Even if you’re not a fan of Steam like I am, they’ve got a deal this weekend too good to pass up. Four games for $9.99 – that means you’re getting some great games for $2.50 each.

Three of the four games here are ones I’ve talked about before on this site, and they definitely fall within my “keepers” category. Firstly, Far Cry. This is the original PC version, far different from the console versions. Even if you think you might not like it – it’s only $2.50!

Secondly, Beyond Good and Evil, which I’ve raved about far more than I ever should have. I won’t gush more in this post, but it’s worth significantly more than the $2.50 you’d pay for a box of string cheese. I’ve bought four copies over the years, and played it 5 times.

Third, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. While it had its minor annoyances, I really enjoyed the gameplay. I got the game, which was originally $50, for $12.50 at Target and jumped for joy at my bargain-hunting prowess. Later, I got another copy on the cheap from Steam. But I paid more than $2.50.

Lastly, IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946, which is some kind of flight simulator. No idea.

Anyway, if you’ve not played these games, I’d seriously jump on Steam’s weekend deal here.

This is a funny little randomly-generated RPG game. Although they bill that you’ll finish in 4 hours, I didn’t play for nearly that long before defeating a giant blob at level twenty and calling it quits. Still, it’s a fun little game. I only wish that you could play in a larger window.

Oh wait. F4 makes the game fullscreen. Wish I’d read the directions first.

HOW TO PLAY

Left Click- Attack
Right Click- Shoot Magic
Space- Level Up
R- Restart
ESC- Quit

Download 4-Hour RPG

Keepers is a new weekly segment in which I’ll discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

I never owned a gamecube. Part of the reason is because I never saw many gamecube games that I was eager to play. The one that was always at the top of my list was Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.

As soon as I got a Nintendo Wii, I got myself a copy of Eternal Darkness, and I was not disappointed. You follow the lineage of the Rovias family as its various members come into contact with the book of Eternal Darkness. At its core, Eternal Darkness is a survival horror game. But its magic system, its inventive plot, and its amazing insanity effects are what really makes the game shine.

Perhaps Shane Satterfield puts it best in his Gamespot review:

When hearing about the sanity aspect of the game, it’s easy to brush it off as a novelty, but nothing could be further from the truth. In the game, as you come across unsightly manifestations of evil, your character’s sanity meter will start to fall. As your meter begins to dwindle, you’ll be cued to the fact that your character is starting to lose his or her grip on reality when blood begins to run down the walls. However, this is just the precursor to the game’s incredibly inventive insanity effects. If your sanity meter hits rock bottom, your character will really start to lose it. Sometimes you’ll enter a room to find you’re walking on the ceiling, or you’ll be placed in a scenario that doesn’t seem quite right. But the sanity effects aren’t confined to affecting the character onscreen–they will also influence you. Without giving away too much, if some technical issues should arise while playing the game, don’t be too quick to take action.

I never finished playing Eternal Darkness, which is part of the reason why it’s still on my shelf. The Ulyaoth Black Guardian at the end of chapter 9 kicked my ass, and as hard as it tried I simply could not beat it. I want to go back to it some day. But damn that boss was hard. Brandon, if you’ve got any advice here, I’ll take it. Hell, if anyone has advice on how to beat this boss, lay it on me.

Eternal Darkness is available for $20 on EBay, and frankly I’m amazed. It’s got to be a pretty rare game at this point, and I’d expect it to go for at least triple that.

Someday, I can only hope that they’ll come out with a sequel to Eternal Darkness with insanity effects half as good as the original. I’ll be snatching that one up as surely as I’ll be buying Beyond Good and Evil 2.

I know that this doesn’t have to do with video gaming, but it is gaming related so I’m going with it.

Today I started to take apart our pool table.

My father-in-law bought this pool table from Montgomery Wards in 1975 making the pool table only slightly younger than me.  For years it stayed in his basement where he, my wife and my brother-in-law would play pool.  When Linda and I were dating, we played on this table many times, under the fluorescent lights of the basement, sneaking kisses in between the constant parental interruptions that they conducted under the guise of needing food from the basement pantry.

When my father-in-law decided that he didn’t want the pool table any more, he offered it to my brother-in-law, presumably because Dan played more pool, but more realistically because Dan has always been offered everything first, but being that Dan was in Oregon, shipping a slate pool table 3000 miles from upstate New York wasn’t going to happen.  So then it was offered to us and we accepted.  So, my father-in-law took it apart, drove it to our house in Virginia and put it together in the basement that he, Linda and myself renovated where it stayed for a few years until he took it apart again, only this time for it to be moved by Linda and I to our current house in Georgia.  Upon arriving here, I put it back together until today, when I disassembled it, probably for the last time.

