Luftwaffles

Finished The Men Who Stare at Goats. Surprisingly good, even though I'm not a George Clooney fan.

I really want to like Terarria, but I just haven't got into it like I have with Minecraft yet. The interface doesn't seem as intuitive as Minecraft, and the movement and combat/digging/building seems somewhat sluggish compared with some other platformers. I have definitely not given it enough time, though. I'll probably get around to it if PXOD gets a server, or if some friends talk me into it more, but I'm sticking with Minecraft at the moment. Any good tutorials or wikis anybody's found?

Civ V is 17 USD on Steam's weekend deal. Thinking about picking this one up, but my wallet is still recovering from the summer sale and new computer expenses.

I've always found the guitar hero drumming interesting because I fucking suck at it. I've played drums for about 5 years, been in about 5 bands, wrote a lot of my own parts and songs, but I cannot for the life of me get the guitar hero/rock band drums. Every time I've tried them I've only been able to do a passing job on songs I already know all the parts to on an actual drum kit, and even then I couldn't get the fills. I genuinely respect people who can "get" the rock band drums, mostly because it's similar enough to real drums, but at the same time nothing like it. I can tell you for sure I'd do a lot better if there was just a little bit near whatever was supposed to be the hi-hat that told me whether I should play quarter notes or eighth notes etc.

Gonna make a run through Fallout New Vegas before I build again because it's one of the few games I bought in the summer sale that will actually run on my current computer. I always go away from the Fallout games and forget just how good the environments are, even if the combat is ridiculously janky sometimes.

http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-from-dust/17-4531/ Giant Bomb quicklook looks fairly promising, the controls look pretty good, even on xbox.

I don't hate you. I don't even know you. The person below me hates Chewblaha.

I always thought it was a last.fm meets grooveshark type of thing. Either way, Spotify does scrobble to last.fm, so that automatically makes me more interested in it.

Not really into Madeon or his style as a whole, but he's got skill. Especially as he's only 17.

Well, I had to think about this a lot. Rise of Nations My favorite RTS of all time, I think possibly the best RTS of all time. Looking back, it's kind of a mix between the Total War games with their tactical map and Age of Empires with the battles and building. It's much better than Age of Empires, though, and moves faster and has more varied units. It's mostly on here because of how much I played it with my brother one summer, in co-op and just murdering swarms of enemies with rocket artillery. Counter Strike 1.6 I was really late to the party on this, never played it at LAN parties, never played in a clan or even very competitively, but used to play it way too often with my brother and swarms and swarms of bots. I remember practicing on wide open maps by giving the bots only knives and myself only scouts and trying to kill them all with as little bullets as possible. When I go back to try and play it now I'm fucking awful, which might be better as I'd rather still remember it when I was 14 or 15 and actually successful. Far Cry 2 This game gets a ton of flak on forums and the internet in general, but I loved every minute of it. It's still the only open world game I've played where I genuinely felt in danger of dying or getting injured at every corner. It's also the only non explicitly tactical shooter (Rainbow Six, etc.) that I could really apply tactics to. Every 4 man guard post felt like an different challenge, and even 4 enemies could put you on the ground if you went in guns blazing without scouting the area at all. The quickly respawning checkpoints and hostile AI was annoying, but it didn't detract from my experience as much as it did from others and it's still one of the best shooters I've played. Call of Duty 4 I feel like a lot of people dismiss COD4 as crap just because of MW2, WAW, and Black Ops using the same engine and not changing the gameplay much at all, but Call of Duty 4 was pretty revolutionary. It pulled off the Michael Bay style campaign like no other game had done before and the multiplayer, even with its issues, was still fun, even by yourself. I bought COD4 on release day and played the campaign to death before I even really realized there was a whole multiplayer component to go along with it. Yes it was heavily scripted, yes the story was shoddy, but it pulled me in like no other shooter had done before. Battlefield 2 This was, and might still be one of my favorite games to play with friends. Teamplay was fantastic, gameplay was fantastic, and the maps scaled were like no other game I remember. It was also one of those games where you could go 2/14 on KD ratio and still be at the top of the scoreboard, something I really enjoyed as I often went 2/14. Also, Wake Island. So much Wake Island. Flight Simulator 2002 This was pretty integral to my gaming experience as a kid just because my parents wanted me to get into aviation. It's also the only game I've ever played where you can buzz your own house in an F-15. I probably spent about 30 minutes with the stock airplanes and then rushed to the internet to get addons and extra scenery. Lego Island 2 Scoff at this all you want, but I figured I had to put it in because of how many hours I sunk into it as a kid. Similar to Flight Simulator, I liked it because you could pretty much run around and do whatever you wanted. Note that this was far before I was old enough to know about the GTA games, so this was really the first "open world" game I ever played. It also had some of the best minigames (Jousting and the cannonball level) I've seen in a game, as well as the worst. (That fucking fishing hole). Fallout 3 This is on here purely for the sheer amount of hours I have invested into it. The open world was so detailed you could spend hours just running from place to place, not even caring about the storyline (until the radscorpions got to you). I just remember running from area to area and admiring the amount of detail put into the areas, as well as places I know of from current Washington DC faithfully recreated in post-apocalyptic fashion. The combat was beyond janky, but it's always worth noting when a game allows you to decapitate people with a 9mm pistol in slow motion. Left 4 Dead 2 I'll always remember Left 4 Dead 2 as the game that got me into what I consider "social gaming". I still have never had as much fun with a game as when me and 3 friends were running around decapitating zombies while carrying a conversation about politics or girls or whatever. The game isn't perfect, but it's the most fun I've ever had in co-op. I still always recommend this game to friends new to Steam just so I can play it again, as it's gotten a little boring now. Phew. That's quite a list.

Apparently Spotify is coming to the US sometime soon. They've said it in the past, but this time they actually put a banner up on the site and opened it to emails. Fingers crossed either way.

It's one thing to make BF3 an "Origin Exclusive" and sell it only on Origin, but to sell it on pretty much every single other digital store except Steam just makes it painfully obvious they're targeting Valve and Steam directly. I'll probably still buy BF3 eventually, but I highly doubt it'll be a day one buy or preorder for me. Hell, I'll probably buy it when it goes on Steam and will probably have to buy the Karkand DLC separately. Damn it, EA.

Looks like Terarria, Duke Nukem, Sam and Max, and Portal 2 are the big deals today, along with what WTF said. Anyone recommend Terarria? It's really the only game that jumped out at me today, but it does seem to be hit and miss with some people.

You mean the other way around don't you It doesn't have enough features and it does start your DL from the beginning when you quit client or pause. Yeah I think the DL manager for them is a bit shite. But after install/reg it's useless and you could run the game from its exe. I bought Mark Leung's game from there. Everything else is a freebie. Honestly, it's been a long time since I used it, you may be right. I know it's small, though, and memory usage seemed reasonable for a downloader (a lot less than Steam). I might have to give it another shot, as ARMA II is a fantastic game, but I have quite a backlog of steam games to sort out from this sale so ARMA might have to wait.

Unfortunately the key they gave doesn't look like it registers on steam, so I guess we have to go through Capsule. I've used it before, though, it's fairly unobtrusive and it does have enough features (i.e. doesn't start your DL from the beginning when you pause/unpause it.)

Hullo everybody. I'm a college student, living in California, wasting away my financial aid on steam sales and computer hardware. My name is Dean, but there appears to be another (more active) Dean on here so I went with some generic gamer username instead. Annnnddd. That's it.