Portal 2

Using quantum portals to blast your way through a world overthrown by AI digital chaos; Portal 2 takes puzzle solving beyond this world. Set in the same universe as Half Life (similar to Orwell's 1984), you play the mysterious Chell - a lone human survivor of the Aperture Science AI incident.  

Compared to the first Portal, the sequel surpasses it in almost every way.  The creators took everything fans loved about the first and quadrupled the graphics, mechanics, and difficulty.  Where Portal had almost no story, Portal 2 begins a true plot with real back-story.

I recently picked it up for $10 - a ridiculous steal for it's 95/100 MetaCritique rating and Apr 19, 2011 release date.  For such graphical complexity, I can tell the programmers took great care to smooth out code performance beyond most titles.  While Half Life 2 initially had performance issues (patched up now) , Portal 2 runs flawlessly.  With much less violence than your typical first-person shooter, this leans more towards a family title with its E10+ rating.  For inquisitive types who normally don't play games, it's also safe to say this logic game is for you as well.

Survive the Steam Holiday Sales

With Black Friday out of the way for 2011, a lot of retailers (especially online) are still featuring unique sales for this month.  The Steam game platforming for the PC and Mac is increasingly famous for having ridiculous week long Sales during the holidays (See the November Autumn sale).   This year they even featured a smaller sale for Halloween, but it was only for horror games.  From my experience, the sales on this platform are often the lowest they go for PC/Mac games, but the only catch is having a system powerful enough to play them.  If you have one, then your all set! So to begin, here are some tips to surviving the sale - getting what you want and not spending too much.

1. Mainly focus on "Daily Deals."  These are generally the lowest things will go during this sale period. All though there are rare cases where a daily deal will re-appear even lower, it's often only a buck or two less.  Basically you want to look for anything around 75% off and/or $5 price.  Newer items are usually only 50% off and around $25.  Steam will have a ton of other stuff marked off outside of the daily deals, but much of it can and WILL be thrown into the daily deals later on for even cheaper so don't risk it. 

2. Read the reviews & make sure you actually want to play the game.  Too often there are buyers on Steam who build up these huge backlogs of cheap $1-$5 games that they haven't touched for months or even years! Keep things simple and go with things you (or someone else) definitely wants to play.  A little backlog of stuff is fine (especially if your usually very busy), but stay realistic and don't go overboard.

3.  Avoid the massive "Publisher Packs."  These always come about in the much larger December sale.  They feature huge collections of 5-10 games for $50 or 20-30 for $100, however many are often very outdated and people often regret buying them later for that.  They can seem like a really good deal at first, but you gotta make sure you actually want to try everything in them - and often over half the packs are so old most people won't even get around to them later.  Unless you absolutely know you want (and have time) to play over 50-75% of the games in the pack, relax and move on.

4.  Don't store your credit card on Steam's servers.  Though they have probably beefed up their security since they were recently hacked, it's still safer to take the time to manually input this data each time (it doesn't take long anyways). For more info, see my post "Valve's Steam Recently Hacked ~ How to Protect Your Account"

Saints Row 3 is more GTA Satire than Ripp-Off

What originally started as (and still remains) a Grand Theft Auto (GTA) knock-off is beginning to compliment the open sandbox game with its own satirical direction.  I speak of the game series Saints Row which essentially represent's THQ's way of hopping onboard the open-sandbox bangwagon of violent car theft gaming created back in 2001 by GTA:III.  This third title is providing to take on more originality with a gta satire approach that GTA fans are respecting quite well.

It's no reason to leave GTA, but rather a just a nice way to take a break from Rockstar's game series instead.  While GTA satires our various cultures, politics, entertainment, and violence in general - Saints Row 3 primarily targets cliche aspects of the GTA genre itself.  I often find spin-offs can also provide many better things their targeted media should have had - particularly with greater character customization and humor in Saints Row 3.

While the GTA games continue to grow more serious and less silly - Saints Row is doing just the opposite focusing much more on game-play and wacky shenanigans.  Many GTA fans are even beginning to divide between both of the games with Saints Row expanding the more traditional GTA wackiness that was certainly reduced in the fourth titled with Niko Bellic back in 2008.  For me, I'll have to actually try Saints Row myself before I can truly compare the two.  While GTA's storyline can become more serious, the gameplay certainly remains humorously far fetched with more realistic physics and graphics.  With the fifth GTA title coming out, Rockstar may even make a return to more traditional gameplay as well.

