Potato Sack #8

Last, but hardly least - Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

This game is all about atmosphere. If you enjoy horror survival, then this game is probably for you. And that is what it is - surviving the horrors around you. This is not Resident Evil or Silent Hill. You don't have guns that ward off the monsters. There's some parallels to Eternal Darkness, the old Gamecube game that focused on sanity and evil - but even then combat was a bit part of the gameplay. In Amnesia, make no mistake - there is no combat here. If you engage one of the castle's horrors, you're dead and reloading the game from a recent save point.

No, this game is about an immersive storyline told largely through flashbacks and notes after you awake with no memory. The way the story is pieced together as you find notes - sometimes from yourself prior to your memory loss (reminding me of a movie I like quite a bit, Memento), serves to encourage exploration as you try to make sense of your dark surroundings.

The graphics look a bit dated at first, there's no powerhouse engine running the show - but they do the job and set the scenes. Darkness creeps in on you from every angle, and as you are exposed to unsettling sites (doors opening of their own accord, rumblings, things like that) - your sanity suffers and a sort of watery filter is applied to the proceedings. It makes your character's movements slow and awkward, and can make your adventure even more dangerous should you encounter a creature.

Light is your friend. It's sort of the opposite of the shooting game The Darkness where you want to snuff out light at every turn. Here, you want to light candles and keep oil in your lantern. These light providing tools are limited resources though, and without them it is not only hard to see your surroundings and possibly miss important clues - but your sanity levels drop as well. You have traditional health as well that you will want to monitor, and the downside of using light is the creatures inhabiting the huge, strange castle, are more likely to notice you when you are in or near light. That creates an interesting balancing act in some of the later stages of the game.

There's a real sense of being immersed in the world as well by manipulating objects. You can pick up and rotate objects, giving them a sort of tangible, 3D feel. You don't just click on doors and drawers - but click, and then drag your mouse as you simulate the act of pulling a drawer open or pushing a door open. It's a small touch, and sometimes a bit clumsy - but overall a welcome one that adds a sort of tactile sense to your actions.

The sound effects are fantastic. The voice acting is generally good, if not great, but the best parts of the game are when you are alone, clinging to a source of light, surrounded by darkness and there's a scraping sound nearby. Were those footprints? Is that my breathing or something else's? Is there even anything else there? Most of the time, no. Thankfully the game is paced in such a way that it doesn't bog down with lots of needless encounters, but you can't take for granted you're alone in those moments either. Just as soon as you do, you round the corner - and you're dead.

You will be solving a myriad of puzzles, and most of them are not too hard. The clues are laid out logically and what you need to complete a particular puzzle is usually somewhat close at hand, whether it's a key, or a book to pull or an object to throw at a crumbling wall - you don't generally get stuck doing a lot of backtracking to solve them.

It's actually a good enough story on its own, but all of these addition elements are very skillfully blended. I liked horror games and horror movies. I almost dare them to spook me - and most of the time they don't do much more than cause an occasional chill, but this game pulled me in effectively enough to keep me on the edge of my seat almost throughout. So how would I score the game? Probably an 8.5. It's not a terribly long game. I'd have to check my time, but I'd guess it rang in at a bit less than 6 or 7 hours. There's also not much to do once you've beaten it. There is a neat sort of 'director's commentary' you can listen to as you play the game, to hear what the developers had in mind during certain parts of the game. It cuts down on tension but offers some interesting insight into the game's creation.

I didn't record any video of this particular game - I played it full screen, which made recordings a bit harder to do, and quite frankly you just don't get the full effect if you're not playing it yourself - preferably in a dark room with loud sound effects.

Wrapping up the Potato Sack

I will be honest, this game was a huge part in my acquisition of the Potato Sack from Steam. I had been wanting to play it for quite some time, and while the $20 price tag was not in and of itself off-putting to me, I was waiting for it to go on sale. This particular sale was just the reason to acquire it when I did. I got a slew of others good games out of the deal in the process - overall it was a good investment for me. For about $35 bucks I got to play 13 different games, and probably spent about a hundred hours or so in total in doing so. Some of them were more obscure than others - I had never actually heard of Audio Surf or Killing Floor, while others like Amnesia and Super Meat Boy had received a good deal of acclaim from professional review sites and users alike. Some fare better than others, and with such a diverse collection of games, everyone's mileage will no doubt vary.

