I saw a piece of news on the BBC a few days ago about Blizzard suing a company in Germany over a piece of software that they released which allows players to cheat.

Fully understand why Blizzard does this as it adversely affects the playing experience of other users. I’ve never played an MP game but I can see why other people cheating would be really frustrating to those that don’t.

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Now that Steam is available on mobile Windows devices I started thinking about all the Half-Life games I had seen on Android, which lead me onto whether I would actually want to play Half-Life games on my mobile (I can’t, I have an iPhone – at least I don’t THINK I can) or a tablet (I can’t, I’m sure this time because I don’t have a tablet! Ha – gotcha.).

I know that desktop usage among non-business users is dropping significantly and mobile and tablet is soaring but there are some things better done on Desktops. I’m not suggesting that games HAVE to be better on desktops but some games work better there, just like some films HAVE to be seen in the cinema to really appreciate them. I’m sure you get what I mean.

The future could easily be VR goggles wirelessly connected to your mobile/tablet – who knows?

I don’t want you to think I am some old fuddy-duddy, I have played games on my mobile but only a couple. Mostly Dumb Ways to Die

I’d love to hear your thoughts on mobile gaming in general and specifically to FPS games like Half-Life.

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Have to admit I was struggling for a good question and I really wanted to avoid another Half-Life 3 one, but this idea just popped into my head.

Obviously, we want the story to either be finished or explained at least to some degree, but personally, it’s all the new mods that we hope to get that really excites me.

Of course, the chances of Half-Life 3 being released WITHOUT mod support is probably as close to nil as it can be, but Valve might decide to move in a new direction.

Plenty of single player games do well without a modding community or do you think that once a company starts down that road it would be commercial suicide not to continue with it.

Are times changing?

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I am generally very open on this site about my personality and character traits. I like to think it is one of the reasons for my modest success.

Today, I am going to share another personal story. Many years ago I had a girlfriend and she noticed that when i was avoiding doing something important or difficult, I would begin to organise my personal spaces; desk, wardrobe etc. She said I would start to “make boxes” to rearrange things. From that point forward, any time I was procrastinating I was said to be “making boxes”.

I still find myself doing it today and a few days ago, I was playing a map and noticed myself “stacking crates”. Regular readers will know I have a (terrible/interesting/stupid/intelligent/useless/useful) habit of trying to get out of ALL the games, maps and mods I play.

So was this “stacking crates” just a video game version of “making boxes”? Was I avoiding playing the map by doing this? I’m not sure of the answer but it did lead me to wonder whether how you play videos games is the same as how you approach life.

Do you change personalities because generally in-game there are no serious or important consequences of your actions? In life, do you take chances or are you more careful.

Life obviously, doesn’t have save points, either manual or auto, that you can start again from, but life is also an experience and simply avoiding interesting situations or risks because you can’t try again could make our lives boring.

Clearly, it’s not for me to tell you how to play OR live your life, but as Plato would have probably said if he lived today, “A video game life unexamined is not worth living”.

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I have a pretty good collection of FPS in boxes and every year I say “I’m gonna install some of those and play them”. Of course, I never do as something shiny comes along, but this year I might actually do it.

In the past it could be quite difficult to get really old games to work on modern PCs but now you can buy a lot of them directly from Steam which means no set up (YAY).

But since i hate spending money, I don’t see why I should buy them on Steam since I already own them. It might be possible to input the code into Steam and get the game but all my games are in the basement and just getting upstairs will be effort enough.

So, onto this week’s poll question…Are you buying older games on Steam?

Who can tell me the name of the game in the featured image?

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I’ve been following the comments about Doom by Maki and Crowbar in this month’s general chat post.

It got me thinking about how much I play and the is “Not very much at all”.

Running the site takes most of my “gaming” time but I do remember that in the past I reached a point where I didn’t want to play anymore, either that day or that week.

In fact, I got “Archer” overload a few months back when I watched about 4 seasons in a very short period of time and had to stop. It was just too much.

This is not really a problem for gamers as they don’t get their gaming in episodes but it means that gamers have to control themselves and when a new game is released it can be hard to stop paying when you are having so much fun.

What do you think would be the number of hours per week you feel you could play before you felt it was too much for you?

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Putting aside the fact that the actual game itself will feature new enemies, weapons, locations and hopefully, please! plenty of story details, are you as interested as I am about the potential maps and mods from from the game’s content?

In many ways, the actual maps and mods created by the community is a better body of work than some of the games themselves. I even considered asking the question of if I had to have one or the other (the game or the community content), which would you prefer, but of course you can’t have the community content without the game!

I am assuming that most readers here will want both but some among you might only be interested in the games themselves.

Thoughts?

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Multiplayer games and mods are always throwing out betas for users to play. I makes sense. Some smart puppy once wrote Release early and release often (I am paraphrasing) but with SP mods and games, it’s a whole different ball game.

I can tell you that if I ever beta test something for somebody I generally don’t want to play the final release. Partly because I know what happening and partly because I would be a little upset if my feedback were actioned.

Some SP game and mods are so different from the standard product that releasing without plenty of testing would be a disaster. Obviously, all SP games and mods should be extensively beta tested but releasing to the general public, especially if it is a game, is a little risky.

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So I woke up yesterday morning to read the news that Steam is now or going to be very soon renting movies.

At first I was excited, I know that I don’t use Steam to its full potential and this could be useful for me, but then I saw the price.

Now, this might be “industry standard” but that doesn’t mean I am going to suddenly start renting movies at that price.

Personally, I think it is too high but maybe it’s because I hate spending money.

I think there is little doubt we all knew that this was coming and I am also sure it is just the beginning, but when I pay a couple of dollars for a game that I can play for many many hours, it’s still hard for me to accept that movies are 3 times the price.

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I know the last poll was only a few days ago but I want to get back to the Thursday schedule.

Please bear with me. I’ve got an idea and before anybody asks, “No, I don’t have any inside information”.

Imagine that half-Life 3 is released but it is also made available with, for an extra cost, themes.

The themes are “overlays” that include sound files (voice and music), textures and maybe some other assets.

The idea is that you buy the game and can play it as Valve imagined it. But you could also “change” it by buying different themes that give the game a different feel.

Think of it as being similar to HTML and CSS. The HTML is the content and the CSS is the look and feel.

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