To The Moon: Seriously, Who Is Cutting Onions?

Are video games art?  Most non-gamers say no and most gamers say yes.  Art, as defined by Merriam-Webster because it was at the top of the google page when I searched for the definition is as follows: "Art - the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects"  So disregarding that dribble of dodging the question, yes, video games are art.

They combine every art form previously established by man kind.  3D models are essentially sculpted, textures are essentially painted, the storylines of some games put novels and screenplays to shame, music is created to enhance the mood, composition is established like a photograph and cinematics actually are movies, pretty much by definition.  But somehow allowing the viewer to interact with said art causes a debate, they'll come around sooner or later.

So since this week Mirror's Edge has decided it doesn't want to play nicely with the graphics card and freeze randomly, so I pushed it off to the side to do a playthough of To the Moon, an indie game I picked up during the last Steam sale because it was cheap.  I have very high standards when it comes to purchasing games.

To The Moon is essentially a throwback to old SNES 2D rpgs.  Everything is done with sprites, story is told through dialogue boxes.  But it does have some updates to the old formula, such as the mouse controls which I really wish was an option in emulators, I found it very pleasing to use.  In addition the game actually looks very nice, even for a 2D sprite based game.

Lots of detail

To The Moon is also in the running for best soundtrack of all time.  It's only real competition is Bastion and that's a tall order to topple.  Headphones/Soundtrack DL highly recommended.

Pro Tip: If you hit alt+enter it will put the game in a window rather than full screen, you'll thank me later.

To be fair, there's not a lot of "game" to To The Moon, it's not really an RPG, it's much more a point and click adventure game which I was slightly disappointing about especially since it got my hopes up.

Why must you taunt me so?

But my anger soon subsided as the story unfolded.  The story of the game revolves around a company that taps into people's memories, makes some tweaks and then you get to live out your dreams before you die.  The company seemed to me like it was Abstergo with better intentions.  The game revolves around a client named "John" and two of the companies employees Neil and Eva.  And John's wish is to go to the moon, a little obvious but I can't really think of a better title.  The story follows the "Memento" style of memory that is, you jump backwards, then watch things unfold forwards so you can jump back further to go more forward.  It essentially tells the story in pseudo reverse order which actually works very well.

The game plays fine, there are some puzzles in the game, some of which were semi difficult if you haven't brushed up on your matrix theory recently.  But that was mostly me obsessing over doing every single one of them in the "Ideal" number of moves, if you don't care, they're probably not that difficult.



But the thing that really makes To The Moon great is the writing.  The story is great and feels real and alive.  The game made me connect and empathize with a 2D sprite, fairly tough feat.  The two main characters have good chemistry and they manage the tone very well.  I laughed at points and was very sad at others.  In 4 hours, the game told a better story than some Oscar nods.  I can't really say too much about the story without completely ruining it, but the story will make you feel things and has good twists and turns.  Just as a word of advice, if you do end up picking this game up, which I highly recommend, don't rush through it.  There's more to the game world than what they lay out in front of you and it's worth exploring and a lot of subtle things that will slowly start to make sense if you think about them.

Subtle references everywhere

The game also teases a sequel at a point in the game which I really hope there is, if it's half as good as this one I'll still be excited.  So when it comes out, you'll know where to find me.

Where to meet if you get lost.

CoD: BO2 Multiplayer: We're definetely going in circles

This post will contain large torrents of harsh language and imagry, reader discression advised.

So this is going to be a short one, I had to take a break from my Mirror's Edge play-through due to a crashing issue that apparently has something to do with PhysX but doesn't seem to be solved through turning it off.  New drivers are taking forever to download, nVidia's file host appears to be an old AOL email server or a TI-83 calculator.

Killing time at work today, I noticed that Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was having a free multiplayer weekend.  So I started the install from my phone (FUCKING FUTURE MAN!) and used it to kill some time while waiting for my drivers to get done.

