Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

To all please have a happy and safe holiday season :)

Assassin’s Creed II

Back in 2012 I was full bore into my Steam whore phase where anything that even remotely looked interesting that was on a deeply discounted sale I would invariably pick up. I have dozens of games that I have either only played a few minutes in, and some I have never even installed (after five + years of ownership). During the 2012 Christmas sale I picked up Assassin's Creed II: Deluxe Edition for $4.99, as well as Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Deluxe, and Assassin's Creed Revelations - Gold Edition for $4.99 - $7.49 each.

PC Gaming is Dead and Cryptocurrency Killed It

I am a free market guy, I don’t believe that the government has any business setting minimum wage, rent controls, and the like. The market should dictate the price of any given product or service, and people should be free to make informed (or misinformed) decisions at will. At least I thought I was a free market guy. It turns out I am as long as it works for me, but when I feel the negative effects of the pseudo-free market that exists in America, I am one of those pussies who cry to the Federal Government for help.

Top 10 Video Games of 2017

The following list is my top 10 games that I have played in the last year. Feel free to chime in with some of your favorites from the past 12 months of gaming.

1. Fallout 4
2. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition
3. Motorsports Manager
4. Breach & Clear
5. Cities Skylines (gift)
6. Grand Theft Auto V
7. F1 2014
8. Ticket to Ride (gift)
9. Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm (gift)
10. MS Flight Simulator X

Gift items are games that were purchased for me by other Steam gamers: Thank you for your gift!

Happy New Year Everyone!!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

To all please have a happy and safe holiday season (better late than never :)

Angry Gamers Get Creation Clubbed

There is a good article over at RPS detailing the issues that Steam is experiencing with portions of the gaming community in revolt over questionable moves by developers, such as with paid mods in the form of Creation Club for Skyrim and Fallout 4.

These hostile review actions are meant to punish developers for unpopular decisions, and apparently are affecting the bottom line as the retailer (Steam) is forced to deploy data graphs to explain away anger spikes, and the developer (Bethesda) is forced to have a fire sale on their initial content offering, putting up some items for free after requiring users to pay credits (cash) for them.

Fallout 4 Creation Club

For those of you who do not know Bethesda released something called the Creation Club, which is now fully integrated with Fallout 4. It is basically paid mods, and this post is not to debate the pros and cons of that. This post is to rant on how Bethesda screwed my game up. I use mods to improve the game, and one of those mods for me had to be the Achievements Mods Enabler so that I could work towards the 80 or so Steam Achievements that come with the game.

Skyrim SE Thoughts

Recently I have been playing a lot of the Skyrim Special Edition that was released last October. While I am grateful to the developer for providing this full game free of charge to owners of the original game and all DLC, I must wonder why they didn’t take some development opportunity to fix some major bugs in the game which were successfully addressed over the years by the Unofficial Skyrim Patch (USSEP). Seriously, what were they thinking?

Steam Sale

There is a pretty good Monday sale going on over at Steam starting today, with a number of decent titles that have substantial discounts (some deeper than what was found during what I regard a weak Winter Sale just recently completed). I picked up the following five titles to add to my growing library of games that I do not play:

Top 10 Video Games of 2016

The following list is my top 10 games that I have played in the last year. Feel free to chime in with some of your favorites from the past 12 months of gaming.

1. Skyrim
2. Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm (gift)
3. Flight Simulator X
4. Cities Skylines (gift)
5. F1 2014
6. Defense Grid: The Awakening
7. Grand Theft Auto V
8. Vietnam ‘65
9. DiRT 3
10. Ticket to Ride

Happy New Year Everyone!!

Get Out and Vote

If you live in the United States and are eligible to vote in the upcoming election, I urge you to get out and vote for your candidate and issues that you care about.

Writers Block

I finished a scenario in Flashpoint Campaigns and was preparing to write the AAR for a blog post when I hit a crushingly painful brick wall of writers block. Over the years my AAR’s have become more involved affairs detailing things such as strategy, terrain, equipment, etc. This all led to circumstances where I would spend more time writing an AAR than actually playing the mission being discussed. There are some AAR’s on this blog that have taken more than a month to write from start to finish.

Skyrim

Tonight (or should I say this morning) I finally made it to level 78 which spawns a Legendary Dragon, and in turn killed the first one I encountered at Arcwind Point. Using the Dragonrend shout I was able to pin the beast on the ground below the summit I stood atop and while it was distracted by various Draugr about, I pummeled it with Daedric Arrows and Fire magic until it succumbed to the accumulative damage. This was the last Steam Achievement that I needed to score a Perfect Game rating, the only other one that I have is for Tropico 4.

Free Remaster Craze

Lately I have been getting free remastered games on Steam. Now trust me, I think that this is a slick marketing ploy for verified owners of an original game to garner a sort of loyalty towards a particular publisher or developer. However the results are of a mixed bag. A few years ago Metro 2033 by 4A Games came out with a Redux version of the base game and expansion pack, however it was not for free (this is not the way to do it). As a result I took a pass on the blatant cash grab as the original game looks very good on my now run of the mill gaming rig.

Steam Sale

The following post details my thoughts on the Steam weekly sale that started today. There are a number of titles of interest that are available at some significant discounts, and if your war game or strategy library is a bit on the light side of things these games may do the trick in filling out your roster of potential go-to games.

Windows 10 Indecisiveness

So I’ve had this task bar icon nagging me to install Windows 10 for a while now, telling me that my system passes inspection and that none of my installed applications are incompatible. Every now and again I look at it and wonder, and then I think about Vista, 8, and 8.1 and how each of those iterations of the OS ended up being widely ridiculed for one reason (sometimes many) or another. I can’t quite seem to pull the trigger on this yet and make the change.

Happy Veterans Day

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has ever served in the United States Military for their service and sacrifice to this country. Personally I served during a very contentious time from 1986-1994 in both the US Army (463rd Combat Engineering Battalion) and the US Navy (USS Detroit AOE-4) but by the Grace of God never saw combat. Back then our enemy was the Soviet Union, and while terrorism was present all around the globe it has never been more of a pressing issue than it is now.

Forward to the Past

Given the myriad of issues that I am having with some games in the Windows 7 environment (as well as AMD video card specific game issues), this weekend I began the process of rebuilding my Windows XP computer. I had tried a dual boot option with my Gateway however it didn’t work, and even if it did in hindsight it would not have resolved the scaling issue with Command Operations (and other Airborne Assault games) as I would still have been playing off of the same GPU and drivers.

Grow Some Stones People

I wrote a post about the use of the equilateral cross in video gaming some time ago, and thought it appropriate to bring the subject back up given the recent posturing of Apple. Apparently this company (in a desperate struggle to remain relevant perhaps) has just discovered that 1) the banner of the Confederate States of America was depicted in some form or another in various products that it was (up to the point of social enlightenment) gladly selling for profit, and 2) that some people (a very vocal fraction of the population) are so incensed by the very existence of such imagery that it somehow shuts them down as functioning humans.

Steam Image Hosting Issues

I primarily use the integrated Picasa Web Album functionality as provided by Google through Blogger, and every now and again I use an alternative service if I suspect issues with the image quality (which has occurred in the past). Typically this means I will upload a screenshot through the Steam service, obtain a link and place it in a blog post and move on. In the past this seemed a tried and true practice as I had no issues until tonight when going through some material, I came across this post from 2013 in which all of the Steam hosted images were missing.