Jan 2010: What I'm Playing/What I'm Paying

Welcome to the first What I'm Playing and What I'm Paying post for 2010.  In the future I will attempt to have these posts ready for the first of each month, but Heartless_ Jr is teething and when I finally had free time this past week all I wanted to do was own face in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

I have embedded the new What I'm Playing/What I'm Paying spreadsheet for January below.  The overall spreadsheet can be found here.

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Game of the Month 

Mirror's Edge
Cost: $4.99 (Steam Holiday Sale)
Played: 7 hours
3-words: Fun action puzzler.






My game of the month was Mirror's Edge.  Unfortunately, the fun for Mirror's Edge ended after 7 hours when I completed the game.  I tried to move onto the time trials, but became bored trying to shave another second off my runs.

Early in January, I compared the game to Portal in a post and it really sums up my thoughts: 

Mirror's Edge is a racing puzzle game, not an action FPS.  The sooner that is understood, the sooner the game can be enjoyed.  Forget that there is gun-play, this game is all about getting from point A to B in the fastest time and most efficient manner.

The only game I can compare Mirror's Edge to is Portal.

At 7 hours played, I feel the price tag of $4.99 was worth it.  I enjoyed the game.

February's Game of the Month: Mass Effect

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/Played

In the /Played section, I will cover the other games I've played during the month.

Civilization 4 (Civ4)
Civ4 caught me off guard.  I didn't anticipate liking it as much as I have.  While it is a simple game to pick up and play, there is a wide variety of things to understand and master in the game.  Even after 22 hours of play, I feel like a fish out of water.  I agonize over every little decision, wondering if it was the right one.  As it is with most involved strategy games, its impossible to tell in most cases whether you made the right decision or not (outside of military conflict that is, its pretty easy when your army is eating dirt and the enemy's is not).  However, I am learning how my decisions will affect each game and therefore making better decisions because of it.

Trine

Trine is a great platform puzzle game.  Also, its a gorgeous quasi-3D game.  It took me about 6 hours to finish and was another $4.99 winner from the Steam Holiday Sale.

Mass Effect

Sure, Mass Effect 2 just launched, but I'm old school and am just catching up on Mass Effect 1.  I've warmed my hands up with a couple hours of play this month and will dive into it hardcore in February. 

Defense Grid: The Awakening
A great tower-defense game which I purchased solely to play on my underpowered laptop when I'm away from home.  Two hours of mindless fun enjoyed so far.

Braid
This is a puzzle game caught between crazyland and Super Mario World.  All I can say is that I'm lazy and routinely have to look at cheats... for level 1!  However, that is due to some basic things not being explained in-game (like moving the puzzles around to create platforms to jump on).  Even knowing how to do something does not make it any easier to pull off.  Also, watching the cheats gives a good overview of some of the "basics" that any Braid player will need to survive.  I feel a lot less frustrated after having watched some cheat videos and am confident I can tackle the rest of the game cheat-free (or not).

S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl
A lot of people love this game, but after roughly an hour with the game I have mixed feelings.  I'm not sure if I have the time or motivation to keep playing.  There are a lot of nuances and "omg its like real life" things I need to figure out about the game.  And I keep forgetting to save my progress.

Allods Online
I enjoyed a few hours of Allods Online and look forward to the launch.  This will be my main MMOG for 2010.

Rome: Total War

Sorry, Civ4 won my strategy side over and not sure I will play Rome: Total War past the one hour I invested.

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/Paid

Total spent this Month: $55.17
My Value Rating: Excellent

It is rare for me to spend money on a game that I am not going to play immediately, but the Steam Holiday Sale was insane.  I had to stock up!  Plus, it will only take a few hours of play to get my money's worth out of each game.

NOTE: This report includes data from a short period of time from Dec 2009 as well as all of January 2010.

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Dec 2009: What I'm Playing/What I'm Paying

Previous months: Nov 2009, Oct 2009, Sept 2009

I'm not embedding the spreadsheet this month because with the birth of a new year, I am planning a new approach to these posts. The "What I'm Playing/What I'm Paying" Google Spreadsheet is still there for the previous months.



With 2010, I am pledging to move this blog towards PC gaming as a whole instead of just MMOGs. I've dedicated a lot of time over the past ten years to MMOGs, but I have played a lot other games as well.  I have ignored talking about many of those games and I want to correct that.

