Internet. Serious Business.

If you have been looking at the Steam Top Sellers list the past couple weeks you have seen the rise of the little Indie game from Klei Entertainment called Don’t Starve. If you viewed some of the origin trailers such as the first one below you may have no idea what you are getting into. While it has ssome very neat art and it kind of tries to set the tone, you don’t see any actual gameplay so you aren’t real sure what it is. That still hasn’t stopped it from climbing into the top 10 top sellers this week, however. Another big reason we see it climbing is that it is one of the early participants in the Steam Trading Card Beta. A new sort of community group that Steam has started in which you gain virtual trading cards just from playing games. You build card sets by collecting them in game, trading, or buying them in the Marketplace. Then you can convert them for Badges and rewards that allow you to pretty up your profile,and get unique emoticons for the forums. BUT…you can read more about that here.

Don’t Starve is a survival sandbox game. Set on a plane much like Minecraft, but it isn’t a building simulator. Your goal is to survive the elements, and the enemies in a hostile world by collecting resources and crafting them into useful tools. The game is complete, but Klei has vouched to add updates every 2-3 weeks for at least 6 months after the April 23 release. In fact, just today, a new patch was released in which a completely new biome was introduced to the world: CAVES! This will be a new biome that they plan to add more to over the next couple weeks so there are still more touch ups they want to make on it.

So…what do you actually do in this game? First I must mention that there are two different modes of playing this completely SINGLE PLAYER game. They have stated that there will be absolutely no co-op, or multiplayer in the game. They want this game to be a single player survival experience. You have the Sandbox Mode and the Adventure mode. When you first start you are dropped into sandbox mode, which is a never ending world that you can keep hoarding resources and battling the world. Every world is RANDOMIZED so no two worlds are the same. You start with none of the map explored, or visible and you have to start collecting and exploring to see what is out there. Adventure mode is a set of 5 worlds in which you are faced with different challenges and must be completed or all the way through, or you are thrown back to the gate, which is found in the starting sandbox world. Forcing you to start all over. The Adventure mode also adds a little bit of a story to the game as well to figure out what this place is all about.

Of course survival drums up thoughts of horror, but this is a bit more survival in the Terraria realm than the Resident Evil one. You play on a plane like Minecraft, but instead of building stuff for fun you build it strictly to survive. You are dropped into the world with nothing. Immediately you must start to pluck up resources you can find and start to build them up to get the right ones to craft more useful tools, structures, machines, weapons, armors, and even ways to cook and catch food. You have 3 gauges you must worry about here. Hunger, Health, and Sanity. Health is self-explanatory. Hunger is too really, but it does have a big impact on your survival. Like the title says “Don’t Starve” and it means it. You can starve to death if you don’t keep that gauge up. The third and most interesting is the Sanity meter. Sanity isn’t particularly annoying,m or hard to control, but it does present extra challenges to your survival. Once it drops to a very low level the world get seven harder. More strange enemies appear, shadows swiping away you right at night for instance, and you visibly look frightened while the screen starts to blur and make you worry about your own sanity. Even so…there are some items that can only be obtained if you are at a low sanity level so you may have to force yourself there at times. Sanity can be kept in check by wearing sanity boosting items, some food, and staying away from fights.

All these things need to be controlled and worked on by collecting and crafting useful items and tools. You have a couple of machines that you must find resources to build them with. You start crafting tools to cut down trees, break up rocks, and even have shovels to dig up things like gravestones. Once you can craft the machines you are ready to start setting up your personal base in which you start to build a sort of place to hoard all your goods. You need to eat remember. So you start to find better ways to get and cook food to give you better food bonuses. You build crockpots to work with recipes instead of eating just one item at a time which gives you much larger hunger boosts. You can create a Fridge to store items so they last longer (yes the food can spoil). You can build farms, make traps for birds and rabbits and spiders. Giving you access to meats. If your sanity is getting too out of control you can take a nice sleep with a sleeping bag, or a tent that has limited uses to give your sanity meter a nice kick. Of course sleeping will take time, and make you hungry so you could actually die if you aren’t full enough.