Valve's Steam Recently Hacked ~ How to Protect Your Account

Over the past decade, Steam has become the largest gaming platform software for both PC and Macintosh computers (even partially for the PS3).  If you still don't know of the software, it essentially provides the computer gaming community with the largest digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and social-media platform to date.  When you purchase a game through steam, you literally hold access to a 100% fully downloadable copy of it on any PC you want with a user account to access it.  It's revolutionized the gaming industry in many ways and now with the increased user traffic and publicity comes the inevitable hackers with unknown intentions.

On November 11, 2011 - Steam's main user information severs were hacked by unknown intruders who gained access to an encrypted database of personal information including passwords and credit card info.  Valve officially confirmed this security breach yesterday afternoon to all users of the platform and forums.  The forum accounts were the main focus of concern - with Valve requiring password changes for users but they are still assessing the potential damages to the Steam users outside of the forums as well.  Basically, they are unsure at the moment of how much was actually stolen or if the encrypted information could be cracked open.

How to better protect your accounts from these attacks.  
To avoid being the low hanging fruit that actually gets picked.  When a massive user database of random low-target (non-celebrity) people is compromised - the most secure accounts will be tossed aside.

1. Change your passwords for both Steam and their forums asap.  They have a password strength assessment tool when you create a new password and I suggest you make one that fills the entire strength rating.  Be sure to use random text (upper and lower case), numbers, & special characters.

2. Don't store credit cards on servers in the first place.  If you currently have one stored on Steam now, go ahead and remove it by going to your "Account History" and removing all stored cards (on the right).  Those who didn't store their numbers on the server should technically be safer.

3.  Set your accounts to private or friends-only.  Many web search tools such as Google are notorious for being so powerful that they can also exploit sensitive data from "publicly shared" accounts.  This is especially true with things like "cached websites" in the search.  Unless your absolutely sure the information is intended to be public, don't make it public.

4.  Use the authentication tools.  Steam has something called the Steam Guard that requires users to confirm account access with unique generated codes sent to their email each time they want to sign into Steam with a different computer.  This seriously reduces the chances of unauthorized access unless the attacker also has access to your email account (which should also have a difficult password).

5.  Don't share the email account used to manage other accounts.  For instance with Facebook, it's best to not share the email you use to manage your Facebook account.  Hackers can easily target the emails a user shares as a first step to gaining access to their passwords for other applications associated with the email.  If you really want to be safe, create a separate confidential email with a really difficult password to only manage your user accounts.  Also change its password every couple of months.

Skyrim takes Random Content Generation to the next level

So the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim comes out in two days with anticipation that continues to grow.  One prominent advertised feature is the game's extraordinary new level of random content generation and artificial intelligence.  In addition to scripted events, quests, locations, characters, and objects is a massive range of random generation for all these aspects as well.  The game features a fundamental storyline along with massive side narration generated by the user's actions.

This random universe generation is coined Radiant Storytelling.  Something the previous Elder Scrolls games only contained limited versions of.  Randomly generated events and encounters are certainly prevalent in the Elder Scrolls IV, but there was never any completely unscripted quests based on all your interactions with the game.  Skyrim, on the other hand, has been stated to have unique side story, characters, and quests all based on how you interact.  This interaction includes even the most subtle details like where you leave certain items.  For example, you may find the same unique items you drop reappearing in a traveling merchant's inventory or even in an enemy's hands used against you later - in a random quest. 

With this level of indefinite generated game-play, it's almost like games are becoming more of wine tasting that doesn't allow you to finish an entire bottle anymore before moving on to another.  Until the game comes out, we'll have to see how deep the bottomless bag of randomly generated goodies goes.  It's a bit eerie how the virtual reality of game universes grow closer to the randomly generated material & content of our reality.  Regardless of the actual depth of virtual reality, I'm sure Bethesda Softworks won't fail to astound players upon the game's release.

I admit, I'm a Stronghold fan

I've played my share of economic simulation games for the PC back in 90s and early 2000s and the Stronghold series stands out as some of my all time favorites.  The reason I'm making this post is because Stronghold 3 was recently released on October 25, 2011.  Why is this a big deal? The first Stronghold came out way back in 2001! Over a decade ago.  Then there was the Stronghold Crusader a year later (just as awesome) and eventually the 2nd era - Stronghold 2 in 2005 (not so awesome - extremely buggy).    So I have yet to play Stronghold 3, but I'm very curious to see what's new in the game.  It seems the reviews are already similar to the low reviews for the 2nd game, but the 2nd was pretty decent once the developers fixed it back up with patches.  The same will happen with the 3rd as well and the ratings will surely go back up.

