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Going to jam a few Elder Scrolls morsels into this

http://cdnstatic.bethsoft.com/bethblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Dawnguard.jpg

Going to jam a few Elder Scrolls morsels into this post.

Bethesda just dropped the name of the new DLC for Skyrim called Dawnguard. From the Bethesda blog "Coming this summer to Xbox 360. More details at E3.." Kind of wish DLC like this wouldn't drop only on the XBox but that is often the way of things. Looks like we will find out more about this exclusive XBox DLC at E3.

In other elder scrolls news it looks like Morrowind turned 10 today and to celebrate Morrowind and Oblivion are half off on Steam this week. Awesome.

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http://www.bethblog.com/2012/05/01/dawnguard/
http://www.bethblog.com/2012/05/01/happy-10th-anniversary-morrowind/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/22320/

Bought this game a few months back and have played much more

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lu4k85uRPu1qe9bi5o1_500.png

Bought this game a few months back and have played much more recently. The unforgiving game play of the first few play throughts didn't win me over. I loved the art style and game tone but the lack of save really hampered me on it.

Started it up again recently and immediately unlocked the Magdaline character. I played through as Magdaline and did much better than I had previously. The play control is the same, but Magdaline starts with a Heart item that allows you to recover one heart every so often. After a bit the play control seemed to gel more and I did much better. Still lost but I went further in the dungeon and it didn't seem like a complete annihlation.

That or I... Read All

AutoCat1000 wrote on 05/01/2012 at 01:50am

Minecraft! (duh)

Tungsten wrote on 05/01/2012 at 09:36pm

Tribes

AdamPFarnsworth wrote on 05/01/2012 at 11:27pm

Pong.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 05/02/2012 at 01:29am

Pong. Awesome. Missile Command is pretty good too. Seriously though it is :)

AdamPFarnsworth wrote on 05/02/2012 at 04:28am

Missile Command was great!

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 05/02/2012 at 04:33am

One Of my Atari 2600 favorites.

Tungsten wrote on 05/02/2012 at 11:04am

Pole Position

Gary_Butterfield wrote on 10/12/2012 at 05:39pm

This is some thread necromancy but I will generally take any opportunity to evangelize my GOTY. Roguelikes work in an iterative fashion rather than linear, right? You get a little further each time and the way you make "progress" is through player knowledge. That's not strictly true in Isaac where you also unlock new items in play but it's the main form of progress. You get better as you get further as you get better as you get further. Unlocking new characters is actually a really sly way of handling a difficulty curve. Maggie is the easy mode for when you're starting and later, that becomes Cain (try to get 55 coins without spending any in one run). This then unlocks the challenge characters and eventually, through an unlock, Isaac becomes the most powerful character in the game. I'll have a more cogent examination of what I think makes this special in my own post at some point but I would urge anyone turned off by the difficulty to power through. When it clicks, it clicks hard (I have hundreds of hours logged on this game).

Tungsten wrote on 10/12/2012 at 11:05pm

I still pick it up now and then. It's still fun and horribly frustrating.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 10/13/2012 at 07:35am

I come back to this off and on. It's fun and I get a little father each time... But wow... It's hard :D

Tungsten wrote on 10/13/2012 at 11:32am

I think I got to mom just for the first time the other day. She kicked the crap out of me.

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Interesting compilation of video game footage set to an

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kiePaAHK3jE

Interesting compilation of video game footage set to an instrumental piece. I find it strangely emotion provoking, with tones of loss, hope, and sweet struggle... Or maybe I'm just in a mood...

Oh Guild Wars 2, it has been a long beta weekend. Such a

Oh Guild Wars 2, it has been a long beta weekend. Such a laggy weekend indeed! With the pre-purchase (notice I didn't say pre-order) of GW2 it gave us access to a beta weekend starting on Friday and ending Sunday. I made preparations with some old gaming friends and jumped in this weekend. I hope you enjoy my thoughts.

