Hey, remember a few months ago when I was playing Link to the Past for the first time and everyone was crazy jealous? Well, get this. This weekend, thanks to the generosity of @Effigy_Power:disqus I’ll be playing Half-Life 2 for the first time. I look forward to finally being able to complain about the lateness of Half-Life 3.

I also finally got Dear Esther to work, so I’ll be putting that away as well. Got a pretty crackin’ weekend coming up it looks like.

Oh, and I’m going to drop something off in this week’s Keyboard Geniuses, so everybody get the appropriate amount of excited for that.

I’m not really gaming all that much at the moment, sadly.  A few hours here and there on Far Cry 2, and that’s about it.  I just moved to the second area, around the 50% mark, and unlocked the last few weapons.  I’m really digging that game.

I did join in briefly for the last TF2 Thursday.  The Blue team was kicking ass with great authority, and no amount of balancing could stop its streak of utter awesomeness.  Of course, I was on Red team, and failing to do anything of note.

Ever since getting into Dark Souls on the XBox, and then losing access to said console, I’ve been really looking forward to its port for the PC.  But of course, it’s not available on Steam, and I’m region blocked out of the Game Stop version.  Curse you, region blocking!  Why must you make my life so miserable!  I’ll probably be able to order an Asian region version from somewhere online, but I really resent the idea of having to actually buy a physical copy, and keep track of it, and stuff.  ARGH.

I’ve gotten addicted to my brother’s Super Mario 3D Land game, so i’ll probably be playing that.

TVDW, will you be writing up your impressions of the new edition of D&D? Though I’m not really into tabletop RPGs, I’d love to read your thoughts anyway. Who knows? They might get me interested.

Usually when I comment on this column, I spend several paragraphs navelgazing about my Steam library, listing all the games that I could potentially play. (I swear I do it to spark discussion, really!) But this weekend, I know exactly what I’m going to play: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Sleeping Dogs.

PoP:SoT feels like two games in one. There’s the ingenious, entertaining, difficult-but-fair puzzle platformer and the boring, irritating, difficult-and-unfair mêlée swordfighter. I suffer through the latter to play the former. When you knock down an enemy, you also have to suck him or her up with your dagger to eliminate him or her. The problem is that in the time between pressing the E key to use your dagger and your dagger making contact with the downed enemy, you’re completely vulnerable to attack. So when there are lots of enemies around, you can’t eliminate any downed enemies. Unfortunately, if you don’t eliminate them within a certain period of time, they come back to life. This makes the entire combat system feel like an exercise in frustration.

But that platforming…oh, that platforming. Nothing beats running along walls, swinging off poles, jumping across chasms, or rewinding the clock any time you screw up. It’s so brilliant, elegant, and fluid, and I can think of no game that has captured its essence since. (Maybe later titles in the Prince of Persia series did, but I’ve yet to play them.)

As for Sleeping Dogs, I’m taking my time with it, doing various side missions and just exploring the town. I read somewhere – I can’t for the life of me remember where – that the game is like what Grand Theft Auto would be if GTA had an editor. That’s how I feel too. On some level, I appreciate GTA’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, but it’s not something I want to see in every game. I may eventually come to hate my time with Sleeping Dogs for other reasons, but for now, I have to say that it’s a remarkably refined open-world experience. It knows exactly what it wants to be and plays to its strengths. Plus, it’s so refreshing to play a game without a colon or a number in the title.

Anyone else playing Sleeping Dogs right now. What do you guys think?

Yeesh.

Anyways, I’ll probably play a little bit more of my umpteenth replay of Mass Effect. I still love revisiting the world of the first game.

I just played through Episode 2 of The Walking Dead and it was terrifically dark. Anyone know when the next ep comes out?

After reading Genevieve’s response, I’m pretty sure that name is a handle and she grew up in my family. Or maybe that’s her real name, and she’s in family, but I haven’t met her. We’ve got a big extended family (both parents grew up in families of 9 kids), and whenever we see my dad’s side, which is often enough, several Pinochle games will break out, and there’s always someone willing to play, age 20-90.

