Steam (Wait, what is that?)

Steam. It's an online video game store with access to other players, groups, and more.

Steam was created by Valve, who are the makers of the half life games, to make managing video games easier. When you buy a game, it downloads right away, and the gets put into your library. Your library is the place to view and launch all of your games. Double click, click, click, click, and you are in a game.

You also get the nice community. This is where you can find other players that play the games you play. So, instead of asking everyone at school is they place this one game you have, or asking everyone at work the same question, you go online, click, click, friends to play with.

There are other features that I won't go into, but there is one I would LOVE to share. Sales. Have you ever seen a video game store where the price tag said, "Buy Just Cause 2 for 29.99 this weekend!" or, "Play this game for the weekend FREE!"? Not in a game store, but on steam, sales happen like this ALL THE TIME. DrMadMan was recently able to play Modern Warfare 2 for a weekend for free due to a sale. The sales are also weekly, so you have to keep your eyes peeled.

Join Steam today! Click on the link to join! https://store.steampowered.com/join/

Wesnoth 1.8.0 is OUT!!!

Wesnoth is a great free game available fromhttp://www.wesnoth.org/. It is fun to play, and now works better than ever! Go download it! Really!

Games that go BOOM!

Fire. Humans have sought it out ever since we were created. To this day, we all are still attracted to fire. But not just that. Explosions, e another type of fire, is also something we desire. So much that video games are now working especially hard to make the most out of explosions, breaking stuff, and fire. Here are five games that range in ratings that explosions are definitely present in.

..,,;;::Familly Games::;;,,..

Boomblox

A game made with help from Steven Spielberg, Boomblox is a game where structures of blocks are set before you, and you must destroy them. Sometimes there are explosion blocks that will blow up everything around it. It's awesome to see a large block castle being destroyed.

Rampage: Total Destruction

Rampage was an arcade game where you moved from city to city flattening the buildings. This game was made to be very similar, but overall better, than the arcade game. There are a TON of buildings to destroy and a TON of monsters to do it!

..,,;;::For Teens::;;,,..

Burnout: Revenge

All of the burnouts have pretty awesome explosions and racing, but this one takes the cake. There is a complete mode for causing THE BIGGEST, BADDEST, CAR ACCIDENT THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN! Yep! You drive into a high traffic zone and BOOM! Explosions, cars flipping, it's all there.

..,,;;::Mature Games::;;,,..

Just Cause 2

This game is famous for one thing. It's this. The objective is do anything you want, and have fun doing it. These game designers were smart, because they know humans love explosions just like I do. They made the explosions SO BIG and AWESOME that you can't resist flying that 747 airplane into a water tower! What about flying a car off a ramp into a military base? OR, maybe the good,ol' "Let's-drive-a-car-at-high-speed-towards-a-gas-station-and-jump-out-before-it-hits-the-pump!"

Battlefield Bad Company 2

This is a first person shooter where anything goes. Quite literally too. Anything can be blown up or shot away. Building can be completely destroyed, sand bags that may have protected that sniper can be removed with some grenades, and cover is always being destroyed. It's always great to have some tank drivers as friends...

And those are my five games that you will LOVE if you are a pyromaniac! See ya next time!

Dear Esther, Why are you so beautiful?

As I walked through the fingernail scarred cliff faces, I thought to myself, "why?" As I crept  through the majestic, magically illuminated caves I thought to myself "Who am I" The answer was simple, I was the unnamed protagonist. My experience was abruptly cut short by the message flashing into appearance along the bottom of the screen. "Frog is now playing Half Life 2: Deathmatch" I was astounded. For the last few minutes I was the unnamed protagonist.I've never experienced such deep immersion before. What caused it? The lack of a HUD? The slow, almost tedious walk across the surreal landscape? The awe inspiring, beautiful voice overs?

Welcome the Half Life 2 mod, Dear Esther. It would be rude to call  Dear Esther  a game, it is one of thechineseroom's numerous projects in first person story telling. The game is, simply, a walk across a landscape. There is no action and basic controls. Movement is limited to walking, crawling or jumping.Trust me on this, you want to walk.  A voice in your head is  constantly speaking to you. The "voice in your head" is your voice, not the protagonist's voice, your voice. The dialog was split up into multiple sections, with one of three pieces  playing when you pass certain landmarks on your long journey. This works surprisingly well, and you  have to challenge your self to put the story together, piece by piece. I am not going to say anything about the story, it will be better for you to find out for yourself. You must download this, really. It will change your  mind on what a first person game can be, and what it is.

Choose what you say 1.5 (LotusEliseGeek)

Another thing to think about is this. You see a civilian and you walk up to him and press "t" for talk. He tells you that neat gems are found in a cave up north, and the conversation ends. No, hello and goodbye.

The only problem I can see with this is that it will need a new system to work with. For example, you you talk politely, goods may decrease in price, and they will increase if you are mean. Also, not every would want to type greetings to NPC's all day. Some preset greetings or some quicklist greetings would help for people wanting to play fast.

I Think I Have an Idea! (Chose What You Say Part 1)

Some of you foke might have played an RPG game once in your life. A lot of RPGs have a single flaw, an emersion breaking flaw. What happens when you walk up to a character and hit “e” or? (or whatever the use button is) A windows appears, someone says something, and you are given three or so  options. This can be extremely emersion breaking and character breaking for obvious reasons. What if you could type down what you wanted your character to say? Instead of saying, “I want to buy something” You could say, “Yo, got some crack”  This would  greatly contribute to your characters personality. I plan on building a simple, short RPG in Python. The RPG will be more of a tech demo than anything, but I plan to build on it later. Right now I’m learning the fantastic language of pygame, and I hope to have a base engine done by the end of the week. In Part 2 I’ll talk about my ideas of how to make this work.

Dwarf Fortress 2010 is Here!

The first major Dwarf Fortress release in 2 years is here! There have beens some major changes, and  I can't give my opinion yet because I haven't played much of it. I did put together a Dwarf Fortress installer executable for those of you that don't like extracting the files to a folder and creating a shortcut. Also packaged is a version of the May Green Dwarf Fortress tile set and (accidentally) a sample save game. You can download it here. Feel free to redistribute it, but link to this post if you do.
EDIT: Files is broken. Working on a new one.