First off, the game is beautiful. NCSoft has a stellar art department and their stylized art direction is consistent throughout the game thus far. Most quests have an audible cutscene to depict the situation at hand. Definitely blows reading a wall of text out of the water.

Each race has its own starting area and they feel very different. Even though I... Read All Oh Guild Wars 2, it has been a long beta weekend. Such a laggy weekend indeed! With the pre-purchase (notice I didn't say pre-order) of GW2 it gave us access to a beta weekend starting on Friday and ending Sunday. I made preparations with some old gaming friends and jumped in this weekend. I hope you enjoy my thoughts.

First off, the game is beautiful. NCSoft has a stellar art department and their stylized art direction is consistent throughout the game thus far. Most quests have an audible cutscene to depict the situation at hand. Definitely blows reading a wall of text out of the water.

Each race has its own starting area and they feel very different. Even though I wasn't very drawn in I'll give them credit for making each race feel very distinct. We got to play the Charr, Human and Norn races this weekend. The Norn are very nature focused, revering the spirits of the animals and the spirit world that only shaman can travel into. They are large too, I was towering over my Human friends. The Humans are exactly wat you would expect, homeland lost they fight on with unwavering spirit. Nothing too special here but the female characters are really beautiful. Lastly I tried the Charr as I wasn't very excited for them. I think they have the strongest story in the beginning. They are singularly focused on their militaristic lives. I was impressed that their gritty and visceral heritage played well into their storyline.

I played Guild Wars 1 quite a bit and have fond memories of that game. Though the characters and story are easily recognizable, not much is the same. Everywhere you run there's a "dymanic quest" which doesn't feel dynamic at all. If you ever played Warhammer Online you remember the public quest system. Well, this is public quest of steroids. The quests became so repetitive and boring I actually started avoiding them.

PVP is something I participated in quite a bit. I played a battleground, which almost put me to sleep, but I kept coming back to WvWvW. That stands for World vs World vs World if you were wondering. In a 4 continent battle putting 3 servers against one another in a very long battle of taking and holding objectives, WvW can be a blast! At times it becomes mindless as you run around in huge groups zerging each other. You will quickly find out that melee is painful, being on the front lines means getting focused pretty hard. Even on my warrior I was mostly using a rifle in combat. There is much less mindless auto-attacking as you need to use skills, dodge attacks and projectiles and revive teammates. The biggest problem I faced was being unable to melee enemies in certain situations due to so much server lag.

All in all it was a fun weekend. Beta's aren't meant to be perfect and this was sure was not. Lots of disconnects, lag and bugs to report. I hope the feedback makes the release a better product. After waiting so long for this title I am a little disappointed. I miss some of the simplicity from the original Guild Wars. Now we can jump in a persistent world, but that doesn't make up for some of the best balanced collaborative PVP I ever played in the original.

Last night I went to the Magic: The Gathering Avacyn

Last night I went to the Magic: The Gathering Avacyn Restored pre-release party at Red Castle Games in Portland.

Red Castle Games is a pretty cool games store. It has a very large selection of awesome board games ranging from Settlers of Catan, Arkham Horror, Castle Ravenloft, Pandemic and others as well has a hefty supply of Magic, Pokemon and other collectable cards. It also has a farily large set of games you can pull of the shelf and play if you want. One such game, Hero Quest caught my eye as it has been out of print for quite some time. I asked at the front if it was for sale as its hard to find and alas, it was not.

My friends arrived and we started with a card... Read All

Any of you MMOers out there... do you think your game would

http://bulk2.destructoid.com/ul/226632-/K3TJe%20-%20Imgur-620x.jpg

Any of you MMOers out there... do you think your game would let this happen?

http://www.destructoid.com/eve-players-band-together-to-destroy-the-economy-226632.phtml

Ever since I first heard about it, EVE has tempted me. I don't really have the time, and I doubt I could really pull off explaining the monthly subscription to my wife, but a game where this happens sounds... entertaining. All of the other games try to make you "believe you are part of a larger world." Well, guess what: this game actually let's you interact with everyone and change the world, even if it's for destructive purposes Just like the real world.

