Happy Thanksgiving 2010!

Catch Up: September, October What I'm Playing/What I'm Paying

It sure has been quiet around here lately.  I missed out on EA Louse and the copy cats.  Work has been crazy and in my free time I've been settling down to watch the Green Bay Packers play, watching my son, or listening to the soothing sound of blocks being mined in Minecraft.

First, lets get the business out of the way.  I have embedded the new What I'm Playing/What I'm Paying spreadsheets for September and October below. The overall spreadsheet (includes previous months) can be found here.

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Game of the Month and /Played

To be honest, September and October were all about one game: Minecraft. Minecraft is a simple, yet brilliant game. Mine blocks, build stuff. The entire randomly generated world is made up of blocks that can be harvested either through tools or through the use of raw fist power. The blocks can then be used to build anything imaginable. Throw in flowing water (or lava), monsters, weapons and armor, and online play and you start to see why I am putting so much time into the game.

To best describe the game let me refer you to one of the video series that convinced me to buy the game:



Minecraft is addictive fun and nearly everything I've ever wanted in a game. Oh and its still in ALPHA. ALPHA! Now with the beta on the horizon and promises of better functioning multiplayer, I may have found the addiction... err game... I've been waiting for since giving up my addiction to World of Warcraft.

Best of all, I can run Minecraft on my work PC.  Good bye productivity (just kidding boss, I only play on break or on lunch).

Btw, you can get some sweet, sweet Minecraft music over on Amazon.

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/Paid

Total spent this Month: $13.47
My Value Rating: Excellent

Minecraft costs anywhere from $12 to $15 depending on the conversion rate at the time.  This purchase price includes all future updates for the game.  This is the best game purchase I've made in a very long time.

Please Ignore This #Minecraft Interlude

YOU are STILL wrong about Free 2 Play games

Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) has doubled, DOUBLED, their revenue since going Free 2 Play (F2P). Many people said this was the end of LotRO. Dungeon and Dragons Online's success changing to F2P was a fluke.  F2P does not work.

I suspect these same people will continue to tell us how terrible F2P is for MMO games. They will say "of course F2P versions of games make more money because all the crazy people have to spend more money now". These are the same people that will still be paying to play World of Warcraft or some old bastion of subscription gaming ten years from now.  The rest of us will be off enjoying the many new worlds opened to us with the F2P model.

Of course, these type of people are and continue to be WRONG about F2P.  MMOs are business propositions first, games second. This has always been the case. The business model that makes the most money is going to win. F2P works and makes money. Welcome to the real next generation; the free 2 play generaton.

Identify this freaky spider I found outside my house!

Thanks for the help!

#Minecraft Boo

• Explore a scary new realm! A brand new hell world for fast travel. Portal in, move ten meters, portal out, and you're hundreds of meters away.
• Fight scary new monsters! Actually difficult this time around.
• Experience scarier depths! The deeper you are, the brighter it has to be to stay safe.
• Be scared of the dark! Torches will die after a while. Use flint and steel to reignite, or place lanterns that last forever.
• Catch scary fish! Or possibly just regular fish.
• Scare other players online! Less bugs, more implemented features.
• Carve scary jack-o-lanterns! Pumpkins can also be worn as totally useless helmets.
• Keep track of the scary time! A craftable watch lets you know when it's safe to emerge from the caves.
• AND MORE! Biomes. More music. Better sounds.
• Coming october 31, 2010 http://www.minecraft.net/boo/

So, this explains where I've been... #Minecraft

That's more hours in a single day than I spend during an entire month on most games.  Yep, I'm addicted.

Minecraft

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Yes, I'm playing Minecraft.

4 Civ IV Annoyances Fixed 5 ways in Civ V

I've had a few days to play around with the Civilization V demo now and I've found a few of the annoyances of Civ IV removed.

1. Religion. Religion was just an annoyance in Civ IV for most players and of benefit only to the hardcore. Religion added more onto an already bloated management screen for a player's cities. Conceptually solid, but not much fun in practice.

1. Civ 5 fixes this by simply removing religion in favor of a revamped Social Policies skill tree familiar to anyone that has played an RPG in the last decade.

2. Stacked units. Some Civ fans love stacked units and others hate them. I'm firmly in the hate category. It made it impossible to strategically plan a war as a player's stack or stacks could never sufficiently defend a landmass. Choke-points and bottlenecks were non-existent. Not to mention the headache that it was to manage stacked units.

2. Civ V features one unit per tile gameplay.

3. Too many units. It was amazing how many units that could be built in Civ IV. Micro-management of these forces of war was never-ending, leading to long turn times.

3. Civ V dials the total number of units way down making each unit far more important as they occupy a hex all by themselves. Also some resources are strategic in nature and limit the number of troops of a certain type a Civ can field. For example: a Civ with one iron resource can only have one iron-based unit.

4. Squares.

4. I really didn't realize squares bothered me until I played Civ V with it's magnificent hexes. Then I thought about all of the best board games I play: Settlers of Catan, Battle Lore, etc. They all have hex boards!

5. Finally, Civ V puts the smackdown on a lot of other annoyances by simply having a better UI; one that is clear and easy to understand on almost every single screen.

Civ5 Demo has me covered

Just a quick note during the busiest work weeks of my life to say that the Civilization V demo is all I need right now.  It's amazing how much it offers for the price of FREE.

Get your own copy of the demo via Steam.