Since getting a new cpu this last Christmas (thank you dear!), I've had an opportunity to play a lot of games previously not available to me, and I've been enjoying it immensely. Steam is one of my regular websites to check now, looking for a good game at a good price. Some come out to be better deals than others, and while I'm not a huge fan of the digital rights stuff that requires I be online to play them, I have to say that overall I am very pleased with the service so far.

Thanks for hanging in there as I wrote up this large collection of articles - I've appreciated the comments and hope you enjoyed them as well!

Read More

Potato Sack #7

One of the game that I got as part of my Potato Sack acquisition from Stem was Defense Grid: Awakening. I've got this for my 360 as well, having acquired it last summer when it was on sale for like 200 points. It's an awesome game, but obviously was not one of my biggest factors in acquiring the Potato Sack. I have been meaning to give it a good review for some time, so we'll just count this as a PC and 360 Arcade review since the game is pretty much the same on both platforms.

Defense Grid is a tower defense game - which basically means you have swarms of invaders (aliens in this case) who travel various paths to try and reach a goal (in this game, they are trying to go to your core reactor, to steal energy cores for themselves, which then will then try to march off of the map). Your objective is to create defense towers to stop them. You do this by gaining resources - and these increase a couple of ways. First, you are always gaining, though the more cores you currently have protected (you start with 24 and if all of them are stolen, it's game over) and the more resources you have on hand, the faster that value goes up. So for example if you're sitting on 24 cores and 1000 resources, every second that goes by you may gain 3 more resources. If you have 3 cores and 10 resources, you may gain an additional one every 30 seconds or so. It creates an interesting dynamic where you want to sit on resources as long as possible - but not so long that your defenses are under-developed and unable to thwart the invading aliens.

The other way you gain resources is by destroying aliens. They came at you in a variety of shapes, sizes and powers. Weak herds of them may band together, trying to swarm through fifteen at a time in a cluster, making it hard for guns to single them out and pick them off - so perhaps a flame throwing tower works better here. Boss aliens are better armored and so flame throwing is not nearly as effective as a gun tower. There's faster than average aliens, flying aliens, aliens who spawn more aliens, and it's a challenge to set up a proper defense that can best handle all of these things. A missile tower might keep the skies free and clear, but they don't help you at all against ground units.

Aside from a large variety of towers to choose from, you can also spend to upgrade them. This improves their abilities - but usually at considerable resource cost. It's a wonderful balance of strategy and management, all wrapped up in a visually pleasing sci-fi package. The music's nice enough, and there's a narrator with a calm, likable voice as the somewhat thin storyline is advanced by him and new towers and tools are skillfully integrated into your arsenal level by level.

Time flies when you're having fun, and I've always found this game to be personally very fun. I remember playing it the first time and then realizing around 3am that I had been playing for about 5 hours. I had beaten most of the maps in that time, but there's varying degrees of difficulty, leader boards, and the very nature of the game begs for experimentation and replay as you attempt to protect each and every core the next time. The graphics are not exactly powerhouse, but I thought they looked better than most tower defense games, and this one can be had on Steam for $10.

I already had this one so for me personally the value as part of the Potato Sack was slightly negated, but for fans of this genre I would encourage giving the demo a try. For me the title's a 9 out of 10. Quick video below of one of the earlier levels:

Read More

Potato Sack #6

13 games for about $35. It's a pretty ridiculous deal if you think about it, but only if those 13 games are worth what their price tag dictates. We all know that's not always the case. Steam released their Potato Sack before Portal 2 came out, with a bunch of indie games in it. I decided to pick it up and go through these games in slightly less than full-blown review status. This post will reflect on Killing Floor and Audiosurf. The two games have nothing in common, but since I couldn't get a good video of Killing Floor, I thought I would talk about it and then finish with Audiosurf.

Killing Floor immediately reminded me of Left for Dead - a game I picked up for my 360 somewhat recently for about $10. Get together with people online or battle the zombies by yourself using whatever weapons you can to try and stay alive. The storyline is almost non-existent, but that's okay since you'll likely be playing online with other people. The single player mode is okay, but it's the online that really keeps you engaged.

I had honestly never heard of Killing Floor until the Potato Sack, but I'm actually pretty glad I acquired this game now. It's a $20 download though, so I'm not sure I would have picked it up under normal, full-priced scenarios (I got Left for Dead on my 360 for about $9). I don't do a lot of online games. I played World of Warcraft for a few years, and even then did most of my leveling solo. Still, this game is easily better with online play. It's far from a perfect experience though.

