Pirates Cheaters, and Reddit

*Things I would like to get out of my life*

Here's an interesting conversation I had:

I used to play World of Warcraft quite a bit, but stopped before my son was born a little over two years ago. I finally realized that I hated everything about the game. I hated raiding the same content over and over and over and over and over again. I hated the barrier of entry into arena play. I hated the drama in guild chat. I hated waiting hours for things to start only to have them come to an abrupt end when someone would rage or disconnect or just flat out give up. I could no longer think of any reason I enjoyed playing WoW so I quit and while I was overtaken by old feelings of nostalgia once in the last two years, I reinstalled and played for a couple of weeks only to find all of my complaints still completely prevalent.

That was just a really long way to introduce the main character in the story I actually wanted to tell. A guy who I used to play WoW with text me (yes that's right, on the telephone.) I am not entirely sure where he got my phone number, but he said he wanted to see how I was and so on. I gave him my Steam name and we started chatting. As soon as I saw his first message I felt that uneasy sensation when you know that someone is going to ask you for something, but they feel obligated to make small talk before they get to their sales pitch. (You don't give a crap how I am doing today, door to door carpet cleaning guy, so just get down to it so I can say no thank you and go back to obsessively refreshing "r/gaming."

Anyway, so he finally gets to the point and lets me know that his WoW account was banned because he downloaded a bot that would make him money while he did other stuff, like play Starcraft II. I thought about it for a while and eventually just thought, "why the hell not?"

Since then, this person has continued to message me on Steam from time to time when he thinks I am playing something interesting. Most recently he interrupted my game of Recettear to ask me how I like it (I didn't know because I was still reading tutorials). I told him it seemed pretty awesome (as I will tell anyone about almost every indie game, unless they are truly terrible). He said that he would have to pirate it and give it a try.

Now, I am no saint; I have, in the past, pirated things before: movies, music and the requisite 8 and 16-bit emulators, but I have a real problem with people who pirate from independent developers. I told him that it was only $20, there was a free demo, and if he wants it, he should really pony up the money to support the developer. He attested that he was poor and I didn't push the issue because in reality, I don't know this person, so it's not really my place to be their mom, but bad, bad pirate.

Weeks later and a week ago I had the chance to sink some time into Recettear and really discover that it's an awesome game and not just because it's independent. The game can be hard as I found out after playing for a couple of hours I was confronted with a very definitive "Game Over" on my screen with no option to rout me to a save that could help me prevent my untimely end. The game was over. While I was disappointed that I had failed, I was so proud of little Recettear for having the balls to do something that modern games have forgotten, let me fail. Thank you Recettear for not being a hand held, barely interaction video story.

I started over only to have my former WoW companion interrupt me to ask me if I had a hard time with Recettear. I answered in the affirmative and let him know that I had literally just failed. He responded with something that made me laugh. "I had to cheat to get past the deadlines." So here is a game that he pirated that he has to cheat to be able to win. The duality of stealing something and then cheating his way through it just to get through it made me smile in an odd sense of awe and disappointment. Maybe I am the guy who has to smell his wine and swish it around his mouth before ingesting it, but it just seems like that's what you do with something you want to appreciate and savor. But he went through Recettear like a gallon of Thunderbird he tucked under his shirt at the local liquor store. Drank it to get drunk and wake up in the morning with a headache and no recollection of the previous days events. I won't go so far as to call Recettear a masterpiece, but people, if you have a game worth enjoying... enjoy it.

On a positive side note: You may have noticed that I have been writing more consistently in my blogs. This is because I made a rule for myself: I am not allowed to look at Reddit on my office computer (at which I spend most of my computer time). I can look at Reddit at PC in my bedroom, which significantly limits the amount of time I spend (see: waste) on Reddit.

Relearning Learned Lessons

Admit it, we have all been the victim of great marketing for a not great game.

I bought Homefront day one and really really wanted to like it, but a short and ultimately incomplete single player and an unplayable multiplayer. I was taken by the promise of a PC focus and large player counts on dedicated servers, but just because food is catered doesn't mean that the food it edible. I was duped. The commitment was made to forego any day one purchases. I could always wait for reviews and my backlog is so full that I can wait for sales and still play a new game from now until oblivion (that's the end of the world, not the game). I would love to talk more about the awful failure that was Homefront, but this post is about Dead Island.

My buddy is really looking forward to the new game mode in League of Legends, Dominion, and to be fair, who isn't? Dominion looks great.

Riot Games is taking the large cast of characters they have created and putting them in a whole new game type. With so many new DOTA clones coming out it's nice to see something other than three lanes, eleven towers, three inhibitors, and a nexus. Anyway, back to my buddy... He is really looking forward to Dominion but what to play in the meantime? Well, Dead Island just came out why not play through that? Being a coop focused game he asked me if I would be interested in joining him on his island vacation zombie apocalypse. If I have a weakness it is being stabbed in the face and if I have two weaknesses the other is the fact that if someone wants to play a game with me, I am forced by some unknown power to say yes.