Jesus titty-fucking Christ that was a terrible idea.  I used to think CoD multiplayer was kind of fun in an arcade sense.  A mindless way to kill some time and some virtual soldiers.  The last CoD I played a lot of the actual multiplayer of was MW2, I did some on Blops 1 but it was mostly MW2.  This is some sort of devil spawn of every bad idea that has ever plagued a shooter all rolled into one steamy cluster-fuck of awful.

The installation took fucking ages.  I thought after I had it downloaded I would just click play and it would go.  Nope, it had to install a "new" directx, (it was 9c, you know the one that was last touched in 2004?) and a new set of C++ Redist files that I already had, the exact version, both the x64 and the x86 versions.  Total time from clicking "play" after the download was done to the game actually starting = 20 mins I shit you not.

So I fix the resolution, turn the graphics on "high" and go.  I get into the game and holy hell, the shit really hits the fan.  The game runs at 60fps (v.sync) unless I aim down the sights and then it's 20fps.  And the fps only drops when I aim down the sights, explosions, shooting, smoke, all 60fps, "Need to aim?  Fuck you, 20fps, have fun asshole."  Fixed mostly by turning wonky FFSA off.  But that's not the worst part, the actual game, provided you ever get it running is an abomination of shooters.

The arenas are now circles with random spawn points.  I got killed by people behind me for 80% of my deaths.  I would spawn, run some distance in some direction, get gunned down from behind.  Respawn at a point close to my previous respawn, go in a different direction, get gunned down from behind.  Respawn, shot in the back, respawn, shot in the back.  I thought it was just the map I was playing on, some train station.  Picked a different map with different rules.  Same shit, circle level, random spawns.  There's no direction, there's no front line, there's no team strategy, there's no nothing, it's down to shear luck, if you manage to run into someone who's not paying attention.  It's like the game is designed to make people rage.  The levels are purposefully designed to make the enemy kill you in the cheapest way possible.  And all of the models look exactly the same.  Your teammates look exactly like you and exactly like the enemy.  I had no idea who was my friend or enemy until I noticed if they had a name above them or they shot me in the face.  I finally figured out the difference between the two teams, if you look really hard at the models, one of the team's have a blue tinged under shirt and the others have a greenish looking one.

I have never played FPS multiplayer this bad, it is abysmally bad, it's every bad thing that ever made it into FPS multiplayer rolled into one, it's so bad that the only way something this bad could be made would be intentionally.  They must have sat down at a meeting and bet each other how bad they could make the multiplayer suck and still have the fanboys defending the game, it is the only way I can fathom why so many fucking bad ideas made it to production.

It could have been good too, just look at Blacklight: Retribution, that game is free and it's everything CoD multiplayer should be.  But it's not, CoD is a pile of things not worth to be called trash.  I fucking hate you and everything you've done to gaming CoD, just go die in a ditch already.

Deadlight: You could have just taken the stairs

I'm taking an aside from the big titles from big production houses to touch on the indie scene this time around.

Deadlight is a, from the wiki, "2.5D sidescrolling survival horror cinematic platformer".  Fucking hell that's a lot of adjectives.  Personally I would classify it as a "2.5D platforming puzzle game with zombies to make it harder."  But either one gives you somewhat of an idea of what the game is about, cept the 2.5D thing, that's a bit odd.

Departing from the game for a minute, I'm going to touch on the indie scene at current.  The Indie game scene is a mean and scary beast.  Opening up your game to profit also means opening up you game to an unforgiving public.  For every Minecraft or Bastion that makes it to the top, there's tons of others that were ripped to shreds along the path to serve as warnings for the climbers coming up behind them.  A indie or any game with an unproven dev house or IP must be very careful what it puts out as it's debut album. Make something great, it will get huge amounts of praise and a cult following.  Make something bad and you've basically signed your own death warrant.

With that in mind, Tequila Works sits on shaky ground in my opinion.

