Tag Archives: Steam

Review: Saints Row the Third (PC), and First Dates

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Playing as a blow-up doll isn't even close to the maximum height of ridiculousness Saints Row has to offer.

As weird as it was to contemplate, Saints Row: The Third reminded me that there are few things more amusing than first dates. Both parties tend to go all-out to highlight themselves as being as hip, cool, funny, sexy, or whatever as possible. To further this endeavor, they will also hide blemishes, hold in farts, wear expensive clothes disproportionately out of line with their normal lifestyle – obviously people will lie to impress others. Videogames (especially with demos) are generally designed with the same principle in mind: convince the player that there is a wonderful experience here worth their time, money, and emotional investment, even if that means misrepresenting the truth to some degree. This practice of selling a not-so-accurate package is tolerated, especially since most videogames (like dating relationships) aren’t really that serious, but the hiding of the truth can lead to complications and disappointment as time goes on.

For my tastes, a videogame without a compelling narrative has much ground to make up; one with a plot that expects to be taken seriously despite treating its story as anything but (see Portal 2) is a borderline affront to everything I hold dear. There’s seemingly little substance and even less dignity in a videogame like Saints Row: The Third that glorifies gangsta culture and has players driving prostitutes around with clients in the backseat of the car, or rescuing strippers from shipping containers on a rival gang’s barge. By all rights Saints Row: The Third is to videogames as some airhead model with more invested in silicon or steroids than education is to people, but Saints Row isn’t even trying to pretend to possess a high school diploma.

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Review: Monday Night Combat (PC)

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Monday Night Combat (MNC), by Uber Entertainment, is the smartest competitive multiplayer game to come out in recent years, and I love it. In a nutshell, it’s a class-based, third-person shooter combined with elements of tower defense, with the ultimate goal being to destroy the other team’s moneyball, which can only be made vulnerable initially by AI bots. Leveling up increases skill potency and passive class stats like health, and is managed with currency earned by destroying AI bots, taking out other players, or picking it up as drops. Heck, even doing fully animated and non-offensive taunts instead of the time-old and immature tradition of teabagging your foes pays off. Each class has a purpose and utility, and each skill has valid uses and situations in the game that they were designed for. If you don’t want to invest in your skills for the match, you can bolster base defenses by purchasing and upgrading turrets, buy a wave of class-specific bots to assault the opposing base, or spend your money activating environmental hazards to harm enemy players or destroy bots on the map. There is always something productive to do other than out-twitching or out-headshotting the folks on the other team.

In any other game, the team that had all positive kill/death ratios would have won. Instead, we lost.


One team can be dominating in terms of kills, but they’re oftentimes doing so at the cost of maintaining map control and escorting their own bots to the enemy base and opening it up to be attacked; it’s not uncommon for a team doing this to ultimately lose despite employing a strategy that would bring them victory in almost any other competitive game. An assassin can be obsessed with chasing backstabs, and they might be really good at it (which is unlikely), but they’d be much more effective sneaking around and creating openings for their team to exploit, or wiping all the enemy bots off the map with the environmental Annihilator attack. Conversely, a support player can deploy their turret near the Annihilator to keep enemies away, while periodically dropping air strike attacks on the activation switch to deny it to the other team until a teammate with the spare cash can activate it.
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Review: Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers (PC)

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Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers, by Stainless Games, was recently released on Steam and has been available on Xbox Live since 2009. This review is of the Steam version, not that I noticed much of a difference between two versions, and I played on the default difficulty. Completing the single-player campaign and challenge puzzles took approximately 8 hours of playtime.

Duels of the Planeswalkers is an incredibly simplified and boiled-down take on the classic Magic: The Gathering collectible card game. To put it simply, Magic: The Gathering is a competitive game pitting two or more players against each other. Each player has 20 health points and when that number is reduced to 0 for one player the game ends. Players can inflict damage by summoning creatures that can attack other players or by playing offensive spells. Of course, there are cards that also restrict player options, heal, or genuinely complicate the otherwise straightforward gameplay. Everything is purchased with mana, which is typically generated by land cards, and this makes Magic: The Gathering a game of strategy, skill and luck.

Games of Magic: The Gathering can escalate quite quickly.

If one is looking for access to thousands of cards and infinite deck building options, Duels will disappoint without question. What Duels does provide is a quick, barebones Magic: The Gathering experience. The complex rule-set is still there, to the point that many people on the Steam forums were, for example, confusing aspects of the “blocking” mechanic for bugs. For instance, if a plain, attacking creature is blocked by another creature, the attacker will do no damage to the intended target even if the blocking creature is removed from play by other means before the attack is carried out, like a spell or ability. If this sounds confusing, that’s because in truth it is. However, Duels through the tutorials, single-player campaign, and the challenge puzzles does a decent job of teaching the ins and outs of Magic: The Gathering.

Video of one of the challenges in Duels.

Which is probably why Duels exists; it’s a gateway drug for the card game, which is the real moneymaker for Wizards of the Coasts. In my experience playing the card game back in high school though, the guy who spent thousands of dollars on cards won. While this could just be a case of somebody who is really good at these kinds of games being inclined to spend a considerable amount of disposable income on them, it’s ultimately a non-issue in Duels. By limiting deck construction to a few choice inclusions and exclusions, balance between decks is relatively simple to fix should something need to be addressed. Additionally, it’s impossible for somebody online to create a deck that will completely nullify yours and ruin the fun in the strategy and skill aspects of the game.

This demonstrates Duels's very limited deck customization.

Unfortunately, new cards for the pre-constructed decks must be unlocked one at a time by defeating the AI in the single-player campaign in Duels. This is incredibly tedious and rewards players who have either the time to grind out wins, or are less than scrupulous gamers who have been saving games right before victory and abusing this to get new card unlocks quickly. A much better option would have been to feed players new cards as they progress in the single-player game, but then unlock everything after completing the campaign. Unless this is patched, playing online against other players doesn’t seem like it will be plausible to me, and it makes it difficult for me to try and suggest that my friends purchase it, especially when I am 20 or so cards ahead of them with an advantage that just should not exist in Duels.

A close-up of a spell card in Duels.

I briefly touched upon land cards earlier, which are the necessary resources to cast spells. A major flaw of Duels is that it is impossible to manually select which land cards are used and when. If playing a mono-color deck (with one color of mana and spells, like red mountains and red spells) this is a non-issue. Where this comes into play is in the few decks that have more than one color, like an elf deck with black swamps and green forests. You might want to spend all of your black swamp mana and save your green forest mana for a spell later, but one card might arbitrarily and unnecessarily use a green mana when casting, which ruins your strategy. Hopefully this will be addressed in a patch.

As things stand though, Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers is fun to load up and play against the computer when I have 15 minutes of free time. For a $10 game, Duels is probably the most economic way to play Magic: The Gathering with the most options. Two copies of the game provides access to eight or so decks (times two), and while I’ve been out of the card game for awhile, starter and pre-constructed decks were ~$10 a pop, so the value of Duels is undeniable in terms of content provided. I can think of much worse ways to spend money if Magic: The Gathering, the card game, ever looked even remotely interesting to you.