So I bought Dead Island even though there are 47 other games sitting on my Steam wishlist, most of which are less than half the price and all of which I would have rather played. Bad games are bad and great games are great, but Dead Island is meh. That is the best description I can give. The scenery is beautiful, the melee is satisfying, the gunplay (which I wholly expected to be terrible) was competent, and the game is an appropriate length for a full retail game.

The worst condemnation I can give Dead Island is that through most of the campaign I was bored. The side-quests are either fetch quests or escort missions and become tedious far too early. The commercials tout an emotionally gripping experience, but the game has none of the music that is used to such effect. It's also nearly impossible to care about any of the characters who either seem too stupid or douchey to connect with. When one of the main characters dies towards the end of the game, my friend (who I played the whole game with) and I felt more joy that the whiny pouting Patsy had died than the melancholy that the game wanted us to feel.

When Aeris died (SPOILERS!) in Final Fantasy 7, it hit home because I had spent several hours leveling her up and thinking that she may be the main love interest in the story.

When the character in Dead Island had her brains removed, I felt nothing. Some double crossing whiny character died? Meh.

"Meh" was the feeling I had more than any other while playing. Dead Island failed to engage me and was a relief when it was over so I could go onto better games.

If you have some friends, nothing else to play, and a great sale, go ahead and take a trip to Dead Island, but it's more of a game to fill a lazy afternoon than an engaging hyper emotional zombie vacation.

I have also been playing:

Dungeons of Dredmor

Limbo

Rusty Hearts

(Which I may discuss next time.)

More Like OLD Vegas, Amiright?... guys?...

I checked my Steam profile and I may have lied yesterday. I have spent a little over 10 hours of my life wandering the wastes of Fallout: New Vegas and for most of those 10 hours, I was not having fun, no sir, no fun at all.

I played a lot of Fallout 3. I discovered every single location and did every quest that I came across. I deactivated the bomb in Megaton, I helped a group of subway dwelling vampires find a blood replacement, I even came across the happiest town in The Waste, only to find out that their basements hid a dark dark secret (I will give you a hint, they are cannibals). I loved Fallout 3 with all it's flaws. Every computer terminal, every locked door, and every dialogue option was a window into the world of Fallout.

Don't get me wrong, Fallout 3 had problems. The main story could be finished in just a few hours, some bugs made a necessity of saving regularly so that when the game trapped you, there was always a save point to go back to, and V.A.T.S was the only viable way to get through combat.

New Vegas fixes a lot of the problems with Fallout 3, but it feels like too little too late.

The main thing I loved about Fallout 3 was going off the beaten path and exploring. I loved meeting new people in The Waste and learning their story. When I finally found out the dark secret of the happiest town in Fallout, I felt an enormous responsibility to cleanse the town, and I did, right down to the pets. I was so appalled at their behavior. So when I found the cannibal in New Vegas, I just let him go because I didn't care enough about him. I had already purged an entire town.

New Vegas just didn't offer me any incentive for exploration. Going to a random cave would not net me an amazing gun or other piece of loot and more than anything else, I had already seen those caves in the previous game. I already knew what the buildings looked like on the inside. I knew how sewers were constructed and I knew that the only thing in those large metal boxes are spare parts and other merchant trash. In playing through New Vegas I couldn't help but feel, I have already explored all this game has to offer before I even inst

alled it. It felt too much like an expansion to a game in which I had already suck 50+ hours. I was done with Fallout 3 and all New Vegas seemed to want to offer me was more Fallout 3.

The second main gripe I have with New Vegas is how I decided to play. I know that speech is always the way to go, but I decided to do something that I have yet been able to do in any moral decision based RPG. I was going to be evil. and I don't mean Chaotic good, I mean straight up, murder parents in front of their children and leave the kids to starve to death evil. The choice of good or evil should not be the equivalent of choosing paint colors. Black or white, it's still the same wall with the same paint. Moral choices should be like choosing a flavor of ice cream. Chocolate should be very distinct from Vanilla and provide a wholly different experience, not just an aesthetic change. Sure there were gangs of law enforcement officials out for me, but those could have easily been re-skinned thugs out for the life of a law man.

Playing evil may have destroyed the experience for me, but I just wasn't interested in exploring something that looked exactly the same as a world I had already gone over with a magnifying glass.

I bought New Vegas for 8.00 on some ridiculous Steam promotion, so I don't feel cheated, just disinterested and disappointed.

Stanley and His Fantastic Parable

Sometimes we like games because they get the impact of a bullet just right or because we want to see what the next skeleton will drop for us. I played an hour of Chime last night because it's just so damned relaxing.

Before we get into today's featured presentation, here's a short rundown of what has been going on in my gaming. I played about 20 hours of Fallout: New Vegas before uninstalling it both begrudgingly and in disappointment, but that is a conversation for my next post. I have been playing League of Legends as always and middling around in Starcraft 2. I played through Dead Island with a buddy and could not feel more "meh" about it.

Today is not the day to discuss sequels that feel more like an expansion or games that are bugged to hell. Today is the day to discuss the only game that made me explore every single possible decision. Thank goodness The Stanley Parable is short or that would have been quite the task. As it stands I played through The Stanley Parable about 10 times and I enjoyed each consecutive play-through no less than the previous.

