Two Awesome Games for $10

Auditorium and Fractal are at the top of the list of the list of games that I should have bought but haven’t yet. Honestly, I’m not sure why I hadn’t bought them before now. Their normal price was decent and the demos were excellent. It’s moot now, because I snapped them up today after seeing Tesh (thanks Tesh!) mention that they are both 50% off.

Both games are very fun and unique experiences which I can’t recommend enough. At least go check out the demos, which you can play online at Auditorium and Fractal.

Only issue I have is that you can’t buy both at once, you have to make two separate purchases. From the comments on their sale blog post it’s a technical issue that is being worked on.

Steam Sale and Surprise

The Steam Perils of Summer sale is over. Based on what I’ve seen, I’m somewhere in the middle on money spent at $70. For only $10 more than getting a single console game, I now own:

  • Audiosurf
  • Beat Hazard
  • Borderlands + all the DLC
  • Dawn of Discovery – Venice
  • Galcon Fusion
  • Introversion Complete Pack (Uplink, DefCon, Darwinia, Multiwinia)
  • King’s Bounty: Gold Edition
  • Supreme Commander 2
  • Witcher: Enhanced Edition

I’ve been torn about whether or not to get Borderlands since it first launched. As a co-op focused game, I couldn’t decide if I’d end up playing more with Xbox friends or PC friends, plus there’s always GamerScore to think about. At $11 (+$12 for all the DLC), it was just too good of a deal to pass up. Plus, I saw a lot of my Steam friends getting it as well, so I figure there’ll be lots of people to play with.

I already own the original Witcher on DVD, but I bought the Enhance Edition anyway. This was purely out of laziness, now I don’t have to mess with patching the game when I reinstall it find the disc.

SupCom 2 and King’s Bounty are games I’d thought about getting at one point or another. I didn’t have a PC that would run SupCom2 well enough when it came out, and then when I had a PC that would run it, it was too old for me to buy at full price. King’s Bounty was one I wanted to buy when it launched but didn’t because of some DRM or retail issue, I can’t remember at this point.

Of all my purchases, Dawn of Discovery – Venice, was the only game I’d planned to buy soon. I really like Dawn of Discovery for city building, but I was waiting on getting the expansion until I’d finished a few more of my console games.

The rest of my purchases were all impulse buys: Audiosurf, Beat Hazard, Galcon Fusion, and the Introversion games. I’d demoed Audiosurf and Galcon before and liked them, but I’ve been out of a casual gaming mood for a long time now. Still at under $5 for each, they were worth adding to my library for whenever I was in the mood for a quick play session.

I haven’t played all of my purchases yet, but I did want to mention how surprised and thrilled I am with Beat Hazard. I picked this game up because it sounded fun and was only $2.50, but I didn’t expect to play it a bunch. It’s a shooter similar to Geometry Wars, but it uses your music collection to drive the gameplay. Oddly enough, it fills the same gaming niche for me that Rockband 2 does. Rockband is a game I play only once a month or so, but when I do, I play for a couple of hours. It’s a chance to listen to music that I like while also gaming. Beat Hazard is pretty much the same thing, only it’s an Asteroids-like shooter  instead of a rhythm game. Unlike Rockband, Beat Hazard is quick to pickup and play for five minutes at a time, and I think it’ll become a part of my regular gaming-life.

Crafting IRL: Bottling

Last week I left off with my beer just starting fermentation (which was May 29th). Checking on the fermenter a few hours later, I was seeing a few bubble in the airlock already. This is good, the bubbles are CO2 and it means that fermentation has started. At this point, things get pretty easy: check on the fermenter once a day or two, make sure the temperature is reading around 70F and see if the airlock is still producing bubbles.

Some time between 7 and 10 days the fermentation is usually done. In this case by the following Sunday, there no bubbles in the airlock but my weekend was a bit busy, so I put off bottling until the following weekend (June 12th). It’s not a good idea to leave beer in the primary fermenter longer than two weeks because the beer can start to pickup astringent flavors from the yeast at the bottom of the bucket. Some beers require secondary fermentation or just additional time, and that’s when people will siphon over to a secondary fermenter (usually glass). Making a low gravity, low alcohol, stout is pretty forgiving though. (more…)

Zinc’s Leaving

I got a little shock today from Twitter. Craig Zinkievich, the Executive Producer and a seven year veteran of Cryptic Studio, is leaving. In the full announcement, Craig basically says he’s taking the summer off to spend time with his family; although, he is planning to continue playing the game (I look forward to him posting gripes at the devs).

I was completely caught off-guard by Zinc leaving, and initially very concerned at what his departure might hint about the game’s future. Unlike with Roper’s management of Champions, overall I’ve been very happy with Zinc’s tenure as EP. Still, that initial fear reaction was just  my normal reaction to change. After reading the announcement twice and heading over to the forum thread, I was much less concerned.