Kind of a related note, my Grandmother once saw us all playing Dominion, original box stacked up with like 6 expansions, and she said, “When I was growing up, we needed one deck of cards to play any game we wanted. Now you need six boxes of cards to play one game.”

And for me this weekend, it’ll be the same as the previous two weekends. Morrowind overhaul with a smattering of Dark Souls (90% trophy get so far).

I haven’t played D&D since the 2nd edition was current. When I was younger, our adventures were usually simple dungeon-crawling affairs, but they gradually matured as we did. I always preferred an urban setting. I got much more enjoyment out of investigating and negotiating than I did out of combat.

It puzzles me that there are those who still play D&D as little more than a dungeon-crawler.   

Most other tabletop RPGs of the 90s were geared towards an urban setting. In “Star Wars” and “Heroes Unlimited”, you couldn’t imagine limiting yourself to mazes and mooks. 

I’m continuing my ongoing effort to stress-test my new computer, which is mostly an excuse to revisit PC games since 2007-ish that I wasn’t able to play. So far Crysis 2 has understandably pushed it the most, but I’ve gotten the biggest kick out of Dear Esther so far. Portal 2 is next on my list.

Any lesser-known PC experiences that I might have missed out on?

Considering that The Last Story has apparently finally made it to store shelves, I’ll probably be playing that this weekend. Maybe. The problem is that I’m also picking up a 3DS XL on Sunday (two, actually, since my wife agreed to defer her birthday present for a couple of weeks) so that could cause some distraction.

I played pinocle once in my life — it was my best friend’s family game.  I don’t remember how the bidding works, although I do recall that I had to ask for a do over when I noticed, later, that I’d been dealt a double pinocle.

At my house, like the house of every other white family in Akron except my friend’s, our game was euchre.  We played it regularly most weekends, even teaching my 5 or 6 year old sister.  (She once stacked the deck to deal herself a lay-down loner.  Her kindergarten-level dissembling was hilarious.)  My parents often went to or held euchre/wine drinking parties, and all the seniors in my high school also played all through our double lunch period.  But I married a Jersey girl and moved to the Mid-Atlantic, so now I only play when I and my S. Carolina resident sister are both visiting the folks at the same time.

This weekend I’ll be doing what I’ve been doing the last month — playing a little Outwitters on my iPhone (I kept getting waxed so I’d dropped of a little recently, but yesterday I beat two guys who were ranked more highly, so I feel pretty good about it now), maybe playing some Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers on my iPad.  (I’ve just started getting into the multiplayer Planechase campaign, and it’s kicking my ass.  It’s particularly difficult because I refuse to change decks because I’ve almost got this one almost completely unlocked, but it’s totally the wrong deck for the first Planechase match.)

Speaking of Magic, I’ll also be watching plenty of the World Magic championship which is at Gen-Con this weekend.  I’m still not nearly good enough a player to understand what’s going on at these high-level events, but thery’re still pretty cool. 

My group needs a new many-player game, so I’ll solicit advice here. We usually get between 7 and 10 for game night, which requires either a many-player game, or splitting up (which I like, but it does splinter the socialization).

Currently in the rotation:
Wits & Wagers
Apples to Apples
Cards Against Humanity (“Apples to Apples for horrible people”)
Ricochet Robots
Bang
Citadels (which we don’t play often enough for my liking)
Shadows Over Camelot (which seems like a much better idea than it ends up being)
Catch Phrase
Outburst (which one guy hates, so we can’t play often)
Cranium (which I hate)

Any other suggestions? I think I need to get my hands on Werewolf, since the funnest part of some of the games listed above is trying to figure out roles. But any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I’m on day 6 of Pathologic, and haven’t killed off any major characters yet, so there’s that. When my soul gets crushed to powder and I lose all will to live, it’s on to marathon bouts of Audiosurf to cleanse my brain before I inch forward in Dead Space and Dragon Age.

