I just finished with Friction Games‘ Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It’s a great game, one that gave me quite a few frights. I’m proud to say I’m one who pre-ordered the game (which caused the developers to create a commentary track to listen to as you played it, something I have not yet done but intend to do). I mention the pre-order fact because it took me months to finish the game! I played anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour at a time, yet it seemed like to took me forever.
That’s not to say that Amnesia overstays its welcome. I kept thinking, “I must be close to the end now!” only to find that more of the story unfolded. So I don’t know where everyone is getting the idea that the first play-through averages 6 to 8 hours. My next playthrough, one I intend to modify to allow unlimited health and sanity, will be for the purpose of listening to the developer commentary, much like a commentary track found on a digital video.
This game is good. The visuals (insanity? yes, please), the audio (insanity? yes, please)… the insanity. If you’re a fan of survival horror, or horror fiction the likes of which H.P. Lovecraft would have been proud to write, then you owe it to yourself to purchase Amnesia. You’ll scream. You’ll swear. You’ll laugh nervously.
Now that this survival horror is complete, I’m moving on to Alan Wake.
So it has been one month since I committed to not purchase any video games in 2011. So far, the toughest moments were when I had to pass on Game Dev Story on Android, and this weekend’s Steam deal on The Rainslick Precipice of Darkness episodes 1 & 2 pack for $2.99. I’ve been able to stop and reflect on just what appeals to me most when I want to make a purchase, and I think it’s the price-point. I have the first episode of Rainslick already. I haven’t even played it yet. How do I know I’ll even want to play episode 2? But $2.99? Not that seems like a good deal. And I want to jump all over that.
But it’s a good feeling knowing that I’m passing it by. Other good feelings? Not obsessively checking Steam on Tuesday or Wednesday to see if the midweek madness has been posted yet. Or Steam’s weekend deal.
On a similar note, a couple weeks ago I completed Just Cause 2 (on the PC) and I have yet to fill that gap with another game in my huge list of unplayed games. I have options, but I find since I’m putting less focus on acquiring new ‘stuff’ I’m putting that focus toward learning and doing other things. Plus, I’ve got that free mmo, LOTRO, to play 
I have a goal for 2011 that should benefit a few areas of my life. Simply, I will not purchase a single video game or downloadable content (DLC) for a video game in 2011. This means pay-what-you-want sales/bundles are off limits, as is pirating said bundles (or any games for that matter). This isn’t a decision I’ve made on a whim, either. I’ve had a few months to let this sink in [facebook] and to work out the details. Note: I’d have linked to twitter rather than identica except Ping.fm was misbehaving the day I initially announced my idea.
On to the details, the only allowable ‘new’ games that I can add to my collection are:
- Gifts — but I am not allowed to prompt the purchase with, “Hey, I’m not purchasing any games in 2011 but if you buy me X then I’ll buy you Y in 2012,” because that is cheating.
- Board and card games — they are not video games.
- Game demos, trials, and ‘free’ games — XBoxLive Indie Game trials, Steam demos (and mods and free games), etc, so long as they are freely available for download by the developer/publisher.
- Code giveaways — kinda sorta the same thing as ‘free’ games
- Borrowed games
If the game doesn’t fit the criteria above, I can’t add it to my collection.
Why? Well, this is where the benefits come in. See, I went kind of crazy with game purchases starting at the end of 2009. My Steam collection ballooned to a crazy size over the course of the last year. I don’t think I could possibly complete all the un-played games in my Steam games list if I try all next year, and an un-played game is an unappreciated game.
Why else? I’ve got a note taped to my monitor that says, “Why are you sitting here? Spend some time with your wife.” I put it there, and it’s pretty self explanatory.
I expect to enrich my personal life by putting less emphasis on video games and more time with family and friends (non-gamers). I expect my wallet to thank me. I expect my productivity to increase as I will cease to compulsively check Steam Game Sales and Cheap Ass Gamer throughout the day. I expect to spend more time reading through my neglected bookshelf. I’ll never make it as a game designer & developer if I spend more time playing games than making them.
Wish me luck in 2011. I have no doubt this is going to be a hard habit to break. I’ll post throughout the year under the tag #stateofthepenny here on the blog and twitter.
Quite a while ago I purchased Uplink (and Defcon) for Linux through the Introversion website. Uplink worked at the time (Ubuntu 8.10) but somewhere along the way Canonical removed the libgtk1.2 libraries from the Ubuntu repositories. This presents a problem when installing the game in later versions of Ubuntu.
sh uplink-complete-1.54DOWNLOAD.sh
complains
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Uplink complete 1.54DOWNLOAD............................................................................................
.setup9739: error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-1.2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I found the solution at the Introversion forums, written by forum member pl3w5y.
Download the following deb files. I prefer to use the command line.
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gtk+1.2/libgtk1.2_1.2.10-18.1build2_i386.deb
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/glib1.2/libglib1.2ldbl_1.2.10-19build1_i386.deb
wget http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gtk+1.2/libgtk1.2-common_1.2.10-18.1build2_all.deb
You can swap out the ‘ca’ part of the url with ‘us’ or whatever your Ubuntu repository country code might be.
Now, inside the directory you downloaded them to, run
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
And that’s it. Now re-run the Uplink installer and the game should install fine.
