The Midagedgamer Report for July 19, 2013
This Week:
It's 200!, Comic Con, BF4 news, Steam's still pretty much Windows
and more!
"It was a dark and stormy night.."
I'd like to think I was at least a competent writer but you
never know until someone sees your work.
While I could probably add a paragraph to that "stormy night"
I probably wouldn't get much past that.
In fact it's likely I wouldn't have gotten past the second blog post.
They say the best writing comes from focusing on topics that
you care about. I hope I'm living up to
that old adage. I enjoy gaming and
writing and as time has passed it's become a symbiotic relationship.
Which is pretty much the reason I keep doing this. I have 3 blogs I maintain including this one
(digitaldynamic & info tech as i see it are the other 2) but this is the one most regularly
updated. The other two are less focused
but give me an outlet to write about something other than gaming.
Anyway...
So we've finally made it to 200. 200 posts on gaming topics that have run the
gamut from what it's like to be a mature gamer to the latest gaming news from around
the web. My first article was published
on January 19th, 2011 on Wordpress. It
was called "observations from a 40 something video gamer" and was my entry into the world of
gaming news and views.
I got great feedback on Wordpress but if you host on their
site the opportunity to make a few bucks was limited and I couldn't afford my
own hosting. I moved over to Blogspot,
signed up with Adsense and today I'm literally making 10's of cents per day!
I still update the Wordpress version of the site mostly
because there's more reader involvement and I appreciate the feedback. That I have more than 30 followers over there
amazes me. So long as someone's willing
to read this stuff, I'm willing to keep pumping it out. Thanks to all of you who care enough to
browse my ramblings every week.
Enough of that, on to the news!
So the San Diego Comic Con is going on till Sunday and while
it's no E3 the lines definitely blur between gaming and fantasy. Considering most of the most popular movies
and television shows in the past decade have been based on comics it's no surprise
that the event's become a barometer of pop culture. Games fit perfectly into the medium and any
game publisher or console maker would be remiss to ignore the event. Microsoft and Sony have gotten the message
and showed up with their next generation consoles showing off games like "Dead Rising 3" for the Xbox 1 and "Octodad:
Dadliest Catch" for the PS4 not to mention Batman: Arkham Origins for PC
and current gen consoles.
If you're into Cosplay and gaming you may want to think
about attending next time around.
"The world is on
the brink of chaos, China is the tinderbox and you and your squad are the
inadvertent spark that could ignite a global conflict"
That's the start of the latest blog post revealing the
storyline behind the upcoming Battlefield 4's Campaign. Here's the major plot point...
"Upon getting
back to the USS Valkyrie, a Wasp class carrier, the intelligence you’ve
retrieved confirms previous suspicions. The Chinese Admiral Chang is planning a
coup in China, and if this happens, the Russians would back him up."
So this time around it's not only the Russians but the
Chinese which I suggested a few months back.
The problem with the Battlefield series is that their running out of countries
to pick on. Let me make another
prediction. Battlefield 5 will probably
involve the Russians teaming up with France to liberate all our shoestring
potatoes. You will fight as Colonel R.
McDonald outfitted with his burning grease gun and modified rocket launcher
nicknamed, "Big Mac." You'll
be working for the super secret intelligence organization known only as, The golden arch.
At least we know it'll look good on your 60" 4K TV and
with product placements, probably come with coupons and few monopoly play pieces.
Check out the blog post here..
Finally,
News a bit light this week again so to entertain myself I
decided to try out Steam on something other than
Windows. We all know that Steam is available for Mac
and Linux. What you may not know is that
it's only available for "some" of those platforms. 
I've got an older laptop running PC Linux OS that I tried to
load the client on and I had success. At
least until I tried to actually log in.
Apparently the Steam client for Linux likes newer versions of Ubuntu
while the rest of the distros are left to their own devices. After messing around with it for a day I gave
up. I was never going to play a game on
the laptop anyway so it wasn't worth spending much more time with it.
After that I decided to try a less "open"
operating system that Steam would supposedly work with.
I've got an older G4 Mac Quicksilver that will never go past
OSX 10.4.11 (Tiger.) Considering this
rig is running an ATI Radeon 8500 I didn't expect to do much gaming but nonetheless
I was curious to see what the client experience would be like. This poor old Mac has never done any real
gaming outside of Railroad Tycoon and
even that was an exercise in patience.
In short, I didn't plan on doing anything more exciting than Bejeweled
on a web page.
Still, it would've been nice to at least vote in the Steam
Summer Sale or browse my friend's activities.
I say "would've" been nice because upon downloading the client
I was informed that it was incompatible.
Apparently Steam only runs on Intel based Macs (mine's a dual 1GHz
PowerPC).
So it's not enough to be on a Linux or Mac PC, you have to
be on the "right" PC. I have
to wonder how deep Valve's commitment really is to platforms other than
Windows. Considering that the bulk of gaming titles for these platforms aren't
exactly "cutting edge" why should the client need anything more than
the wares Steam is offering?
The lesson here: Platform independence apparently has a
prerequisite.
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