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Showing posts from September, 2014

Some thoughts on the Steam Store Update...

Steam updated the look and feel of the Store page , along with some fairly major revisions to how things work. Some things to note: 1) A while ago, Steam altered the tabs on the front page. In terms of what was on sale,  you used to see the new releases tab before anything else , then could dip into best sellers. At some point, they changed it so you'd  see top sellers first . This used to grind my gears for a number of reasons, and it has been  covered extensively elsewhere . The way the tabs function has now changed again, so you default to "POPULAR new releases". To see what are presumably not high selling new games, you have to scroll to the bottom of the game tiles then click the "See all new releases" button. You're then taken to a feature-bare page of games, but at least you'll see new games which aren't AAA blockbuster pre-orders. As a final note, things like daily deals are currently way down the page. This all seems like a really

Videogames: The Hacking Minigames Edition

Many moons ago I took part in an episode of Gamespot's Reality Check, on the subject of Watch_Dogs and videogame hacking . Out of that came a shorter segment based around good and bad examples of hacking in videogames. Fair warning: it mainly looks at the trend of turning hacking into minigames, instead of titles which are primarily all about hacking like Uplink. A couple of games not mentioned up above were given a shout-out in a  spinoff blog from way back when. And yes, I really did sit there for an age trying - and failing - to figure out the hacking minigame in Alpha Protocol. Bonus points for mastering this on a PC with mouse and keyboard. The (rather distracting) mouse pointer which controls the right box often ends up moving outside the terminal screen, resulting in two eyeballs trying to track two boxes and an increasingly distant pointer crawling across a sea of flashing green letters and numbers. The frequent reward for managing to not get a migraine in the fi