General
Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.I have logged only a few hours in City of Heroes since it went F2P, but having played ardently for several years, I still sometimes gets a new ability in a game and think, “Great, just a couple more levels to slot this up and it will be awesome.”
: Zubon
If you liked Portal’s gameplay, you will like QUBE’s at least 75% as much. The developer video included with Portal 2 explains their original plan: no portals, no Chell, no GLaDOS. QUBE is that, also with no story. What QUBE does have is about 4 hours of puzzles in an environment that feels a bit like running through Aperture Science.
QUBE stands for Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion. The first puzzles relate to colored blocks that do different things. Later puzzles start rotating rooms, using light and magnets, and letting you decide which color boxes should be.
The puzzles are not enormously difficult. Most of the time, once you understand what the tools in a room do, the solution is intuitively obvious. The more interesting puzzles come at the end of a sector, when you get complex interactions instead of new tools.
It can be glitchy. I had boxes teleport, spring away, and disappear entirely. One point requires precision platforming in the dark. About 90% worked as intended for me, and the rest eventually worked.
There is no story and only hints of a setting. There are no words. If you loved Portal for the humor and tone, this will not do anything for you. It just has puzzles in a 3D environment.
: Zubon
As near as I can tell, this summer’s Steam sale is less about making money and more about economic experiments. Sure, the revenue is nice, but the long-term value to Valve will come from seeing how people react and buy. There are flash sales, community choice, today’s deals, pack deals, and a few other ways to see sales. They vary in discount, placement, and duration, but you’ll see the same sales appearing multiple times in multiple places. Missed that flash sale? No problem, it’s tomorrow’s daily deal, and you’ll get a chance to vote to bring it back in a few days.
It is a real time experiment in marketing with millions of people paying to participate.
: Zubon
Without a doubt, DayZ is a very challenging game to get started in.  This initial experience can be very frustrating if you don’t have voice coms with a group of players to ask questions of, so I thought I would throw some initial pointers out there for our readers who might be interested in giving the mod a try.
Hey, I just met you,
And this is DayZ…
Zombies are everywhere,
So crawl to me, maybe?
~Cyndre
There is no point to DayZ. Â
There are no objectives.  You can’t win, nor progress, nor develop any significant power advantage over the environment, PvE, or other players.  You invest hours on end only to lose it all in the blink of an eye. Â
All you can do is try to survive.Â
You never thrive in DayZ.  You are always one meal away from death. Around every bend in the road, in every building,  every step you take brings you closer to your eventual demise.  You will die. There is no survival.
Why then do I find myself on the tail end of a ten-hour DayZ marathon, wishing I could skip sleep and work and log in for another ten?
~Cyndre
I increasingly find myself Googling the solutions to quests and puzzles on the assumption that they are broken. I sometimes find that I have been outwitted, but more often something is wrong with the game. That could be a technical error or a design flaw.
The Secret World has had some trouble with broken quests, and it is always upsetting to solve a puzzle and later find out the computer was not accepting the correct answer. You usually find that out after trying 20 “well maybe” guesses after the right one. I was just playing QUBE, which is enjoyable but has a couple of points requiring very precise jumps, which can be difficult when you apparently have no feet; you can look down and see yourself levitating somewhere off the platform you are standing on. Google, YouTube… okay, yep, I was doing exactly the right thing just 3 pixels off. Dodgy game physics are a related issue. Google, YouTube… okay, yep, just keep repeating that sequence of moves until the box slides instead of teleporting away.
On the design side, frequent readers know some of my pet peeves. The broken logic of adventure games is classic, as is that article, if you haven’t read it yet. Other games substitute “guess or brute force all options” for logic. Another old favorite is when you missed something because it was two pixels wide. Oh, I need a coin to proceed, and it was the slightly brown line in the sidewalk crack from seven screens ago? You know, I don’t feel bad for not taking the time to find that one. I’ve probably spent enough time trying to figure out what I was supposed to be finding.
I recall the early days of LotRO, which launched with many early quests involving things to click on the ground: a sack of bandit loot to reclaim, a mushroom to pick, a body to bury. With the newbie zones heavily populated, you could run to exactly the right spot and not find the quest objective because it was still respawning. Players cleared entire camps of dwarves without realizing that the clicky was by the first campfire, and how amazing that bodies could disappear and resurface! Modern tech has mostly solved this problem: the clicky disappears for you when you click it, but other players can also do so without rivalry.
: Zubon
The thing about Eve and wormhole space, is that it has large bursts of activity as plans unfold, and long periods of inaction while plans are developed and hatched.
Luckily for the pilots of Surly You’re Joking, Zombies have invaded the DayZ mod of Arma 2, and we have been spending our downtime butchering them and anyone else we can find.
I was hesitant when Steam launched. Let me get this straight: I will need a dedicated internet connection to play or access my games, I get no physical media, and if Steam goes away or cuts off my access — best of luck? What’s the upside here?
As it turns out, Steam has been an excellent corporate partner in my life. It has been reliable and has continued to improve over the years. It provides sales, updates, cloud storage, and matchmaking. The biggest downside is that its sales model encourages impulse purchases of marginal quality games. The only time I was not liking Steam was when I damaged a RAM slot on my computer, so everything loaded slowly; Steam pops up advertisements (“Updates”!) when you close a game, so Steam was refusing to close and let me have my computer back until it threw ads at me. Now I prefer digital distribution to physical media, because I lose CDs more often than Valve goes out of business. To the extent that you can say it about a corporation, I trust Valve.
I was hesitant when Blizzard moved everything to BattleNet, for all the same reasons. I might trust Blizzard, but Activision-Blizzard? I refused to buy SC2 until I found a rather good sale, and I do not own D3. I’m still not convinced that golden goose will go un-slain.
Does anyone trust EA? At all? About anything?
: Zubon
Years ago, goldsellers were the great plague of gaming. They were everywhere, they were annoying, they were criminal conspiracies that were hacking accounts and credit cards. I flipped the eff out when WAR launched without a working /ignore function and the majority of chat was goldspam during off-hours. Pitchforks and torches appeared when one of our former writers patronized a goldseller.
I know they’re still out there, so why don’t I hear much about them? I regularly get phishing spam at an address not even associated with a WoW account. I do not know how long ago I last saw goldseller ads, because they no longer mentally register, but my sense is that I have seen them recently. Account security is still a big thing, particularly for WoW.
Is it mostly a WoW thing at this point? There is only so much profit available in niche markets. Maybe companies have gotten better about anti-goldspam techniques.
I just don’t hear much about RMT in a F2P environment, and most MMOs have gone F2P or hybrid. If a player won’t pay for the game itself, you probably will not be able to sell him much gold. If a player is willing to pay to get ahead, s/he now can usually pay the developer directly.
: Zubon
Maybe it’s just me.