I've read a lot of people have connection issues - thankfully I was not among them, but even if I had been, I'm confident I could have navigated my network settings pretty easily. Benefits of being in software tech support I guess - but I know not everyone has that particular luxury. I did however had a lot of graphics issues right off the bat. My computer more than meets the system specs, but I was getting these crazy flashing screens and the game would crash on my initially. Tripwire Interactive didn't have any obvious tech support - it directed you to forums, which sort of annoyed me at first. That said, the information in the forums was actually pretty hand, and these were known issues I was able to fix up pretty quickly.

Once I was on my way and playing, I was introduced to a game that I would summarize as:

- fast and fun
- with pretty good graphics
- rocking music but horrible voice over

There's still glitches, and there are not a ton of maps, but the online, different characters and perks and weapons all add up to make most sessions unique. My son likes these types of games as well - he loved Left for Dead when I bought it, and he too immediately saw the parallels between that game and this one, though Left for Dead felt a bit more polished in my opinion and I liked it better. I'd probably score Killing for a 7.5, but I'm factoring in value at the cost and the time I had to put into getting it to work right I suppose. My son, when asked, said a 9 out of 10, and that he thought it was a lot 'cooler' than Left for Dead

Audiosurf almost feels more like an experience than a game. There's certainly game elements involved - scores, maneuvering around on the screen - things like that. The goal is pretty simple - you control a sort of hovercar back and forth, collecting colored blocks to help create combo scores while trying to avoid gray, colorless blocks that can ruin these combinations. There's a futuristic vibe through the menu and limited sound effects, and the graphics while fairly simple are appealing at least. The core game mechanic however, is similar to 1... 2... 3... drop this beat that I covered in Potato Sack #1 - you pick your own MP3's, and the track, tempo and colored objectives change accordingly. That provides a good deal of variation in the game. There's quite a few difficulty levels, types of vehicles and the music is limited only by your own collection, so replay value is actually pretty significant here.

There's a demo you can pick up, and at $10 I would recommend trying that. It's not a game I plan to spend a ton of time with - I'd probably go with a 6.5 or 7 if I was scoring. It's okay in small doses, but not engaging enough for me personally.

I have a brief video down below of it. Killing Floor, with its handful of graphics configuration issues would not play nice with me when trying to record, so the video is Audiosurf only.

Read More

Potato Sack #5

One of the more curious titles in the recent Steam Potato Sack was Super Meat Boy. I'm going to be up-front on this one: I'm not much of one for platformers. Super Mario Bros games hold a special place in my heart, and my kids like them (we have Kirby's Epic Yarn - which I still haven't touched), but generally speaking platforming games do not hold the same place in my heart as sports, strategy, rpg and fighters. When I think of platforming games, I think of interesting visuals, challenging jumps, lots of dying and level memorization. These were staples of the NES era when I'd play games like Life Force, Contra, Rush N Attack, Legendary Wings and so many more. But over the years, I did not play these kinds of titles nearly as much.

Why am I prefacing this? Because on the one hand, I can appreciate a lot of what Super Meat Boy does and does well, but it's not a game I will probably spend a ton of time playing personally. My son loves it. He has no problem with trial and error and tons of deaths. I find it to be a decent 20-30 minute diversion and then I sink my gaming teeth into something a bit... well, I was going to say 'meatier' - realized the unintentional pun within, and hang my head in shame. Moving on...

There's a lot to like here. the presentation is full of retro goodness for people who enjoy this sort of genre. You will die and often, but one thing I did appreciate was that most of the levels were actually quite short. No checkpoints, no running out of lives. Boss battles feel a bit more like a traditional Super Mario level, where as many of the levels in Super Meat Boy are much shorter. In the first world, you will be seeing several levels that are 1 screen in size is all.

The controls are solid. You run, you jump, you cling (and slide down) walls as you angle for your next jump. There's a sense of both horizontal and vertical scale that keeps the levels feeling fresh. Graphics and music and sound all work together to help recreate the retro experience. On their own, these elements are slightly above-average to good, and not great, but together they do a good job of carrying the game's theme and intent across.

There are a lot of intangibles here. Each level has a tougher, more sadistic 'dark world' that amps up the difficulty level and splashes the screen with a cool, new look to levels you've already beaten. There's secrets to find including bandages you can use to unlock new characters who all have their own attributes as well. There are also leaderboards for those who like to compare scores. All of this adds up to a fairly large game with a lot to do.

