A Long Look @ The Long Dark

Over the last 2 months I have invested 351 hours into this Steam early access title from Hinterland.  I had owned the game for over a year but hadn’t given it a try until I saw others playing on Twitch.tv in Dec. just after the “resolute outfitter” update…

There are currently 5 challenges with defined objectives built into the game but the true “test” for players is the sandbox mode where your only goal is to survive…

After playing for a couple days on the lower difficulty levels I decided to explore “interloper” difficulty and fell in love with this title…

Scarcity of resources, the open world nature of the game and the overall ambiance of the Canadian wilderness set this game apart.

Updates are on the way but no one knows when so I would suggest keeping this game on your radar if you just don’t do early access like many out there.

Here is a link to the Early Access “Roadmap” for development…

Roadmap

Re-play of “Dragon Age: Origins”



Bioware has been offering “Dragon Age: Origins – Ultimate Edition” for the PC @ discounted prices over the past few months with great frequency.  For $7.49 on Steam it was finally time to pick up this game with all the D.L.C.

I played through this title about 3 years ago but there is over 35 hours of main quest here, with the additional content you could easily log 70+hrs.  Not to mention the branching story-lines and quest details that can be imported into Dragon Age 2 upon completion of this game…

Origins has been available since 2010 but still holds up to the triple AAA releases today with respect to overall presentation. The music is great, the voice acting is very good, and the in-game banter of your characters among each other is truly unique and unexpected.

The game-play utilizes the now famous “pause” mechanism present in many Bioware RPG’s…so if you liked it before you will like it here.  There is a real challenge to many of the battles, even on normal difficulty settings, so you will have to plan out your character progression and party composition depending on the scenario.  As usual, here are some pics and a game-play video from the play-through:

Terraria 1.2.3 Update…



“Value.” Just one of many positive comments that could be made to sum up the Terraria experience so far…and then comes another update…!?

It doesn’t appear to be an update that incorporates anything earth-shattering in terms of the actual game-play.  But then again, there are a number of Hard-mode “balancing changes” mentioned in the developer notes to entice fans back for another playthrough…

Here is the link from the developer blog listing all the new updates:

Http://www.terrariaonline.com/threads/terraria-1-2-3.132539/

Upon logging into my Terraria world today, I immediately noticed some of the new animations related to the character’s equipped accessories and some of the new sound effects scattered throughout the game (i.e. duck noises).  This was a fun surprise because I had been preparing my world a few days prior to go and take down the Wall of Flesh and activate Hard-mode…I cleared out the area around the Jungle Temple, farmed the WOF twice, destroyed five or so Demon Alters and then got smoked by a Pirate Invasion that I just didn’t see coming…, “Boo me”!

The best part of it all is that I have played through the game in Hard-mode previously and defeated the other bosses, except for Pirate Invasion and Pumpkin King…that’s even more value coming my way down the road!  In my experience when the developer team is releasing a new update before the user has played through the previously released material that’s a good sign for both sides.

It appears fans are letting developers know that the punctuated stream of improvements is appreciated.  I paid $4.99 on Steam for my copy last June and then bought two more copies to share with friends a few months later.  At the time, many of us were “waiting patiently” on an update rumored in August or Sept of ’13…, but in the era of developers charging a fee for DLC, this “free” content is a nice change of pace.  Few could have expected the game to be improved so dramatically, developers had already produced a great game that had tremendous replay value.  Now they have followed it up with multiple patches that improve the game in a meaningful way.  Let’s hope this trend catches on with other development teams moving forward…