Daniel Stahl, formerly a Producer on the game, is taking over for Craig and has brand new Twitter account, Cryptic_dStahl, if you’re interested in following him. Daniel is very active on the forums and well respected by the community, at least for now. MMO forum communities being what they are, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

If you want an idea of what kind of person is taking over management of the game, just read Stahl’s awesome response in the forum thread about Zinc leaving. There’s also a good follow up by Zinc to some of the comments in the thread, and an additional post by Daniel to address some of the conspiracy theorists. My cynical side suggests that all of this is exactly what Cryptic would post, but given the number of dev posts I’ve seen by Cryptic staff I don’t think that’s true.

Of course how this will actually affect the game is any one’s guess, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Crafting IRL: Brewing

Besides PC and console games, reading books, and sleeping, I like beer. I’m not talking about PBR (be thankful if you don’t know what that is) or Bud Lite, I’m talking about the good stuff: Guinness and micro-brews and such. I don’t drink a lot, and haven’t had a hangover in years, but I do enjoy a good beer or two.

I’ve wanted to try making my own beer for a long time, but I always thought it required having a basement because it would stink up the apartment or house and required cool temperatures. Neither one of these is true. Well the temperature thing can be true if you’re making a lager but it’s not true for making ales.

I started brewing in 2007 and have done seven batches (mostly stouts). I’m an extract brewer, which is a little easier than all-grain and requires less equipment and skill.

I realized recently that I hadn’t brewed in quite a while (August 2008), let’s blame fatherhood for that although it’s probably just laziness, so last month I decided it was time to get back to it and picked Saturday, May 29th. My favorite recipe that I’d made so far was a milk stout which is called that because it has milk sugar in it, lactose, which yeast cannot convert to alcohol. This makes a sweeter stout, and I’d really enjoyed my first batch (beer number 5) but it was almost gone. (more…)

New Ethshar Serial

I’m a long-time fan of the Ethshar series by Lawrence Watt-Evans. The first book I read, With a Single Spell, is actually the second in the series, and I picked it up as a kid during a regular scouring of a favorite used bookstore. I never ran across the other books, and it never occurred to me to look and see if his other works were part of the same world or not until rereading it a few years ago. Thanks to the magic of the Internet I found his site, a whole series of stand alone novels set in that world, and went on an Ethshar binge.

There are ten published novels, starting with The Misenchanted Sword and finishing with The Vondish Ambassador (the linked page is slightly out of date as VA is now published). The interesting thing is that the last two books: The Spriggan Mirror and The Vondish Ambassador were originally published on-line as serials.

In 2005, a combination of lack of publisher interest in continuing the series and fans clamoring for additional books led Watt-Evans to try an experiment. He wrote The Spriggan Mirror as a serial. To his surprise, it was successful and was completed and published. Since then he has completed a second serial, The Vondish Ambassador. It’s an interesting variation on the normal author/publisher model and apparently a good way to prove to a publisher that there is a market for stories they’re not otherwise interested in.

So, I was excited when I saw recently that he was working on a new serial called The Final Calling. I’m especially excited for this one since it deals with Warlockry, which has been a long running mystery in the series.

The details about how serialization works are here. The short version is: the first chapter is posted for free, each chapter after that is $250, and one chapter posted per week or more slowly depending on donations. Donors over $25 get a printed copy.

Of course there’s no guarantee that enough donations will come in to cover finishing the book. But, Watt-Evans is three for three so far and good at keeping to a schedule as well. Based on his last serial status update, the story is paid up through Chapter Seven (which he’s currently writing), Chapters One and Two are posted, and Chapter Three is scheduled to post on June 30th.

One Bullet Down

Scratch Crackdown 2 off yesterday’s list.

I spent an hour with the demo and did not have fun. It may have just been a bad demo, the game may actually be just as great as the first one, but I’m not planning to order it until I see what some other gamer-friends think of it.

The demo really felt like they gave you a beginning of the game character and dropped you into the middle of the game.

Decisions, Decisions

I may be switching to console mode again for a few days. Why?

  • Transformers: War for Cybertron is on it’s way from Amazon and should be here by Thursday.
  • There’s the freshly downloaded Crackdown 2 demo on my Eilte’s hard-drive begging to be played.
  • Mass Effect 2 has three DLC’s piled up that I’ve barely touched.
  • Red Dead Redemption has some new and free CO-OP maps.

There’s lots to do on the Xbox 360.

Then again, poor Cimmerian Brynulf has been trapped in Tortage for weeks longer than he should have been, and he’s only one quest away from escaping.

Bullet points provided courtesy of Anjin, Inc.

Silver Hunter and the Serpent Lantern

Serpent Lantern, the first Adventure Pack from Cryptic Studios for Champions Online, came out last week. I’d been looking forward to trying out the new content, even though my level-capped Silver Hunter still has quite a bit to do in Vibora Bay. I’ve been spending more time in the Alpha Quadrant and Middle-earth than Millennium City, recent and I was looking to SL to reawaken my interest.
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