Imagine for a moment an interactive story in which the main character has free will and doesn't have to do what the story has written. There are essentially two main characters in the parable of Stanley. The first character is the narrator who attempts to tell Stanley's story and the other is Stanley (you), the main character. Now, acting as Stanley, you have the choice to follow the narrator's story, or dismiss it and make choices that contradict the story and in turn may upset the narrator.

The experience the player will have throughout The Stanley Parable will vary drastically based on one simple decision: Will you obey? The Stanley Parable also discusses (in a way) game design and the fallacy of player choice, but you will have to experience that for yourself. The Stanley Parable can be found on Desura and only requires that you own Half Life 2.

Go now, or don't, the choice is yours.

Delayed

No, not a game, my writing. I will pick up soon, but playing real father has taken over for a bit. I welcomed my second child and first daughter into the world yesterday. I will get back to neglecting her for video games shortly. See you then.

Ah Crapsicles

I started writing in this blog again because Rock, Paper, Shotgun posted a job opportunity for a staff writer. More than anything else, I wanted that position. To be a games writer would combine the two personal activities that I love the most into a paying job. I understood that I had until July 17th to submit my resume along with a sample of my writing. Every post on this blog was a possible submission. I finally decided which article to submit and edited my resume from a 2007 boring resume about getting another dead-end, soul sucking, hell job, into a resume about a job that I wanted more than any other job I have ever seen.

I checked the job listing one last time to find the e-mail address for submissions and found that I didn't have until the 17th, I had until the 13th which had past. I submitted anyway, but immediately received and e-mail saying that I was too late and that my submission would not be regarded.

I am in a rush and won't be adding graphics to this post, but I wanted to throw this out there. It was a huge bummer for me, but in some ways a relief as well. I have been writing my last several posts with Rock, Paper, Shotgun in mind and it will be nice now to get to free writing and worry less about a specific style.

Alright boys and girls, I am off for a direly needed vacation. No screens means I won't be playing much of anything, maybe a sand castle game on the beach, but that's about it.

Until then...

Old School RPGs Alive And Well Again

There is so much to discuss today, so let's get right to it; no time for jokes... okay screw it, one joke.

Today I wanted to finish up my coverage of three indie games that I had determined to cover, but this last one became a bit more of a task than I had anticipated for an awesome reason. Cthulhu Saves the World is now out on the personal computer along with Breath of Death VII: The Beginning. I have kept my nostalgic eye on these games since it was first announced that they were coming to the PC. I loved RPGs from the 8 and 16-bit era. I think that the death of the traditional JRPG is tantamount to 2K saying that strategy games are contemporary.

In that same vain, I recently stumbled upon a game that I want to play now. You hear me PVGames? NOW! The game is Aleph and won't be released until the year of our Lord two thousand and twelve, but hey, you know what? That is not that far away, and it's got a solid chance of being released before Black Mesa Source updates their Twitter again.

With the release of the game not exactly upon us, the most interesting thing about Aleph for me is the financing. It is being done thought a website called www.kickstarter.com. Their tagline explains, "What is Kickstarter? We’re the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world." So, here is another game developer (not a team this time like Interstellar Marine, but just one guy" taking his idea straight to the public (through a mediator) and asking for help.

The developer is by no means begging, for your contributions you will be compensated. For a five dollar donation you get your name on a grave in the game, but for a 500.00 donation,"

This is a major support reward: You will receive my eternal thanks, the $100 reward, a copy of the development binder, and you will get to design your own dungeon! This is your chance to put the player through hellish traps and devious puzzles!"

Why can't my wife understand that $500.00 is not too much to pay for immortality? I am sure that if she could have a zombie named after her in Plants Vs Zombies that she would gladly mortgage the house and sacrifice our retirement to have the pleasure. If only PopCap could design a zombie that slowly sucked the souls out of your plants little by little year by year we would have a perfect fit, but I digress. What were we talking about again, oh yeah, money!

There are investments in between the $5.00 and $500.00 mark with varying degrees of rewards for your support. PVGames, you my good sir are a genius. Your game seems cool, but as someone interested in games, I would love to give you the 250.00 necessary to get a copy of your development binder. I love games and am infinitely interested in the process of making them and the people in that process.

The time is almost up to invest, but I am sure if you e-mail the guy he would be more than happy to take your money. Here is a video of how the game is shaping up. Good luck PVGames, I hope you continue to receive the support you need for the game we all want.

A Lesson In Finance and Awesome Games

The global economy may be in the gutter, but gaming continues to grow. According to gameindustry.biz, 2011 will bring more than 74 billion dollars to the game industry; that's over 861 billion pesos. With all that money flying around, why do indies even exist? Why isn't every game given a chance? I am sure there is a long answer for that on Gamasutra, but the short answer is people have to make money, corporations make choices (some good and some bad) How do independent developers get a piece of this pie and work for years on their labor of love game? Some developers like Team Meat borrow from friends and family and live on nothing, hoping to strike it big.

Some developers like Notch ask people to buy into beta or even alpha builds to help

finance their work. Interstellar Marine is one such game, but instead of boring you with the details, I will let the developer explain in this trailer/infomercial.