Deadlight plays kind of oddly.  It seems as though it's trying to be too many things at once.  On one hand, it wants to be a puzzle game, with jumping and platform puzzles that require you to interact with the environment to solve them.  On another hand, it wants to be an action platformer with chase scenes and difficult to navigate sections with time limits.  And then it wants to be a zombie survival game with tense sections and limited ammo and finally it wants to be a gritty storytelling device.  But the jack of all trades is the master of none.

I really hate this section

The 2.5D thing is hard to get used to.  Displaying a 2D running path in a 3D environment is not something gamers have a lot of experience with.  There's this constant urge to try to go into the background like in old 2D adventure games.  For the first half of the game I kept trying to press up to go through doorways, it just seemed like the logical thing to do.  The fully animated backgrounds look very nice, I hardly had to do any set-up for my screen shots like I normally do, the whole game looks like it's made of promo screenshots.  But it's tough to get a feel for the depth element.  A few times I was shooting at stuff in the background or couldn't see something because of something blocking it in the foreground.

There are literally stairs right there

The controls are a bit odd too.  The game was very upset I wasn't playing with a controller and reminded me of this constantly.  When a new tutorial window would pop up it would say, "Press X to do this action or if you're one of those damned PC gamers I guess you can push e or something to do this too.  Oh, it took you so long to find the keyboard bind you died?  Well, should've played on an Xbox then."  The X button had a nice big graphic to tell you which button to push so you just had to glance at the message to see which one to push, the key bind was just part of normal text.  It's very difficult to read quickly like the game demands of r you and pick out the one letter that's not a part of the sentence.  To illustrate this point, go find the single letter in that last sentence I wrote, preferably while you only have 4 seconds to do so.

Aside from it just wishing you played on a controller, the controls feel kind of stange.  It doesn't have light or flowing platforming.  It has the same sort of feel to it as the first Assassin's Creed climbing style but a little slower.  And your character has weird collision boxes.  The difference between actually grabbing a ledge and missing it feels a bit off.  This is also true of the landings, apparently Randal soled his boots with ice because sliding is something you have to contend with frequently.

Aside from it's problems, the controls are functional but are going to require you to try.  Pulling off a successful wall jump is a fickle art form that the game requires you to master.  Pulling and pushing boxes also has you hold down the strangest button combination in some cases.  You have to hold down "e" to grab the box the push "a" or "d" to move the box.  So try that out for a second, put your hand on WASD like you're playing a game and then push down both "e" and "d", it's going to feel odd. But they still work and I usually felt that my skill let me down rather than the game in most of the cases where I died.

The combat is actually pretty nicely done.  There's a bit of dissonance about a guy that can climb up entire buildings by jumping from window sill to window sill getting winded after swinging an axe four times in a row but I actually rather liked it.  The game actually gives you some choices when it comes to combat.  You have the opportunity to shoot all the zombies if you so wish, but you do have limited ammo, you can try to kill them with you axe, you can run, you can try to trick them, you can avoid them, it's nice to see a zombie game that allows you choices.  The guns have a nice feel to them, the aiming feels good and solid and the guns feel powerful which they often don't in zombie games.  The encounters often felt tense as well, you may jump into a fight with one strategy in mind and have to adapt in the middle as more zombies join the fight from the background.  Pulling off your first decapitation 180 headshot combo is really satisfying.

Those zombies could come through at any minute

The story of the game revolves around a one Randal Wayne and is told mostly told through semi-animated graphic novel type panels like the one below.

Would actually make a pretty nice desktop wallpaper

And a word of advice if you ever play this game, TURN ON THE SUBTITLES.  The game's voices can be a bit hard to hear and can get drowned out by sound fx and background noise.

See how useful they are?

