Last night, I purchased Torchlight on Steam, based on the positive reviews I’ve been reading about the game. At only $19.99, it’s a definite bargain. I’ve only played about two hours worth so far, but man is this game fun! Torchlight is an action-style RPG, much in the vein of Diablo (in fact, it’s made by a bunch of old Diablo developers). The graphics are beautiful and cartoony, spell effects are fun to watch, and the voice acting is pretty decent. But what I want to focus on in this post are the pets your character can have.

When you start a new game, you get to choose a pet (either a dog or a lynx-style cat), which you can then name. Your pet travels around with you and can aid you in battle. It will attack enemies if you put it into an aggressive stance, it can carry loot for you, and it can even wield items: a couple of rings, two spells, and an amulet. You can even send the pet around to gather up loot on the dungeon floor!

By far the best ability, however, is that your pet can travel back to town to sell items for you! Can you believe that? No longer do you have to teleport back to town to sell your unwanted loot. Just load up your pet with the stuff to sell, tell it to go back to town, and it will. The obvious downside to this is that you lose your pet’s abilities and assistance for a while, but it’s oh-so-worth it in the long run.

I’m having a blast so far with this game, and I’d much rather be at home playing it right now than at work. I definitely recommend checking it out. For only $20, it’s a great value!

A few days ago, I installed “Serious Sam: The Second Encounter,” a game I haven’t played for many years. Released back in 2002, SS:TSE is an incredibly fun first person shooter. Though the graphics are dated, the gameplay is as fresh and exciting as ever. If anything, playing this game makes me even more excited for the Serious Sam HD remake that’s coming soon.

What really surprises me, however, is how much I remember about the game. It’s astonishing how, after all these years of having not played Serious Sam, I remember the location of nearly every secret area. I can remember areas where enemies pop up unexpectedly (so I know to be on my guard), and I remember most of the various ammo and health drop locations.

If I were to load up Wolfenstein 3D, I could probably take you to 80% of the secrets in the first chapter of that game. The same thing holds true for Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and countless other titles that I spent time with when I was younger. Have I really wasted that many brain cells to remember stupid things like this?

Gabe Newell, from Valve software, recently conducted a focus group session with deaf gamers. Three videos are available of this event: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Note that the audio quality is, ironically, pretty bad in each video.

One of the most interesting tidbits from these videos involves Valve’s desire to introduce a deaf character into a future game (possibly in the Half Life universe). An idea is floated where Alyx has taught Dog sign language, based on a past crush she had with a deaf individual. In essence, it would be an excuse for Valve to develop the necessary technology for characters to sign. Pretty cool.

I think it’s great that Valve is doing this. In the accessibility world, blind people get nearly all of the focus. For a gaming company to branch out into this realm is really quite remarkable. I’m looking forward to see how Valve implements this new technology, and I’m excited to see where the Half Life story goes with this (assuming, of course, that Half Life is the intended universe for this work).

I recently purchased a copy of Far Cry 2 on Steam. Oddly enough, Far Cry 2 has nothing to do with the first Far Cry, save for the name. Crytek, the original game’s developer, wasn’t involved in the development of Far Cry 2, so I’m confused as to why this game is billed as the true sequel. Other than the standard first person shooter tropes, the two have very little (if anything) in common.

To me, Far Cry 2 resembles the Grand Theft Auto series more than any traditional first person shooter. The mission design feels similar, as do many of the game mechanics. But in the long run, how does the game fare? Here’s my review.

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The rather humorously titled Slashdot article Duke Nukem For Never, reports that 3D Realms, once among the brightest computer game developers, has closed for good. This is pretty sad for me, as I was once a major fan of the company’s games. So big a fan, in fact, that I maintained a little Map Editing FAQ for the Build game engine. In essence, that document and those games are what got me publishing on the web in the first place. It’s hard to believe that was 13 years ago.

I can’t say I’m surprised that the company has gone out of business, however. They’ve made a bunch of poor choices over the past few years, and have essentially released no new self-developed titles since 1997′s Shadow Warrior (which was a great game). It will be interesting to see what happens to whatever actually exists of Duke Nukem Forever.

As a part of its recent layoffs, Microsoft closed Aces Studio, the team behind Microsoft’s stalwart Flight Simulator line of games, and the upcoming Train Simulator 2. According to the report, Train Simulator 2 is officially dead, and will not be revived. The Flight Simulator counterpart may be brought back at some point, but even its fate is undetermined at the moment.

I know I’m one of the only people on the planet who cares about it, but I was looking forward to Train Sim 2. The graphics looked great, and I was really looking forward to the migration to the Flight-Sim game engine. But, alas, it’s not to be.

Onward and upward, I suppose.

I recently ran across an interesting implementation of the classic Arkanoid game. The game is coded completely in object-oriented JavaScript / DHTML. I’m really impressed with what the author was able to do. The game has all kinds of features: a level editor, power ups, decent sound effects, and more.

I found this via a handy list of other JavaScript Games. What a good way to waste some time!

I’ve recently been looking for a few new computer games to play. Seeing as there’s nothing on the immediate horizon that suits my fancy, I decided to dig into my existing computer game collection for something I hadn’t played in a while. The first title that popped up was Microsoft’s Rise of Nations, the one and only real-time strategy (RTS) game that I own. I’m not a big fan of the RTS genre, mostly because I’m really terrible at those types of games, and the only reason I own one is because my dad got it for free at a Microsoft conference. Surprisingly to me, it’s a fun little game. As I’ve already said, I stink at RTS games, so even playing on the 2nd (of 7) difficulty levels still presents quite a challenge. But I have fun playing the game, and that’s what matters.

As much fun as I was having, there was still an itch that I couldn’t scratch. Thanks to some recent Diablo III screenshots I found via a news posting on Blue’s News, it occurred to me: I needed a good-ol’ role-playing game (RPG) to play. So I dug through my still-boxed computer games (which I never unpacked), and found my old copy of Sacred. It’s a Diablo-like RPG and was just what I was looking for. While perusing the Wikipedia article on the game, I noted that an expansion pack had been released, something that I originally had not picked up. A ‘gold’ edition of the game had later been released, including the original game along with the expansion. I saw it for sale on Amazon for $25.99, which seemed a little high, considering I already owned the base game. Thankfully, the game is also available on Steam for a paltry $9.99. I was sold, immediately bought the game, and I’m already having a blast (and I’m looking forward to all the new content).

Score another win for the Steam platform.

I just finished reading an excellent article on how to fix pathfinding in games. The author presents a number of excellent examples of how today’s pathfinding can break (with examples from legendary games like Oblivion and Half Life 2), and offers a great solution: use a navigation mesh instead of a waypoint graph. Genius.

On Saturday, Blizzard officially announced Diablo III, the next in the highly popular role-playing game series. Although the first Diablo was fun, it was Diablo II that put the series into the upper echelons of gaming. It has been over 7 years since the one and only expansion pack for Diablo II was released, enabling the game to run at 800×600 instead of a paltry 640×480 (those were the days).

I highly recommend the game play trailer on the official website (linked above). One of Blizzard’s employees shows a number of new game mechanics (destructible environments that you can use to your advantage), as well as one of the new playable classes (the witch doctor, which looks super cool). I am super excited about this title, and I’ll definitely be picking it up once it’s released. Blizzard, like Valve, seldom disappoints with their releases, and this is one to definitely watch.