I don't remember when I first heard of Interstellar Marine, but I remember every day that I want to give them my money (I guess the infomercial worked.)

I am currently avoiding any and all coverage of Bioshock Infinite because I want to experience it myself. Almost all major gaming websites recently released the full E3 trailer which is about 15 minutes in length. I don't want to expect anything and I want to be completely surprised. This idea runs in stark contrast to what Interstellar Marine is doing. Interstellar Marine invites all to play a little for free and then buy into the game before it is released with the promise that you will be spoon-fed the game until its official release sometime in the future.

One of Rock, Paper Shotgun's many PC pet-peeves is the lack of demos; they go so far as make news when a game actually releases a demo. What Interstellar Marine appears to be doing is releasing several demos way before release and asking you to have faith in the product enough to pay for it. But instead of making you wait months (or longer) for the game to release, they will release snippets of the game to play. It's definitely a demo of sorts, but done very differently, and an argument could be made that it is better. That being able to sample several parts of the game instead of just one gives the potential buyer a better idea of what the game will be.

Like a tight-rope walker though, this is a balancing act. How much should they give before they ask for something in return? It can't be wise to give a starving man a meal and then ask him if he is hungry and would like to buy a plate of food. Demos are supposed to get you interested in a game; they are supposed to let you play just enough to want so much more.

Not to make the game itself a side note, but while this first person gun down game set in space certainly looks great, it appears that the biggest innovation is what was referred to in the video as "AAA Indie." By having the community finance the game, the only people that Zero Point Software is responsible to is the group of people that have purchased the game. Have you ever wanted to own a game? I don't mean in the boxed copy of digital rights sort of way, but really own the game as much like a developer as you can without learning code yourself. Then you owe it to yourself to pickup Interstellar Marine, or at least buy into the idea.

Hot and Sweet Indie Love

Ooooooh yeeeeeeaaaaaaaah (read it as if you were Isaac Hayes), sweet indie love. We know we don't appreciate you like we should baby, but we are sorry and we are trying to make it right. (Please cease that silly voice, you don't do it well anyway.)

Maybe it's the fact that Terraria is on sale today for $4.99 or maybe it's that I just haven't heard much about these games from other outlets, but I want to talk about some independent games. Over the next couple of days we are going to learn about some games that you should follow because I told you to. As a side note, if you haven't already purchased Terraria, you can't go wrong with $4.99 and if you already own it, do yourself, your friend, and your indie developer a favor and gift a copy. Earlier today is was $2.49, but apparently that was a mistake; a mistake that I took advantage of three times for my friends. It's $4.99, quit being so cheap and enjoy some indie goodness.

Let's not keep secrets, I am a PC elitist. I am proud of my rig and my community (for the most part... every body has its poop chute and so does every community), but when I was growing up I played a lot of consoles and I am not ashamed of that. My favorite RPG of all time is still Shining Force II; it's simple and led me to love the genre. I grew up on Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Commando. I fire up the Nintendo Entertainment System from time to time to reaffirm how incredible those games still are.

Many years have passed since I spent sleepless nights memorizing where every heart container was hidden in The Legend of Zelda and some of the people that grew up on these games have become game developers themselves. Super Meat Boy might as well be a love letter to the classic platforming games that Team Meat played in their youth. Another such game is Retro City Rampage.

If that trailer doesn't have you tapping your toes to the low fidelity music and replaying it to see what games were referenced, then you cannot be my friend. I can't even count how many references there are to games I love in that trailer alone.

Retro City Rampage is an open world homage to the NES. Think GTA in 8-bit and chock-full of games you obsessed over from the '80s. Originally started as an actual NES game 8 years ago interest started to spread and the developer (basically one guy) decided to make it on platforms that aren't powered by blowing into them. Although the website says for Wiiware and Xbox Arcade, I e-mailed the developer and confirmed that it will be coming to PC as well. CONFIRMED!

With news like Torchlight selling one-quadrabagillion copies, the indie market is not looking like a bad place to be. RCR, I wish you all the success in the world, but even more, I look forward to playing the hell out of your game.

Finishing Games From Yesteryear

What have you been playing? you ask. Oh yes, that is the name of the blog and boy do I have a list for you. Sit back, strap in and prepare for the list of games I should have finished years ago.

I bought The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay years ago on Direct2Drive, but after 6 or 7 hours of play the game crashed and I lost my save. Now, I have a hard time repeating a half hour of gameplay that I lose when I die only to realize I hadn't been responsible in my saves; so when I lose 6 hours of gameplay I am done. I uninstalled the game and cut my losses. I paid $20 for the game and figured that 6 hours was enough enjoyment for my money, even if I didn't finish the game. When I saw the rereleased Assault on Dark Athena on sale for less than a postage stamp I picked it up and finally got around to finishing it. Time enough had passed that I had forgotten enough content to make the game feel new. The dagger in my gaming heart came at the end of the game when I realized that my crashed save was only about 30 minutes from the end of the game.

