With Portal 2 being on sale for $6.79 this week on Steam, and also releasing the addition of the “Perpetual Testing Initiative” on top of it we have a much better idea of how good Portal 2 can eventually be. The PTI allows players to create their own test chambers and share them on Steam. A very big deal for continued replayability.

ib4lolreviews

rant

Now…the one thing that always sort of bugged me about this series was the extremely high review scores the first game got. Portal 2 I think deserves a much higher score as it is just a better game in every facet and better by an extremely large margin. Portal 1, however is ranked with a 90 on Metacritic (AT least this is what Steam still shows, might be slightly less now. Think it was around 92-93 at release though). This puts it in the elite games of all time. Portal 1 is simply just not that good of a game. Not remotely worth a score higher than say 80-85 IMO. It’s a game you can plop down with and run through in a couple hours. That alone makes it feel more like a giant Demo than an actual full gaming experience. It really wasn’t intended to be a major budget game either, but the reveiws and the love affair with our favorite developer Valve made it skyrocket into the ratings stratosphere somehow.

Sure, we can argue that it was inventive, and something new, but it still bugged me quite a bit that it was ranked so high. Heck I think I got this game for free it was like a tech demo at one point. So it wasn’t necessarily a rip off, but it was a big disappointment to me compared to teh vast amount of insane rankings it got. /rant

Ehem…anyways, Portal 2 is on sale still and I found it to be a nice surprise, although I got the same feeling I did from Portal 1. After going through 5-6 levels I got bored of it. Not because of it being difficult (I haven’t really ever had a problem with these Portal puzzles that I had to look them up for solutions), but because I just wasn’t intrigued with it anymore to want to play longer in one sitting. I’m sure I could blow through P2 as well, but I just haven’t wanted to keep playing it. 5-6 levels and I’m done for the day. It’s “fun” for that long for me.

The addition of co-op is a good one and adds a lot to this. The addition of even more in the PTI add-on is even more to do. Of course we don’t have a heck of a lot of good test chambers yet to make me care about this. No co-op option as of yet, but it is rumored to be coming eventually as far as I have read on forums. Doesn’t matter to me though. I’m still not “excited” to jump into this game every day, and thinking to myself that I will be playing it again when I get done. I don’t know if it is just not difficult enough, or it just isn’t as good as people think it is. For $6.79 it’s worth it of course, but in the end I still consider this series to be a bit over-rated even if it has a few intuitive designs in it. Honestly I’d be hard pressed to rate this much higher than an 8/10, but the addition of co-op and the PTI add on this week pushes it to a healthy 8.5/10. Not bad by any stretch. Simply not in the elite company where it resides as a top all-time game at 95/100 where it sits in Metacritic now.

Of course Reviews are stupid, and don’t really say that much other than a game is well received. I mean “World of Goo” is ranked at a 96 which puts it in the Top 3 ranks all-time. Really? World of Goo is one of the top 5 games since Metacritic started? The funniest though is “Out of the Park Baseball 2007″ with a whopping 96 on Metactritic with a user review of 3.6. GTA IV is the best game in the Metacritic lifetime BTW.

Also…announce friggin’ Half-Life 3 already Valve, please. While it won’t get me to turn my high power led light back on by flipping the switch on my PS3 to “On” it will certainly make me have to look for a new computer. Maybe not. This one isn’t shabby and runs everything i have now. Still…hoping it looks that good, and we know it will. HL3…want now. Oh and WTF happened to Episode 3? It’s only been about 5 years now. WHY ALYX NO FATHER!?

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I think it is safe to say that my most anticipated video game this year is Starbound. It is being developed by some of the peopel that gave us Terraria, and looks to have a lot of similarities. Except tht Starbound will be much more in depth than Terraria ever was. Here’s the development website.

According to the site they are going to have this out in Q2 or Q3 2012, BUT they will take longer if they don’t have it looking as good as they want it by then. It is an independent development so they aren’t pressed for a hard release date at this point.

