I think I did okay with the Steam Summer Sale this year. I picked up a reasonable handful of games, but I didn’t add a bunch of crap to the Backlog of Shamefully Un-played Impulse Buys like I used to in the old days. I actually took this time to cull some stuff from my wishlist. I figure if it’s 75% off and I’m still not buying it, then I’m probably never gonna buy it.
Link (YouTube) |
So my plan was to play a bunch of demos for this series. But then Steam Next Fest ended, and a bunch of demos were removed from Steam. That’s just crazy bananas. If you’ve got a demo and it’s still representative of the quality of the full product, then taking down a demo is hurting yourself for no benefit.
Weird.
(I know the claim is that demos supposedly lower sales. I have some serious concerns with the methodology behind that conclusion. Most importantly, I think it only applies to popular AAA titles in entrenched genres. I don’t need a demo for AssCreed or Tomb Raider, because I already know how those games work. This isn’t always true when dealing with a fresh genre blend from an unknown developer with an unknown property. I might actually enjoy your mashup of Cooking Mama with Batman Arkham combat and a dash of Tekken by way of Fruit Ninja. I don’t know. If you let me try a little of it, then it significantly lowers my risk. The study above claims that game demos hurt sales, but going by my personal buying habits that’s not the case. This study is basically saying, “Who are you going to believe, our statistics, or your own eyes?”)
Anyway. Like I said: I’d planned to review some demos, but they were taken down.
But! The Steam Summer Sale began just a few days after SNF ended, and basically my entire wishlist went on sale. So what I’m going to do is drop coverage of games that have pulled their demos and instead cover a few of these shiny new wishlist items I’ve picked up. And to be clear, I’m not trying to punish the games that pulled their demos. It’s just that, you know, I can’t cover them, because the demo is gone.
Let’s start with one of the demos that’s still live:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Steam Next Fest 2021 Pt2: City of Beats / Neon Abyss”
My writing is generally fueled by whatever experiences I’m having at the moment. If I’m programming, then I talk about the coding I’m doing. If I’m playing a videogame, then I talk about the game. If I’m inflicting my music on the world, then I talk about music theory. And if my health is bad, then I try to find a way to talk about it in a way that makes it funny or thoughtful.
Lately I’m spending a lot of time worrying about my health, but this time around it’s a dull, grim sort of worry. I don’t have anything witty to say about my current predicament and I don’t have any clever observations. Things are just going poorly and there’s nothing to be done about it. My current situation is my new normal and I need to accept that.
My father died in 2000 at the age of 59. For years I’ve been half-jokingly saying that my goal was to beat him and at least make it to 60. He was an overweight recovering alcoholic with epilepsy that lived alone and smoked two packs a day, so outliving him always sounded like a pretty easy goal. I’ve got a decade to go if I want to outlast him, and It wasn’t until recently that I started to worry that I might not make it.
I’m fine at the moment, but I’m dealing with a lot of cascading health complications that began with my high blood pressure and have branched outward since then. I want to repeat that I’m okay right now. I’m not in pain and I’m not dying. But I’m moving a lot slower than I was a year ago, and I need to be very careful with my diet and medications to make sure things don’t get any worse. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast Unplugged #6: Let’s Talk About DEATH”
Like I said at the end of my E3 coverage, Steam NEXT Fest features a ton of playable demos. So I decided I’d play a few of them and offer my reaction. I spent a bunch of page space responding to the AAA trailers that the big publishers put out, so it seems only fair that I should give some attention to the hardworking indie teams that went to the time and trouble of putting together a playable demo here in the year of our Lord, twenty hundred and twenty-one. I thought demos were all but extinct, and if developers are going to bring them back then we ought to reward them with our attention.
Then again, maybe my attention isn’t that great of a reward. I am by nature relentlessly picky, insufferably critical, and tragically jaded. When you put out some sort of trailer or public demo, then you’re probably looking for unconditional fanboy gushing, not the critique of an aging, cantankerous programmer.
This is particularly true when my response is generally negative, which is the case for…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Steam Next Fest 2021 Pt1: Lake”
We spend most of the show talking about game demos and trailers. Which means the show notes are going to be a big wall of embedded videos. I realize this isn’t super-useful to those of you who read in an environment where you can’t watch videos, but this is what happens when you do an entire show about three-minute video game commercials.
Link (YouTube) |
And so we end E3 week with a final catch-all post designed to round up the smaller presentations. Note that I won’t be covering the Nintendo stuff at all. I’m just not keyed into Nintendo’s stuff and so I’m not going to have anything useful to say.
Same goes for Capcom, although I’m willing to bet Chris will have some thoughts on that stuff at some point, if you’re following him.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2021 Part 4: And the Rest…”
Like I said in the previous post, the Xbox show is not a double act featuring both Xbox and Bethesda. Here is the second half of the Xbox presentation…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2021 Part 3: Still More Xbox”
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