My friend continues to pull me into his world of Terraria and after 5 hours have passed in a play session for which I had only planned 45 minutes. I blame him and my uncontrollable desire to dig holes all the way to hell or a space there to hang out. I have been playing Terraria since the day it came out and the most exciting part of Terraria is seeing how much Minecraft has changed in its life. The piston update in Minecraft and the constant updates for Terraria make me incredibly excited about what the future has in store for my 2D land of holes to hell.

Far Cry 2 has been sitting in my library for over a year now and I am f

inally getting around to firing it up and shooting my way through the shanties of Africa. Blame it on the stagnating power of console limitations, but Far Cry 2 still looks great and plays like a modern shooter should. I have only sunk a couple of hours into what I am sure will be a 30+ hour experience, but I will say this: If there are zombies, monsters, or genetic experiments at the end of this game, I am going to throw a fit like the world has never seen.

On a side note, my wife has been playing Plants vs Zombies which is coincidental because she is about to give birth to our second child and when she was in the hospital, bringing my son into this world, I must have logged 50 hours of zombie killing plant goodness.

EA Steam Crysis 2 Debacle Explained?

EA continues to try to explain and hopefully quell the debacle created by the removal of Crysis 2 from Steam. EA has been doing damage control recently as if their dam just broke and flooded a small town. While the voices of ire seem to have quieted around the pre-order bonuses for Battlefield 3, many PC gamers, EA haters, and Valve enthusiasts are still up in arms about Crysis 2 being removed from Steam as an apparent move to promote Origin.

Admittedly, most of the fear/anger over the issue is assuming that the Crysis 2 debacle is an omen of greater evils to come. I believe that people care less about Crysis 2 than they do about the impending Battlefield 3 and the future of EA and Steam's relationship.

Head of Origin David Demartini was next in line at EA to go on the defensive about Origin and player choice. So gung-ho in their defense they gave the page on which the news can be found,

the name, "http://www.ea.com/news/demar-at-ea-we-believe-in-choice." In this document Demartini links EA's "official policy on selling games on third-party download sites..." Here is an excerpt from said official policy:

Any retailer can sell our games, but we take direct responsibility for providing patches, updates, additional content and other services for the individuals and communities that play our games. These players are connecting to our servers, so we want to provide them with the very best service. This works well for our partnership with Gamestop, Amazon and other online retailers.

However, when a download service forbids publishers from contacting players with patches, new levels, items and other services – it disrupts our ability to provide the ongoing support players expect from us. At present, this is the case with only one download service. While EA offers its entire portfolio to this site, they have elected to not post many of our games. We hope to find a mutually agreeable solution to this issue soon.

Basically EA says that Steam is not offering them control over patches and that while other download services will try to sell any piece of poop that EA decides to fling their way, Steam can afford to have more discriminating taste; I am looking at you, Impulse and Littlest Pet Shop. Steam has always kept my games nice and up to date (as a matter of fact, that is how I was introduced to Steam), but apparently EA is upset that they don't have more control over

just how up to date their games are.

EA's damage control is taking an ax to their breaking bridge instead of a hammer. It seems like every time they put fingers to keyboard to squash the angry internet people their mouths are filled with gasoline that just spews into the ever growing flame of discontent. EA, take it from me, random blog writer in the sea of wannabe game writers, STOP IT! Go with your initial claim that you, as a publisher, allowed Crytek, as a developer to make a proprietary publishing deal with Direct2Drive and that it was out of your hands. Reddit has new topics every day and I am sure some other game developer will step up and do something bone-headed that makes people forget about how mad they are at you.

You can read the whole lot of Demartini's spun words here.

An Easter Egg that Could Feed A Small Country

Do you have ten minutes? Trust me, you do, this is worth it.

Now reach down and pick up your jaw from the floor and download that map here.

You're welcome.

Gamer Knowledge

1. Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, B, A, (select) Start. You get thirty lives in Contra, which is the only way anyone can beat that game anyway.

2. Input "Link" as your name in "The Adventures of Zelda" and you start on the second quest.

3. Use a second whistle when in the warp zone in Super Mario Brothers 3 and you are brought to the last world

4. Dark Worlds are hard (Thank you Super Mario 3 and Super Meat Boy)

5. "LFM LK kill pst gs, spec & achiev or no re kthnxbye" makes total sense.

6. Calling someone a "noob" will make them mad, but asking if they are mad will make them madder.

7. I don't know how, but I know every single rock to blow up and bush to burn in the first quest of Zelda.

8. "1" is alway melee (whether it's the basic attack in your MMO or your melee weapon in your shooter).

9. Nazis are bad (okay so video games may not have been the first place you should have learned this)

10. Blowing on games magically fixes them.

11. Mythological trolls live under bridges, but most real ones live in their mom's basement.

Desura: The Steam Of Mods

The first computer game I ever played was Oregon Trail which is an experience shared by any child who went to grade school in the early 90's and especially one that grew up in Oregon, like myself. I am pretty sure it was state law to have at least two variations of The Oregon Train in every classroom. Like any good drug story, I soon became tired of shooting buffalo and fording rivers (if you know what I'm sayin') and I moved on to finding Carmen San Diego somewhere in the world and eventually blowing Nazis to smithereens in the treasure filled castle of Wolfenstein.

