Time for Steam to clean up Early Access

Since there are so many titles up for sale during the Steam Summer Sale, it’s hard not to be exposed to a slew of new titles. However, it also exposes some serious flaws with Early Access. There are a lot of titles still in Early Access that haven’t been updated in a couple of years with hundreds (or more) negative reviews saying the game has been abandoned and not to waste your money. And it’s not just one or two titles, I’ve seen dozens. I think Kickstarter and Steam Early Access are a fantastic platform to let Indie developers get their games into player hands without having to go through the corporate BS that kills off so many titles. Think of how many studios Microsoft and Electronic Arts have scuttled and you’ll get my point. However, it’s becoming clear that Early Access is a dumping ground for get rich quick schemes and half-baked games where developers are hoping they’ll get […]

A closer look at DimmDrive on Steam

With the Steam Summer Sale going on, I thought it was a good opportunity to bring up DimmDrive, the Steam RamDrive creation tool. I’ve had DimmDrive installed for a few months and have been using it on Shroud of the Avatar which is currently in development. The machine I’m using it on has 32GB of ram with a 24GB ram drive and the entire contents of SotA loaded into memory. That should be an indication that you need a lot of ram and a higher end machine. I’ve seen a lot of reviews from people with mid-range machines and 8GB of ram and that’s just not going to work for you. Putting this on an “older” system or a “laptop” isn’t going to make it run like new. I will say that my experience has been quite positive. Like I said, I loaded SotA entirely into ram and scenes load quicker and I’m able to enter a new area quicker […]

A closer look at SpinTires

When SpinTires came out as a Tech Demo, I was really excited about it. I missed out on the Kickstarter (thankfully), but picked up the game right at the end of it’s Early Access cycle. It had all the potential in the world to be something really unique. However, the final version removed all the features that made the Tech Demo so much fun. All the trucks were gone, modding had been cut out and you were basically left with driving around in the dark. So the game wasn’t off to a good start and things seemed to get worse. All you had now were useless trucks that bogged down in the mud every few seconds so that you spent all your time using the winch between trees. That was exciting for an hour and then you were ready to throw things. Then the dev cycle seemed to stop. No updates, no communication and the game pretty much languished, at […]

RightNote on Sale for 50% Discount

I’ve written about RightNote before and how it’s replaced OneNote. It’s a great tool for taking down notes, but it has a whole slew of features that make it far more than simple note writing tool. It’s a full featured Editor with enough formatting features to satisfy most people. You don’t need the bulk and expense of Microsoft Word, when all you want to do is write, not format. RightNote offers a very nice hierarchy view of your documents, so you can have multiple documents open at the same time and jump straight to the one you want. If you’re working with longer or multi-part documents, this is far better than the Word approach. RightNote also has Spreadsheet functionality built in. You can make a standard spreadsheet and put in basic calculations. It might not be sophisticated enough for the boardroom, but considering most of us make simple budgets or ledgers, it’s handle the job without issue. RightNote supports multiple […]

Steam Summer Sale in Full Swing

The Steam Summer Sale is in full swing, so much so that the servers were actually choking from time to time as people descended on new deals. And there are thousands of deals to be had. Almost everything in my Wishlist is on sale, although I don’t think 10-15% is really enough of a discount for this sort of sale. Come on now, if you want me to be interested you need to at least give me 40%. That being said, I snagged some great deals! Lots of new games to mess around with and several indie titles that show promise. If you’re not sure where to start, here are some games I highly recommend with steep discounts. Banished Besiege Age of Empires Rise of Nations Tropico 5 Lego Worlds Windward Project Cars The Crew Hand of Fate Desktop Dungeons Forsaken Isle And by the way, what in the hell is going on with all these enormously breasted Japanese anime […]