Rationing Time for Playing Games

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[CoconutKid]

Here is a post from a fellow traveler stolen from the Kalypso Forum.

moose67 - today:
I have fallen out of love with game developers over the last few of years. Gone are the days of buying a large and deep game that has hours upon hours of gameplay inside.

It feels as if the DLC epidemic is spreading to every developer there is. Nearly every game that is advertised on Steam these days has DLC content for sale. After having payed £25 for a game, you are then bombarded with DLC's, booster packs, weapon unlocks, collecters edition, goty edition etc. Then we have the corporate blackmail with things like "Pre order this game and get a beta key for that game" "Pre order this game and receive a bonus outfit" etc. The list goes on and on.

I think Steam has a lot to do with this trend as it is the perfect platform to make this bullshit work. I have visions of their little sales people planting this seed in the minds of all the developers they deal with. Me personally is not buying into anymore. I will from now on be buying older games that I have overlooked a few years ago and will be buying them at bargain bucket prices on Ebay.

For many months I wanted the Empire and Napoleon games. Looking on Steam I saw that there was several DLC's which gave you additional armies. These armies that should have been in the original game for the price they were charging and once upon a time would have been. A few weeks ago steam had the GOTY edition of Total War on sale for around £7, I immediately hit the buy button as this was a bargain of the year for me.

After playing the game for a few hours and suffering a few crashes I realised that the game was poorly coded and had several large flaws. This game was rated at 93% when in the real world it should be 70% due to the massive flaws and non functionality. Even the MP server interface lacks the most basic functions that games 10 years ago had.

And then there's MoW assault squad with its continual Multiplay crashes. I bought the game, can't play it, and get no support or answer at the DMS forums. Instead he just hides in his cave and quietly knocks up his crappy Map packs to sell us as DLC.

I remember years and years ago when I used to play Tropico1+2, Sudden Strike, Cossacks, Stronghold, Blitzkrieg, Commandos, Gangsters etc etc. All these games were awesome with masses of content and NEVER ever crashed on you. I still play some of them these days and they still work perfectly on W7 with no crashes ever. Some of those games did bring out addons, but after playing such a great game I was more than happy to shell out and buy an addon as I knew it would worth it.
Does that ring any bells for you?

I makes me think about my big stock of really good paper board games which don't depend on a Bulgarian\German teenage interpretation of the Caribbean in the 1950's + -- one doesn't have to think about eye candy. And I can't see a difference in 3D.

[RhiannOn]

Yep, I agree about  the dlc. Unless it is really cheap I will not buy any. So far I haven't got sucked into pre-order this and get key for xxx on steam.  But the good thing with steam is I had to reformat approx three weeks ago as I upgraded  my mb, cpu, etc and as I have steam on a seperate partition all I had to do was back up some saves etc in My documents.  Then just ran the steam client and it updated the  steam parts required and all my games were ready to play. All done in approx quarter of an hour.   Overall, I do like Steam..especially so when the sales are on.....
As yet I have not had too many problems with steam except I make sure it is in offline mode now before shutting my pc down or playing non steam and I cross my fingers if playing any steam games in online mode, although so far lately it has been very stable. 
 In the past when steam was in online mode permanently and a game had a hissy fit which locked up my pc and I had to do a hard reboot, that lead me to be unable to play any of my  games through steam sometimes as it had issues trying to connect to the servers to verify my pw after the reboot . It took a couple more reboots and a bit of "cussing" before all would be fine again. Obviously something got messed up. I could still play some but not all games via the exe in the \common\game folder though.
Gosh the other day I reinstalled Rollercoaster 3 Platinum off the disk (Thanks to a recent thread here that got me all nostalgic  ) and it was so effortless.  There was no cd key input required, no internet connection needed to verify and no profile to make as with windows live games.  The fanmade mods were copied from my external backup drive into the Style folder and My documents RCT3 folder and within minutes  I was replaying one of my old parks. (Those little kids in the karoke still crack me up with their dancing)  . Gone are the days when that can be done now with many new games.

[CoconutKid]

@ RhiannOn,

Thanks for your thoughts and experiences. It's helpful to hear that someone can still recognize that everything new is not actually an eclipse of other ways.

Just now the US is having a financial collapse of the government postal service which is talked about in terms of the competition of Free E[lectronic]mail with First Class paper bound mail. I think the difference is really in privacy. The paper stuff is a lot easier to keep private than the electronic stuff. Think about Wikileaks and the State Department. But that's another topic.

I would like to ask folks here how they ration their playing time among the hundreds of games they have on their computers, stored on "Cloud Nine" thanks to Steam such secure places, and on historical disks (as RhiannOn describes)? I find that I still follow the pattern I developed with war games based on paper maps & cardboard counters which required some table space to set-up and remain undisturbed over a span of time. I really don't find an interest in jumping from one game to the next in the pattern of the chess master who plays dozens of opponents as he walks from one to the next making a move for each.

Does it really make life more interesting and stimulating to race at top speed through every activiity possible?


BTW, for those who wonder why I'm still on a dial-up connection -- it costs me ~$25 per month while DSL would cost me ~$90 per month.

[susanexpress1]

Thank you for your sharing.  If you do not post it here, I think I will never think about this question.