My youth was filled with PC essentials like Pitfall, Wolfenstein, Diablo, C&C Red Alert, and Half-Life (certainly there are more games and more important ones at that, but these are some the ones to which I had access). There was never a "gaming computer" in my house growing up. I would read minimum system requirements and purchase a game, hoping for the best. I owned a copy of Dungeon Siege for 3 years until my family upgraded to a computer that could run it.

While I liked PC games, I was not a technically savvy youngster. I didn't know what an IP address was which was hard on me, because in those days (old man talking here) there were few other ways to play online.

My first experience with online multiplayer was Diablo's Battlenet service. If I wanted to play a game online I needed to buy it as soon as it came out, because once the developers started patching it or people started adding sound packs from Unreal Tournament, there was no way I was going to be able to play it again. I would try to enter an online game, but be confronted with a list of files that I needed to download. So it was off to webcrawler.com or search.com (wow who would have thought that a website called "search.com" wouldn't have made it?) to find the long list of files. The searches would yield results of websites that would make any modern virus scan go into red alert and sound off as if nuclear weapons had just been launched directly from your browser.

Most patches required patches and in the tangled web of my early experiences with the internet, I would eventually just give up. The most prevalent example of this is Counter-Strike. Oh, how I wanted to play Counter-Strike. Everyone that played it had nothing but amazing things to say about it and it seemed like such a revolutionary step forward from the rocket parade of Unreal Tournament which I was playing at the time.

I bought Counter-Strike on three separate occasions over the course of a couple of years. Every time I saw a new box I would hope that it was the new version and I wouldn't have to find a million files from a million different seedy websites to get it up and running. In short, I could never get it working.

But in 2005 I was saved.

I was introduced to a little thing called Steam which did all of the dirty work for me. Steam was exactly what I needed to be a PC gamer at that time. It would automatically keep my games up to date and let me play without having to scour the internet for sounds like these.

From Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat I learned about Mods, but while Steam had all but cured the ills created by my tech ignorance, mods were still in the state that patches were back before Steam. Fear not! I am not writing this only to lay out a problem, but also to present a solution. Desura is the Steam for mods.

Created by Moddb, Desura was released last year and quite honestly, it's not receiving the coverage it deserves. Sure, Desura is a digital distribution client that looks and feels so much like Steam that one would swear is was a modder's tribute, but it serves a very different and distinct purpose.

I try to use as few digital distribution services as possible. I like having things organized and would spend a little more on Steam to have my games there rather than having some games from Direct2Drive, Impulse, Origin, Games for Windows Live, or any of the several other services. That being said, I do believe that some services serve a specific and important niche. I think GOG is great because they provide an important service that Steam does not (namely selling older games that work on modern machines).

Desura fits an important niche that Steam and no other service, for that matter, satisfies at this time. It is a way to organize and update your mods all in one place. Have you wanted to get more involved in the modding community (just like I wanted to get involved in online multiplayer) but just can't overcome the barrier of entry? Have you always wanted to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Complete seems so much more playable? Desura is the answer you have been looking for. Don't take my word for it. Download Desura here and finally get GTA San Andreas multiplayer up and running or play Black Mesa Source; just kidding, Desura can do a lot, but let's not go crazy.

Desura the stepping stone that many gamers need to overcome the technical wall that has been holding them back from enjoying some truly amazing games. No need to thank me, your eternal praise is thanks enough.

My ELO journey from 1200 to 0 and back again.

Every gamer needs a "go to game." A game that they play constantly with other games only filling in the empty extra spaces. For the longest time my "go to game" was Day of Defeat Source, but when Team Fortress 2 came around, the server and community of players with whom I had become very close, slowly fell apart. Now we get a server going once a month or so and play all night reminiscing about the good old days like a WWII company reunion.

Recently my "go to game" has been League of Legends, and by recently I mean the last 2 years. I have sunk thousands of hours of my life battling lane dominance and ganking unsuspecting champions.

After a certain amount of hours with any game, when I feel that I have finished everything the developers had in store for me, but I have not yet satiated my hunger for more, I do what any reasonable individual would do, try to break the game. Like a child pulling a branch on a tree to see just how much force it takes to snap it clean off, I like testing the world of the games I play. Admit it: you created another save in Fallout 3 so you could kill every living soul in Megaton. It's okay, I am not here to judge. We all want to test the limits of our games and after more than a thousand hours with League of Legends that is exactly what I decided to do.

My goal: Level an account to 30 so I can compete in ranked games and then lose or leave said ranked games until my ELO (the rating system used by League of Legends) goes from the starting point of 1200 all the way to 0. Then I will see if I can pull myself back up to 1200.

The Descent:

In total I played 388 games. I won 193, lost 161 and left 34 of them. The fastest way down the ELO ladder would have been to queue up for a match and leave while the players chose their champions, but in addition to taking a loss for leaving the lobby, I would also get an administrative time out. The time outs were small at first, but after 20 or so leaves Riot asked me to take 24 hours and think about my actions; I was grounded.