The obvious difference between Starbound and Terraria is that Starbound is a space theme. The other main difference from Terraria is that instead of just creating one world for you, in Starbound you will travel to many planets that randomly generate. Each world will have different creatures, different looks and themes, and different resources. Starbound is also dipping into the RPG elements a bit more by having actual quests for you to do. Plus it will have a journal of monsters that you can read about. You can still build stuff though so don’t worry, your t slot won’t go to waste!

I’d suggest just going to the site and looking at where they are. The support from fans is very high and it’s a pretty freindly place with lots of creativity. They even held a contest to create a monster for the game and they picked at least 4 of them. Some of the entries are amazing. Check those here.

Since Terraria cost me $2.50 and I expect this to cost no more than $20 (probably $10-15) I fully expect this game to deliver more play hours per dollar than any game besides Terraria I have ever played. I play Terraria still and that’s well into the 200 hour range already.

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I was told that this is the “zombie game that everyone has been waiting for” so I figured I’d take a look. Basically, it is a mod for the game Arma II, which obviously you need to own to play the mod.

This is the description of the video series uploaded by CHKilroy:

This is the first part of a series of videos I will be doing using the (still in development) Arma 2 mod DayZ, a persistent world zombie modification. If they ever get a proper website up and running I’ll definitely edit it into the description of this video.

From what I’ve watched so far it looks pretty fun. MMO style gameplay where the players are one dead and done. When you die you spawn a new character on another server apparently so it’s not like taking a rest at an orlando hotels and then getting back out there with your team. You must also find food and bandages to prevent bleeding to death. Here’s the first part of the series, which is rather long:

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Want to see a bunch of console players whine? Announce a PC version of the game with a bunch of new content in it. One of my favorite games this gen is easily Dark Souls. Played on the Playstation 3 as you can see from my in depth 2 part Dark Souls review a while back (Day 1 purchase before the Patch 1.05). After all sorts of pleading for a PC edition it is actually going to pay off.

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition is scheduled to be released 8-14-2012 at the moment. Based on all reports so far it appears the new edition will include new boss fights, new areas, and maybe even additional side quests. Now…is it going to be a better edition juiced up for PCs? As far as I can tell it is a direct port, and even the developers are having a hard time creating any sort of keyboard/mouse control scheme. They have even stated that using a controller will be recommended. No big deal, at least maybe someone will actually make the PS3 controller the chosen one for a game for once, or at the very least make it an option without having to use an emulator to make your PS3 controller work as a 360 controller.

The biggest whining though is over the extra content of course. Console gamers feeling as if they are getting the short end of the stick, while essentially being the ones that made both Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls into a money maker for From Software and now Namco Bandai. It is a legitimate concern, and complaint frankly. We all know that the extra content is an incentive to buy the new PC version as well. Soemthing that is done quite often on consoles with timed release DLC, and exclusive DLC that Microsoft seems to love paying for to get the sales their way. Of course this means most of us know what is going to happen with all the additional content on the PC version. It’s going to be announced as DLC AFTER the release of the PC version in order to get more people to buy it. Then after that settles down we’ll get some BS announcement about how they have “heard your cries and want to give you what you want!”. For a price of course right? Absolutely. While many will think this should be FREE for console gamers considering they all bought it first. Highly doubtful, but you never know. (don’t get your hopes up for free Dark Souls DLC). You’ll just have to put off your new kuat bike racks purchase a couple days if it is that big a deal.

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I know…I’ve been talking about Terraria A LOT lately, but I just love the game. In fact I was actually following a playthrough recently for some dude on Youtube when I found their “Server Tour”. They had opened up a public server for people that follow his channel I guess and everyone just started to build.

Some of the the stuff is astounding. Beginning of the video is pointless really, but at around 17:00 there is an amazing ship structure that someone built that is definitely worth checking out. If you let it keep rolling you will see some very creative artwork of a bunch of video game characters. It’s really quite impressive. IT’s really long so be happy I gave you a time stamp. Otherwise grab your baby boy bedding and get ready for a long watch of people exploring Terraria.

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