Strategy Potpurri & Et Cetera

I'm taking a break from Hearthstone. That game pisses me off. It feels like too much hinges on the luck of the draw. It's like the decks aren't big enough to mitigate it through card variety and multiple strategies per deck. Also the fact that you can only play as a single class and use a pool of neutral cards. Multi-classing would be an interesting thing to see added.

I've kind of been bitten by the strategy bug lately. A friend of the podcast sent me a Steam coupon for 90% off a game called Conquest of Elysium 3, which turned out to be a cool 4X-style game pared down to the raw essentials. The production values are nil, but the core of the game is quite cool. The thing is, every time I quit out of the game, it would glitch up my Steam client, necessitating a trip to the task manager to kill the whole thing and restart. Not cool. I wouldn't mind seeing a better-done version of that game, though.

I also played the beginning stages of a Civ V game as Shaka of the Zulu. I didn't like how things were headed, though, so I killed that game. I wanted to try out Endless Space, since it looked cool and I had heard good things and I already owned it. It certainly looks nice and seems playable enough, but again I wasn't satisfied with my ability to understand an play the game, so I gave up and moved on. On to Crusader Kings II, which I still don't know that I quite understand. I sort of played around with it for a couple of hours as a middle-tier lord, of Luxemburg. I managed to find a wife and produce a few children, so that was good. An ill-fated war effort followed, and then me wondering what I should be doing aside from just letting the game play itself out over the years, me making the odd decision here and there. If that's how the game is played, I may prefer a more hands-on game. I guess I'll try again with EU IV at some point.

Also on the tactics/strategy tip, I tried out Guardians of Middle Earth an Defense Grid: The Awakening. The former is a console-adapted MOBA that no one plays anymore, and the latter is a well done tower defense game, probably the best I've seen, actually. I might play more of it, or check out the sequel.

Revisiting Half-Life 2 yet again, I made some substantial progress, getting all the way through Nova Prospekt and back to City 17, where I am now on my way the Citadel. Along the way were a couple of challenging encounters around turret-placement and enemy wave defense. It's a great game, with a great feel.

A couple of new ones on the playlist that I plan to re-visit are Mount and Blade (I'm just getting started, here), and Colin McRae Rally, which I had time to mess around with for a few minutes, but that's all, so far.

Uninstall: Bit.Trip Runner

I have too many other games of this sort that I like better. That's it, in a nutshell.

It's been a while since I blogged, and there are a few reasons for that. General business, a move and visit from family, balls-to-the-wall swampedness at work, and Diablo III. Among other games.

I've played quite a few things lately. Thirty Flights of Loving, the game attached to the Idle Thumbs kickstarter, episodes one and two of The Walking Dead, Darksiders, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a little bit of Crusader Kings II and Civ V, and even a couple of things on the ipad. Plus a good amount of both Dota 2 and Diablo III.

I'd love to go into detail about each, and I might at some point, but I can't right now. I just didn't want to let this blog go to seed any further, and I have a trip lined up for the rest of this week, so it seemed like now would be the right time for a quick status update.

I will say that I finished off 20 matches of Dota as Silencer, and I'm thinking of trying a carry next, maybe Faceless Void. I got a nice weapon upgrade in Diablo for a pittance on the auction house that might carry me through Belial, or at least help out with farming act II. I've only played a couple of hours of Darksiders, but so far so good. I'm kind of excited about the sequel to that. The Walking Dead is pretty good, CS: GO seems to me (total CS neophyte) to be a streamlined and modernized update to that game, and CK II is going to need to be revisited at some point. Maybe with that Westeros mod.