The Value of a $10 Price Tag

The state of PC gaming has come a long way. The evolution of such is both interesting and quite odd, leaving PC gamers with a heckuva lot of options and with a slew of games across any price point that any gamer could entertain themselves pretty much forever. I say "odd" because things that we used to say not too long ago (say, five years ago) are still being said, but these same statements are invalid. Just yesterday, my friend Zach told me to head over to this link where he wanted me to spread the word about the game Lux Delux making it to Steam. Well, before I did this, I of course had to play it.

He says "Just get it, it's only ten bucks." Hmm. Ok. So I go and watch some trailers and am finding out about this game. Meanwhile, my friend John says "Hey Justin, did you like Oregon Trail as a kid? If so, check out Organ Trail. It's on Steam and I recommend it. It's Oregon Trail, only with ZOMBIES!" So I do some quick searches and see this game for $4 on Steam. Hmm.

And I get super mad, because during the zombie apocalypse, dysentery is the least of my worries.

See, five years ago, saying "Get it. It's only ten bucks," used to elicit a game purchase. Now, not so much. Why? Because there are an infinite amount of $10 indie games out there to choose from. I do not have infinite $10 to spend on every $10 game.

The PC gaming terrain as I see it is broken down into five price categories. More about this after the jump. Most gamers as I know it don't stay within one or even two price categories. They span the spectrum and they have a generic budget for the totality of their gaming. My friend Justin C. breaks it down best when he really gets to the root of this issue. Upon recommendation of a game, he will stop me and say: "Ok if I'm at Best Buy and I only have X amount of dollars, is this the one game that I get?" It doesn't matter if X is $10 or $50, that question is very valuable. The fact of the matter is, $10 video games can be equally fine/good/great/bad/horrible as any other big name $50 game. So we have to consider that the price tag is no longer low enough at $10 to just be an insta-buy.

At what point is the price tag low enough that you will auto-buy the game upon friend recommendation? How often do you buy a game based on friend recommendation? How's that usually work out for you?

My answers after the jump. Oh, and by the way to both Zach and John - I played Organ Trail and Lux Delux. My thoughts after the jump as well.

Need For Speed: Most Wanted - A Review

So with the whole SimCity launch debacle, good ol' EA decided to give everyone a free digitial download game. Being a decently big fan of the Need For Speed franchise, I decided to go with the title Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Let's get a quick background on my expectations.

Now before this, my exposure for Need For Speed games was NFS: Underground (1 and 2) and NFS: Hot Pursuit. I was a *huge* fan of the NFS:U series. Basically, I saw it as a fantastic rendition of the Fast and the Furious movies ported to video game... and let's not talk about how embarrassingly much I love the Fast and Furious franchise. Needless to say, I played the ever-loving heck out of NFS:U 1 and 2. I unlocked everything and then still went back to it every now and again just to customize the look and feel of my favorite cars. Hot Pursuit was a much shorter stint of gaming for me, but I liked how sweet it was to play as a cop. So with that in mind, I was interested to see what to make of Most Wanted... After the jump.

SimCity Review and Thoughts

Hello and sorry for my time away. I keep saying that I want to put something up at least weekly, but I guess I'll just have to settle with putting something up whenever I have a good enough chunk of something to talk about. Today, I'll cover some of the more talked about controversies of SimCity, because well, everyone seems pissed about the damned game except for me. Oh, who am I kidding. I'm pissed too, but for completely different reasons. After the jump.

Yea, my city doesn't look a damned thing like this.
But it's cool that it COULD someday, eh? Eh?

Windows 8 Review - Part 2 and Final Conclusions

So I'm finally back to conclude my review of the Windows 8 operating system. I'm glad that I waited for a bit, because at this point I think that the extra month of exposure to the OS gave me some good insight to share. In case you missed my Part 1 initial thoughts, you can take a look here. For those of you who want an overall TL;DR-type summary, feel free to take a look at the very end of this post, after the jump for a cliff's notes version. Otherwise, we continue. If you don't even feel like going after the jump, let me just say right now that I'm perfectly pleased with the new operating system, however I will NOT be installing it on my laptop quite yet, even though I bought two copies of it. I know, a little bit of a conflicting point of view, but more on that later - overall, I like the OS. But no more or less than I like W7. Onward!

Official Favorite Games Profile Sheet

So yesterday, I get a facebook message from my friend Brian. A simple, three line message.

Yo.
<link>
Let's do this.


So I take a look at the link and here's what I see:

 

YES SIR. Let's do this we shall. Now, a half an hour later, he sent me another link. Obviously, his own favorite picks. I don't actually have his permission, but I don't care and I'm going to link to it anyway (sorry Brian). Since I'm at work here, I don't think I'm going to go through the motions and scour the web for pics to edit this sheet and make mine look anywhere near as official as his looks. I give him mad props and kudos for that. But another reason is that I had to zoom in quite a bit to get an idea of what some of these games were, because the pics are so damned small. So instead, I'm just going to make a full-functioning list for my own picks.

In doing this activity, I realize I can practically write complete blog posts in pretty much each of these categories. HAH. So many games. To pick one for each is just going to not be easy. Also, I'm making it my goal NOT to duplicate any cross-category, since I really don't think I'll need to. Let's face it the "pool of existing video games I've played" out there is pretty damned deep. Here goes, after the jump.

Talking About Tactics Games

A little bit of a departure, though very much deserving of a post on this blog. I'll come back to more Windows 8 review in a while; I figure I'd do more of a "1 month later" review and cover a few more topics I think are important as far as navigating around and playing with an operating system. Today, I wanted to get a little bit of an idea out there on the topic of tactics games. I'm sure you've all played them, or at the very least have heard of them. For reference, some of my favorite tactics games out there (though the list of which I've gone through is far longer than this): Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, Ogre Battle, Vandal Hearts, Suikoden, and Shining Force.

Just a few broad ideas to be thrown out here, and I'm curious to hear your ideas too. So shout out in the comments if you feel like talking about this. I was just recently asked to name one thing I love about tactics games they all have in common, one thing I really dislike about them, and one thing I wish they could implement or improve on when it came to tactics games. So here that goes. After the jump.

Pretty damned ashamed I didn't include a picture of Shining Force II before this edit.
My bad, favorite tactics game of my childhood. My bad completely.

Windows 8 First Look Review - Part 1

Yes yes. In a land of the internet where everyone has opinions and reviews, mine is coming sort of late. But that's ok, because I know that only a small portion of my friends have Windows 8 and the larger majority of them probably haven't even bothered to think about upgrading their OS yet. I sort of did it at a whim and I wanted to give myself a full 10 days or so before I gave my full-out opinion on it.

Now, before I begin, let me explain how I generally use my computer. When I'm at home, I generally am not so much a "power-user". That is to say, I don't do any hardcore benchmark testing, I don't do graphic design work, I'm not programming anything, there are no models rendering in the background while I'm doing other things. No. I very much do "normal" stuff. I'll watch some movies. I tool around on youtube. I watch streams on twitch.tv. I jot down some mental notes on notepad or Word. I keep track of deck ideas for MtG in excel. I game. I game on Cockatrice, MtGO, and any other game I feel like playing at the time whether it's some MMO, FPS, RPG, or what have you. And then I surf through facebook and check emails and listen to music on Spotify. I feel like I'm a fairly average geek-type normal computer user. More of the review to follow after the jump.