Steam Summer Sale: Don't Starve

I'm a big fan of deals and a big fan of good PC gaming. So it's not a surprise that I am particularly fond of the digital distribution platform, Steam, which is notorious for it's sales. Right now, tons of great games are on sale for anywhere from 15% to 85% off. I've managed to snag several for $2.50 so these will make great gifts in the future.

I however, will not disclose how much I've spent so far, or how many of these games are going to sit untouched. I have a tendency to stockpile games and let them gather dust. I am also told this is a common occurrence.

All hail Gaben!

But one game I have been spending a lot of time with is Don't Starve. You are a scientist, and for whatever reason, someone or something has dumped you in the middle of the wilderness to fend for yourself. Now you have to make sense of the new world you've been placed in, gather enough resources to survive each passing day, defend against wild animals, and most importantly, don't starve.

It's such a simple idea but it has a lot of depth to it. With each passing moment, it gets closer to night and you need to make sure you have enough light to dissuade monsters from taking a bite out of you. You need to constantly hunt and forage for food but not everything is edible. And being alone in the dark can really take a toll on one's sanity, resulting in hallucinations which can eventually manifest and attack you.

And they never leave you alone!

But you are a scientist afterall! Find the right materials and soon you can craft better forms of light, research farming methods, and build armor and weapons to help in your fight for survival. Cook food to make it more nutritious, build and bait traps to catch prey, and begin to tinker with magic that can freeze your enemies or even bring you back from the dead.

Speaking of death, Don't Starve is in the genre of of rogue-like. This means that if you die, your entire world is deleted and you need to start all over again. While it does ramp the difficulty curve up a bit, it makes survival that much more pressing. You need to explore to get food, but running through a dangerous swamp could be deadly. Chopping down trees for fire is necessary, but it's hard to do when besieged by a swarm of spiders.

This also gives the game a lot of replay value. You are given a completely new world to run around in each time you start over. Plus, after playing through a few times, you'll unlock new characters, each with their own quirks and traits to mess around with.

For example, Willow starts with a lighter.

For a game that's only in the beta, it runs very well, has a lot of content, and is continually adding more content with each passing week. New areas like caves are being expanded on, as well as new characters and gamemodes to try. I highly recommend taking a look at this game, especially since it's currently 40% off until July 22th.

Anyone who isn't convinced so far can watch the trailer below. If you'll excuse me, I have more games to buy.

LIMBO: This Game is Depressing

If it wasn't obvious enough that I'm a gamer (and that I would give internal organs to Valve if they asked) I'm not sure what else I need to do. However, I know a lot of you aren't like this and can't understand the appeal. That's fine, but whenever I do make comments on a game I will do my best to make the commentary more accessible to non-gamers.

Preemptive apologies to Beth because this isn't a book review.

Thanks to finals being done I can actually enjoy myself. So today we'll be talking about LIMBO, a game about a boy who wakes up in a forest and needs to go find his missing sister. It's a 2D platformer with physics puzzles, in layman's terms you run and jump around and manipulate the properties of the environment to move to the next stage. Sounds pretty standard so far.

And now why LIMBO is horrifying and how only a serial killer could smile during a playthrough.

This is not a happy game.

The entire game is set in black and white environments. Utilizing that grainy film effect and clever lighting it creates a ominous, dark and unwelcoming world. To further help this, the only sound effects in the game are faint background noises such as the sound of flies and soft crunching of questionable objects.

The puzzles generally take a bit of thinking and timing to figure out. Most of them consist of some variation of timed jumps, operating switches and machines as well as pulling and moving objects to help you advance. The game particularly enjoys having you desecrate the bodies of the dead.

Oh and did I mention? The entire world hates you. Everything, anything and everyone can and will kill you at a whim. Whether it be like falling from too high, drowning, cut into pieces by a sawblade.

Being eviscerated by massive spider.

And the boy dies in the saddest ways possible. You feel bad every time you watch his tiny body go limp or fly in all directions of the wind. Afterall, it is your fault he missed that jump or electrocuted himself. That being said, you do come back in a safe and reasonable location in respect to where you died. You're not going to have to redo every puzzle upon your death.

The story is sparse and is left almost entirely to the player to figure out. Some people think this is a problem but I personally found it added to the unnerving atmosphere of the game. You don't really have a sense of what's going on or why. Some people question if the boy and his sister are even alive.

It's a mystery!

That being said, it is a very solid puzzle game and has won many awards. I love supporting the independent developers because they don't produce bland and repetitive games. These guys are willing to take steps in new and unique ways and they should be rewarded for it. Unlike companies such as Electronic Arts.