Story is one area where indie games tend to shine.  They don't have too much of a worry of "mass appeal" and can try out some unknown areas of story telling.  I kind of liked the cinematics, but I also liked the similar ones from Metal Gear Ac!d so maybe I'm not the best source for that kind of stuff.  But the story kind of fell flat for me.  You don't start at the beginning of the story, you start "145 after Patient Zero" and start the game by murdering a woman in your group.  Apparently this is a bad thing but I only have the game's word for it.  Everyone else in the group seems upset by it but it seemed like a pretty logical conclusion at the time.

Randal is not very likeable in the way they try to portray him.  He's too gruff and frank.  You're supposed to feel sorry for him being separated from his wife and kid but I can't help but feel he'd be much better playing the unstoppable badass he tried to be in the cinematics, that would really draw me in.  Then you could have something bad happen in the story to break him, would have sucked me in better.  They constantly try to make you feel for characters you just met.  A lot of the cinematics would be poignant if the other characters had any part in the story, but they just don't.  The game follows a few too many cliches to really hook me in the story.

So in conclusion, the game is fun if this is your style.  It has too many focuses and the game is not nearly long enough to make good on all of them.  Things are introduced in a rushed manner and it loses focus.  There were a number of times were the game really got rolling and flowing only to take you out of it in an instant.  The characters are shallow and don't develop at all, it just seems rushed.  Still glad I played it though.

BLOOM!

Those brands look oddly familiar

This guy is nuts

That's one fucking nice background right there

Spec Ops: The Line: Maybe we should have just stayed home

Time to complete Dead Space 2 and make a blog post about it, one week.  Amount of time to complete Spec Ops: The Line and make a blog post, less than 24 hours.  Here's the first and last achievements I got.

Very start of the game

Roll credits

I did manage to sleep at some point in there but I'm still concerned about how easy it was to get lost in there.

Spec Ops: The Line is the latest in a loosely tied together series of games all with "Spec Ops" as part of their title.  Most of these games flew completely under the radar picking up very little press.  It's really amazing how little info there is on these games prior to the release of this one, even the wiki articles were completely bare.  But apparently enough people liked them that they continued to make them.  And I'm very, very glad that they did.

Spec Ops: The Line is the definition of a "sleeper hit".  The game looked like a fairly generic third person shooter.  Perhaps trying to ride on the coattails of other shooters at the time.  The trailer is pretty par for the course.

Kind of Gears of War meets Call of Duty, but it's so much more than that.

But first I'm going to talk about the game in a mechanical sense, I'll make a break for the story at the top of it's section so keep scrolling if you don't care about how the game plays or the setting.  Seriously, it's not like it will offend me and I'll bear the scars of your rejection for the rest of my life, it's fine, just go.

Are they gone?  Good, I hate those guys.  Anyways, Spec Ops plays almost exactly like Gears of War.  You sprint between cover, peek over and pop the heads off of the baddies.  It's fairly generic but it works well.  The game has a good feel about it's combat.  The guns work well, the AI is actually very very good and no gun is suitable for everything.  Spec Ops has a range system built into it's guns.  So the pistols do not work as sniper rifles and shotguns can't be effectively used from far away.  There's a nice coloring system built into the cross-hairs that will tell you if you're in range or not and it actually works rather well.  I mentioned a second ago that the AI is well designed which is very good because you have two with you for the duration of the game.  They're actually extremely useful in combat, don't get in the way often and are very well written.  It almost makes me rethink friendly AI as being a universally terrible choice in a game.

We're the three best friends....

The setting of the game is absolutely perfect.  There's this really eerie juxtaposition of these lavish hotels filled with sand in a war zone.

Pretty amazing stuff

But it also establishes much more than that just from minor set pieces and subtle hints.  The areas almost tell the story better than the dialogue.  The progression and set design is better than pretty much anything I've seen.  It's all extremely varied and keeps you exploring.

