It’s published by the same studio (11 bit studios), but they each have different developers. 11 bit studios also created The Alters, but Starward Industries created The Invincible.
When I first bought Red Dead Redemption (well over a decade ago, for the Xbox 360), I got it exclusively for the “Undead Nightmare” expansion pack. I love zombie games, and setting it in the Wild West? That’s a unique twist I hadn’t seen yet.
However, I didn’t want to just jump right into the zombie gameplay. I wanted to be intimately familiar with the world and its lore first, so I could squeeze all the enjoyment out of the zombie expansion. I wanted to know all the townsfolk, so when I had to blow someone’s brains out, I’d understand their relationship to the main character and how emotionally impactful that choice was.
Suffice to say, I was so anxious to get to the zombie expansion that I rushed through the entire game in maybe 2 evenings. I didn’t really enjoy my playthrough because I was just trying to get it over with as quickly as I could.
When I finally got to the zombie expansion, I didn’t really enjoy it that much. It was at that moment I realized that the original game was far more fun than the zombie expansion. But I had rushed it and wasted my whole experience.
Last year, I finally got around to playing through the game again and I made sure to slow down and really enjoy it. It’s such a fantastic story. I played the Undead Nightmare expansion afterwards and made a post about it here for Halloween month. That, too, was more fun than I remembered.
Now I need to finally play Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve owned it for years, but I always get bored maybe an hour into the gameplay. They put so much effort into making it as realistic and complex as possible that I just get distracted and lose the plot. RDR1 was a more straightforward plot and kept me engaged, but I keep losing focus on the sequel. I need to force myself to sit still and power through it sometime. #ADHDproblems
I have two original Steam controllers and I absolutely hated them. The track pads, whereas a cool innovative technology, weren’t good for 90% of my games. I needed that D-pad, or at least a joystick. I hardly used my controllers, and now I just hold onto them as a piece of Valve history.
Mine came with the physical Steam Link box. I bought two of those boxes, so I could use Steam from a couple different places in my home away from my gaming desk. Instead of the controller, I just plugged in a keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link box. They did away with the hardware though, and now it’s just an app on Smart TVs and app stores. So I can’t use my keyboard and mouse without some extra steps.
I felt the same way. It was even more disappointing because Epic Games got their claws into it, so it released as an exclusive title. I had to wait a year before I could play it on Steam, and it didn’t even live up to the hype!
I recently re-installed Far Cry 6 and a friend and I have been replaying it in co-op mode. It’s actually a lot more fun than I remember. I don’t know if it received a bunch of patches/updates since I last tried it, or if I was just super-critical after Far Cry 5. But it’s not a horrible game. At least not yet; we’re only a couple hours into it so far.
Video games and collecting Sonic the Hedgehog comics are my two expensive hobbies; I don’t spend money on much else besides essentials (food, shelter), so I can afford to splurge a bit on these hobbies. I am not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but the US military took really good care of me for 20 years and continues to provide for me in retirement, so I’m able to live a pretty relaxed life now.
If you somehow dont have Metro 2033 yet, you can still add it to your library for free today.
I saw that it was free for 48 hours! I already have the whole Metro franchise, but I’ve informed my gaming friends about the deal this morning. Thanks for spreading the news!
One caveat to my Steam library is that I always try to wait for deals before I buy; I rarely buy anything at full price. I don’t want to think about how much money I might’ve spent if I bought everything at full price! 😱
I really like video games. And I’m retired young(ish), so I have all the time in the world to game now.
Plus, I have a (relatively new) blog dedicated to introducing games to people, which encourages me to play through a variety of games in my library. It’s basically just archiving my “Random Screenshots of my Games” posts in !games.
And according to the SteamDB, I’ve played 26% of my games. The last time I checked, it was at 38%, but that was maybe 2,000 games ago. I need to keep working through my library!
Oh damn. I’ve spent $30,359.76 on Steam in the 17 years I’ve had an account. And I just passed 4,000 games in my Steam library within the last month. That checks out.
It’s not that bad. They have three difficulty settings: Normal, Black Mesa, and Hard. I played on Normal and I haven’t really struggled anywhere. I think I’ve only died once in my whole gameplay, and it was when I was fighting off waves of Marines flooding a single large space that I couldn’t leave. I’m assuming “Black Mesa” is their suggested difficulty level.
Thanks for your support! My posts originally started as just a random screenshot or two of the latest game I was playing. But I always hated how people just talked about specific video games like everyone on the thread was intimately familiar with them. Especially if it was a game that sounded interesting to me. I wanted to know more about it!
So I decided to use my screenshots as a way to introduce newcomers to each game; give them a little intro to the plot and gameplay so they’d be interested in trying it out for themselves. Or to remind previous players of a great game they hadn’t played in a while.
By the time I started writing long-form blog entries on video games, I already had a bit of a series going and I didn’t want to suddenly change the title of my numbered posts. So they are “random” screenshots of my games, but they’re also a spoiler-free in-depth exploration of each game.
One day, I plan to go back and re-do some of my earlier posts so I can actually have in-depth discussion on those games too.
I’ve also been archiving my posts on a personal blog, in case any of them get taken down or blocked here for any reason. If anyone’s interested in checking out my history of posts, it’s a bit easier to review the archive at that link.
They put a ton of effort into remaking Xen so that it blends better into the gameplay and story. I think I read somewhere that Half-Life took about an hour to slog through Xen, but Black Mesa, despite having around 4 hours of Xen gameplay, was actually really enjoyable.
Here’s a bonus screenshot for you. I really like this image, just because it’s sort of an ominous “quiet before the storm” shot. Seeing both scientists watch you with silent anticipation as you’re about to cause a world-altering event in that next room.
A childhood friend of mine worked as a developer for Riot Games over a decade ago, when League of Legends first became popular. He tried to get me to play it with him, but the community was so toxic, it’s the first and only game I ever quit solely because of the community.
If you didn’t play specific characters with very specific builds, you were just wasting everyone’s time and any losses would be blamed on you. It was really bad.
I love the content and lore that comes from LoL (Arcane, K/DA, etc.), but I can’t stand the game itself.
Epic just recently announced that they’re never releasing it outside of their store. They’re the exclusive publisher, so they have distribution rights, and their CEO Tim Sweeney is determined to snub his nose at Steam, even though Alan Wake 2 still hasn’t earned back its production costs. It’s a complete flop, but they won’t extend to the Steam market to help sales.
Unlike other games, where publishers sign exclusivity contracts with Epic Games for a certain time period, Alan Wake 2 was actually published by Epic Games, meaning that Epic Games gets to decide what systems the game releases on. So it’s not coming to Steam. Which means I’ll never get to play it, because I’m never giving a penny to that awful store of theirs.