Diversion

Steam has been throwing one hell of a Christmas sale, with some games up to 80% off. This has given me the chance to play some games that I wouldn't have bought and others I wouldn't even pirate (if I did pirate games, which I don't).

I avoided console ports and games that were not a negligible money and after browsing the deals for some time I ended up with:
-Braid
-World of Goo
-Indigo Prophecy
-Mirror's Edge
-Painkiller
-Eufloria
-Beyond Good and Evil
-Torchlight

In normal circumstances none of these games would have been worth my money but the considerable discounts and my pay arriving hours earlier together overwhelmed my stinginess.

Let's take a look at these choices:

Braid was an immensely popular game with clever puzzles and a surreal atmosphere. To my ears that means over-hyped and pretentious. The gameplay consists of puzzle platforming with time manipulation, with goes from ingeniously challenging to fiendishly frustrating.

World of Goo is an indie puzzle game that I've actually finished before, when a friend bought it. My logic for buying was that if I was going to support things like Braid and Mirror's Edge which I paid for because it was there, then I had to support something that deserved it.

Indigo Prophecy can be fairly accurately described as an interactive movie, as the gameplay mostly consists of simple actions to get you to the next cutscene. There are also intensive button mashing sequences whenever the makers wanted the player to feel the same level of stress as the character.

Mirror's Edge is some bastard hybrid between a platformer and a FPS. The gameplay consists of first person free running in first person. Yes I know I repeated myself but that was to emphasis the bizarreness of the design.

Painkiller is an oldschool FPS in that you shoot demons.....and that's about it. No hiding in cover, no gimmicky mechanics, just pointing weapons at targets and watching them die.

Eufloria is another little indie game (strangely it was also one of the most expensive) that plays similar to a free game on Kongregate. You control little seedlings as you head out and colonise meteors, so if you hadn't guessed this is not a game steeped in realism or logic.

I remember Zero Punctuation mentioning that Beyond Good and Evil is a game people should play, so why the hell not. I know even less about this one than I do about the others, to the point where I'm not sure what genre it is.

Finally there is Torchlight, a game that would be a clear Diablo ripoff if it hadn't been made by some of the people who worked on Diablo. It's so similar I'm actually curious to see what if anything is different.

That's just a very brief summary of these game. Some have finished downloading and I've played them to some extent while others remain unknown. After some more time I'll do a recap on each game.

But since I'll be going to Brisbane tomorrow, don't expect this anytime soon.

That also applies to the Silent Hill 3 conclusion or a GitS post.