My ELO sat at about 950 and the hard part was about to begin. I could no longer just leave games, so I sat idly by as the other team, with their +1 champion advantage laid waste to my teammates. Of course to the unskilled eye I was playing the game. I would be in a lane, killing minions and gently poking at my opponent, but when it came time to really fight I was nowhere to be found. I would hide in the tall grass of the jungle or kill some minions on the other side of the map. I managed to get to about 700 ELO with this strategy. My teammates could just not carry my dead weight play.

Now, I did win a few games on the way down, about 30 games in total. So what could be done if my team was going to inevitably win? I would stay in the game just long enough to make sure that the opposing team wasn't going to come back and win and then I would quickly ex

it the game hoping that it would count me as a "leaver" and therefore a loss for me, even though my team was victorious. I was forced to do this about 10 times, but because I was on a disciplinary level for leaving so many games previously, I was forced to win from time to time. The irony of the frustration I felt when the screen flashed victory is not lost on me.

Soon, it became clear that missing a player was not enough of a hindrance to my team to induce a loss, so I was forced to take more drastic action. I never played harder than when I was trying to lose. My champion had to look like he was trying, but failing. I would follow an enemy champion just a little too far into turret range and allow said enemy to pickup first blood against me. I would attack an enemy knowing that in the end he would be left with a sliver of health, but I would be left to respawn after the death timer counted down. The beginning of each game was an assessment of which enemy champion to focus. Which one had the skill to carry a team to victory... that is the one that would be the recipient of my lust for death.

The longest leg of the journey was definitely from 700 down to 300. It was also that range in which I heard the most racial epithets. The lower ELO I managed, the more I would hear the words, "noob, fail, f**k (and all its variants), n***er, and so on.

Low ELO is the ELO of hyprocrites. Players were so angry because they felt dragged into low ranking from which they could never return, which they refer to as "ELO hell." Many p

layers felt that their losses were completely out of their control and that it was always their teammates fault. Even as they stood with several times the amount of deaths as kills, they could only see that those deaths were a result of a previous death of another champion. Part of the reason I did this whole experiment is because I was bored, yes, but also because I wanted prove that with skill, a champion could crawl even out of the lowest ELO, simultaneously busting the myth of an ELO hell. I was more and more skeptical of ELO hell the deeper I dug because one thing that players at all levels have in common is their belief that they are stuck in ELO hell.

So where is ELO hell? Is it 200, 700, 1200, or even 1800? I contend that the system works and that ELO hell, or where a player's ELO stagnates is where they are playing games with other people of similar skill and therefore do not win anymore games than they lose.

A funny thing happened when I finally arrived at 300 ELO... complete and total apathy. Gone were the capslocked messages of anger and obscenity. Gone was the incessant map pinging of higher ELOs; no, these people were just playing to have fun, not really caring whether they won or lost. It was even harder to lose in this rank because many matches ended up being 4v3 or 3v2 because people would just leave and no one would care. I made a lot of friends in this bracket because I could talk openly about my intentions and question people about theirs. I did find one other person who had the same plan as myself, but in the end, he could not crawl back to his starting point. Most players on the other hand, just accepted that they were not as skilled as most players and enjoyed the friendly competition at the dregs of ELO.

The pool of players at and around 300 ELO is pretty thin, so I played my last descending 20-30 games with the same 20 people. I am sure they are all still there, trading wins and losses and having a great time, not worrying about who wins or how low their ELO falls.

I eventually got down to zero, actually I went negative. My stats still showed zero, but I had to win a couple of games before I saw that first single digit number pop up under my rank.

I only played two champions on my way

back up. I played Master Yi, chasing and ripping apart my enemies all the way to about 1,000 ELO, rarely losing a game. At at about 1,000 I switched to Sona. It took me about the same amount of time to get from 1000-1206 as it did to get from 0-10000 Matches lasted longer and I could no longer carry a team if one of my teammates left or was playing without a head on their shoulders. Who knows; maybe I met some people with my same plan on their way down to the dregs as I was trying to redeem my original rank. I met some people on my way up that I had seen on my way down that were, to say the least, astonished at my miraculous increase of skill.

As a rule, I accepted every invitation for friendship and played with those new friends as much as possible (probably trying to atone for my sins of making them lose all those games.) Some of my harshest critics on my way down (people that groaned or left the queue when they saw me) became the best of friends on my way back up. They would constantly ask to accompany me in games to assure victory. (I know that sounds pompous, but at 500 ELO, queueing with me was a guaranteed win.)

It took me about 2 months, playing at least 2 games a day to do it, but I did it. My friends I played with on my other account had all but abandoned me because I no longer played like I used to. Play styles vary wildly in different ranks and after hundreds of games below the 1200 line I was absolutely terrible. I could no longer remember how people played at my native ELO and could not adapt fast enough, which led to an unfortunate amount of legitimate losses.

In closing, no... there is no such thing as ELO hell, but there is such a thing as not having the skills to adapt to play at a certain level. The game will find your correct ELO, but you aren't condemned there. Adapt and move on, or go hang out with the coolest people in the game down there in club 300.

