T w e n t y S i d e d
Impulse turns 2 today. (Get 15% off using the coupon code Impulse-Bday.)
Deus Ex turns 10 today, and yesterday it was on sale on Steam for $2.50. I meant to tell you about that but it slipped my mind.
And Clockworks turns a year old today.
That’s a lot of birthdays. What’s the big deal with June 23?
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Revisiting a Dead Engine
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Happy Birthday to Quebec, too!
Well… tomorrow anyways. Those two days get mixed up with all the drinking everyone does.
And Alan Turing’s 98th birthday. And Mathematica‘s 22nd.
And Joss Whedon: June 23, 1964.
I couldn’t think of someone I know who’s birthday is June 23, so naturally I looked the day up on Wikipedia. How is that natural? I don’t know!
Anyway, I watched Firefly for the first time ever yesterday, and here’s what makes this relevant: Reading the births section of Wikipedia’s page on June 23, I found out it’s also the birthday of Joss Whedon. An interesting coincidence.
Oh, and I can’t edit posts anymore? I just meant to say that by yesterday, I meant the 23rd, as it’s the 24th here now.
There’s a 30 min time limit on editing your own post… looks like you “missed it by that much.” :)
Wait… I missed Joss’s birthday? o.0 /shameful
I guess a lot of developers get randy around September.
Deus Ex at Gamersgate is $0.01 cheaper at $2.49! Great for Steam-dislikers. :P
A tempting proposition… but frankly I’d like to keep all my downloaded games in one bin. It’s either GOG.com or Steam, anything else is just too much to keep track of for me.
Gamersgate is nice, as it’s clientless. You can also backup the downloaded installer files to your local drives. Gamersgate also has a good policy on limited installs as they can reset the install count if you need to.
I use GOG, Steam, Gamersgate and Impulse for my gaming needs. But if the boxart is nice, I’ll buy from a B&M store.
I always buy from a B&M store whenever possible. Only bought 6 games digitally. And even then all I used was Steam and GoG.
Steam:
-Mass Effect, since if I bought it physically I’d have to deal with the secuROM. And I’ll be damned if I let that crap on my PC.
-Killing Floor, it was $5 during the Steam Christmas sale, I couldn’t resist.
-Battlefield 2, lost the disks and isn’t sold anywhere near me. Also bought this during the Steam Christmas sale for $5
-Beyond Good and Evil, wasn’t sold anywhere near me, and I’ve been wanting to play through it again for ages. Of course when I got it off Steam for $10 two days later GoG offers the Beyond Good and Evil and Prince of Persia Sands of Time as a $10 bundle. I was pissed.
-GTA Vice City, got it during Rockstar Week. Was the one GTA game I never beat, isn’t sold anywhere near me, and I lost my PS2 disk.
GoG:
-Fallout 1, never played it until recently. Figured I’d give it a shot since I’ve been told many times how its the best of the series story-wise. Figured I’d check it out, and I regret nothing.
Over here, B&M stores have small variety of titles, high prices, rarely there is anything on sale (4 year old games are still sold on full price) and people give funny (or sad) looks when a 36 years old male is buying a computer game. It is much more of an embarrassing situation than buying hardcore BSM gay porn…
So steam is a great option for me.
If I want the boxed copy, I ask my sister to bring me one from the US the next time she comes for a visit.
You would find that in the US, the opposite is true: no-one bats an eyelid when 36+ YO males buy video games. The hardcore BSDM gay pron, on the other hand…
… not that I would know, of course!
I turn able-to-legally-purchase-M-rated-games exactly one month from now, which makes me happy.
I’m just going to say it straight: if you don’t have Deus Ex, and you don’t buy it now, you’re an idiot.
Also, Deus Ex: Invisible War is a pretty good and somewhat under-appreciated game. If you like Deus Ex then it is definitely worth your money. Don’t shy away from it just because you’ve heard it’s not as good – barring some technical quirks, simplified (sometimes for the better) game systems, and smaller levels, it really is a steal for $2.50.
If they would fix the “won’t-run-on-multicore-machines” bug in Deus Ex, I might actually play it. As it is, I hate having to alt-tab out during the intro movie and bind the game to one core, and as a result I just don’t play.
It is installed, though.
Try “C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /C start /affinity 1 “
Got it from steam and never noticed any issues that forced me to alt-tab or anything.
I also modded the game to get some better visuals.
this link is very helpful (there is also a mod that deals with multi-core issues):
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1235278
Dang. I bought Deus Ex about two or three weeks ago. If I had only waited.
My sister turns 12 today.
and its my birthday on the 23rd too!
Does it bother anyone else that the opening act of Deus Ex has terrorists seize the building right next door to the world anti-terrorist headquarters? I love the game, but that always stuck in my craw.
Haven’t played it, but I don’t see it as a major issue. Part of terrorism is proving that every citizen out there is vulnerable, and so hitting a building next to the Anti-Terrorism Center fits right with that methodology, especially if the terrorists don’t care about their own lives.
I think it’s perfectly realistic. Terrorists always seem to infiltrate CTU on 24. :)
UNATCO has its HQ there for symbolic reasons – because of the previous terrorist attack on The Lady. So it has double symbolic significance to the terrorists – both as a thumbing of their nose to UNATCO, and a quasi connection of their reputation to the more successful previous bombers.
I realize that the terrorists would want to capture the statue of liberty, I just can’t imagine that they could. It would be like the Taliban seizing control of the Pentagon to protest the war in Afghanistan.
Today is my birthday. June 23rd is also Luxembourg Independence Day. This is too implausible to be a coincidence.
Remember the birthday paradox is in effect here. There are a total of 366 possible days, there are over 6 billion people alive, so more than 16 million people share each birthday. There have to be millions, if not billions or trillions of significant events, as well. Nothing implausible about it.
Oh my god 23!
Also, Clockworks turned 1 year old on the 23rd.
I think I know why June 23: all the kids are usually finally out of school by then, even in the Northeast (though I know one school that doesn’t get out till the 28th this year… inhumane).
Do they release games on Tuesdays like they do CDs and books and DVDs? In that case, maybe check June 30 for game bdays as well.
Yesterday was also my Cousin’s B-day. :p
“Deus Ex turns 10 today, and yesterday it was on sale on Steam for $2.50. I meant to tell you about that but it slipped my mind.”
Damn you, Shamus. Damn you.
I could have had both Deus Ex 1 & 2 for $5.00. Now I have to pay double that for just one!
Ten dollars! Why, I could eat lunch at a chain restaurant for that kind of money! And think of all the ramen!
also my girlfriends birthday that why it’s posted to day. spent whole day at holiday world. also why i’m so sunburned i can’t sit in a chair properly.
For many companies it’s the last week of the fiscal year.
I don’t know about game companies, but many companies don’t operate on a Jan-Dec fiscal year…a lot of places it’s July-June. It would make sense to me if a game company had a year like that, because they have so many sales right around the holidays that it doesn’t make that a good time to end a fiscal year…you try to do that during a slower month, which for game companies is always the summer.
Most companies will try desperately to get a product out the door before the end of a fiscal year. This is one of the major reasons game companies go bankrupt: too many years in a row of zero revenue looks bad on the books, even though maybe every third year they make it all up.
Our financial system in America is not built to the advantage of people who produce products that take longer than one year to produce unless you can offset that by having multiple multi-year products releasing at a steady pace.
Hence EA.
June 23 is MY b-day too! :D