Sonic Mania May 31st CE

Argh my wallet blargh get hype LOOK AT THAT GORGEOUS BOX got hype

why couldn't I stop myself from buying this

IT NEVER ENDS

A brief discussion of Groupees and Greenlight bundles

ok wait what is going on here

I'm a pretty big fan of https://groupees.com/ which I believe was originally a website that allowed indie musicians to get their work 'out there' that gradually morphed into a bundle selling site. There is also of course indie gala and a couple others, and then everyone loves humble bundle. Groupes and Indiegala are more the reasonable fringe, or um, a reasonable facsimile ... most of the time...

One thing Groupees seems to have success doing is, under their own terms, is running "Greenlight" bundles, or bundles of indie games which 'promise' they will give you Steam keys to their indie games once the game is greenlit and so forth. Generally speak, I do believe other sites have tried running this sort of thing, but Groupees seems to have the most success with it. (I should put success in quotes, I think) They're currently running their 14th Greenlight bundle, which is over here, if you care. I have absolutely no idea how good any of the game in this bundle are. None whatsoever. So of course, I bought them all.

look at all these sweet sweet nickels and dimes

For a lot of people, a steam key is worth infinitely more than a desura key or DRM free link. Especially if sweet, glorious cards are up for grabs. But this creates an interesting conundrum, how often do you  actually get a key for a game? There are two hoops to jump through here: First, the game actually needs to get greenlit. Second, the key has to somehow make its way back to you. So, as a little discussion, I'm going to look over the Greenlight bundles I've bought and look up how many keys I've gotten vs how many of these games have been greenlit without sending out keys. Note that these bundles are often build your owns, or might always be, ie I selected these games for purchase rather than the bundle's contents being static. So maybe I didn't choose so wisely. Maybe I should have just voted anime.

Oh, and I'll list how much I paid too, just for the fun of realizing how much money I've wasted on this shit when I could have put the same amount of money into just buying Skyrim or something. As a note, I've read sometimes people will give out their keys by going through Desura instead of sending them to groupees. I consider this as fundamentally disingenuous and I'm not checking Desura for Steam keys

Magic the Gathering Online: Please no v4

I love Magic. It is one of my longest lasting hobbies. Now, sure, right now I'm not playing in real life. I take breaks here and there, sometimes card games feel great. Other times card games don't feel so great, some years I don't play it at all and instead write 300k words or whatever. Other times the draft set is core set, which I would rather gargle than play, especially when it is as actively worthless as m15 looks to be.

I think the things that make Magic itself so endearing lies in the various oddities, silliness and so forth. The game is essentially an abstraction as all RPGs are of wizard hat battles, and therein lies the rub - The abstractions themselves make for a really neat game, one built on math and theories. Magic gets pretty stupid sometimes, of course, R&D is perpetually stuck between doing a terrible job and an good job due to the fact they need to codify their theories and stick to them or instead get weird thoughts like 'X isn't very intuitive!! We should change it' or 'this doesn't feel very green'. It's an abstraction, guys, it doesn't matter.

here we have os/2

But still for all the shit talk I've ever mustered up, Magic has gotten a ton better and is a really interesting and deep game. I don't know if it is for everyone, I feel like not, but it definitely is a game that supports all its game modes and allows for a huge amount of players.

Magic Online, on the other hand, is a blight. And thanks to Wizards letting everyone do some prereleases for free, we can talk about an authentic v4 experience.

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2013 in review

As with last year, this is a set of mini reviews summarizing my recollections of games I played over the course of 2013. Unlike last year, I'm going to be really frank about something: I don't necessarily recall, with perfect accuracy, how I felt about the games while I was playing. This is more or less a summary of how I feel about them a week, a month or almost a full year afterwards. This is after digestion, these are the lasting impressions.

I divide this into four categories, which work in the following somewhat conflicting ways. Category A is the games I think, regardless of your tastes, you should give a serious look at and try because I really enjoyed them. Category B, inversely, are game I think you should try only if you like the genre they're in, but otherwise I felt pretty highly about them. Category C are games I liked or sort of like, but I'm not really recommending unless you're already inclined towards them, or I had problems with getting them running. Category D lastly are games I just stopped playing and/or can't really see personally ever telling anyone to play.

You may notice this review system is entirely subjective. While I do my best to be impartial about things that aren't objective in nature, the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to look at my reviews and decide if you agree with me or don't. If you do, then my opinion is worthwhile, but if you don't maybe you like the games I don't like, and vice versa. As an aside, where I put my experiences does not interrelate with where you put yours. If you really liked a game and I didn't, it doesn't matter, it just means we disagree and you can probably look at the review to figure out why. I get hung up on stuff that doesn't matter to most people, but I do tend to talk about why.

To me, that's the idea, to talk about flaws and facets, and then maybe other people can figure out from my subjective opinions how they'd mesh with their subjective opinions. Because ultimately we're not all that objective, except I will say I'm a fanboy of absolutely goddamn nothing and that's my thing.

Also these reviews are not, as with last year, of games entirely from MY 2013. Many of them are older, but some are more recent, but I feel like hey - how often do you get to read a review of complete games years later, or compared to modern titles? The point here is to discuss if this $5 title is still worth your money four years after its release, and how shit ages, and if we have time how many donkeys power uPlay.
 

Steam Sale!

The holiday Steam sale starts a few hours, at 1am EST or 10pm PST, or at least so everything seems to point to. I wrote a detailed analysis of how sales work here but for the sake of brevity in a time of crisis I'll go over the five simple rules to steam sale by. Also, I'm not going to talk about amazon or gamersgate or whatever else. They all have sales too.

1. Don't just look at the front page - Almost everything is on sale.

2. Don't buy things unless they're a flash, daily or vote deal!

3. Exception to 2: Unless the sale is almost over, since maybe it won't get a daily deal. The larger catalogue sales often end the day before the end of the sale, and because of repetition they probably already had a flash or daily sale if they were ever going to.

4. There will be a metagame, it looks like it's about the same as last summer - snow globes to make into badges. If it's anything like last sale, sell them right quick, because their prices tumbled and never recovered. You can finish the holiday stuff at the end for a quarter what it costs at the start.

Granted I might be wrong, but I doubt it.

5. When you go to buy something, ask yourself "Am I going to play this in the next six months?" Remember - stuff goes on sale over and over again. It's not a one time thing.

Now if you'll excuse me I have a sobbing wallet, already beaten and bruised from Christmas shopping, to prepare for sale time. Don't worry boy, this year I sold cards all year to get ready, so it won't hurt so bad.

Also if you have a SA account, feel here to join the ongoing sale thread here!

Steam Sales: An attempt at a comprehensive End User's Guide

It's October now and that means the biggest crunch of Steam Sales is rapidly approaching us. This is a handy-dandy guide to understanding how the Steam Sale structure works for you, the end user, and to buying a giant pile of games you will fundamentally never play but as inexpensively as possible. Ahem.

For reference, I'm going into my fourth year of having a Steam Account. I got an account to get into a sale and that's basically how I frame my entire experience with buying off Steam. In these three years I have accumulated about ~300 Steam games at an average cost of 'give or take' $2. Steam Enhanced gives a figure of $415 spent, but that number is a bit complicated, since I've gotten Steam keys from all over. Anyway, let's begin!

this remains the most honest macro of all