Taking after my co-blogger Pike, I thought I would take a look back on my year in gaming!
January
I started the year in the middle of a huge Civilization IV kick, and it was by far the most played game of that month I am sure. I sampled a multitude of mods for it, such as Caveman 2 Cosmos and Fall From Heaven 2.
February
Feb was still plenty of Civ IV, but there was a great deal of Dwarf Fortress mixed in there as well. At the end of the month I also fired up my good old WoW account, a little before Pike did likewise.
March
There was plenty of WoW this month, at least for a couple of weeks. Once that was done I believe I started a huge SimCity 4 kick that lasted for a couple of months.
April
In April the new fan version of Hearts of Iron 2, known as Darkest Hour was released. I pretty much immediately fell even more in love with HoI thanks to this and played little else.
Sadly I did not play any Pony Alert 2
June and July
I didn’t spend terribly much time on any particular game during the height of summer, I was more concerned with not melting! A wide variety of things were dabbled with here. I think there was some Minecraft.
August
In August I sat down to replay an old favorite on the PS1, Breath of Fire III. It really is a wonderful, charming game with all kinds of hidden depths, and it was time well spent.
September
September was when I played the majority of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which surprised me as much as anybody else by not only being good, but by being a worth successor to the original DX!
October
In October I started on a long-lasting space 4X kick, which includes Galactic Civilizations 2, Master of Orion 2, Space Empires IV, and Star Ruler.
November
November was when both Skyrim and Saints Row: The Third landed, and I spent a huge amount of time with both!
December
I’ve spent most of this month with the Kaiserriech mod for Darkest Hour, and I’ve just now started up Dwarf Fortress again.
And so we come to the close of 2011. It’s been an exciting year filled with things like, well, this blog starting up, for one. I’ve also played quite a lot of games, of course. Here’s a look back at some of the things that have struck my fancy this year:
http://dkarim.com/new.php JANUARY: http://offsecnewbie.com/wp-includes/rest-api/ Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was what I was playing at the beginning of the year. I’d never actually played a Phoenix Wright game before and I borrowed this one from my sisters, who are big fans. I regret to say that I didn’t finish the game because I got sidetracked by other things, but the first three-quarters or so were an enjoyable, if somewhat benign, romp. The whole gameplay premise was new and interesting and the fun characters kept you interested during parts that may have otherwise lagged. I did have to give the game back to my sisters after a while but I hope to finish it some day!
Dashie gets things done.
FEBRUARY:
February is when I started playing Civilization IV, which I had somehow never played before. Shameful, I know. Regardless, life would never be the same.
MARCH:
March was the month that Mister Adequate and I started this blog! I was also still playing a lot of Civ IV. I think this was also the month where Mister Adequate and I, both old World of Warcraft vets who had since quit, resubbed for a month to give it another whirl. There were a couple weeks of fun as we ran around as Tauren paladins, but those couple of weeks only lasted, well, a couple of weeks and then it was back to Civ.
APRIL:
I played a lot of games on-and-off throughout April, including Hearts of Iron 2 and X-Com: UFO Defense. There was, I think, still a lot of Civ going on.
MAY:
May was when I finally got around to playing SimCity 4. Considering that I grew up with SimCity, it’s pretty terrible that I didn’t actually get around to the fourth installment until now, but there you go.
JUNE:
Ah, June. The month that I finally sat down for a proper playthrough of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and was immediately smitten. I don’t know if a game had ever captivated me quite the same way that SMAC did that month, and I feel safe telling you six months later that there will always be a special place for this game in my heart.
JULY:
This was the month that I finally let myself be consumed first by Minecraft and then by Terraria. I’d resisted for so long and finally could resist no longer, and I spent most of this month derping around with a mining pick. I haven’t played either game in a long while, but I won’t lie: they were nice to spend long, lazy summer nights with.
Yours truly, having been caught in the act of playing Minecraft for hours on end.
AUGUST:
In August I headed back to Civ IV, because I just can’t quit it. Many, many multiplayer shenanigans happened involving Mister Adequate and I, partially because we both love Civ and partially because we can’t seem to get any other games to work with multiplayer.
SEPTEMBER:
September was a busy month that involved me moving back to my home state and getting a new job. Still, there was enough time for a lot of old favorites, as well as enough time for Mister Adequate and I to discover that Sid Meier’s SimGolf is a thing.