The world has a Day, Dusk, and Night cycle. During the day you are happy and your sanity meter doesn’t take any negatives unless you try to get into battle. If you have some gear that boosts sanity it will replenish some during the day even. During dusk it will start to fall if you don’t ahve any Sanity boosting gear. Then at night it will fall even further. Sanity becomes a part of your daily routine in which you figure out quickly that you must craft some good clothing to make sure you can keep it at a respectable level. While the day time is the time to explore the arge maps, night is the time to GET TO THE LIGHT. Too dark to travel without a torch, or other light source, it is usually best to either get back to your base camp fire, or drop a fire pit in the wilderness until day time. During this time you can either sleep, or try to get some things done like cooking food, harvesting farms, traps, and dry meat racks for instance. This is all well and good in the starting summer season, but once winter creeps in you have a whole new set of worries. FREEZING to death. You need fire and clothing more than ever at this time because not only can your freeze to death, but your sanity falls at an even faster rate. Your real goal through the first 20 days or so is collecting enough resources and setting up a camp to store them in order to survive the upcoming winter, which lasts about 15 game days. All while avoiding getting killed!

Once you get tired of sandbox mode you can open Maxwell’s door and enter Adventure mode. This is more of a challenge than having everlasting worlds. Your goal here is to collect items needed to open the next door to the next world. Still having to survive like you did in the sandbox mode. Just now you start over with nothing every new world except for being able to drag only 4 items with you to the next one. This isn’t exactly a lot.

Now this may seem like a lot of things to overcome, but the worst of all is PERMADEATH. If you die, you are dead for good! Well…not necessarily. As long as you find the usually two pig altars in a level you can respawn once at each. You can also find amulets that you can wear (instead of helpful armor mind you) that will revive you once as well. Later on when you figure out how to make a Meat Effigy you can build those too at the cost of 30 health for each one you build. Since you only have 150 health to begin with this isn’t exactly a small cost. First few games you play…you will die and have to start all over. IT can become tedious if you don’t figure things out. IT took me about 10 games before I could get through the first winter even. So there was a lot of early collecting trying to get more done before the deadly winter arrived.

This game has had extensive beta testing already and many have been playing it for over a year already so it got a little bit of love from those that were there through development. They ahve taken suggestions very well and are very receptive to the community for new ideas to add to the game. There is also a VERY small modding community, but with the game being a top seller it should grow. Klei as I said has vouched to make updates for at least 6 months so the game is still growing. The caves addition was quite substantial and adds a lot more space to the game. IT puts you into a world of darkness, which is much tougher to explore than the world above. As if it wasn’t hard enough already…

I forgot to mention that you can actually feed PIGS and have them come along with you and do your bidding. They will help you chop down trees and fight for your honor. I use them as decoys for hairy situations while they act as my meat shields. No worries, there are plenty, and you can even build pig houses by your base to spawn even more. There is a nice mix of friendly and deadly enemies in the game to avoid, kill, or…EAT. Eating some of the little things like rabbits and bird though after killing them can add to your naughtiness level. A hidden level that can only go down by these actions, but will regen a bit if you wait long enough between actions. When it reaches a level too naughty…let’s just say that something may not like it too much. >:)

The art style is very nice as you can see from the videos below. You have several characters to unlock as well so you can use different strategies with different players and their skills. They are quite easy to unlock as Klei doesn’t feel that this game needs to force silly achievements on you. The music is also very good and perfectly fits the fell of the game.

Overall this game has been a nice surprise. It will give you many dozens of hours of playtime, although if you are dead set on beating adventure mode it could be done in much less time. You aren’t really going to just beat it though right away. You will have to learn a lot before you play, and doing it blind is truly the best way to go about it. The price as of now is $14.99, which is actually a tad higher than most Indie games we get, but it is not overpriced in my mind considering the promise of continued updates and additions. Once the caves are completed I would say they are on the level of a DLC that you get from most games.

As of right now I would probably give this game an 8-8.5/10. I think it still needs some more additions with the future updates to make it more interesting over the long haul for the sandbox world. More modes would be nice to be added for different challenges as well, but certainly there is plenty here to do already. Some new fun stuff like pets maybe (other than our living carrying chest) It’s worth the price in current form, but the new additions will certainly be anticipated by me for more fun. IF you are an indie fan, or jsut plain like survival sandbox type game (this game is actually rather unique as I haven’t played many games with this mix really) you will absolutely love this game. The community is also very friendly and very into the game. I would give it a must buy as long as you aren’t a casual. You know…people with ADD that only want fast paced games and can’t handle a little patience and planning. This game isn’t particularly easy.

