Progress on Portal

Played a bit of Portal. Beat a couple of advanced maps, got a couple of achievements.

Played some Shards of Dalaya. My mage is level 44 now, which is nice. Haven’t gotten to try out my new spells yet, though.

I also played through Super Mario World a couple of weeks ago, beating every goal. Great game.

Games on Steam

Recently, I got several games on Steam, due to the awesome sale prices.

Portal: free, a while ago. I beat this one just recently–around 2010-07-03, I guess. Awesome, awesome game. I’ve got 6/15 achievements.

Beat Hazard: $2.49. Neat game, and worth the price. I have 13/25 achievements.

Audiosurf: $2.50. Another cool music game. I have 2/17 achievements.

Torchlight: $5.00. At that price, who could resist it? I’ve got 9/67 achievements. My saves were even compatible, so onward I go.

Civilization 4 complete: $9.99. Civ 4 provides enough gameplay that, compared to movies or something, $10 per playing session wouldn’t really be overpriced. $10 for the whole set (Civ 4, Civ 4: Colonization, Civ 4: Beyond the Sword, and Civ 4: Warlords) is a totally good deal. I spent four hours playing it last night. I was playing on easy, and it was indeed very easy. I’ll have to play on the next difficulty up next time. I was about ten turns away from getting a diplomatic victory (by having enough votes to just vote myself in) when the game ended and I got a time victory instead. I wasn’t far off from a domination victory (is that right? Having most of the map and population. That one.), either. Great game, but at 4 hours for an easy game against a few computers, I remember why I stopped playing before. It takes so long! Still, I’m sure I’ll play it enough to get my money’s worth.

All told, I spent about $20 during the sale on several extremely worthy games. I’m satisfied with the value I’m getting, which is unusual. Definitely I’ll make sure to put aside some money for the next sale like this. Who knows what gems might reveal themselves? There were lots of other great games at great prices, though I already owned several: they had Freedom Force and its sequel for less than $2 for the pair, but I already own Freedom Force. They had similar extremely low prices on various shooters and other games of types I don’t like, so not much temptation there. Still, a dollar or two isn’t two much to pay for even a less-than-stellar game, so I’ll look forward to next time.

Lately

Played more pinball, as usual.

Got a few more stars with Luigi on Super Mario Galaxy–I’m up to 41, I think. I hope to finish the game with Luigi before Super Mario Galaxy 2 comes out, which gives me about a week. I’ve got to say, Super Mario Galaxy is a really high quality game. The levels are very well designed, and there’s enough new and different stuff throughout the game to keep it interesting. It’s great.

I got Portal, since it’s free on Steam. It’s really great. I’ve played partway through it before this (and I played Narbacular Drop before Portal was released), though I haven’t yet finished it. I think that Portal mostly does a good job of being challenging in places without also being frustrating. It’s not too difficult, and the earliest parts are especially too easy to require much thinking, but it’s fun just playing with the portal gun.

I played some Codename Gordon, which was also a free game on Steam, but it’s much less fun. It’s a sort of run ‘n’ gun platform thing which seems like it might be implemented in Flash. Not terrible, but I doubt I’ll finish it or even play it again.

I beat the demo-thing Peggle Extreme which is available on Steam. It’s a fairly fun little casual game.