OCTOBER:
In October I played all of Final Fantasy. The one with no numbers after it. It was definitely neat to look back at an older JRPG like that and see just how much the genre has changed (or stayed the same.) Mister Adequate and I also gave WoW another spin, which lasted all of about two weeks. Ah well!
NOVEMBER:
This was the month that I jumped right into Final Fantasy 2 and also fell in with a lot of other great games, such as Space Empires IV and The Binding of Isaac. Somehow, though, between all of this, I still managed to win NaNoWriMo. Oh, I published a book, too. Guess that’s worth a mention!
DECEMBER:
December has been a month of two things: Paradox games (Darkest Hour and Europa Universalis 3, specifically), and Skyrim. The Paradox games come as no shock to anyone, I’m sure, especially because I’ve played them before, but Skyrim really took me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite as engrossing as it is. Great way to round out the year, though!
My response to the end of the video-game-playing-year. Also, this post is apparently Rainbow Dash Edition, which I'm okay with!
We might not see some of you again until after the holidays, so if that’s the case, do have a Merry Christmas or a Happy-Whatever-You-Celebrate!
For some people this weekend will entail good food, good friends, and good times spent with family, but for others this weekend means something much more important: video games, of course! If you fall into that category, what do you plan on playing this weekend?
Myself, well– I’ve still been on a Paradox kick and I’m playing all sorts of EU3 and the Kaiserreich mod for Darkest Hour, but unfortunately my computer is giving me fits and making it difficult to continue with this course of action, so I’m thinking I’ll settle down with some console games. I’ve got a lot of Skyrim to play, and I’ve also fallen woefully behind on my quest to play all the Final Fantasies, so I’ve really got to catch back up with that. Especially because I’ve already got a new quest planned, and that is to play every single game I have on Steam. Seeing as I have about 160 of them and I keep adding more (Curse you Gaben and your sales!), that’s going to be even more exciting than playing the dozen or so FF games that I’ve got.
My face, should I win Steam's newest giveaway and suddenly own every single game on Steam.
I’m not a huge fan of most racing games, though of course there are exceptions like Wipeout, Rollcage, and Burnout. However the apex of the genre is without question Gran Turismo, which might not necessarily be to my taste in genre terms, but which has one incredibly strong appeal that really does tempt me.
You can customize everything. This game offers the kind of spergy detailed control and tweaking that really should make Strategy gamers think twice about our claims to be spergy over details. The same sort of thing appears in the NASCAR games which my dad used to play; you can customize the shock absorbance of each individual shock… thingy… look I’m not a car guy, that’s not the point.
The point is why don’t we have this sort of thing in other genres? I’m 100% behind racing game fans having a game like GT, it’s only good. I just want to know where the game that lets you design a train with that level of detail is, or an airplane. And then we get to the things I really want to see personally, which starts Gran Turismo crossed with Wipeout. Can you even fathom that level of detailed control and tweaking over your nifty little Auricom F-3600 AG racer?
Of course if you recall my recent post on different ship design methods in 4X games, you can probably see where this is going. Yep. I want a game where you can tweak the voltage that runs through the coils of your gauss cannon. I want a game where you can change the total range of movement of your ion thruster nacelles and get different effects. I want a game so incredibly complex that it makes Aurora look small-time.
I also want a game where you can do this with mechs. Armored Core is nice, but I don’t just want a bunch of different components, I want to modify each and every component individually. When will the world realize how desperately it needs to fulfill my unbelievably specific requirements?
So Mister Adequate– being not just my co-blogger here at The Android’s Closet, but also my better half– bought me a couple of gifts recently. The idea was that one was my Christmas present and one was my birthday present (my birthday is in a few days.) He also graciously let me open them early!
Well. One of the presents was an Xbox 360 and the other was Skyrim.
Yeah. Best Birthday/Christmas gift EVER.
Anyways! Ever since then I’ve been dumping hours into Skyrim like there’s no tomorrow and it has really exceeded all of my expectations. It’s been a long time since I really got into a new video game in this way. Heck, it’s been a long time since I really got into a console game in this way. I keep finding myself wanting to return to this magical world and experience more of it. Even my beloved strategy games keep getting pushed aside so I can wander around Whiterun.
