Steam Summer Sale and Streaming games

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Well hello there!

First up, it's the start of the Steam Summer Getaway Sale! The first sale I saw on Steam was last Christmas and saw me buy around four games and that was only because I caught it halfway through! Still more than I've ever bought it one go! You can find more information on the sale here! Though it's currently experiencing some heavy load right now so tends to time-out!

Today's deals are as follows and are available for the next 20 hours:

Bioshock - Infinite -50% (€24.99)

Defiance -66% (€10.19)

Hotline Miami -75% (€2.12)

Call of Juarez - Gunslinger -33% (€10.04)

Don't Starve -40% (€8.39)

Left4Dead 2 -75% (€4.99)

Endless Space - Emperor Edition -60% (€10.19)

Scribblenauts - Unlimited -75% (€4.74)

Antichamber -66% (€6.45)

Toki Tori 2+ -34% (€9.23)

That's enough of that for now! I might carry on posting up the days deals, if you're interested that is! I have also heard that Green Man Gaming also has Bioshock Infinite up for half price.. but you can also use their -20% off digital games code for it too!  (GMG20-F202F-UI40F if you're interested!)

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So, as you know I started streaming my random playing of video games. It's quite enjoyable! Well, it means I get to play games more often than I was. I'm mostly playing Starcraft 2, DotA 2 and Diablo 3. Though I have streamed X-COM: Enemy Unknown and my first ever attempt at playing the first Bioshock!

Setting up the stream was quite easy, once I kinda knew what all the things meant.. though it looked intimidating to me when I first glanced at it. With a bit of digging and trial and error I found that the program I wanted to use was the one I mentioned in my earlier post, Open Broadcaster Software... after I had already purchased a personal license for X-Split. Major d'oh moment.

I had set up an account on twitch.tv years ago when I tried to stream with my old PC.. and failed terribly, due to it's horrid specs and my absolutely lame internet connection. I think I already gave the link to the post on Team Liquid that gives a pretty darn good explanation on how to set up the broadcaster software and link it to your Twitch account. If not, let me know and I'll dig it out for ya'll!

Or maybe I will do a detailed post on setting up each of the accounts, who knows! If people want it then I'll do it!

Something that I found really cool, is that Twitch allows you to link your YouTube account to it, to allow you to upload footage directly from Twitch to YouTube.. and it's pretty fast! Though, I think there is something up with the YouTubes at the moment and it's not been letting me upload stuff since last night! :'(

I've not really been streaming one game in particular, I guess that's the character hopper in me taking over.. you know, when you make a character on a game, in my case it was World of Warcraft and being unable to stick with it for any length of time.. I've been hopping between SC2, DotA 2 and D3 regularly and not really sticking to one.. which I think I need to do in order to get really good and build a base of viewers or something?

Oh, I also managed to build up the courage to beat off my ladder anxiety and complete the placement matches on the US servers and placed .. silver. Not too bad.. though my intention was to lose the placement matches and then work my way up from the bottom.. but that message got lost somewhere between my brain and my hands.. and I won a couple of the games. Anyway! Here is one of my ladder games for your viewing pleasure!

Recently my Starcraft streaming efforts have been going towards completing the campaign achievements, it's been really fun so far but I can tell it's going to get annoying!

Anyway, that's me done for now!

Ciao for now buddies!

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Starcraft 2: IEM and slow internet

This will be a short one! My PC arrived yesterday! Oh my days! The tower is huge! Much bigger than my old one, that right there tells you that it's better.. cause bigger is better right?! While I'm writing this, it's downloading stuff on my nice and slow interwebs.. joy, it just did 10,001 windows updates. Ok, that may be an overestimation but still.. it was a lot! I love getting a new computer, but then I also hate it very much.

I've downloaded steam and D3.. oh! With the graphics cards I got, they gave me a key to Tomb Raider, so that is also downloaded - going to give that a bit of a play later. They also told me I'd get keys to Bioshock: Infinite and Crysis 3 but they have yet to arrive. I'm excited to see what Crysis looks like! Currently downloading SC2.. C'mon! It takes so long! Now, I know I complain a lot about my internet.. so.. take a look at this! Note: This is without any downloads running.

