh shortness. You've probably noticed I use long sentences. People say it's because it makes me look smart. Others think it's because I just got so much to say in so little time. I think I do so because long sentences make the alpha male. Being alpha male all the time is tiring. I let someone else be alpha male for while so I can do whatever it is beta males do.

For this blog post, I will use short sentences for this one. See how it goes. Mebbe is easier to read. Remember, this blog is as much an attempt to convey awesomness of video games to you as it is a scratchpad for my own writing technique! Anyway...

Yesterday I bought Max Payne for $2.50. It was part of the Rockstar Week on Steam. I heard many great things about this game before, but never tried it till now (Whoops, a comma... double Whoops, a sentence in parentheses!). Game is fun. Bullet time is fun. Narrative is interesting thanks to interesting use of in-game scenes as well as comics. Levels feel way too linear and short though. If structure of levels were released today, might be comparable to how some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 co-op levels feel like.

Rockstar is going with a 3 hour sales frenzy on Steam, where they dictate a game in their list, chop the price by 75% or so and give the user but 3 hours to scramble to purchase the game. I was reading through the GTA series forums and found a post of someone complaining that they weren't able to buy GTA IV because they were still at school. Given the rating of the game, I think Rockstar did a good job there. Business is business though.

Anyway, I got to get to class. Will have next Distant Worlds part up soon!

On Darthcaboose's (that's me) Steam Library

Ola everyone (no I'm not Hispanic). Here's the Library of games I got on my Steam library. Note that the vast majority of the titles were purchased during many of the ridiculously cheap Steam weekend deals; so while there are quite a few titles, most of them didn't cost me more than $5. In all, I'd value all the games here at under $300; with an average of $0.25 in cost/hour (and that number's always going down, until I buy a new expensive title).

Wow, this looks tiny; but it's two subsections of my Steam Library split into two different images placed side-by-side. I'm lazy and usually end up using WYSIWYG programs when I want to do silly stuff like place images of my Steam library online.

In my favorites, you can barely see a few of Valve's best recent titles on there, in particular Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 1 + 2, as well as a few non-Valve titles that I've come to love, including the excellent Torchlight from Runic Entertainment as well as Global Agenda from Georgia-based Hi-Rez Studios (of course, being the poor and destitute college student I am, I am not paying the subscription for that game).

At the bottom on the right-side image you can see I bought the ~$5 X-COM pack that was recently on sale on Steam. Gotta say, never had played the series but am glad I did. I'm a big fan of middle-to-high-end complexity strategy games that don't pamper you with a tutorial, forcing you to try stuff out, fail miserably, search online for a wiki and adapt from there. Of course, all those steps are fun, fun, fun; the point of optimizing electronic play!

With the exception of Guild Wars (never really got into it), I'm not a huge MMO fan. Too much of a time sink, and the inability to stop the game at your own convenience (park your character/toon/spaceship into the nearest inn/city/spaceport before you can log off, as well as the whole raiding and grouping issue) is not conducive to my own busy schedule. I was a big WoW junkie during the first two years of college and, well, I'm sure you can guess WHY I ended up quitting. I've found other MMOs to be interesting, though, particularly Eve Online by Iceland's CCP (doing quite well despite the active volcano there) which can be described as a futuristic spaceship MMO with a fantastic Spreadsheet-esque economy. My only issue is the cost; I'm paying $14.95 a month to PLAY a game which takes a lot of time to play and doesn't earn me money in the end... Meh...

So, now you have my list, and no, I ain't gonna tells ya my Steam ID.

Well, introduction aside, where do we go from here? I dunno... if anyone's reading this, post a comment below if you'd like me to write about a favorite game of yours. I'm thinking about writing a bit about a little-known game that recently came out called Distant Worlds. What is Distant Worlds, you ask? Well, you'll just have to wait & find out later!