At $15 on Steam, it's not a bad price. It lacks some of the musical and graphic 'wow' of a Super Mario or Kirby release, but at a fraction of the price, that's to be expected. If you enjoy platforming gameplay and aren't frustrated/turned off by punishing difficulties, then there's a lot of value to be had here and it's probably worth a go. This is a game I've been eying for awhile, and I'm glad I got it as part of this package and not as a standalone personally. I'd probably give the game an 8 - it's not my cup of tea but I can't deny that you get a lot of game here for the price.

Below is a funny video of my gaming session. I have no idea what was going on here. usually the game is fast and buttery smooth playing on my machine. But as I recorded it here, two things began to happen. A) The game slowed down considerably. Not surprising that if my processor's getting taxed that I'd be dropping frames. B) While I was recording, impossible game physics occurred. I was unable to jump at times, I couldn't cling to walls -and as you will see, I started to fall through walls and floors. I have absolutely no idea how this happened, but the video plays out almost more as a blooper reel. A level that's usually a matter of seconds to finish? I couldn't do it. Somehow the game engine was affected by my processor being taxed, and breaking its physics. I've love to know what is happening here behind the scenes to cause that, but I thought it made for an entertaining video at least. :)

Read More

Potato Sack #4

Indie games are generally ones done without a large budget. One of the best ways to get around the need for voice acting, powerful graphics engines and more is to develop a puzzle game. Set up a system of rules and then apply them creatively to a span of levels. Several of the games in the Potato Sack package by Steam recently would fall into that particular category, and among them was Cogs by Lazy Eight Studios.

The premise is both interesting and simple - slide around wooden panels (much like those plastic frame-enclosed sliding square games from when I was a kid), but instead of trying to assemble an image, you are connecting parts of a greater whole to make an invention. My wife played something similar on her iPad recently, and her reaction to that game seems similar to my reaction to this one. It's fun to start, and you get a nice sense of accomplishment when your invention is fully assembled and it 'comes to life'. You use gears, pipes and more to line up gas valves, put a clock into motion and play out musical chimes in a specific order.

There is a lot going on at any given time. It's not just enough to figure out how to lay things out, but the need to shuffle the squares means that there's no clear path in place for doing so. It's really very easy earlier on, but the challenges become quite taxing in the later stages and make the game feel like a bit more of a drag. As you complete puzzles, you gain stars. Sort of like Guitar Hero, you unlock later challenges through the accumulation of these stars, so you can theoretically skip some of the puzzles if you are really struggling with them.

Graphics are okay, and the sound effects feel appropriate though the music is pretty underwhelming and there's not a lot of variety to be had either.

With no hint system in place, some of these challenges can get pretty frustrating. Like my wife's iPad game, Cogs was a lot of fun when I started, but the returns diminished for me the further into it I got. At $10, it's not a bad game, but I'd probably give Cogs a 6 or 6.5. It's not bad, but there's better for the price (you could for example, pick up Toki Tori and Rush for that same price).

The other game I want to talk about is called Bit.Trip Beat and it, like cogs, is $10 on Steam normally. I thought the title looked familiar, so I did a quick bit of research and realized I had seen a review for this on the Wii in the past too. I had been playing some of the Steam 'music' games like Audio Surf or 1... 2... 3... and thought I was in for a similar experience with Bit.Trip - but was pleasantly surprised to find that was not the case.

The first impression is an interesting one - I had this full screen game of low resolution, blocky but colorful graphics with a paddle on the left side that immediately called out to classics like Pong. The retro graphic style quickly grew on me though, as did the catch electronic beats. The premise is pretty simple - objects fly at you from the right side of the screen, while you move your paddle up and down on the left hand side to keep the flying pixels from falling off of the screen. Succeed in making contact, and it turns out that precise moment matches a beat in the funky music score. It's all very engaging - my oldest daughter's not much of a gamer, but she loved this one.

As you get further along, the challenge can become a bit overkill - truly frustrating. It doesn't help that sometimes there's just so much going on in the game and with the backgrounds, that your flying pixels can be obscured. It feels a bit cheap when you have a huge string of hits going and a block slides past you because you never saw it on screen due to the background comet hiding it.

Let too many blocks on by, and you wind up in a dull, gray, music-less world that gives you a chance to save yourself. These sections are much easier because you don't have the various distractions - but it's just not as much fun either. You find yourself desperately wanting to get back to the music and color that gives Bit.Trip Beat its life. I'd probably go with 7, maybe 7.5 simply because my daughter enjoyed it so much - at $10 it's not a bad value and was a bit of a surprise for me in fact.