The gameplay, as I mentioned before, is generic but suitable, but not without it's faults.  The aiming can be a bit finicky and a little hard to get used to.  The game seems to have been designed with console auto-aim in mind because the fine aiming controls on the PC are a little difficult and aiming moves in a sort of grid pattern.  The combat is fairly repetitive but the changing settings mix things up fairly nicely.  The game's difficulty is a touch on the easy side.  I played through on "Suicide Mission" (hard) because "FUBAR" difficulty was locked at the beginning, but it really wasn't that hard.  I got a few of the, I'm assuming, more difficult achievements along the way, like these two.

I felt like the difficulty I played on should be the normal one, I shudder to think what the easiest difficulty is like.  I do like that a few shots from either side is enough to put someone down and if it isn't it's because of a real reason, like the guy's wearing armor.  And the combat was broken up and varried enough that it still feels okay, not great, but okay.

Who knew sandstorms were hard to fight in?

WARNING

I'm now going to talk about the story.  There will not be major spoilers in this section but to get the best experience out of the game you should walk into it with as little knowledge of the story as possible.

Last chance people, I'll post a break at the end before I start random screenshots in case you want to see those.

Still here? You're sure? Okay.

------------------------------------STORY SECTION QUIT SCROLLING SO FAST------------------------------------

The storyline of Spec Ops is really what sells it.  The game immerses you in the story right from the get go.  I generally don't like support characters in games as major points of the narrative.  They just seem to sit there and say and do things that makes me hate them.  That said, Adams and Lugo really solidified the story.  The game might focus on Walker, but the writers did not mind him sharing the spotlight.  The two support characters are gritty and real and they keep their mouth shut outside of story points so I actually liked them throughout the entire game.  They provide other points of views to the story events and don't sugar coat their responses, the support characters develop almost as much as Walker does.

The twists in the story are incredible and difficult to predict.  To avoid spoilers I'm going to say that there's a couple of times where bad things happen.  And every time I actually felt something and I knew they were coming, I played this before on the 360.  Even so I still got chills or felt legitimate anger.  There's a couple of choices in the game that are very well hidden, the game doesn't do that thing games normally do with "Press this to be a dick, press this to be nice", it's not so black and white.  You often don't know that you actually choose a particular path, it just seemed like that's what you were supposed to do.  There's a part in the game that will be completely influenced by your feelings of the story events thus far.  I choose my path and it felt right and justified within the context but I felt a bit of guilt too.

No two people will get the exact same thing out of the game, different choices, the characters you end up identifying with, the only thing that seems to be universal is you will take away something.  It's one of the first military games that you never feel like you want to be there.  It's gritty and at times painful.  The game isn't "fun" in the conventional sense but it is very compelling, you will keep playing it.

Maybe your choices will be different

-----------------------END OF STORY SEGMENT: BRING ON RANDOM SCREENSHOTS -----------------------

Interesting Graffiti

Can we not go in there?

Pre-rendered is actually worse looking than the game

Such a hopeful message

Mmmm, pool water, it's got electrolytes!

My sleeves are missing...

#YOLO #SWAG #LIVINDALIFE #DYINGDADEATH #DEAD #DUBAI

Wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man...

WACKY WAVING INFLATABLE ARM FLAILING TUBE MAN!!!

Why he doesn't use one of the five carabiners on his rig, I'll never know

P.S. Hi redditors ಠ_ಠ

Dead Space 2: They didn't teach us any of this in engineering school...

Survival horror is a weird genre.  It has a set of fans that are fanatical about the genre and a set of people who will outright refuse to play anything in the genre.  It's odd to find a set of games who's popularity can also be measured by the amount of people who refuse to play it.  Survival horror usually have a few things in common.  The setting involves confined spaces, difficult combat, unsettling monsters and rely heavily on being atmospheric to come across as scary and tense.