Despite having my own pool table, I am terrible at pool.  Far, far better than Linda, but still, pretty bad.  My college roommate Dennis and I used to play all the time, both in college, and then on Thursday nights when he moved to Virginia, but I never seemed to get any better.  In fact, the only time I would ever show any improvement was when Led Zeppelin came on the radio in the student union.  Not sure why that mattered, but my game improved nonetheless and if it didn’t, hey, it’s Zeppelin on the radio.  It’s hard to get upset at that.

In college, people used to joke with me about having such a crappy game of pool because I was a physics major and pool is all physics.  Well, as it turned out, I had a pretty crappy game of physics too.  Neither got better over the years, to my continual disappointment.  See, I’m not good at any sport, not a one, and pool, being a kind of non-sport sport, I thought it could be the one sport I’d end up being good at.  My dad worked his way through college hustling pool, so my hopes were high that genetics would eventually show me some favors, but it never happened.  I still enjoyed playing though, well, as much as one can enjoy anything they constantly lose at.  Really, it was never about the pool, it was about just hanging out and having fun.  Talking comics with Dennis after hitting up the Starbucks on a Thursday night, or sneaking a kiss with Linda before her mom came down looking for pasta sauce.

Once the pool table was at our house in Virginia, Linda and I played a fair amount, but that all dropped off when the kids entered the picture.  Simply put, kids take up a lot of your time, so when we did have free time, pool wasn’t at the top of the “Ways To Spend Our Free Time” list.  As the kids got older, we would occasionally play a game here and there, but usually the kids either required more attentiont than we could give while playing a game of pool, or we just had other, more important things to do.

In the end though, it wasn’t a lack of free time that did in the pool table, but practicality.  The pool table takes up one of the largest rooms in the basement.  My office takes up a room that Linda has always had an eye towards turning into a spare bedroom.  This fact combined with the fact that my toy collection has more than outgrown my office caused Linda to come up with the idea of taking apart the pool table and moving my office to the pool table room.  There, my toys could live in a larger space, my son could get my desk and I could add some chairs and a couch and turn the large room into an office/leisure area, an area I have since dubbed The Man Lounge.  My old office could be turned into a bedroom, which, when combined with the full bathroom we’re currently renovating would not only provide a nice sleeping space for guests, but up the resale value of the house.  When presented with such hardcore practicality, as well as a room called The Man Lounge, it was hard to justify keeping a pool table that we never use.

Today the kids had a half day, and they wanted to play in the basement, so I took the opportunity to take the pool table apart.  Before I started though, I played one last game thinking that maybe if some long lost mutant poolshark power had manifested without my knowledge, it might offer the table a last minute reprieve.  Suffice it to say, that didn’t happen.  In fact, my newly developed astigmatism makes it even harder to play as when I try to line up shots, I end up looking over my glasses and when I can look through my glasses, the curvature of the lenses makes everything crooked.  I always thought it wansn’t possible for my game to get any worse, but I can assure you, it is entirely possible.

In the end, the pool table will be replaced with a foosball table (I absolutely love foosball) which will no doubt get used as much as the pool table did, however it looks cool and has a much smaller footprint thereby making it somewhat immune to issues of practicality.  The pool table will be stored in the basement, maybe to be resurrected some day, most likely to be moved to some other basement of some other family.  If that is the case, I can only hope that the new family has as much fun with the table as we did, and that the conversations, and kisses, that take place around that table become as treasured a set of memories for them as they did for me.

This one is even more old school than the Commodore 64 wallpapers I’ve been putting together. River Raid is an Atari 2600 game, and I remember loving it. I could play this game for hours.

Hope you enjoy the wallpaper.
Download River Raid Wallpaper (1024×768)
Download River Raid Wallpaper (1280×1024)
Download River Raid Wallpaper (1680×1050)

I recently finished playing Dead Space, which I quite enjoyed. The next Playstation 3 game I’m looking at is Resident Evil 5. They’re both ostensibly survival horror titles, although Resident Evil has certainly slid away from that.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between the two games, but more specifically, there’s a similarity between Dead Space and the older Resident Evil titles. I believe that as Resident Evil has undertaken a major shift beginning with Resident Evil 4, Dead Space has taken up the mantle once held by the Resident Evil franchise.

Resident Evil 2 is probably my favorite title in the series, in no small part because that game scared the everloving snot out of me. I jumped – literally – more than once when playing that game. I have very fond memories of sitting in my mom’s house in a dark room wearing headphones, and falling out of my chair every time a T-virus infected zombie smashed through a window or a Licker dropped down from the ceiling.