Fus ro derp?
Anyways, if you’re still sitting on the fence regarding whether or not to get this game for whatever reason, I urge you to look into it. I’ve just scratched the surface and I think this really is deserving of the title of Game of the Year. There’s just so much to do and the game accommodates all sorts of different playstyles, and it’s all beautifully put together.
Besides, I’m a giant fluffy tabby cat with a sword. I cannot stress enough how awesome this is.
I’ve had a tremendously poor Internet quality these last couple of weeks and it just kept getting worse – it took me several minutes to check my email for example – but fortunately it is fixed now so we can get back to our regular scheduling! Many thanks also to Rilgon for his excellent post yesterday, giving us a little look into a genre that Pike and myself don’t pay quite enough attention to (Largely because the genre will never equal what Treasure made in my eyes).
I have recently finished a World Conquest in the KR mod for Darkest Hour, playing as an enlightened, democratic Japan. That flung dozens of nukes around and killed tens if not hundreds of millions in her global conquest. Enlightened!
And now Pike and myself have settled down for a wonderful evening of Civilization IV, where we face the famous Confucian Egyptians, among others!
Tell us, dear readers, both what you will be playing this weekend and of your favorite alternate history situations in videogames, either as settings or ones you have yourself created!
Hi, I’m Rilgon, and I’m lucky enough to have Pike and Mister Adequate let me grace the Android’s Closet! Today, I’m here to talk to you about Jamestown and why you should be buying it and playing it – ideally as part of the Humble Indie Bundle #4. I consider myself somewhat of a shmup person. I’m not the greatest, by any means – I’ve never 1CC’d Ikaruga, never even come close to beating any of Treasure’s greatest on their hardest difficulties, and playing Touhou on Lunatic’s still a pipedream. I enjoy them dearly, however, and when a good one comes along, it’s hard to not take notice! I initially bought the Humble Indie Bundle #4 for Cave Story+, but Jamestown has stolen my heart – or, at least, the adrenaline-filled shmup-loving part of it!
For a game to be good enough to grace the annals of the Android’s Closet, it’s got to be best-in-breed. This is the blog that sings the praises of X-COM and SMAC on high (worthy recipients, mind you), so anything reviewed has gotta be up to snuff – and Jamestown fits the bill. Right off the bat, the steampunk styling and quirky story will grab anyone to whom a good steampunk slant attracts. The premise is simple – it is the year 1619, and you have escaped execution at the hands of the British king. You have made your escape to what some call The New World and other call Mars on a quest to clear your name. From here… well, that would be spoiling, wouldn’t it?
Steampunk pony? Steampunk pony.
Novices to the shmup genre are more than welcome. Jamestown has a staggering five difficulty levels – Normal, Difficult, Legendary, Divine, and Judgment. Normal will be approchable by anyone who’s been gaming as long as readers of the Closet no doubt have, especially after Jamestown’s fantastic tutorial that teaches you the basics of the minimalist hitbox that defines so many bullet hell shmups, the interaction between your weapons, and the Vaunt scoring/comboing system. Those of us to whom shmups are our bread and butter, though, will be treated to some seriously intense stuff. I saw a bullet arrangement that’s right out of Touhou 8, Imperishable Night on the second stage as early as Difficult level, and I’m still struggling to finish the final stage on Legendary. Divine and Judgment are… still to come, let’s say.
Shmups are visceral things, though – you’ve got to have catchy visuals and catchy music, or the whole thing just feels bland and unfulfilling. Jamestown brings this to play with bravado. Final Form Games, the makers of Jamestown, have something great here. The soundtrack is amazing (and comes with your Humble Indie Bundle 4, hint hint!), and definitely gives both context and conflict to the game, especially its bosses. One of the bosses you face is a steam-powered battle train, and the boss theme for it is sublime. You really FEEL like you’re racing this train down a railway, dodging its littany of fire and returning attack with your own.
Oh, and if you happen to be lucky enough to have friends over, Jamestown supports 1-4 players, using keyboard, mouse, and Xbox 360 controller schemes. It will also apparently recognize multiple mice independently. And if you’re a Mac or Linux gamer (*nods to Pike*), you’re also in luck, because as of the release of the Humble Indie Bundle, Jamestown works in Mac and Linux as well! I can’t speak to how easy it is to install, given I have nothing to do with OSX and all of my Linux installs are textual, but I’m sure Pike could cook something up on the Linux front as a follow-up post, should it be needed.