Origins Trailer:

A bit of gameplay:

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Not so much anymore after watching this video. While there are a lot of great puns and one-liners you can get out of this video it is kind of disturbing more than funny. What’s most disturbing I guess is the actions of the trainers that seem to be “untrained” in dealing with such a situation. Lok how they basically antagonize the animals here and make this situation appear to go alot worse than it could have it they had used proper back ground check service here at easy back ground to figure out if these guys really had the right tools to do this job.

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I think I will split this into a two part review due to it basically being a game of 2 extremes. One being good, and the other being a huge letdown. So I’ll start with the bad news in the battle of Story vs. Gameplay with my look into the gameplay of BioShock Infinite. IF I can stand talking about this game long enough to write Part 2 I will…eventually.

BioShock Inifinite has gotten some of the most glowing reviews for a video game in the last several years. With dozens of perfect scores of 10/10 on Metacritic, not just from fans, but from major video game review sites such as IGN, you have to stop and see what all the fuss is about. I did, and I was not swayed by the game to agree with the review scores. In fact, I was actually quite disappointed with the game as a huge Bioshock fan from the first two games. Both of which I consider to not only be better games, but much more fun, and certainly more fun to replay.

I’m just going to go right into it, but I’m going to completely ignore the story for the time being as to push home the “gaming” aspect, and my disappointment with it. Infiniite has tired and extremely boring gameplay. The worst of the series by far. It is the most basic of the series too, which makes extra playthroughs more tedious than something to try new things with. There isn’t much reason to try new things. Actually…you really can’t try new things because everything feels the same.

The gameplay lends itself to a poor gaming design overall actually. First and foremost, all upgrades in the game are controlled by one resource. Money. Unlike the previous 2 Bioshock games, Infinite uses cash to upgrade everything. This includes gun upgrades, Vigors (the new word for plasmids in Infinite), and all of the healing items. In previous Bioshock games there was a reason this wasn’t the case, and the main reason that the gameplay had much further depth and variety due to you having a limited supply of this rich resource through one game with many more options to use it on. Bear with me here as I explain how something this simple has such a dramatic effect on the overall gameplay.

With only one currency used to purchase upgrades, Infinite takes away some of the best moments in the Bioshock series. Both previous games had you killing for EVE to upgrade your plasmids. How did you do this? In BioShock, you killed the infamous Big Daddies and made the choice to save, or slaughter the Little Sisters. Being the good guy earned you rewards after saving a few of them, while killing them immediately got you a bigger chunk of EVE immediately. Infintie has no EVE. Instead it is called “Salts”, but that is just your MP gauge, and isn’
t collected in any form to upgrade your Vigors.

In BioShock 2 they had a similar, although a bit more detailed and different method to collect EVE. In fact there wee a couple ways you could get more EVE. You still had to go kill off a Big Daddy to get EVE, but your choice here between killing the Little Sister and getting the EVE right then came the more detailed track of saving her. In BS2 you were to carry her around and look for EVE on other dead bodies and have her extract it. While she did this you had to protect her from waves of oncoming enemies. Taking this rote you earned more EVE this time than you did killing her immediately. Then you had to find one of her hidey holes to take her to her escape.. You still had the option to kill her off even at this point as well and get some EVE that way.

On top of the traditional and most prominent method of obtaining EVE in BioShock 2, a new boss enemy was introduced that gave you a bit more at times as well. The Big Sister! Battles with the Big Sisters came after you had saved 2-3 Little Sisters and you would hear a scream to let you know that the quick and powerful Big Sister was coming to take you down for “playing” with her Little Sisters. After that kill you earned more EVE to use to upgrade.

In both those games that EVE was used not only to upgrade your plasmids at machines, but it could by extra items that you could use to boost certain skills. Infinite had what they called “Gears” that also did this, but you just found them lying on the ground. Most of which were utterly useless, or completely limited to very small parts of the game. You could find winter gear from bogner that had more use to you in this world than what the game offers. Bioshock and BS2 had much greater variety and usefulness for these little do-dads.

On top of the EVE as a resource, the previous BioShock games had machines that you had to find and were very rare called “Power to the People…” machines. These machines gave you ONE weapon upgrade per machine and were scattered over the course of the game. BioShock had enough to get every upgrade, but BS2 you weren’t given enough to upgrade everything. THEN you had your cash, which was used to buy ammo, EVE, and health.