Dead Space was one of the first games I played when I built my new computer.  My old laptop had a fit just looking at the system requirements as laptops tend to do, but I was very interested in the game due to the press surrounding it.  I rather liked Dead Space.  The setting was good, the characters were interesting enough but weren't in the game much which was fine by me.  It had good atmosphere and I really liked how much you interacted with the environments and I thought the combat had a good feel to it.  I also liked the silent protagonist approach to the game's story.  It made the character you in a way and made him seems like he was just a terrified engineer.  Dead Space was also paced very well.  You slowly gained better armor and weapons, the puzzles and enemy encounters slowly got more complex and tense, the environments changed nicely and was always introducing new and exciting areas.  The game felt nice and well thought out.

Dead Space 2 departed from most of these to the great detriment to the game.  In Dead Space, the game started and it was a while before you even caught a glance of a necromorph.  It established the setting in a "Show you" sort of way and eased you into the game, setting and story.  Dead Space 2 starts with a rather long cinematic that condenses the entire back story and storyline of Dead Space into one cinematic.  After that, it brings up your girlfriend again and then pops to an interrogation room in a psych ward with Isaac talking to some unknown guy.  Even though I haven't even started the game, I already like it less.  I don't like that Isaac has a voice, I don't like his new voice and I'm already starting to not like Isaac at all.  After that cinematic ends, Isaac is woken up in a psych ward by an unnamed character who is alive for exactly 38 seconds before turning into a necromorph directly in front of you.  Then you have to run through said psych ward with no weapons or even control of your arms and the game attempts to make it frightening.  This "brick to the face" sort of game intro really doesn't fit Dead Space at all.

After the intro sequence, the game actually gets tense for a bit.  They make a point of not giving you a weapon right away which was good.  One of the most tense moments comes after you "borrow" a gravity gun from a surgical suite.  But once you get your weapons back and your engi rig, the game is pretty much back to the status quo of Dead Space 1.

The story is competent but doesn't really add too much to the overall story and I hate that Isaac has a voice and I hate how they made his character.  If you want him to be a tragic hero, don't make him a snarky asshole, it really doesn't fit.  Other than that I won't touch too much on the story since there's several twists and turns in the story that I don't want to ruin but the characters do get less awful as you get further into the game, it does get better if only slightly in my opinion.

What I will talk about is the good parts of the game.  Dead Space 2 is a console port, in case you didn't know, but it's actually a very good one.  A lot of times console ports don't bother giving the PC gamers much control over the game and tends to make the controls anywhere from kinda bad to downright unplayable.  Assassin's Creed has this problem, it's just not designed for a keyboard and mouse.  But Dead Space does a good job.  The key maps make sense and are comfortable, the movement is in the sort of "toggle" style that makes using a keyboard easy and the aiming controls feel right at home on the mouse.  A lot of game devs should take note of how well optimized the engine is.  On "High", which is very pretty, the game ran at 110-130 fps which is a very small range and was incredibly steady.  Even when things got tense and there was a lot on the screen it sat there like a rock.  Now my GPU runs at about 54-56C when it's idle and only ever scrapes 70 in really graphic intensive games during the summer.  Dead Space 2 was peaking at about 66 running at 120fps so I decided to give my GPU a break and turn on v.sync.  This was the only problem I had with the game being a console port.  V.Sync is supposed to set the fps to your monitor refresh rate, most of the time, including my case, that's 60hz or 60fps.  But v.sync in Dead Space 2 sets it to the normal fps of a console game, which is 30 fps.  Kind of annoying but I just turned it off, exited the game and forced v.sync through my graphics drivers, easy fix and worked flawlessly, it's a good port.

The game does have a few issues that are caused by it being born on a console that really couldn't be helped by the devs so I don't fault them, it's just stuff I noticed.  The difficulty of the game is heavily reliant on the combat and the way the enemies move.  Analogue sticks on controllers don't have acceleration as a design spec.  The controller doesn't know how "hard" you moved the stick, only how far in any given direction.  It would be possible to give sticks acceleration, but gamers have been trained over the years to adapt to not having it so adding it would be a bad idea.  A mouse, however, is heavily reliant on acceleration.  This makes the combat much easier as a result.  It's fairly trivial to slice the legs off of a running enemy far before they reach a distance where they can hurt you.  When I started the game I started on "normal" difficulty to get a feel for the game, it only took me 10 minutes with my first gun to turn it up to "Zealot" which actually made the game nicely challenging for most parts of the game.  It had a good feel to it.