Today’s post was written by Rilgon, who you can also find on Twitter and on Tumblr!
This thought was about very young kids who played games. Have you watched a young child play a game? To many of them, it’s not about meeting a set objective– rather, it’s about making your own objectives, learning, and exploring.
One of the very first games I played was Dig-Dug. To this day, I still have a soft spot for it. Dig-Dug, in case you haven’t played it, is a game about digging your way to monsters and blowing them up. Did I play it that way, way back when I was clutching the joystick with pudgy, much-too-small hands? I’m sure I did. But I also recall trying to clear all the dirt from the screen for no other reason than, well, wanting to clear all the dirt from the screen. It didn’t accomplish any in-game objectives, it was just something that Baby Me found fun. I was moving the character around because of the sheer joy of moving my character around.
Good times, the 80s.
I can think of other examples, too. We had a game called Fidgets, for example, which was some sort of proto-typing game. All of the letters were represented by a crude image of a singing bird and you had to type the correct letter to shut the bird up. If you typed the wrong letter, that letter’s bird got all scrunched up to indicate that you were incorrect. I thought the scrunched up bird was hilarious and and whiled away many, many long minutes carefully scrunching up all the birds, while driving my parents crazy with the one correct bird that continued to sing one note.
Back then, you see, I made up my own game objectives.
Kids today still do this when they play modern games. If you haven’t seen Child vs. Skyrim, you probably should:
This girl is gleefully exploring, making up her own objectives, going through with them, and then, well… learning that perhaps her objectives aren’t the best way to go about things.
There is a certain nostalgia for this simplicity and I think that’s where the much-bandied about idea of “nostalgia goggles” comes from. People pine for Vanilla WoW because they were exploring and learning about a new world before they “grew up” and got their big adult raiding job. Perhaps people pine for the games of their childhood for similar reasons.
So as you may or may not know, GoG.com has decided that they’re not going to stand for this ‘Steam getting all the money’ shit, and have thus launched their own huge sale. Front and center of this is something that really stretches the definition of the word “sale”, because it is costs no pounds and no pennies, which means in foreign monopoly money they presumably have to GIVE you money when you download it.
Empire Earth was a pretty great game. It was essentially Age of Empires, only on a Civilization timescale, from prehistory to a cybernetic future with mechs and stuff. For free? You have NO excuse not to give it a shot, it’s a wonderful game that is probably even better these days thanks to the fact that modern computers should be able to handle obscene numbers of units and stuff.
At ten bucks, EEII is probably worth it for fans of the genre. Not as good as the first, but still a pretty solid and enjoyable game.
III is right out.
I’m leery of sounding too much like an advertiser for a website or anything, but it’s really difficult not to enthuse about GoG.com when they’re in the middle of a sale that means you can buy The Witcher for four ninety nine USD. Is there anything you’re hoping to snap up over the next few weeks to while away the long lazy Christmas evenings, all wrapped up in a blanket and stuff?
(Ed. note: Obligatory pony picture. It's Christmas related, and also Mister Adequate related, because he's a Brit so we Yanks can make fun of him. -Pike)
I don’t really have a lot to report today– a particularly interesting round of Europa Universalis 3 has been eating up most of my free time– so I’m here to make one of the posts that our dear Mister Adequate usually makes around these parts and ask: what will you be playing this weekend?
As for myself, well– the Paradox bug has bit me nice and deep and I keep having to scratch the resulting itch, so I’m guessing there will continue to be a lot of EU3 and possibly some Darkest Hour as well. I’m also still slowly but surely working on Final Fantasy 2– although I keep getting sidelined from it by delicious strategy games– and there are a couple of indie games I’ve been having fun messing with, as well (The Binding of Isaac and Aquaria, in this case.)
Speaking of indie games, I’d also like to bring your attention to a new indie-bundle-type site that has popped up, called The Indie Gala. I’ve refrained from buying the package there yet– although I’m a sucker for cheap games so that may change quickly once my latest paycheck is direct deposited– but I figured I’d get the word out!