This carries over into all aspects of the gameplay in my mind. Including things such as the save points, which are just auto-saves as you enter/leave certain areas. These saves are actually very annoying for the explorer in you. If you spend the time to search out all the BioShock secrets (Why wouldn’t you? That’s a series staple.), and needed to quit immediately you were punished with a loss of a lot of time. Since the game only auto-saved when leaving an area you couldn’t just quit int he middle because you never knew of that exit was ONE WAY. You didn’t know if you could ever get back there. So you had to either quit, replay the entire area, or try to reach a save point before you wanted to.

How does the save system relate to the money thing? Well…not so much the save system itself, but kind of how enemies work and why there is no reason to go back and explore. In the first 2 Bioshock games you had respawning enemies after either a period of time, or after travelling to different areas. Since you had to actually fight for EVE and you couldn’t just farm enemies in these areas for it, but only ammo, health/EVE aids, or money. Farming had few benefits to you other than refilling your ammo and it was still a risk because you could end up worse off than you were before if you tried to do it.

In Infinite, there are only a couple of areas where enemies respawn. People will point this out as saying that they do respawn in Infinite, but it isn’t really a respawn so to say. This is more of another fight in an area you are forced to backtrack through, and as such it isn’t an area you can go back to several times to farm these enemies. You see them because they are on the story path. They don’t want you to break the game by being able to farm enemies due to their moronic upgrade resource system.

Having one currency alone in Infinite has that much impact on the game design ALL BY ITSELF. Since you gain money from containers, enemies, and of course our little friend Elizabeth (Who? Oh yeah…she’s our “friend” in this game who I’l mention sparingly in this portion). Elizabeth tosses you healing items, and sometimes cash in certain circumstances during the game. During battle she could save you, or could totally screw you because she throws you the thing you don’t want. Salts instead of health, which DUH is an easy call isn’t it? Either I die, or I get health. Salts don’t do a thing for me. IT’s not an awful mechanic, and it is put in simply to make Elizabeth feel like a useful battle companion, but overall isn’t all that interesting. With her tossing you money, however you can kind of farm cash at times in this game if you can figure out what makes her toss it to you. Based on my playtime I am pretty sure that if you check the vending machines enough along with a slight bit of time passing by, and maybe checking a few other containers while in an area she will just flip you some extra cash. There was one point where I got her to give me enough in one room to purchase 3 weapon upgrades and a major Vigor upgrade. So much for breaking the game huh?

All that crap makes the game less fun, but mostly it is that lack of fights for the EVE that makes the game worse and less interesting. Infinite does have its big bad monster enemies in some form, but they aren’t nearly as interesting. They come out as scripted battles rather than moving around levels on their own like Big Daddies did. Infinite’s form of Big Daddies are called Handymen and they are completely stupid and have no real point to them in regards to the world, or the game. They are of little interest and not fun to fight. Scripted battles that don’t allow you to set anything up before the fight like you would with an impending Big Daddy fight. They don’t drop anything particularly special other than maybe one of those useless Gears. You only fight a few of them too so it isn’t like they have any real story, or interest behind them.

Man…this is getting long and that’s just stuff about why I think the resources make the game suck. I haven’t even told you yet that you are only allowed to carry 2 guns at one time! The guns have no special abilities. They only use one type of ammo. None of them are high tech, or interesting in the least. Remember using ammo that sets enemies on fire, or freezing enemies, or the Tesla coil on a shotgun to stun an enemy in the previous BS games? Absolutely NONE of that here. There are more weapons, but none of them have special attributes. All upgrades bought in CASH of course. Just traditional junk. So carrying only 2 doesn’t even matter really. Sniper and a shotgun. Sniper and an RPG. Whatever. You need a ranged gun and a big hitter more or less and the rest don’t matter because they don’t do anything special. The weapons are boring beyond belief and their upgrades even more so. No trap guns like those Rivets, or the old RPG that had traps that exploded, or the wires you could shoot with the bow. Nothing. They SUCK.

You ask…what about the Vigors? Surely those are interesting and have gotten better than Plasmids were? You’d be completely wrong. Vigors have upgrades, but they do nothing all that interesting. The array of vigors you can use almost all have the same roles. Crowd control, traps, and one interesting one that possesses some enemies. There may be about 7 vigors but at least 2 groups of 3 perform virtually the same functions. No security bots to control and bring tagging along. Instead of sending bees you can send crows. Nothing fun, or new, but who cares anyways. All you fight are soldiers that are brainwashed.

