Christmas Again.

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I’m on my Christmas holiday for the next couple of weeks, so this blog may be quieter than usual until the new year. “Usual” already being pretty quiet compared to 2012, of course; it turns out being in full-time employment sucks away all of your time and energy and leaves you a withered, lifeless husk of a human being whose atrophied claws are hardly capable of accurate touch-typing. I’ve been toying with the idea of maybe starting fortnightly science posts again next year since I feel like I’m losing my edge a bit when it comes to the physics, but it’s probable this will go the way of all resolutions. In the meantime I’d like to thank my regular readers — in defiance of all logic and sanity, I do have a few — for their comments and conversations over the last year; your feedback is greatly valued and one of the reasons why I still scrape up the time to sit down for a couple of hours each week to bang out a game review. I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas and New Year, and we shall see what the future holds for the Scientific Gamer.

2013 End Of Year Retrospective.

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Time for the Scientific Gamer Totally Made Up Awards Ceremony 2013! If this were a real awards ceremony it’d be an entirely self-serving affair where a captive games journalism machine showers pointless awards on whichever publisher had the largest marketing budget to pay for them this year, but happily I’m entirely free of corporate sponsorship (seriously, I’m disappointed in you guys) and so I can do whatever the hell I like. As a result these awards may be a little unusual and totally biased in favour of my opinion, and if you don’t like them you can go start your own blog. Or argue in the comments. Either’s good.

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Thoughts: Pinball Arcade.

MM This review was originally going to start with a look back over Pinball Arcade’s history on other formats and Farsight Studios’ long and eventful two-year battle to get it released on Steam, but even as a passive observer of that process I could write a whole book that reads like a Greek tragedy. Suffice to say that now that it has been released the reason why it had such a hard time is abundantly clear: Farsight aren’t very good at making videogames, it shows in the final product, and I imagine that until the restrictions on Greenlight games were suddenly relaxed a few months ago they were having trouble meeting Steam’s terms and conditions for integrating their table DLC into Steam itself. Everything that isn’t the actual tables looks like it’s been cobbled together on a shoestring budget, from the menus to the UI to the table browsing to the payment system for actually buying the things. In terms of attractiveness and ease of use Pinball Arcade is an abject failure.

Fortunately for Pinball Arcade, however, it turns out that what Farsight are good at is making computer simulations of pinball tables. I don’t expect virtual pinball tables to be any more than acceptable-looking, and since they’re controlled by all of three buttons (plus nudging) the ease of use thing isn’t an issue either.  And in terms of actually playing the thing, well, as far as I’m concerned Pinball Arcade blows Pinball FX 2 out of the water.

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Thoughts: Assassin’s Creed 4 – Black Flag.

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Me, at the end of last year’s Assassin’s Creed 3 review:

I’m certainly not looking forward to the next game — not unless somebody at Ubisoft has the nous to recognise that after the heyday of Ezio Assassin’s Creed 3 seems like a bloated mess scripted by a collection of twelve year-olds. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen, and so I’ll probably give next year’s  AC release a pass.

Me, slightly further up the Assassin’s Creed 3 review:

The boat sections are outstanding – and in fact I’d be more than happy to see a full game based around them a la Pirates!

Me, upon learning that they’d made the next Assassin’s Creed game all about sailing a pirate ship around the Carribbean.

Shit.

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Thoughts: Enemy Within.

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Enemy Within is the first expansion to the XCOM remake, a game which was pretty well received on here over a year ago but which in the long run turned out to suffer from some fairly deep-seated structural issues – the aliens’ completely supine geoscape presence and an inverse difficulty curve  being amongst the most prominent. A good thing, then, that it was made by Firaxis, since if there’s one thing Firaxis excel at it’s fixing critical flaws with comprehensive and well-designed expansion packs. After the success of Gods and Kings and the well-designed additions Brave New World made to Civ V (even if I didn’t particularly agree with them all that much) I had high hopes that Enemy Within would do the same for XCOM.

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Thoughts: Desktop Dungeons.

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It seems the brave new world of the Kickstarter/pre-order beta is here to stay, and with it comes many new and wondrous phenomena such as “paying for something nearly two years ago and then forgetting all about it until an email plops into your inbox telling you the game has been released on Steam.” This has happened to me at least twice in the last year alone, and now we have unexpected surprise #3: Desktop Dungeons, a game which impressed me greatly with its proof-of-concept alpha, opened the gates on pre-orders to great fanfare early in 2012, and then subsequently went almost totally silent until last Thursday when I was informed that I could finally go and get my Steam key from their website.

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Thoughts: Battlefield 4 (Single Player).

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It seems the universe has a sense of irony.

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