The first games of this series were intense with often ridiculous levels of difficulty - especially in the Stronghold Crusader: Extreme.  It's one of those games I enjoyed for many reasons from fine intricate graphical mechanics to sheer difficulty that required tons of planning ahead. Unlike other popular economic simulations such as Age of Empires - Stronghold requires players to manage painfully realistic medieval economies for castles with a great depth of resource development into goods.  These included details like actually having to set up a full set of production facilities just to produce food, weapons, armor, etc. And not only that, your food supply was constantly consumed at various rates as well - determined by the size of your population and daily ration limits.  Making bread for instance requires a wheat farm, mill to produce flour, and a baker.

The supply and demand factor is also significant based on your population size. However one thing that bugged me was how trading rates with the resource/goods market never changed over time like they should have.  This could be a random factor or perhaps it could relate to the current circumstances in the game, but it would be nice if Stronghold 3 featured a resource/goods trading market with constantly changing prices for goods. While the first era of Stronghold games features unrealistic instant trading of goods for currency, Stronghold 2 took the difficulty up a notch and requiring real traders at trading posts physically transport goods which took time based on the distance between trading destinations.  Stronghold 2 essentially beefed up the castle management difficulty further with crime, waste management, and royal dinners - which got some mixed reactions from fans of the previous era.  From what I've heard and read so far, the 3rd era has cut back a bit some of the annoyances from Stronghold 2 and enhanced the most favorable aspects the Stronghold 1 era further.

Kane & Lynch 2 - Dog Days

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is an artistic video game that steps up the gritty realism beyond today's conventional graphics.  The visual and auditory aspects of its overall atmosphere make it worth checking out more for the exhilarating documentary experience experience alone. An experience of two bad asses fleeing China after a botched arms deal in the international black market. With complex ambient sound-scape layers generated from real city noises, vintage synthesizers, guitar amplifiers creating a vastly real world experience in the perspectives of a two drugged up inebriated criminals. The gameplay feels more like an arcade shooter with an interesting set of complex disastrous situations to blast your way out of.  Replay value is found in the elaborate online co-op missions and reattempting the main story on the highest difficulty for maximum experience.  It's one of those games you love for sheer badassery of the experience over all other matters. And be warned, some things in gang wars do get ruthlessly extreme but I won't spoil any of it until some of you are shocked by these parts of the game yourself. 

So Dog Days is actually a sequel to the first Kane & Lynch: Dead Men - however the sequal surpasses the first one in all aspects. You follow two professional criminals - James Seth Lynch who contacts his old business partner Adam "Kane" Marcus to work together on a new project that could mean retirement.  After a series of messy incidents in Venezuela (from "Dead Men") the pair parted ways and Lynch starts a new life in Shanghai with a girlfriend named Xiu. Lynch is still connected to a unknown mafia through a UK man named Glazer who tells him about a new underground arms deal with various African countries that needs to pass through China.  It's excepted to be a highly covert operation with lots of international support until word gets out to unaffiliated Chinese criminal organizations who soon want to take over the deal.  Personal lives grow involved and all hell breaks loose when Lynch finds out his girlfriend is taken hostage.  These violent conflicts quickly spark involvement of Chinese authorities as the situation becomes an all-out war.

Underrated Game Review: Lead & Gold

In terms of underrated video games these days, Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West is one to top them. It's one of those intriguing online 3rd person shooters with greater depth than excepted.  Like Team Fortress II but with less complexity and frustration as you relive the violent era of the Wild West with style and elegance.

It features a 4 character classes that form teams in six engaging game modes. There's The Blaster, a shotgun wielding miner who can toss (and cook off) dynamite; The Trapper, a sniper with bear traps to "hunt" opponents like bears; The Deputy, wielding a repeater carbine and ability to "mark" enemies for everyone; and The Gunslinger, who can quick draws 6 shots under a second.

 Each character is part of a unique synergy system that allows each player's significant progress to provide performance enhances to everyone else.  A system that naturally provides collaboration between teammates.

The main replay value is the 82 Steam achievements you can earn through various challenges. Controls are easy to pick up and you learn a lot of different strategy as you progress.  Those who used the Steam game provider (which pc gamer doesn't?) can often find this for about $2 during one of their major sales and $10 retail outside the sale.  It's still bound to pass through the next 2 sales.

There's something about the brilliant western shooting mechanics and vivid atmosphere than makes this game feel like an overlooked gem with the current small size of it's online community. It also runs great on many decent laptops as well! View the official steam page for this game here: http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/42120/.