Steam Summer Sale Day 06 - Two Sentence Review Guide

I finally made it to Turkey this evening and found a lovely bit of internet that I can use to my heart's content. Speaking of content, more games are on sale and today's haul is pretty awesome.

Okay...maybe not that awesome.

Front Page Deals:
War Game European Escalation: Finally a game based around the high prices of escalator production companies and the war they waged on high prices. European Escalation is a unique strategy game with a large arsenal of missions and weaponry, I doubt you'll get bored.
9 tiger tanks out of 10
Price: $20.00

I cannot believe they deleted this scene from Die Hard 2

Steam Summer Sale Day 01: The Two Sentence Review Guide

The heart races and the mind boggles at every single time the front page loads and you see the word "Sale" on the Steam front page. For those who are unaware what this means, Steam often have Summer or holiday sales which usually cause, even the common gamer, to go into fits of excitement, not dissimilar to an inebriated party girl shouting "This is my song!"

Woo Gabe Newell!

So I thought I would do two sentence review for everything on the front page. Sadly, I may be away this weekend and thought I might as well do as much as I can. I will simply be writing what I think, followed by a score, which will be consistently inconsistent.

About as much sense as this...

Terraria: Minecraft, this is not. Resource building, side-scrolling fun based around a charming an old school art style.
9 exceedingly outrageous stories out of 10.
Price: $2.50

My bed may not be a racecar, but my underground lair is pretty sweet.

Steam Greenlight is great if you're not a dick about it.

I realise more and more as I get older that you really do need to pick your battles. For example, if I picked any battle in the history of the world, I would pick the Hundred Years' War, because a hundred years seems like a good round number and I could easily count it down. But mainly it's the battles that I can't be a dick about, are the ones that will often be better for me.

Also I get to meet this Joan babe or whatever.

Steam recently announced Steam Greenlight, not Project Greenlight, which is that weird Matt Damon/Ben Affleck reality show where they found screenplays and made movies for just a million dollars. No, Greenlight will be a community based system where game developers can upload their games and have people vote on them to get them on Steam. This sounds like a great system, based around a democratic notion that the best titles will get in, however, not everyone is happy with the system.

Pictured: Not Everyone

I read the multiple news stories as they came up, just over twelve hours ago and I was pleasantly surprised at the reaction, until I posted it over on the IGDA Sydney Facebook page. The IGDA people are some of the nicest and coolest people you'll ever meet, but they are cautious and weary over almost every news story they hear. And you know what, that's a good thing. It's better to be safe than sorry, but it's also better to be sorry than a dick about things.

Then again, you can make a career out of being a dick.

I think from a good open-minded outset, that they were thinking, logically and said that hopefully "it doesn't turn into Xbox Live Indie Games" or that Steam really doesn't put in a filter such as "x votes and automatically it gets on Steam." But I trust Steam, I really do and Steam Greenlight will have issues when it starts and people will get flustered and people will rage and hell, at worst, some dickish people might leave Steam, but I think what they're doing is a great way for indie developers to really make a mark and get on Steam. Of course, let's think about it from a discursive and logical point of view.

What the fuck did I just say?!

I don't think financially or even from a coherent stand point that any indie developer, outside those who have had large mainstream success, would have enough money to pay people to force a vote to get their game on Steam and even then, they would be found out and reported immediately. Also you have to remember that the players and community of Steam are going to be voting for this game. These are the same people who have kept both Modern Warfare 3 and Endless Space in the Top Sellers at the same time. This is a truly balanced market from my point of view, but hey, don't be a dick about it.

We can totes have a reasoned discussion about it and glorified Booth Babes

Steam also needs to factor into making sure the games aren't all just labelled as "Indie" or "Greenlit" as that it makes the process, much like XBLIG, a bias to other shoppers. I have a whole other beef with the word Indie, in different mediums, but that's for later. I'd rather see a game on the front page or with literally the other hundreds of games, rather than put off into a secondary section, like a "Sell Quick" item at your local petrol station or someone to make a quick profit on a house.

"Are you selling it because of the smell? It's the smell, isn't it?"

Also, for games that don't get through the Greenlight stage, there should be a wayward games foundation where games can go though a workshopping process, or given secondary options to make sure the game gets the care it deserves and needs before being smashed like so many dreams. These games may not be "good enough for Steam" but they probably do need to be worked on and then again, they may just need to find a specific audience.

Pictured: All high school dreams.

Steam has a long road ahead of them and I'm sure they've got a lot of trial and error but seriously, if people let them do their thing and not be a dick about it, things should go well. While I played Captain Hindsight in the last post about the Above Average Network, I realise something like this is in it's early stages, and is slated for an August release, but I can say right now, I expect a lot of people complaining in the early months, not dissimilar to the launch of Steam but with worse spelling and stupider comments. But then again, I don't want to be a dick about it. 

Yay, belated joke!

The JRPG and You

The following editorial was originally posted on QJ.net on the 29th of Decmember of 2011 and can be viewed here. The beginning was an original opening I was toying with and eventually cut due to it's overwritten nature, I've left it in because this is a blog and I needed something to entice a reader into possibly reading more...other than just the READ MORE button. In the article, I draw a comparison between the stories, histories and the genre of gaming, that are Western Shooters and Japanese Role Playing Games. Each a reflection on the cultural history on each country (American and Japan, respectively) and also a form of genre which has grown stale and how other countries/genre's have rectified it so.

It was written some time after I'd spent some time playing the 2009 game, Demon's Souls. The game was incredibly difficult and got me thinking about one of my least favourite genre's: JRPG's. Whilst I grew up playing Pokémon and one of my favourite games from a few years ago was The World Ends with You, I had felt that people had looked down on those who had not been playing Final Fantasy every year of their life, should not be playing JRPG's and considering I am quite time constrained, the whole genre kind of fell by the wayside in my catalogue of games. Like it's more social cousin, the MMORPG,  the time heavy and plot driven ideology, which JRPG's push often give off an air of the Greek epic such as those by Homer or the unconquerable Ulysses by Joyce. However, my adolescent experience, playing games such as Final Fantasy X, had left me cold and grinded down to a point where I'd never really want to play the games again. But Demon's Souls was a JRPG...why did I feel different playing this.


Let's explore shall we...