I’ve got a bunch of gift copies of games on Steam that—for various reasons or other—I’ve not yet given away. So it’s time to remedy that: if you’d think you’ll enjoy playing one of these games, DM me your email address and the one game you’d like most. If I don’t follow you, @me to claim it, and I’ll follow you so you can DM me your email. Only claim one game, please, leave some for the others.
These are all great games; if I had to decide on my top 10 favourite games ever, each of these would be likely to make the list, and some of them would be jostling for first place. Without further ado, the games I’m giving away are:
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The Secret of Monkey Island, Special Edition - Windows only.
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Psychonauts - Windows only.
- CLAIMED World of Goo - Mac, Windows.
- CLAIMED Team Fortress 2 - Mac, Windows.
- A second copy of The Secret of Monkey Island, Special Edition - Windows only.
I’ll update this post as the games are claimed.
"A lot of designers don’t like “save game”, because it makes it possible for the players to restart any time any little thing goes wrong, which means that they get through the game quicker and lose less frequently. In short, they don’t get to experience the full amount of suffering and disappointment that the designer has planned for them."
Do you really need my permission to begin searching? It’s not as if I get a choice at all.
You know the search is finished. Why do you need me to handhold you through this? Is removing previous versions of Office emotionally troubling for you?
Couldn’t you have told me that on the previous screen?
Thank you for taking my time to present a tautological conclusion.
I would never have actually started blogging without Tumblr. I had tried several times to start a blog with Wordpress or something else, but I just spent too much time faffing about with settings and themes and never got around to writing much.
The lack of comment support is also a benefit in the end. Comments require moderation, which requires time and effort. And comments for me would mostly be ego-stroking anyway. But Tumblr makes it easy to comment on another post, just like this. Only I’m not writing my words on your page, where they might (hypothetically) be offensive, or boring, or just stupid clutter, but on my own space. Which keeps the best of both worlds.
The only lack from having no comments is the lack of community. But building a community of commenters is hard, and keeping it sane and civil is harder yet. Better a forum with a team of moderators, I think.
“After the light, the second most important aesthetic character in the game is the floor. Of how many games could you write that sentence? You’re always acutely aware of what you’re standing on. Tiled, stone floors make up most of the streets and buildings you encounter, loudly registering your clip-clop footsteps.… But then, there it is: carpet. Sweet, blessed carpet. On carpet Garrett can run, jump and be merry, producing nothing more than a soft scuffing. Sneaking up on the enemy is a cinch, picking their pockets and being long gone before they’ve a clue you were ever there. Oh, heavens, a completely dark carpeted room: sheer bliss.”
John Walker eloquently captures the character and the genius of Thief: The Dark Project in this retrospective written last year for Eurogamer. Every time I play Thief or Thief II, they jump right back to the top of my favourite games list.
"‘Cinematic gameplay’ is an oxymoron. In order to do both you must weaken both."
It seems to makes sense to run ads on a blog, in order to help recoup the costs of bandwidth and hosting. But moving from ad-free to ad-supported should be carefully considered. It changes your relationship with your readers at a fundamental level: because you are not merely selling space on your blog to the advertisers, you are actually selling a small portion of your readers’ attention. You are beginnig to commercially exploit your visitors.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing—it depends on the aims of the blog, the audience you are seeking, and the kind of relationship you are trying to build with the audience. But if the context is inappropriate, this may lead to your readers feeling used, or even offended.
Another oft-overlooked impact of advertising is how it changes your message. Many web-based advertising services exercise little editorial control over the ads they run, which results in disreputable ads all over the web, even on otherwise reputable sites. Since you are ultimately responsible for the content that appears on your site, you can end up appearing to endorse medically questionable diet pills, or whatever the cheap-scammy-ad-of-the-week is. And that makes you look bad.
Just a thought. How did we, as a society, ever come to accept such an innately ridiculous concept: that I can own what’s in your head?
"We all realise you rely on advertising revenue, but it’s not something you’re entitled to, it’s something you earn by cultivating a user base, and any revenue lost to ad blockers and Safari’s Reader is money you failed to earn this week, because you pissed off all your readers. That’s the game you play when your income relies on users actually wanting to look at your website."
"First, even though the content is digital, the reader loses most of digital content’s benefits. I can go to the Wired website, link to articles there on my blog, share them via email or Twitter and use the power of the web to share and opine. The iPad edition offers none of that flexibility — and it doesn’t offer any of the flexibility of paper either. I can annotate my paper version of Wired, clip out articles, or even pass the entire magazine on to you and you can in turn pass it on to others. I can’t do any of those things with the iPad edition."
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