Mostly it’s gonna be a week of putting off/dreading packing for school and cleaning the downstairs. I still have a couple suitcases I brought home from school in May that I never so much as opened. Who know what horrors await within!

Sentinels of the Multiverse is great.  If you’re looking for a fun, highly replayable cooperative game, definitely check it out.  And unlike Arkham Horror it doesn’t take hours to play or half an hour to explain to a new player.

Weekly mod report time! There are probably a lot of horribly-constructed sentences (and too many parentheses), but these are basically my notes from the last week.

Candy Apple Island had to be scrapped, due to some mod conflict with the Ridgeback – the “optional” pack requires yet ANOTHER mod in order to work, and apparently just having the optional pack (but not the required mod) installed tells the mission that you’ve got EVERYTHING, so it won’t let me edit it because it requires the other mod (that I never downloaded or installed). Odd and annoying and, strangely enough, poorly documented! 

But, it was a mild setback at worst: CAI was my first attempt at anything in the editor other than “place a guy and a truck, then drive around an empty world.” I’ve been working on another mission to test my scripting capabilities, and a lot of that work got ported over to the new co-op sandbox test mission. I do miss kingHomer, the BMP-3 that could. And did. Until we all died.

I’m able to semi-randomly fill a container with stuff (a list of loot, chosen randomly from a number of list, meaning I have to write up all the lists) and place it in a location (again, one from a list, but at least the locations have a radius they can appear in, so it’s slightly more randomized). This little discovery is being used to the fullest extent. As is being able to spawn units on a trigger, so I don’t have to hand-place every single unit – I can just set a few here and there, with triggers for the “full” group to appear when the players are within a certain range. This will save on loading time and should keep things from bogging down too much.

There is one small problem that I recently discovered, though. The Ambient Combat Manager (which is great for setting up “random encounter”-style roaming groups of units) doesn’t allow custom factions, which we intend on actually using. Not a gigantic problem, since one of the factions should be rare enough (at least at first) that we’d need to hand-place them (or triggers for them to spawn) anyway, but it’s still annoying. 

I’ve taken baby steps towards having conversations between units. So far, it’s all dialogue, and all pre-written (no choices yet), with a couple sounds inserted where appropriate (a static-y radio when you start losing contact with the chopper, mostly). I’m probably going about it the long way, but I’m still learning. There’s even a little surprise thing that I feel clever about, but don’t want to spoil for Mooy and Effigy. :D

Ambient Animals works on Namalsk (the island I’m working with now); I saw a cow while checking the hostage situation to make sure things were triggering. Ambient Civilian Vehicles does not (I saw wrecks, but those seem to all be hand-placed by the map-maker). This might be because there are certain invisible triggers that have to be placed for those things to work, and they weren’t placed on Namalsk. I haven’t dug too deep into that yet.

A bit of a rant: I’ve started to hate the DayZ community and I don’t even play the mod. Every time I search for how to get certain things to happen in the editor, I’ll find at least the first page is mostly taken up by “how to do [thing] in DayZ, and not get banned” or “DayZ should have [thing].” Or just a general “anyone playing DayZ?” thread. 

OR I get an OFPEC or ArmAholic (two big ArmA forums) thread with somebody asking almost the exact question I have… 2 years ago, and with no replies.

Overall, though progress is being made at a pretty good pace. I’m having fun figuring this thing out (most of the time), and I’m able to get things to happen how I want them to happen (most of the time). I still suck at the actual GAME, but whatever. Effigy can drive and Mooy can shoot. I’ll just fret about things not happening the way they did when previewing. :)

A Fearful Slaughter on the table, keeping various games of Stone Age at yucata.de going online.

I’ll be burning through Dust: An Elysian Tail and Darksiders 2 this weekend. It’s kind of funny how similar they are–Metroid-style worlds to explore, juggle heavy combat, divisive art styles.