Down below is a video of the early Bit.Trip first level and then also me solving out a couple of the earlier puzzles in Cogs.

Read More

Potato Sack #3

The Potato Sack by Steam was an attempt at getting a bunch of Indie games together, and packaging them at a single price. It was a heavily discounted package that helped draw attention to some titles that might not normally have seen much attention. While the first 2 posts I made on this topic revolved heavily around smaller, more obscure titles, there were a few in the Potato Sack package there tried to push a bit further and show that they had more in common with big budget games than most indie efforts. Some worked better than others in this package, and the game I want to take a brief look at today is simply called: The Ball

The first thing you notice is that it touts the use of Unreal engine and that it has a fairly nice-looking if brief opening scene, giving it a story before plunging you into the depths of an archealogical dig on your own. You then happen to come across a strange 'gun' for lack of a better term, though it's really more of a physical hammer (left-click) and a drawing device (right-click). Your primary tool in this game is a very large, ancient ball. You can propel it forward with the left-click and draw it back to you with the right.

What do you use the ball for? Just about everything. It's your tool in combat (run over monkeys, zombies and more with it) and your primary means of solving puzzles. I would say the majority of the game is puzzle solving and exploration. To that end, the game generally works pretty well. The environments look pretty good, the puzzles are generally logical and the ball is integrated into them pretty well. The music is decent as well, but the sound effects annoyed me a fair amount - usually because you have to have the 'draw' part of the gun active so the ball follows you around, and it's a somewhat grating sound after awhile.

Also of concern are the controls. At times they can be really touchy, and while the game does have checkpoints, they are spread apart just far enough that you find yourself retracing your steps. Also, while the ball itself handles okay, there's times when you have to 'hammer' cubes into locations and that just feels clumsy. Also, I got hung up on environments at least 4 or 5 times while I played, and was finally the reason I stopped about halfway through. The game does not seem to be terribly long - looking at the achievements it appears the game is about 4 or 5 chapters and I got through the first couple relatively quickly. But the last time I had gotten hung up, there had not been a save in nearly 25 minutes, and then I tried to jump over something, and got 'stuck' on a wall. The first couple of times it happened it was annoying, by the last time though, it was just killing the game for me because it seemed like each time forced a lot of lost time.

Combat is also kind of awkward. You get the hang of it quickly enough, launching the ball at your targets and then pulling it back to you to run over anyone you might have missed. But, with the controls being so jumpy at times, it is easy to get ganged up on by charging creatures and feel like you never got a chance to defend yourself.

On the one hand, I can appreciate what the developer, Teotl Studios was trying to do here, but the $20 price tag, annoying situations/glitches/controls and what appears to be a somewhat short run time make it hard to recommend this particular title. There is a demo of it on Steam if you think you might be interested, but this is a title that I'm glad was a throw-in and really didn't cost me anything as I would probably only give it a 4.5 to a 5 overall.

I included a brief video below of me solving a couple of puzzles, and you can see the game mechanics in action.

Read More

Potato Sack #2

So I touched on a trio of titles that were interesting, but as full games were a bit lacking in my mind - at least for the price - back with Potato Sack #1 the other day. This time, I'm examining two of the titles created by Two Tribes - Toki Tori and Rush.

Both of these games are essential puzzlers. Toki Tori has minimal story - you're basically gathering up eggs in various levels using a handful of tools available to you. When you start off, it's little more than navigating a basic level. It's all 2-D platforms, ladders and occasionally very simple enemies that wander back and forth repeatedly. You will use freeze rays, a teleporter, lay down bridges and more during your adventure. There are 4 worlds in total, and a dozen maps in each. I blew through the first two worlds in about an hour, but spent much longer on the last couple of worlds as the difficulty spiked a bit. You have to be very creative when you try to navigate the maps, but there is a handy rewind feature that lets you go back to various points in the map in case you made a silly mistake along the way. It's a great mechanic that encourages much-needed experimentation.

The intangibles are somewhat lacking - there's a harder difficulty that can be applied to the maps, essentially doubling them, but when it's done it's done. There's just not much to do after. Graphics are cute - bright and colorful. My youngest termed them 'adorable' when she saw me playing. The sound is okay though the music was actually pretty catchy. From what I've seen, the maps are different on the PC than the Wii version. Overall, I'd give the game a 7 or maybe 7.5. It was fun, and at $5 on steam, not a bad value if you like this kind of game.

