Dungeon Defenders: This is MY house

Must... defend...

I was going to celebrate the end of bad movie month by reviewing a bad movie, just for old times sake, but then decided that I’ve had quite enough of that, thank you very much.  I mean, when was the last time I reviewed an honest to god VIDEO GAME?  As someone who is a supposed gamer since the wee days, when controllers were more of joypads and the height of gaming was, in fact, River Raid on the Atari, I’ve been suspiciously silent on the new game front.  This, I think is because of monies.  Video games cost them.  Other things I need that are only obtainable with monies:  Food.

Anyway, that’s enough of a tangent.  Dungeon Defenders.  It only cost about ten bucks, I think, and I only picked it up because a friend on Steam said “download this now” and I said okay for some reason.  And yet, unlike all the other games I have downloaded and bought on a whim, Dungeon Defenders is fantastic.  I spend waking hours thinking of strategies and tricks to try.  Challenges cause me to shake my fist at Trendy Entertainment for their devious ways.

Plants Vs. Zombies: Aim for the shins

DON'T BE CAUGHT WITH YOUR PLANTS DOWN

Okay, I’m gonna do a shorter game review for today, because there are too many shenanigans going on.  The shenanigans aren’t important for the purposes of this review.  Well, except for the fact that ants are apparently hell bent on living in my keyboard for some reason.  There may be frequent pauses as I, ahem, evict my new tenants, because they have not paid rent.  So I figured this was as good of a time as any to hit upon the best addictive tower defense game of last year, Plants Vs. Zombies.  I had originally downloaded the demo of PvZ for Xbox 360, but something about the game just didn’t grab me.  It was too slow, too limited in choices, too…  something for my tastes.  Then Steam came out with a sweet deal to purchase the PvZ game of the year edition for under $4, so I figured hey, why not?

I have not stopped playing since.  God help me.

Free to Play: Incomplete entertainment

Give a gamer a free game and this is what it feels like in our heads

Don’t know how many of you out there have been paying attention, but several free-to-play games launched on Steam this month. Four games launched in one chunk, with Champions Online, Spiral Knights, Global Agenda and Forsaken World taking the stage first, and Valve’s ever-popular Team Fortress 2 joining in shortly after.  The first chunk of games is interesting in that all four of them are MMOs of varying sizes and shapes, offering worlds of content, endless quests and character progression for Steam’s community.  Now, as many of you may know, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with MMOs, forged deep in the murky bowels of the underbelly of World of Warcraft.  So why the eff would I pick up four new MMOs?  Simple.

THEY ARE FREE.

Terraria: More like Metroidcraft

YEAH!!!!111

Okay, fine, I admit it.  I have an unhealthy addiction to infinite sandbox games.  Plop me down in front of a totally sweet building/digging  world and leave it just open-ended enough to guarantee that there’s no real end to it, and I’ll sink countless hours building imaginary worlds and blowing up as much as the game engine allows.  I’m not sure why this is.  I’m no architect.  I guess I just like that feeling of progress, that you’re actually accomplishing something even though you’re really just placing some pixels on top of more pixels, which is realistically done all the time.

So when Terraria was released on Steam this week, I couldn’t help but pick it up.  Touted as a “2D Minecraft but not,” Terraria focuses more on crafting and exploration than straight up building, offering tons of new content to see, explore, and get pissed off at in your quest for newer and better loot.

Portal 2: This one’s for science

Eight hours.  That’s about how long it took me to plow through Valve’s puzzle gaming masterpiece Portal 2.  It’s not exactly a long game, but honestly it was already a done deal as soon as they announced there would be a sequel to the three-hour long original cult classic a while back.  I knew I’d be getting the game.  I was more than a little worried about how it would turn out.  With a chaotically lovable insane AI, a unique game mechanic and a near endless series of memes, the first Portal captured the hearts of millions, with only a three percent fatality rate (plus or minus 2 percent for accuracy).  I’m always a bit leery about sequels to games I enjoyed the crap out of the first time around. Just in case.

That being said, the eight hours I spent in Aperture’s science facility this time around was some of the best puzzle gaming I’ve encountered in a long, long time.  And the writing along was enough to knock my boots off, which I did find a little odd since I don’t think I actually own a pair of boots.

Stronghold: A series of games that I hate

More bullshit for you, m'lord?

This post may or may not make much sense to anyone outside my head.  That’s okay by me, I am waaay beyond the point of caring now.  I’m feeling a bit delirious and unsure if I might throw up sometime in the next 12 minutes, and to offset this unfortunate turn of events I spent the past two hours watching Die Hard on Netflicks, because nothing calms the stomach and heals the body quite like Bruce Willis going on a murderous anti-terrorism rampage.  Now I know what you’re thinking:  “Really, Tophat?  Another review for an ancient cult classic movie?  Come on, man!”

Not to worry.  I decided to do a review for a string of games that I’ve had the misfortune to pick up recently.  While I haven’t put nearly as many hours into this franchise as I have, say, Civilization, I’m fairly confident that I can make up the facts about this game that I don’t know, and no one would be the wiser.  Maybe someday we’ll have more Bruce Willis shenanigans somewhere else down the line?  Today is not that day.

Civ5: It’s good to be the king

Diplomacy is not going as planned.

It’s been a while since I could do any straight up PC gaming, but I finally had a chance to pick up Sid Meier’s Civilization V (or five, for those of you who don’t speak Roman) this weekend.  As someone who has been playing Civ games since I was too young to really understand what was happening in them, Civilization 5 stays true to its original source material while adding new features, tweaking old ones, and generally screwing up history to the point of hilarity.