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Valve (creators of Steam) knows how to burrow into your monkeybrain and make it want things. Last year, they introduced ‘achievements’ — destroy all the security cameras in Portal, and you get the Camera Shy achievement. What the hell is it? I don’t know, it pops up and congratulates you and puts a little icon on your profile. AND MONKEYBRAIN WANTS…so it finds out what the achievements are and goes back through all the games to get them.

Now they’ve introduced virtual trading cards. Which are…shit, dude, I don’t even know what they are, but I have three already. Get out of my head, Gabe Newell!

Somebody made a short live action Portal film. Which is pretty good.

Thanks for letting us know…I don’t check in there very regularly.

Okay. Here goes.

I am considering buying a computer game, just as a research thing to see what they are about. I’ve never owned one, played one, or seen one played, unless you count a flight simulator app for RC airplanes a friend of mine bought. (Seriously.)

Would you recommend Skyrim for an utter newbie? I like the idea of sitting on a hill and taking the occasional pot-shot. I don’t want to spent a lot, and I don’t have a fancy gaming console type computer – basic laptop.

Oh, that’s a puzzler, AliceH. What game to recommend a game noob.

Skyrim is a place, a great big place, and you can do lots of things in it. You can follow the story line(s) if you like, or you can just go off in the hills and hunt and fish and look at stuff wonderingly. I have racked up over 600 hours in Skyrim, with two separate characters.

Portal and HalfLife are more like movies or novels. You are an actor, and you have an experience with a very definite plot. It takes maybe 20 hours to play through the first time for a typical plotted game, though most people play through their favorites multiple times.

All games have a learning curve, meaning they’re all irritating as hell for a while until you’ve absorbed the controls enough that you don’t have to think about it. That learning curve will be steeper if you haven’t gamed much.

Anonymous? On my own effing blog? What happened?

I’d quote you some prices, but the Steam store is being hammered at the moment and it keeps falling over. During the sale, though, you can get one of the classics for not much money.

Oh, hey, here’s an idea: I have recently discovered that watching someone else play a game is allllllmost as much fun as playing it myself. Go figure.

So with games I’ll never play (because they belong to a specific console I don’t own) or games I’m thinking of buying, I’ve taken to going to YouTube, plugging in the name of the game, and watching someone play it for a while. The only thing is, there are certain surprises you don’t want to spoil for yourself, particularly in plotted games.

Hm. I’ll give youtube a try then. Thanks!

Don’t look at me. Last game I bought was “Riven”.

Which hillside?

There’s a series on Youtube about playing Skyrim without doing any quests at all or following the story, but just chopping wood and hunting for pelts until he made enough to buy the most expensive house in the game.

Pretty amusing.

Leading to that old Skyrim ballad, “The Sniper On The Hill”…

Whilst Gabe Newell is in your head, would you mind asking him what the fuck is going on with Half-Life 2: Episode 3?

I watch people’s playthroughs on games too. Either ones I’m thinking of buying, ones I’ll never buy, and ones I used to play back in the day.

MajorSlackVideos, vash12349, and xcalizorz all do good YouTube playthroughs.

I watch people’s playthroughs on games too.

I do not get this. My son does this too, and posts his own, mostly Minecraft.

I don’t game much anymore, not since both my boys started kicking my ass up and down in every game we tried.

There are a lot of different game genres out there, AliceH, youtube is a good place to start, but a lot depends on what you like to do, puzzles, build things, blow things up, sneak around, rebuild civilizations or fight monsters.

AliceH,
Steam also has freebies from time to time, so you could check those out. You will have to go to steampowered.com and download the client first, then set up an account. Both of those are free.

If you have the Google Chrome browser, there are games that you can play with that. Most of those games are also free, so you can play them and discover which genre you like best before you buy one. They are available in the Google Chrome store. Just Google (heh) “google chrome web store”.

Boop boop, I’m the fucking pac man, you silly turd burglers. Next thing you know some dumb shit’s gonna be having sex with his phone.

I’ve only ever purchased one game on Steam, Civ-V, which runs like *ss on my laptop, so I’ve reverted back to playing Civ-III, which is more fun anyway.

At least I got it cheap on sale. I think 5 or 10 bucks.

Posted this on FB earlier today:

http://www.dorkly.com/comic/52849/normal-reactions-vs-reactions-during-the-steam-sale

Heh. ..pointy..

Does this mean we can be Steam friends? 🙂

Certainly, Poindexter. Name of: AuntieWeasel. It tickles me no end when Steam rats out what you guys are playing and when.

Me? I’m back in New Vegas, sitting on a hillside, picking of raiders.

My Steam name is Fritzworth (high school German class nickname). Great image for your profile, by the way. ..pointy..

Steam, with all their super-deals, has conditioned into me a Pavlovian response of immediately typing my credit card number whenever I see they’re having a sale, but, despite that, I really need to finish the dozens of games I bought after all their previous sales. I haven’t even downloaded all of the games I bought from them yet.