Pickups and Trades #2

A while ago I made the mistake of copying my “Interesting Games” list onto the Wishlist on my Steam account. Every so often I get emails telling me that some of these games are on sale, and if they’re charging less than £10 I’ll very often buy them. In hindsight, that’s probably not the best way to go about it since I’ll be very surprised if I even play all of these games this year, let alone beat them! For financial reasons, I doubt I’ll be doing the same next month. Still, I’ve made it a priority to at least have a go with some of these games I’ve been buying, so keep your eye on the Last Week’s Games series to see what’s been going on.

On Steam, I bought the following games:

Bastion, Transistor and Pyre: These games went on Steam sale, and was on my radar for being talked up by a lot of the Youtube channels I follow who were impressed by the games 
and art style.

911 Operator: A game about, well, being a 911 operator. Over the last few years I’ve been really getting in to games trying to do things just a little bit differently, and I’m looking forward to trying this one out.

Desperadoes 1 and 2: From what I understand about the gameplay to this one, it’s Commandos with a Western setting. I was sold straight away and when it went on sale with both games for less than £2.50, I jumped at the chance!

I ended up playing this in the end, and what
I played of it was compelling to say the least...

Reigns: This appears to be a whimsical game about the decisions you might make as a king. For not even £1, it’s worth a look at least.

Enter the Gungeon: A Rogue-like Dungeon-Crawler with an emphasis on shooting. I’ve been waiting for this to go on sale for a while!

This War of Mine: A wartime survival game of some considerable renown; I’ve been looking forward to picking this one up for a long time.

Mount and Blade, Warband and Fire and Sword: I seem to remember Totalbiscuit talking these games up a while ago. Looking forward to playing them!

STALKER: Call of Pripyat: A rare (for me!) shooter on the PC with references to Chernobyl, this will be an interesting experience!

Detention: A horror game set in Tailand. I’m not big on Horror games but this seems to do the job well, by accounts.

Also from GOG, I acquired Dungeons 2 for free, from an advertisement sent to my email address. I have no idea what this one is about but it’s got Dungeons in the title so that’s good enough for me!

Rest in peace. I'll stick to the Lego games in future!

One game I had to say goodbye to was Marvel Heroes Omega. I did intend to return to this at some point but sadly Gazillion Entertainment, who ran the game, has been shut down, and so therefore has the game. The game doesn’t exist anymore, so there’s no reason for it to be on my hard drive either, and this highlights a wider issue currently under discussion: There’s a massive push form some of the larger game publishers for games to become “Online Services,” i.e. games played entirely online and funded by the people who sink a lot of money into micro-transactions for it. It might be working at the moment, but the demographic who play these games won’t be doing so forever, and if the decision is made to shut down the games, the game, the players and any money they’ve put into it is deleted permanently.

This is a risky venture for players, but also for game developers. If we’re creating an environment where a small number of games have to be continuously funded in order for them to survive, it will be difficult to sustain a job for very long. Let the horror of Marvel Heroes sink in: Just before Thanksgiving last year, at least 75 people at Gazillion lost their jobs, all accrued benefits and their livelihoods, because the game was shut down. There were a lot of very complex reasons for this that I’m not aware of but for what it’s worth, and I hope that Gazillion’s former employees managed to find more work.

For the Xbox 360, I downloaded Split/Second from Games with Gold. I had to delete some of the games I’ve got physical copies of to make room, but I managed it! This was one of the games on my list to collect so I was very pleased to acquire this one for free. I look forward to playing this; it’s been a while since I’ve played a racing game!

I also bought Mini Ninjas from CEX in Merry Hill; it looks like a good fun Ninja game that doesn’t take itself too seriously so I’ll be glad to have a go with that.