(By the way, I will take as many opportunities as possible to bash EA because I hate them with every fiber of my being).

This is technically my first review of ANYTHING ever. Any comments or suggestions would be great whether it be about the post or potential future reviews. I'm really open to anything, as long as I can make it entertaining.

You can pick up LIMBO on Steam for $9.99 or try the demo for free. HOWEVER, Steam is currently having their 2011 Holiday sale so LIMBO is $4.99 until January 2nd.

Terraria, why do you hate us?

For those of you who are not aware Steam is celebrating the holiday season with their Daily Wishlist giveaway. Simply have a Steam account with 10 items in your wishlist and then view the daily special to be entered.

What does Terraria have to do with this? Well, to celebrate version 1.1 coming out it was Thursday's daily special at 75% off. A lot of people call it a Minecraft clone but there are enough big differences between the two games so that really isn't an issue.

Diggy diggy hole hole.

Anyways my girlfriend Theresa prefers Terraria to Minecraft because 2D games don't make her nauseous. We don't understand why Minecraft makes her motionsick, we disabled headbobbing, fiddled with mouse sensitivity, etc. etc. but still she feels ill some days.

But for whatever reason, Terraria did not want to cooperate with either of us that day.

Maybe we should have stuck with Minecraft...

There are new features out for Terraria and because I want to try them out with my girlfriend I begin setting up a server. I'm not the most techy guy around but I at least I know how to go onto Youtube and research these things. Follow step by step instructions. I may be derpy but I'm not that derpy.

But no amount of research would get my router to port forward correctly. In other words, no one was able to connect to the server I was hosting. I struggled for several hours before finally giving up. Maybe it's an issue with my router, I'm tempted to reset it and try again.

Or maybe I can just stare at it until it fixes itself.

Meanwhile, Theresa was dealing with in-game issues. The game has new challenges and hazards including new monsters and traps littered around the dungeons. Our current armor isn't up to par and it became quickly apparent. BUT, there is a new NPC that exists who can help enhance your armor. Theresa set forth on a quest to find him.

The new NPCs spawn randomly in dungeons and needs to be "rescued" by you. After that they spawn where ever you've built a home allowing you to access their services more easily.

Surprisingly, my girlfriend managed to find the guy with no trouble at all. She goes up to talk to him and then....

A bug occurred that caused the NPC to glitch and disappear.

 

I imagine her expression was something like this.  

While my girlfriend goes to find where the NPC has respawned I'm tempted to just pay a bit of cash and just rent a server for as long as Theresa wants to play. It'll be easier to manage and maybe we can get other friends to join.

And if that works, maybe I can get that Minecraft server going too.

Early Christmas Shopping

With about a month left until Christmas most people begin to start shopping (and panicking) right about now if not later. Me? I started shopping back in October. Thanks to the glory of being able to order things online I can just buy and forget, receiving a package in the mail a few weeks later.

Makes me wonder why more people don't do this.

For my girlfriend I've got things still on their way. There are rumors that Problem Sleuth Volume 3 and Homestuck Volume 1 are coming out near the end of the month so I'm hoping to order both for my sister. Anyone else read the Inheritance series? The 4th book came out so I grabbed that for my Mom and my brother wants computer parts so I'll get those whenever.

For a lot of friends it's as easy as going onto Steam during a Steam sale and buying things to gift to them later. No seriously, I just bought Portal 1 and 2 for less than $12 yesterday and I'm just waiting for other games to go on sale for other friends. I also bought a ton of Minecraft giftcodes to give away just before the game came out of Beta.

That was easy.

But there are two people I'm having trouble thinking of gifts for. My Dad and my cousin. Mom should be on this list too but I lucked out this year with the book. Dad is hard to buy for because I sadly don't know my Dad that well. We're both usually busy, we don't have a lot in common, etc. etc..

I know he likes chocolates and I've heard that some of the best places to get chocolates are from online stores. Unfortunately, I have no idea where that particular issue of Consumer Reports has disappeared to so I'll keep hunting.

The cousin is also someone I don't really talk to as much. I guess I could just get him a random PS3 game or One Piece related (are there any One Piece games for the PS3?). I already have something in mind for his brother so that makes me look bad if I don't get both of them gifts.

Why couldn't he have a Steam account instead of a PS3...

But I still have one month left so I'm not panicking too hard. This blog is actually helping to pay for some of the gifts so I'm grateful for that. Never thought I could ever successfully make money off what is largely considered online leisure activity.

Never been more glad to be wrong.