Steam, vampires, etc.

Dear Steam,

Well how are you doing this fine evening, then. Good! I’m glad you’re currently working for all of the 3,030,033 people logged in. Somehow that number seems serendipitous, wouldn’t you say? No? Although I’m a bit sorry to bother you with such trivial matters, seeing as how the act of starting yourself up on my computer is akin to getting a 90-year-old Amish man wearing wooden clogs to shuffle in a 30 cm diametric circle in order to attempt to generate enough static electricity to power Beijing for 30 seconds, that is, a horribly misguided attempt to make something work that should never work.

‘Never work’ is perhaps too harsh, as when you do work you are the most charming and agreeable of bedfellows, even though you may occasionally spaz out and hit your head on the low lying doorframe of my mainframe.

Please consider being more consistent in future. Please either always crash or always work, so that I can dump you heartlessly or love you forever. Although the act of considering consistency may make you start hemmorhaging code, so perhaps start with the first part of the word, ‘con’, which is somehow a very descriptive word already. Also thanks for keeping everything in the cloud. That way, when you start screaming obscenities at some random time during our time together and you black out and I find you lying strewn drunken and naked across my desktop with your logic bleeding from your ear, I can waste all my time re-downloading 650GB of game files.

And .. what’s that? Hmm.. you mean..?

*deletes ClientRegistry.blob*

Oh. Brilliant! Ok. Well forgive everything I said. What’s that? I didn’t say anything? …Well of course not. I love you, you’re the best and most attractive game content management system around. (*BACKS UP STEAMAPPS FOLDER, EVERY DAY, FOREVER*)

None of the above is always true! I love Steam most of the time. Anyway. I’ve been playing Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines for the first time and loving it. For some reason I’ve been meaning to play this since… well… 2004… and only got around to it today. It’s really sad that a development company like Troika who had such incredible vision but such poor time-management skills (well, according to Activision’s standards, I suppose) went out of business. This is the first game of theirs that I’ve played, and I fully intent to try out their other interesting looking titles (Arcanum for one). But Vampire is really well done. As a first/third person RPG from 2004, it really shines and belongs to the same pedigree as Deus Ex, with a similar focus on medium-sized, highly detailed play areas, not full open worlds, but relying on much more detail and interesting hand-crafted content. It’s a real shame more people haven’t played this, it really is one of the best games I’ve played in the last 10 years, and there’s a fantastic atmosphere and believability to the characters you’ll meet, and it grabbed me much more than the more recent RPGs-with-relationships such as Mass Effect and friends. Quests are not usually of the fetch type, and the black/white ‘moral conundrums’ that plague today’s RPGs are nowhere, rather gritty, shades-of-grey type choices that need to be made. Twilight is nowhere to be seen.. it’s gritty and hard-boiled, kind of Sin City meets Anne Rice. Maybe. Also the characterization is fantastic. You can play the game through as a Tremere… a bad-ass vampire mage who can make the blood of fools boil from afar… or have a completely different experience as a mentally moggy Malkavian, where your dialog options look like William S. Burroughs cut-up sentences (ie. completely nonsensical and crazy), making conversations and their outcomes a game of Russian Roulette.

Plus the voice acting and soundtrack are fantastic, and the facial animations hold up well from 2004, despite using a hobbled Source engine. Just make sure you patch the thing!

Anyway I haven’t finished it yet, just initial impressions. I might give a fuller rundown later.