Changes for my What I'm Playing/What I'm Paying posts

First, I am putting myself on a stricter gaming budget.  Subscription MMOG diehards will argue until they are blue in the face at how "cheap" it is to pay $15 a month for dozens of hours of entertainment.  $15 x 12 months = $180 is my budget for gaming in 2010, starting as of Christmas 2009.  My goal is to have a varied PC gaming experience, including MMOGs, FPS, RTS, and web games.  This is NOT meant as a way to prove anyone wrong!  It is a way to show that $180 can buy a wide variety of gaming on the PC if a gamer is willing to be conservative and play some games they have missed over the years.

Secondly, I have loaded up on games via the Steam Holiday Sale.  I have purchased everything from BioShock to Mirror's Edge to S.T.A.L.K.E.R:Shadow of Chernobyl.  Most of these games are on sale from $2 - $5.  At approximately $35 total spent, I feel like I have an entire year's worth of games saved up (and there are three days left for the sale!).

Anyone can buy a bunch of cheap games, but it takes some dedication to actually play them.  A two dollar game is a waste of money if it never gets played.  To alleviate this problem, I am going to have a game(s) of the month as part of each post.  For example:  January 2010 will feature Mirror's Edge.

After each month, I will give a mini-review of the game(s) of the month as well as discuss the others games I may have played.

I will also calculate the amount of time I spent playing each game every month and figure it into a total money vs. total time spent playing equation to determine the value I am getting from each game.  To help track this, I have a decision to make:

Raptr vs. Xfire

Raptr is a newer tool meant to combine multiple IM platforms as well as track how long each game is played.

Xfire is the old standby gameplay tracker.

Having used both together for a month now, I am leaning towards Raptr.  It tracks more data, has better reporting, and a better website.  Xfire will be going bye-bye (again).

Not laws

These are general ideas, not laws that cannot be broken.  The budget isn't set in stone and I am more than willing to break it for a good game (WoW:Cataclysm being a possible budget breaker this year).  It is quite possible this splurge in spending on older games via Steam will be a wash and I will never play some of the games.  Also, its possible a change from MMOG blogging to general PC gaming blogging will kill my readership.

Regardless, 2010 looks interesting!

TIP: How to move Steam games to another drive in Windows 7/Vista/XP

With the Steam holiday sale blitzing everyone's wallets, there are plenty of people trying to find hard drive space to store all of their new games (seriously, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for only $1.99, Mirror's Edge for $4.99).

One of the quirks with Steam is that it only allows users to install games to the same drive that Steam resides on.  For many, that is their main C: drive, which often fills up quickly.  I will detail the process used to move 3rd party games to another drive.  This will be for Windows 7 and Vista (Windows XP users click here).


NOTE: Click here for details on moving Valve's games (Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, etc.).
NOTE: Both drives must be formatted with the NTFS file system.
NOTE: This moves the actual game files, not saved files that may be in different folders.

Steps

Step 1:

Create a folder named Steam2 on your additional storage drive (remember, the drive must be formatted NTFS).  Putting the folder in the root of the drive will make it easier to run the commands later.  Example:  D:\Steam2

Step 2:

Locate your Steam install folder.

Examples:
Windows 7/Vista 64-bit - C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\
Windows 7/Vista 32-bit - C:\Program Files\Steam\

Step 3:

Next, locate \steamapps\common\ in your Steam install folder.  This is where 3rd party game installs are neatly kept in their own folders.

Step 4:

Select the game folders you wish to move and then select CUT.

Step 5:

Go to the Steam2 folder created in step 1 and click PASTE.  This will move the folders and files for each game over to your spare storage and remove them from the original drive.  The next step will link these moved folders back to their old locations so that Steam can find and use them.

Step 6:

Open a command prompt.

With the prompt open, use the mklink /J command for each game that you moved.  The mklink command creates a link to the moved folder.  The syntax is as follows:

mklink /J link target

mklink = the 'make link' command
/J = the junction prefix, which creates the link between folders
link =  the file path to the folder that needs to be linked to
target = the file path to the folder that has the data in it


Example using BioShock on Windows 7 64-bit:

mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\bioshock" "F:\Steam2\bioshock"

*It is important to note the quotations used around the file paths, as the command line does not like spaces or special characters

When this completes correctly, you should see:

Junction created for C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\bioshock <<===>> F:\Steam2\bioshock


Any questions?  Comment below or send an email to heartlessgamer _at_ gmail _dot_ com.