I can’t fail to mention either that Infinite has discarded the whole camera/video camera research system that the previous 2 games had as well. There is no system at all. Completely gone. None of that boosting your damage, or finding new toys by researching enemies in Infinite. A very bad call I would say, but I would guess that the main reason they did this was because the enemy variety is so poor, and certain enemies are so sparse that you wouldn’t be able to do it anyways. The enemy selection is horrid compared to the first 2.

Ugh…that’s enough about the gameplay. I’ll mention Elizabeth more in the story review part 2 and waht her gameplay is. It doesn’t really fit here anyways. She’s not all that beneficial anyways. There is actually more gameplay stuff I could complain about, but I got the point out I wanted and what the big problem with the gameplay all stemmed from. The one currency system.

Let me just say this…if my score depended entirely on the gameplay for BioShock Infinite this game would get a 5/10 and I’m not kidding. This of course brings some of my love for the first two into it, but even if I didn’t it wouldn’t be any higher than a 6/10. It is tedious, boring, and completely stale. If you play games for the gameplay rather than the story I suspect that Infinite will disappoint you. IF you play for the story mostly it probably is your type of game. Gameplay matters much more to me for video games so the pathetic presentation of gameplay mechanics in this game makes me want to punch myself in the junk.

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I am seriously starting to worry about my gaming habits. While I play games far more than most people, and that alone is a bit of a problem, I have way too many games to be stuck in Borderlands 2 this long!

During the Steam Christmas sale as you know I bought a ton of games. Yet, since I got Borderlands 2 I haven’t been playing any of them. I’m not even sure I have finished any of them. In fact, my favorite series, the Souls”s series from From in which I adore Demon’s Souls and own both the PS3 and PC versions of Dark Souls, I have disregarded lately. I got Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition around Christmas, and I DID play it almost exclusively for a week, or so because I hadn’t done any of the DLC yet, but I didn’t even finish my first playthrough! I started Saints Row: The Third and played it for a while, but decided it was a bit tedious and boring. That it lacked a lot of things SR2 did and that it was just a bit of a letdown. That of course came in my THQ going out of business package that housed about 24 games. I haven’t even installed more than 3 of them I don’t think. I only bough tit for SR3, and the two Darksiders games. Haven’t played either of those, but tried Metro 2033 for a while. It’s OK, but it has a lot of technical problems I have read.

Then I bought the GTA IV Complete Edition a couple weeks ago just because I wanted to see what it looked like on PC. Think it cost me $7.49 for GTA IV, Lost and the Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony. I played that for a bit and I do love that game, but again I got bored after a bit and went back to Borderlands 2. With the release of the new Level Cap, as well as having all 3 DLCs and Gaige, I have played all 5 characters already. I have Axton, Gaige, AND Salvador at Level 50. Salvador I’m using now and up to Level 59. I even got OCD stuck farming Badass Ranks the last couple days after I realized your could “prestige” those and i did it so now i I start over to see them pop up every minute. I’m hoping I can get that thing up to platinum and earn a platinum rings from joyjewelers.com, or something special, although I know that it will just add another +1 star in my BA Rank page. Right now I have a fancy little star with a 2 next to it on Salvador and a 1 with Gaige,and Axton. My BA Rank is now hovering around 80,000 without any cheating, or anything. I literally did these all legit. Every one of my boosts are over 15% at this point. Only thing that bugs me about these is that they don’t let you choose the one you want every time and you get stuck with crap things like recoil, accuracy, etc. instead of Crit. Damage, or gun damage. LOL I took ONE show with my Level 50 Slag Slow Hand and it ranked me up to Rank 4 of the Slag Damage challenge.

I just need to quit playing it. Of course another character will be out soon and of course I will buy it and start a NEW game with it. I haven’t even played some of my favorite series this year yet. I never got Dead Space 3, Far Cry 3, and most painfully Bioshock Infinite. I mean…I never miss releases of games like this. Bioshock Infinite is getting RAVE reviews too, yet I haven’t even looked at it. I absolutley LOVE Bioshock and Dead Space too, but they still aren’t in my catalog. Please help me quit Borderlands 2. “I can’t quit you!”

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The Mapex Drums guitar center collection has quite a few options from drum kits. Ranging from the Voyager and Horizon series, the intermediate Meridian Birch and Meridian Maple, and the professional level Saturn and Orion to the Black Panther snare drums, which introduced limited editions of drum kits based on those snares. As of February 2012, three models were produced: The Blaster, The Velvetone and The Retrosonic. Basically the best you can get with the limited edition ones, but kits for all ranges of apptitude.

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