The game does settings very well.  The lighting engine is very nicely done and the shaders take full advantage of this.

Very nice lighting

Really cool effects

The gameplay is also nicely varied with my favorite part being the zero gravity sections which are handled really nicely.

Not Zero G but an interesting section none the less

Overall I did end up liking Dead Space 2.  It does sit rather meekly in the shadow of it's first incarnation which did almost everything better, it's still a competent game, just a misguided one.  It forgot what made Dead Space 1 good and focused to hard on what they thought  made Dead Space 1 good.

A lot of the heart string tugging came off as trying too hard.  I had heard previously about a section in the game involving children and how the section was so unsettling and how horrifying the section was.

Why can't I hold all these feels

I just thought the section was funny.  There was no set-up to it at all and I was mostly just happy that the enemies were easy to kill so I could save up some ammo.  The babies in particular were supposed to be very unsettling but the way they walked was very comical and I laughed hysterically when I shot the first one and it's head went rolling off.  It was just trying so hard to pull at heart stings that just aren't there.

Baby head bowling, I think I may have problems

Attempts to make the game scary also came off as campy and obvious to me.  For example, at one point in the game you go onto a docked ship.  The area is very cramped and has weird lighting and is rather unsettling in general.  In this ship there's a log that you can find that talks about "ghosts" in the ship and particularly one that follows people around making scratching sounds while you're moving and stopping when you stop.

This would have been an amazing addition.  There was this perfect opportunity to make a section of the game terrifying.  Add the scratching in, add an enemy that you only catch glimpses of but can nearly constantly be heard.  Make it change things in rooms you have to go through more than once, such as finding several bodies in a room just lying on the ground, go off and do something and then having them hanging from the ceiling by their entrails or something.  At this point in the game, you expect there to be an enemy around every corner, removing all the enemies would make everything tense.  You hear banging coming from beyond the door in front of you, but when you enter, nothing.

But alas, they just have you fight normal necromorphs in a rave.

The game did manage to keep me around until the end, including a particularly terrifying scene involving things going into other things in a very visceral and unnerving way and if you screw it up you have to do it again.  And then a really annoying section that's blatantly ripped off of Resident Evil 4 but I still finished it.  I just wish it had been more like the first one and with less voices in it.

Commence random screenshots because I took too many

People still talk like morons in emails in the future

All that blood

I seriously hate this chick

*cough* Event Horizon *cough*

*more cough* More Event Horizon *more cough*

Event.... Horizon...

Un-Fucking Your Steam Library

Steam have evolved into a great service.  It's easy to use, keeps all your stuff in nice accessible places (save for screenshots, that's a nightmare), but managing a growing or overgrown library is one of the biggest hurdles people seem to have.  Since Steam keeps all your games listed, whether they're installed or not, your list will grow much faster than you think.  Doubly so if you use the wrapper for third party programs often like I do.

So here is my guide to un-fucking your Steam library into nice easy chunks that are easy to wrap your head around.

The crux of organizing your Steam Library lies in the use of categories.  You might already have a few categories that manage some of your games, you might have a ton and are just reading this to see if I bring anything new to the table, which I probably won't in all honesty.

For a long long time, I just had my library in long form.  It seemed easy enough to keep everything sorted, I mean it's all in nice alphabetical order, pretty easy to find stuff, but using the categories to their full effects can stop things like, "What game should I play?" or "Did I finish that game or not?" which might seem minor but actually plagued me for years. 

But everything is much better now.  Much more streamlined, easy to remember where I was in a game and stopping things from getting stagnant.  Now just a warning before I start, I'm going to go through my process.  The key part of that is "my", this might not work for you, but it may get you started on your own system that works better for you.  These are just guidelines that I have found that work for me and would probably work well for others.  So without further delay, here's my system.



