Endgame Viable

I bought 2010’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit for $8 in a Winter sale in 2014, and yesterday I installed and played it for the first time. I believe this was the ninth game in the Backlog Bonanza so far, with a depressingly huge list of games left to get through. Every frame of every race looks exactly like this. I’ve always liked racing games. They’re simpler games from a simpler time. I remember playing a Need For Speed game somewhere around the late 90s or early 2000s. I even bought a steering wheel and pedals for it (now long gone). (848 words.)

For undoubtedly many of the same reasons as the rest of the United States, I wasn’t in a very good mood yesterday, so I called an audible and substituted Brütal Legend instead of the game I *planned* to play. I remember enjoying a demo of Brütal Legend on the PS3 years ago, so when I saw a PC version in a Steam sale for $5 in 2013 I had to get it. (399 words.)

Inside-Baseball Note Of Possible Worth To New Bloggers during Blaugust: I forgot you’re supposed to put the more important and unique search keywords at the beginning of a blog post’s title, and thus have I changed the format for my titles and introduced an inconsistency into my Blaugust posts. (At least, that was the last SEO advice I remember reading. It changes at least once a year.) Yesterday, Hitman: Absolution came up on the Big Board for the last day of the first week of my Blaugust Steam Backlog Bonanza. I got it as part of a “Hitman Collection” in a Steam sale for $11 in 2013, and it is the first Hitman game I have ever played. (887 words.)

I bought both Dead Space 1 and 2 in a Steam winter sale in 2011 for $5 each (that was back in the halcyon days when Steam sales were always 85%-off sales, not the trolly 10%-off sales they are today). I played seven hours of Dead Space 1 according to Steam. I didn’t hate it, but I obviously never finished it. Yesterday on the Backlog Bonanza, it was finally time to take a look at the sequel, Dead Space 2. (937 words.)

I was looking forward to seeing this real-time strategy game from 2008 for the first time, and now that I have, I’m not even sure what to say about it. This might be the exact point in time when the games industry stopped and said, “Wait, I think we might have gone a little too far here.” Or should have said that, at least. First, let’s talk about the game part of the game. It’s a real-time strategy game. There was a time when I enjoyed these kinds of games, but now I find that all the clicking and scrolling and micromanagement of units just gets on my nerves. This game has all of that. (655 words.)

Ran out of steam on Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls and went back to PC games in July. PC Games Elder Scrolls Online, 7 hours. Wow, whodathunkkit. I found myself intrigued by the Zone Story in Rivenspire enough to keep logging in to go through it. Still haven’t finished it yet though. Now I’m distracted by the Steam backlog. Lords of the Fallen, 2 hours. This was my alternate game when my hands hurt from using the controller too much. Sort of lost interest after I stopped with the Souls-like games though. Still want to finish it someday. Antichamber, TimeShift, The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, Majesty Gold HD, Life is Feudal: MMO. Games for the Steam Backlog Bonanza. I normally don’t mention games that are less than 1 or 2 hours, but I mention these here for completeness. August is probably going to be a long list of one hour or less games like this. Console Games Demon’s Souls (PS3), ~14 hours. Bloodborne (PS4), ~6 hours. (169 words.)

It’s possible that I’ve played Majesty before, according to Steam, but I don’t remember it at all. From the description it sounded like it would be in the same vein as Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld, both games I’ve enjoyed, but it was a little bit different. Yesterday was this game’s (possibly second?) chance to impress me, according to the schedule. The map where you select the "quest" to embark upon. (773 words.)

Yesterday I tried a game called Antichamber from my Steam backlog. I played for an hour and a half, an almost unprecedented marathon for me in a first look at a game. It’s an indie game that I (apparently, because of course I have no memory of this) got for $5 in 2013, and it took me six years to actually play it. It's really, really hard to find a representative screenshot for this game. (494 words.)

Is Lord of the Rings still Lord of the Rings even when it’s not Lord of the Rings? That is the question I set out to answer when looking at Lord of the Rings: War in the North, from 2011. Actually, it was just the next game on my Steam backlog list. I paid $5 for it in a Steam sale some time back, and yesterday I looked at it for the first time. (823 words.)

The Steam Backlog Bonanza Week One. Streams will be at roughly 4 PM EDT (GMT-4 I think) on my YouTube channel for about an hour and/or until I get bored. Currently I don’t enable chat so lurkers are extremely welcome. If you miss it, I believe the streams are available to watch if not immediately afterward then shortly after. I know… you can subscribe to my channel and find out! AND SMASH THAT BELL!!!! Hehe. (733 words.)