Bundlage

The World Cup, er, The Beautiful Game Bundle

You like soccer, right? Or is it football out where you are? Whichever, you’re probably into that … sports-thing. At least if you’re outside the US. And if you are … or if you’re just curious about the whole thing, do I have a bundle for you.

One of the consistent winners in the bundle sweep I do every week has become Bundle Stars, a relative late-comer to the field, who nevertheless keep something on the order of 8 to 10 game bundles going at any given time, all running at least a couple of weeks. They were absolutely on top of this year’s FIFA World Cup series with a whole pile of soccer games ready to roll out, including one that I’ve been looking forward to tinkering with for quite a while: Lords of Football.

Why would I be interested in LoF? Imagine the Sims mingled with a sports manager simulation, wrapped up in some fairly attractive graphics, and then finally embedded in a game I know nothing about. That’s worth a little interest.

The bundle also includes two fairly well considered straight-up soccer games and some other stuff. But for $3.25, both you and I can afford to learn a little bit about what the rest the world seems to consider a fascinating pastime.

For my part, I don’t think it’s violent enough. But since I get to deal with my players’ sex addiction in LoF, I’m not too bothered.

The Two-Hour Beautiful Game

Of course, if your interests in guys running around in tight shorts, kicking a leather sack around runs to more of a tabletop opportunity — I actually have your hookup. While it’s not the rough equivalent of Blood Bowl or Dungeon Bowl in good old American football, I do have a tactical boardgame/wargame version of soccer for some of those people who want to start their own leagues with little miniatures of dudes that kick balls.

Two-Hour Wargames, whom I’m often on about, produce a tabletop soccer game called The Beautiful Game, and you can pick that up for $5 in PDF only from their site.

Me, I’m waiting for them to finish up Competitive Violence League which is, as you might have already guessed, their take on American football. But in the meantime this might be fun to tinker with.

Steam Summer Sale

No, seriously, just go to the Steam Summer Sale and spend a lot of money. Like every summer.

Every. Summer. This is why you can’t have nice things.

These guys don’t just change the rotation every day, they change the rotation every eight hours and part of that rotation is chosen by the community at large. Most of the sales involved are somewhere in the order of 60 to 80%, and I’ve seen cuts go deeper. Keep an eye on the Flash sales and you could find it even more ridiculous cuts.

I’m not even going to bother to write about anything but the handful of things that we are interested in that are on sale until the end of the whole thing. Otherwise, will just be here flailing around poking at games we can’t keep up with.

Space Engineers is 10% off ($18) until the end of the Steam Sale on the 30th.

And Blockstorm, the Unofficial FPS of Operation BSU(tm) is $10.

For some reason, Eric and I have been playing this game in random stretches on and off for a couple of weeks now. There’s just something really nice about the gunplay that makes getting a successful kill feel like you’re responsible, and being killed feel like you could’ve done something about it to prevent it. Ultimately, that’s the mark of a good FPS — the emphasis on player agency and the reinforcement of the fact that the game does hinge on the player’s decisions and not on random luck. That is a great, great thing.

You can build your own in-game avatar from voxels, and that’s a hell of a thing. I suggest picking something that actually blends into the environment on the map you’re on. Crazy thought!

And The Dead Linger is rocking 35% off at $13 until the end of the sale, too. I wrote a much longer bit on TDL on the Operation BSU Community. You should read it.

Finally, as an excellent example of the really short term sales that you get during The Steam Summer Sale, I will point out that Planetary Annihilation is on sale right now (again, as of this writing early Sunday afternoon) for 66% off, putting it at $16.99 — for the next forty-seven hours. So if you listen to this show and your fascinated by the talking about Planetary Annihilation that we've done over the last six months, this would be an excellent time to go pick up a copy of PA and then tell us about it so that maybe we've run into some people to play with.

The last couple of builds have been really huge for them, with entirely new game modes being inserted, serious rebalancing on a lot of the units occurring on every cycle, and the process of just turning into a nice, solid game.

You have forty-seven hours. See to it.

Tabletoppin’

Chain Reaction — Final Version 3.1

For the folks who have been following the strange post-apocalyptic tabletop narrative/wargame/RPG 700 Horsepower, you may have noticed that we’ve been using one of the Two-Hour Wargames core systems, After the Horsemen, as the basis of a lot of our character-specific gameplay. In fact, last night, the session involved walking around in the wasteland and running into people who had no interest in shooting us in the face before ultimately finding what we left town defined in the first place. Not a single shot was fired — which comes as much as a surprise to me as to you. If you’ve been following our live streams of those games on Saturday nights, or if you’ve been catching the recording later in the week, you might be interested in whether or not the systems would work with your group or with your particular play style.

You’re in luck. THW has released an updated version of their Chain Reaction mechanics for public access at the world’s greatest price: free. $0.00. The best price ever. All you have to do is go over to the site, click on it, download it, go through it. The FV 3.1 mechanics, out-of-the-box, like all THW products, support solo, same side, and head-to-head play — in this case, primarily focusing on modern tactical gameplay. That means, shooting at people. If you’ve been looking at the possibility of following in the footsteps of Payday 2, or Battlefield: Hardline, you could totally do a cops versus robbers-with-heavy-weaponry right on your own table for free.

Let me reiterate, for free.

Never say I didn't give you anything.

If you’re interested in my ongoing, more real-time updates on the day’s events, news and gaming, what you want is Operation BSU, where all the news fit to print never sees print.

On Saturday nights, you can catch the 700 Horsepower players making the post-apocalyptic wasteland just that much more insane. This week, we went into the woods and we met some friends. Also, we found a giant beehive. Also, no one died. If that’s not grounds for shock, surprise, and tuning in every week to see what happens — I don’t know what is. Next Saturday, we take a break from the tactical awesome and switch gears to grammar and punctuation… Which might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but for the rest of you we’ll be playing Happy Birthday, Robot! It’s a lovely, gentle game about writing stories together, intended for children. In our hands — well, I refuse to be held accountable for any sex, violence, or straight up social deviancy that occurs. Except for the parts that I do, those I can be held accountable for.