The other Two Tribes game in the Potato Sack was Rush. Again, a puzzle game, but without the cute graphics of Toki Tori. You control blocks that roll from start points, and you use certain physics, signs, treadmills and more to redirect them to a finish point on a 3-D map that sort of reminded me of Marble Madness on a much smaller scale. It sounds easy, and some levels are, but others require a lot of thought. There's a nice hint system you can leverage as well should a map be particularly challenging.

Graphics are bright and fun, if very simple. Not much in the way of sounds, but the music is catchy at times. The controls and menus are easy to get around and the learning curve is pretty solid. There's probably around 100 puzzles in total - you can get more if you sign up for the Steam group on Rush. I liked this one just a bit better than Toki Tori - so probably a 7.5 or an 8 overall out of 10. Like Toki Tori, it has a palatable $5 price tag should this sort of game be of interest, and I believe there's a free demo available for download as well. A pleasant surprise that I spent most of my afternoon on (Toki Tori I believe took me about 4 hours to get through the normal difficulty from start to finish).

In the video you can see my struggling with levels the first time I encountered them in both games. Toki Tori in particular was rough - about the first 4/5 of that video was me being stuck, then dead. Then, the light bulb came on and you can see me wrap up in the level in about a half minute.

Read More

Gaming thoguhts... 5/2/11

Quite a bit going on game-wise right now, for me and in general.

So, the in general first:

Lots of new stuff about the Project Cafe by Nintendo has speculation running all over the place. Too soon to really get into any one camp about it, but I'm definitely curious where it will go. Hearing that it will have significantly more horsepower than the 360 and PS3 was interesting, but the controller rumors and how it will be integrated into the game play is a bigger curiosity of mine. Also, hopefully they'll get the online stuff right this time around. Speaking of getting online right...

Sony held a press conference earlier stating that they were working with the FBI and will be slowly bringing up their systems over the next few weeks or so. They're also running with the idea to give Playstation Plus users an extra 30 days free, while giving all PSN users a free 30 day run of Playstation Plus. I think that's a good idea for a few reasons:

- that will increase downloads and help them stress test things
- it doesn't really cost Sony anything unlike the suggestion to put funds in our wallets online
- it gives people a chance to try the service who haven't yet (raises a hand - that's me) - so they may even get some new customers out of the deal.

There was a lot of good sentiment to what Sony's offering and saying, but still question marks. The Playstation Store sounded like it could be down much of May. That makes it hard to take advantage of Playstation Plus - so when does that free 30 day trial start, exactly? Also, Sony has said there would be select free downloadables - I for one am curious what those are. Games? Themes? What if you have said items already - do you get alternates?

So far it doesn't look like anything bad's come of the vulnerable account data, but only time will tell. Losing the network access has been mildly annoying for me - I just picked up Mortal Kombat and couldn't really do much of anything with it online, but I know my time will come. The potential loss of personal credit information was much more bothersome, and I am keeping a close eye on that.

I just wrapped up my large Mortal Kombat series of reviews. I don't often get to review brand new games, that are only a couple of weeks old, so I wanted to get that one out there quickly. A few of my side projects are on hold at the moment. I wanted to do more 'best free games' but haven't had much of a chance. Also, my KotL - Summoner game is on hold for a bit. My trial ran out and I do plan on buying it and picking up where I left off - I've got about 45 minutes of play right now. I don't plan to make this a massive game, but hopefully 4-6 hrs worth of time, but I probably have to wait a few weeks before I can dig back into it anyway.

That gets me into my biggest game related project of late. I've been breaking down the Potato Sack from Steam. 13 games - lots there. I'll probably break this up into multiple posts over the next couple of weeks. While the deal's dead, the individual games are still on Steam for those who find something interesting. And many of these games wind up on sale from time to time - like Amnesia just in the last 6 months has been on sale for 2 or 3 different times and was included in this bundle.

I've also got a handful more reviews coming up soon - having recently beaten several games. So, what am I playing now?

Well, I've been playing King's Bounty on Sega Genesis for a retro. I've been playing FX Pinball as well on my PS3. I've been playing one of the Dragon Ball Z games on my 360 as well. Then there's the potato sack. God of War has gotten a bit of time too. Also as soon as I post this, I am ducking back into Star Craft 2 a bit - I've hardly gotten to play it yet, but really want to so that's next. What have you all been up to and have any thoughts about the general topics above?

Read More