Last week was a very busy week for me and everything went perfectly on The Big Day. Despite the possible implications that the coinciding "Father's Day" may have on the event, I am not going to be a dad anytime soon. The date just happens to have a tremendous significance to my spouse and nothing else. I know it has only been a week but writing a new post feels a bit foreign to me now because it seems like I have been away for a long time. I did keep up with my gaming the best that I could while I was away though I did not acrue any new games during that period of time because it was impossible for me to do anything else but squeeze a bit of gameplay time here and there.
Yes honey, we've come a long way together...
The most exciting gaming development that occurred last week was Valve's surprise offerings of "free to play" massively multiplayer online games via the Steam client. Of course, one does not need to even have Steam installed to get these games in the first place because you can just download the games from their respective developers but the idea of having everything organized and managed via one application is a defiuitely an example of some clever forward-thinking. Unfortunately, the excitement waned sooner than I expected because Valve really missed the mark on this venture. The fatal flaw here is that from the four games (out of five total) that I downloaded and played, only one of them was automatically registered with my Steam account and that game is Spiral Knights. That statement may be a bit confusing so allow me to explain - when you first log in to Spiral Knights, you don't have to register nor open a separate account with the developer which means that you can jump straight into the game using your already established Steam account.
Valve is on to something big here but they really need to capitalize on this opportunity.
This is not the case for the other 3 games: Forsaken World, Champions Online, and Global Agenda where you have to create an account separately for each of those games. This just doesn't make much sense to me. Though the cash transactions are managed by Steam while playing these games via the Steam client, it is baffling that Valve was not able to secure a deal with the other developers to allow players to access the game with just one secured Steam profile. Thankfully, all of these games are throwaways really and you know how much I hate cash shops and these supposedly "ftp" players are just so dependent on them. I deleted all of them soon after I tried them out except for Champions Online because the cash shop requirement is the least invasive out of the bunch... At least for now at the early parts of the game!
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