Thousands of Hours of League of Legends

I will be honest, StarCraft scares me. I want to play more, but every time I get online, ready to play a match, my palms get sweaty and my heart takes on the consistency of 50lb chunk of whatever those mineral crystals are that my SCVs are harvesting. One of the great benefits of StarCraft ownership is that it comes packaged with a community that loves to modificate. DOTA (defense of the Ancients) is arguably the most popular mod for StarCraft and it has spawned so many clones and inspired so many variations that DOTA is now more synonymous with a genre than a single game. Riot Games' League of Legends is one such game, so if you haven't heard of this game, come out from under your rock and join me as we jump into Damacia.

League of Legends is one of the most infuriating games I have ever played and that, my friends, is how I know that I love it.

I loved Amnesia: The Dark Descent because it made me turn around in my chair thinking there was someone or something behind me all the while unwillingly soiling myself. I can't stop playing Frozen Synapse because the sense of accomplishment I feel when I can out-plan my opponent makes me feel like a smart human being. Now, I can't stop playing League of Legends because when it goes right, ripping apart the other team with my sword, gun, magic, or Barrel of Grog is a syringe filled with ecstasy being injected directly into the the Limbic system of my brain.

Here's the fact dump: Players (summoners) choose a champion with whom they are commissioned to decommission the other teams Nexus, from which a never ending series of minions spew. Your task is to push along with your minions one of three lanes that lead from your nexus to that of your enemies taking down enemy minions, turrety towers and enemy champions as needed. Seasoned players will be upset with the simplicity of my description because there certainly is more to it, but you learn as you play.

Like all team-based games, League of Legends lives and dies by those you play with, luckily it's easy to make friends over the course of the match, which can vary in length from 15 minutes (someone is doing very well and someone else is having a really bad day) to over an hour (almost always a great game no matter who wins).

Yes there are people there who want nothing more to

make you angry and then question you about it, bro; welcome to the internet. Riot is doing what they can the quell the storm of trolldom from Trollopalis, but there are a lot bridges out there and even more people living under them.

League of Legends is a case study in how Free to Play gaming does and should work. A player can earn all the essentials with gameplay, the only exclusion being full body hats... skins! that's it! The game currency is reasonably priced, as are the items on which you spend it. Free to Play games could learn something from Riot's store. You will sell 1,000 French Maid Nidalee skins before you sell 52 Eve Online monocles, and you will make more money (and friends for that matter) doing it.

They even managed to implement a system akin to what the manshoots are running and gunning with nowadays. Leveling, loadouts, and specializations are all part of the game, under the guise of summoner skills, runes, and masteries.

I will close by stating the obvious... what are you doing still reading this? Sign up and download the client here and hit me up for a game. They call me Antipunk

My wallet Weeps As Steam's Summer Sale Makes Me Lose All Self Control

There is a farmer's market close to where I live at which I can fill up a cart of fruit and vegetables and always be shocked to be able to pay for it all with the change I have under the mats of my car. I mean, $3 for this crate of blueberries, how are you making money!? There is an incredible sense of pride when you get a great deal on something. I love telling people that I bought my TV for 25 bucks on craigslist.

In that spirit, I was pleased to see that when I woke the, now annual, Steam Summer Sale had begun. Before I knew it, my credit card had leapt into my left hand as my right hand furiously ten-keyed the numbers into my first purchase(s). I know I finished the main story of Oblivion years ago, but $8.50 for the Game of the Year Edition Deluxe... DELUXE! I would be ripped off not to buy it.

I can't wait to get around to playing it sometime in late 2013 and someone interrupt a conversation with a stony faced NPC to say, "Oblivion huh?" "Yes," I will reply, "and guess how much I got it for?"

While the feeling that these deals are just too good to pass up is at the forefront of my gaming consumer heart, the stupid logically part of my brain is whispering, "You know you won't play these games; you're backlog is already deeper than the hole to hell you dug in Terraria (NOW ONLY $7.49)."

In addition to Steam having deals that are making my bank account shed numbers like a Badass being shot w/ an assault rifle in Borderlands (Game of the Year Edition now only $7.50), Steam is also continuing their quest for prizes system that they introduced in the Great Steam Treasure Hunt of 2010. Each day of the sale is highlighted by certain games at discounted discounts discounting discounts, some of which have special achievements that can be done for tickets which are subsequently spent in a prize shop full of little pieces of DLC and knickknacks. Confused? See the full rundown by those who created it here.

The genius of the achievement for prizes for me is that it gets me to play games that have been sitting on their virtual shelf collecting online dust (which I imagine is a combination of rejected reddit posts and pornography). The Treasure Hunt got me to finally install Zombie Driver and Just Cause 2, both of which it turns out, are pretty amazing games.

Today Steam will have me playing:

Bit.Trip.Beat ($2.50) to get a perfect score in 1-1 (probably somewhere near impossible)

Lead and Gold ($1.50) to try to headshot 7 poor westerners without kicking the bucket. That sounds like I will be buying a friend a copy of that fantastically under-appreciated online multiplayer hoedown, in exchange for a favor.

Toki Tori ($1.24) to stand in all the sun beams. I don't know what that means, but I can't wait to finally have a reason to install Toki Tori and find out.

Swords and Soldiers High Definition ($3.40) to complete the Viking Campaign level 3 by killing all units.

There is a lot of gaming to be done, so until tomorrow, wish me luck.