What do you get when you pay for a game?

This is something that's been bugging me for a while.

I had recently bought Counter-Strike Collection and when I started installing it a pop-up showed up prompting me to register in "Steam", something I had read about some time ago. The purpose of this was to make me log in everytime I wanted to play so they could make sure I was using a legal copy of their software.

Fair enough, I paid for it and it was an online game so it wasn't that big an issue.

Sometime later I bought Valve's Half-Life Anthology. The main game I wanted to play using it was the original Half-Life. I started installing it on my computer, which wasn't connected to the internet and at that time simply couldn't be. Suddenly a pop-up showed up. "Register your copy on Steam or you won't be able to play the game". I couldn't.

It was a singleplayer game, I had paid for it and it was there in my hand but they wouldn't let me play it. What had I just bought?

Apparently I had just bought permission to play the game but only if they were watching.


(I'll probably write more about this in the near future.)

Pacman stuff

I am not the biggest Pacman fan but lately I have come across a vast amount of pacman stuff. Today I bring you the best so far!

Cheese Pacman


Guitar Pacman


What the skeleton of Pacman would look like.


Awesome Christmas tree.

And now imagine if they had used the original name. Thank the testers for noticing the obvious pun. "Puck Man" with those letters and the long nose...the future of videogames would have been ruined right from the start.

Videogame Wedding

And now for something completely different.

Sometimes I think of myself as a geek but things like these make me feel like a noob. One of the guys from Blizzard got married a while ago and he had a videogame-themed marriage. It's not a Blizzard-videogame themed one, the photos indicate a more Nintendo-themed approach.

The wedding's entrance music was The Legend of Zelda main theme and the party music was the Super Mario Bros one. The tables were named after videogame consoles, according to their actual timeline. The head table was called "Press Start to Begin"...and just look at the cake!

I wish I could have been there!

Full article and more photos here.

3D created graphic whores

This post is going to raise a few eyebrows.

As 3D came into the videogame world and became a standard because "it made things look more realistic", 2D was shoved to the corner of childish things. By the time of the Nintendo 64 and the Sony Playstation the standard was 3D. It was the future Sega Saturn had pointed years before.

By that time 3D was cool because it was new. Bad 3D was chosen over good 2D because a lot of people thought it was cooler. Ok, it gave people the chance to do new things because they could move the camera and all that. It represented technological breakthroughs in the hardware and programming side of things.

3D games were hot and 2D were not, or so it seemed. There were exceptions, of course. The interesting part is that some games were proud to be 2D and some of them were only fun because they were planned that way. Money was speaking high and there were conversions. Lots of conversions. Some of them were rubbish but a few pearls were created. Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid. New genres of gaming came from that time. The classic DOOM spawned thousands of clones and a few were good.

Where was 2D? Mainly in puzzle games and RPGs and mostly on the PC. I love good 2D graphics and by that time the best games kicked in. Awesome RPGs like Diablo, Baldur's Gate and Fallout showed up. Worms came out of nowhere and gathered a cult success by sheer fun and humor.

With these new generations of consoles and graphic cards the emphasis is on the graphics instead of the concept of the game, good characters or stories. I know people who can't enjoy a game if it's not running at full speed and full resolution and that actually makes me sad. They spend hundreds on pc parts to have the games running like that. They only play games and don't use it for anything else.

Nowadays people are divided in various sectors but the people who really enjoy games for what they are couldn't care less if the game is in 2D or 3D as long as it is good.

Old-school Videogames and me

I was lucky to start playing videogames at an early age but I missed a lot of the now-called old-school classic videogames. I was paying attention to them, though. Watching some videogame-related tv shows, reading magazines and talking to my friends kept me up to date on the new ones.

I loved when we visited a friend or relative which had a videogame console or cool PC games. I ignored everything else and played it with its owner. This may seem unsensitive and maybe it is, but it was the chance to play the Super Mario and Sonic games (my favorite ones at the time).

At home I played SimCity (yes, the first one!), Supaplex, Rodent and another videogame about the Olympic games on the PC. It was nice, but they weren't my favorite games. I wanted to play something from Sega, or Nintendo! Those guys delivered good games that hooked me right from the start. They created characters that looked cool and videogames that seemed long and fun.

When I was introduced to the Game Boy and the Game Gear my brain almost couldn't handle the excitement. I couldn't handle the cost, either. When I learned the price and counted my savings, it remained a dream.

When I got my first Game Boy Pocket for my birthday, my life changed.