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For those who just scroll till they see something important.

 

This is my current Steam library page

When I first started my reorganization, I just put games that I wanted to play in my "Favorites" category.  This worked well for a while until I started putting too many in, the list got too large.  I would just ignore some games to get to the ones I wanted to play, which is hardly any better than using the long form library.

The first thing I did was put all the things that were Half-Life or mods there of in one category. 

Picture provided for those who don't know exactly what I mean.  Now you may notice a few things that are missing, but I'll get to that in a bit.

That worked well for a while, especially having somewhere to put the betas as they were just taking up space.

The next category I did was "Multiplayer".  These are games that require the internet to work properly.  I made the decision to include a few games that are possible to play offline, but that I personally played exclusively online.  This was mainly to keep everything I couldn't play when my internet died off my list.

The next thing I was tired of was games that I had completed clogging up my list.  So I made a "Completed" category originally.  This worked well for a while until I got a bunch of DLCs and a couple of games I had added achievements.  So I made a "Main Story Complete" category for games who's story I had completed.  This allowed me to put both games that were actually complete with no further content to explore or ones that I had finished the main storyline but might want to revisit for achievements, new game plus style things or just another play through.

The next was the other half of the split of my "Complete" category which is "Unplayed DLC".  I recently got a hold of all the DLC for Skyrim and New Vegas, but they were hanging out in my "Completed" category so I was neglecting them. 

Next up was "To Be Finished".  This category is for games I started but lost interest or stopped playing for whatever reason, I can only play Dark Souls for so long before I need a break.  This also includes games with current achievement or 100% runs going such as my current running Just Cause 2 completionist run, that one's taking a while.  As a rule, if a game sits in the "To Be Finished" category and hasn't been played in 2 months, I uninstall it and move it back to it's "To Be Played" category or into "Main Story Complete" depending on circumstance.

"To Be Played: X" was the next set and was made as an offshoot of the "To Be Finished" category.  Oringinally, this was one category, "To Be Played" but the list was rather long and wasn't giving me the answer to, "What do I want to play next?" problem.  So this category exists as two.  "To Be Played: AAA" which is for games with AAA devs, but more as a way to differentiate a style.  AAA games tend to require investment in story, a long run and less "pick up and play" style of gaming.

The current holdings.  These are games that I have never played or only played the first hour of at some other time in history.  Except for Spec Ops: The Line, that's in there because I want to play it again so very, very much.  It should be coming up after I finish my Dead Space 2 blog post which I swear is coming up, work, school, social, explanation 4 not found.

The other side of the coin is "To Be Played: Indie/Small".  This is for small arcadey games that I can just pick up and play but for whatever reason haven't.  And also for Indie games so they have their own niche.  There's a few in here that I started playing and then they violated the "To Be Finished" rules and fell back into here because I didn't get too far into them.

The last few categories I didn't mentioned spawned out what was needed to get the rest of my library under control.  "Server Tools" contains server tools like old Half Life Mod dedicateds, Terraria's Server Tool and a couple of links to outside admin software, just so I have it all together.

And "Strategy/Retro" was born because I had a bunch of strategy games that I pretty much only install to play with friends that have little to zero story content and after that was all sorted I had a very small amount of re-released retro games, such as the Thief series sitting around that I had already played so they didn't fit into either "To Be Played" category.

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The last thing, and perhaps the biggest thing that has changed is my "Favorites" category.  This is only for the game or two games that I am currently playing.  If a game has sat for a week or more in favorites without being played, it gets booted back down to it's old category.  Strictly adhering to this rule has provided the biggest benefit.  Now I start a game, play it for a bit and say, "I'll come back for it.", I used to do this all the time, end games midway through but those days are gone, it forces a rule and a time limit so I actually finish games which is a big hurdle for me and many people I know.