Search Google for Zerg Rush.

Guys. Holy crap. Its not like this is my first foray into

Guys. Holy crap. It's not like this is my first foray into Steam. I've been using it for simpler games for ages now, but I'm more into it since I'm playing more "serious" games on it.

But I *just* finally decided to see what pressing shift+tab to access the Steam community did. That thing is badass. You can get a full tabbed browser in your game as you're playing it.

Why had I never checked that out before?

Tungsten wrote on 04/27/2012 at 09:55pm

Ya, I've used it for all sorts of things. It's great. I usually just use it for the clock though.

Now that I think about it though, I've been alt-tabbing out of skyrim to look up console codes. Guess I don't need to do that anymore.

jdodson Admin wrote on 04/28/2012 at 12:29am

Good tip, I have Steam too but some of these in game key presses illude me.

shift+tab. Try to run that in my mind like a mantra.

SHIFT+TAB!

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 01/24/2014 at 03:24am

LOL You sound like me when I first discovered it. Tim was the first person to chat with me while I was playing Terraria. Then I was like, "whoa," because I had been saving my game and exiting Steam so that I could go check out the Terraria Wiki. Interesting stuff!

jdodson Admin wrote on 01/24/2014 at 04:50am

Wow, Travis seriously hit up Steam a year+ ago? Man, seems like a lot longer than that.

But yeah, that's about right for me too I suppose. Maybe two.

Azurephile Super Member wrote on 01/24/2014 at 04:58am

I'm not sure how long I've been on Steam, I suspect that it's been less than a year. I found out that Portal was on Steam for free, so I created an account and tried it out. I thought the game was humorous, but the puzzle aspect of it had me feeling stupid, so I uninstalled it. Then, Travis gifted me Terraria, which is only the 2nd game I have on Steam. Otherwise, I tried a Ys demo. That's about it. It's kind of sad, I think, thinking of how I've had friends that have been on Steam much longer and have many more games in their library, but then it goes back to my whole, "I'm oblivious" idea when it comes to modern gaming.

Travis Admin Post Author wrote on 01/24/2014 at 05:08am

No, no, I've had it since the HL2 days, just barely using it. :)

jdodson Admin wrote on 01/24/2014 at 06:21am

Travis: Ah, yeah, me too but little compelled me back then I got some Bundles....

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Looks like the Diablo 3 free beta weekend blew the doors off

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/546667_200311833421040_177648035687420_322024_1633520084_n.jpg

Looks like the Diablo 3 free beta weekend blew the doors off battle.net a bit:

"Diablo 3's weekend beta went about as smoothly as a hamster in a ball rolling down an erupting volcano – which is to say it was completely normal for a high-profile beta test. Saturday saw a peak of 300,000 concurrent players, Blizzard community manager Micah Whipple (Bashiok) tweeted, reporting the full number of testers for the weekend was "a lot.""

Friday night was quite laggy, Saturday was better but battle.net was out of commission until 9.50am. Some of my friends on Mac had the game crash a few times. My Windows client was stable but lagged out a bit. On Sunday battle.net was pretty... Read All

Portal 2: Valve Will Release Simplified Map Editor on PC

Valve will finally release the Portal 2 simplified level editor and rating system May 8th! Looks like it will be free DLC for all PC players and there is no word on it coming to consoles. Awesome.

I don't generally do much in the area of level editing but I plan on giving this editor a spin as it looks pretty straight forward to use. I picked up the PS3 version and that came with a free steam copy. Its cool they are releasing this so far after launch!

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http://www.giantbomb.com/news/portal-2s-perpetual-testing-initiative-launching-may-8/4107/