Beginning with Resident Evil 4, the formula changed. It was an action game. A third-person shooter rather than a survival horror game. I’ll admit that I loved Resident Evil 4, but it was not a survival horror game. Dead Space, on the other hand, is quite definitely a survival horror game, and it gave me some of the best scares I’ve had since Resident Evil 2. I’ll admit that I’ve become a bit acclimated to game scares, and largely because of that, the game doesn’t have me jumping the way I did when I was 19, but Dead Space did a damn good job.

Of all the games I’ve bought for my Playstation 3, I think Dead Space is also the first “keeper”. Generally, when I’m done with a game, I’ll sell it on EBay and use the money to buy the next game I’ll be playing. I only keep it when the game is so good that I plan to replay it some day. Oblivion, Mario Galaxy, Call of Duty 4, Resident Evil 4, and Mario Galaxy are all games that have fallen into that category. But I sold Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed. I’ll definitely be selling Mad World. More on that later.

Resident Evil 4 didn’t have much in the way of scares, and from what I’m hearing of Resident Evil 5, it’s sounding like the even-numbered ones are the really good ones. But Dead Space did a better job of scaring me than any other game since Resident Evil 2. That’s why it’s a keeper. That’s why I’m proclaiming that it’s taking up the mantle once held by Resident Evil. Word.

I’ve really been slacking with Free Game Friday recently. I’ll try to do better. Anyway, here’s this week’s game – two days late and without a picture.

Tetoris is a giant giant game of Tetris. Imagine if the board was about twenty times bigger. Insanity.

Play Tetoris

It should be no secret that I’m a huge fan of the Half-Life franchise. There’s a new Half-Life fan film on the block, and its going to give Escape from City 17 a run for its money. Neither are as good as my favorite Half-Life 2 video of all-time, Half-Life in 60 Seconds, but they’re not cartoons either. Enjoy the video.

At the end of February, Steam had a special where they sold Lost Planet: Extreme Condition for $5. I figured that for $5, I couldn’t go wrong. Ha ha. Boy, I wish I’d bought a couple cartons of Ben & Jerrys instead.

I suppose what I’d expected was a mediocre shooter, maybe something like Prey or Condemned, both of which I disliked. But they had their moments, and would both have been worth the $5 purchase. And Lost Planet is a DirectX10 game, and the only DirectX10 game I’ve played since getting this fancy Vista system is Crysis, which I couldn’t ever even finish playing due to terminal bugginess.

When they said you’d be fighting bugs in this game, I think I mistook their meaning. The game’s first annoyance was that when I looked at the key-mapping screen, I couldn’t use my mouse’s 4 and 5 buttons. Also, you can’t adjust the mouse sensitivity. I decided that at some point, I’d have to go back and use Logitech setpoint to adjust the sensitivity and hack in mouse button functionality like I’d done with Thief: Deadly Shadows.

When the game started, I was treated to a number of cutscenes, the length of which I’ve not seen outside a Final Fantasy title. I’ll admit that here, the DirectX10 showed: the cutscenes were great-looking. But I thought they’d never end. When they did end, I wished they hadn’t. The gameplay has characters moving around like in an early Metal Gear Solid game, except much more slowly. I’d expected a shooter. You can click a button to switch to first person perspective, but as soon as you take one of a number of actions, such as firing your grappling hook, it automatically reverts to third-person perspective. And although the game should know that I’m not using a XBox 360 controller, it still shows me every time I should hit the X or Y button or move a thumbstick.

In truth, the game reminded me of Metal Gear Solid in a few ways, and none of them good. I played MGS2 on the PC, which was until now the worst port of a game I’d ever seen. But I got about 85% of the way through Metal Gear before I had to quit. After an hour with Lost Planet, I realized that there were about a half dozen other games I’d rather be playing. So I tried to quit the game. For ten minutes. From what I can tell, they expect you to power off your XBox 360 to quit the game. Eventually, I tried Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but was having spotty success with it. So I had to use the PC’s power button to turn it off. And I went and played Dead Space instead. When I eventually powered my PC back up, I uninstalled Lost Planet.

…well, it’s certainly one of my two or three favorites in the game. And it’s probably the hardest non-optional stealth room in the game. Because I couldn’t screenshot from within the game, I took this shot with a digital camera. You’ve got to climb down that ladder, hide behind the crates at the base of the ladder until the guard’s back is turned, then pull a U-turn around the center pipe to come up behind the two guards at the right. Now comes the hard part. The guard at the door stands still and pivots around every so often. The other paces in a circular pattern. You’ve got to wait until the pacing guard is moving towards the door, then follow behind him, making sure that the guard at the door doesn’t see you. You can then duck behind the whitish vent until both guard’s backs are turned, but then you’ve got to move within inches of the guard at the door to actually get through the door. Even on my fifth playthrough, I can’t get it the first time. I remember trying forever on my first run through the game. It just seemed like the right thing to post about for this site’s 100th post.

Anyone else remember this part?