Apart from that, I watched some of the first day of the Intel Extreme Master's Starcraft 2 tournament. Instead of deciding to use the Wings of Liberty, they decided to go ahead and use Heart of the Swarm(which is released in 7 days!!!). At first, I was quite sad as from the games that I saw played - two Protoss Vs Zerg, the Zerg buddy lost :(

However, there was one hero waiting in the wings of liberty to take up the mantle of ultimate Zerg buddy... LiquidRet. He is part of Team Liquid and has been for a long time! The guy has put a lot of effort into playing HotS and it showed. I won't spoil any results for anyone, but safe to say it was really enjoyable to watch! If you are interested, you should check out the VOD's from today's games!

Time for me to try out some of them games!

Ciao for now!

p.s. I was about to post this and then saw this new blog post by Travis Day about Diablo 3's itemization - very cool read and some promising thoughts in there. Find it here.

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Starcraft 2: HotS and stuff

I figured it was about time I did a bit of a natter about Starcraft.. and I guess it's the perfect time to do it, with Heart of the Swarm being released in 9 days and the beta was closed on the first of March(I think), which was two days ago! Since I've been spending a bit more time checking out twitter, I have seen a lot of pro-gamers tweeting that they don't quite know what to do to fill their time now that they can't play HotS.. I don't have that issue, mainly because I haven't played it for quite a while!

Apart from that though, for those who have been living on another planet, the new HotS trailer was released the other night and here it is!

I am mainly looking forwards to the campaign being playable and to see what has changed in the overall SC2 experience. Heck, I guess part of my time till HotS is released will be spent checking out the features that were implemented into WoL, that I never actually knew about! I'm sooo out of the loop!

The changes I'm talking about are patch 2.0.4, the full patch notes can be found here. The main ones that piqued my interest were the following:

Anyone can now create or join a Clan and participate in private clan chat, post news on Clan affairs, and more. Clan tags are pre-pended to character names of all players who join a Clan.

The very idea of clans is pretty cool and the fact that clan tags automatically pre-pend onto your name just rings out as awesome to me.

Players will soon have the freedom to select any game region to connect to and play.

Global play, wayhay, now I get to test my mettle against those pesky non-foreigners.. who will no doubt destroy me at any and every turn!

The overall AI play experienced has been greatly enhanced.In a custom game, players can now elect for an AI player to follow a specific build order, such as Full Rush, Timing Attack, Straight to Air, and more.AI players will now report key information back to their player allies, such as when they are scouting, attacking, expanding, and retreating.Additional AI improvements, including the ability to issue specific commands to AI partners, will be coming in Heart of the Swarm.

Any updates to the AI is pretty sweet, it got pretty tiresome playing against the AI when all it did were the same tactics and all that happened when you ramped up the difficulty was that it ramped up the speed at which it did the same tactics, really.

In other news, my pc still hasn't arrived yet :(:(:( though it should be delivered sometime tomorrow! Hopefully just before I get home from work.. though it will probably be delivered right before I have to go to work... then I will have to go to work and actively have to not think about my new pc and what I could be doing with it.

I've been playing a bit more Diablo 3 in the past week, I started doing something new.. leveling hardcore characters.. after doing a bit of research I found out that the best way to do this is to level 3-5 at the same time.. so I'm leveling a Witch Doctor, a Barbarian and a Demon Hunter on hardcore.. oh, did I forget to mention that I will be limiting myself by not using the auction house for the duration of leveling.... ohhh and did I also forget to mention that I will be attempting to do this while set to Monster Power 10.

Daunting task! At the moment, it's going pretty easily.. though they are only between levels 7 and 12.. the plan so far is that I will level one of them up 5 levels, then swap to the next and so on. I am allowing myself to trade between the characters however.. which is why I picked the three classes I did, as the Barbarian's main attribute is Strength, the Demon Hunter's is Dexterity and the Witch Doctor's is Intelligence.. so any drops I get, I will be able to use on at least one of my characters!

I'm looking forwards to it, exciting times!

Though, with my new pc I am getting free copies of the new Tomb Raider, Bio-shock: Infinite and Crysis 3.. so I'm not sure whether or not I will be playing those, or trying out some new things on the beast! I can't quite do what I really want to do just yet as my internet connection is still a big pile of tripe.

That's all from me!

Ciao for now!

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I'm baaack

Okay so I know I've had quite some time off from writing here!

There has been a lot going on, obviously! I've been trying to concentrate on work and of course my little free time has been put into playing a few games.

But what have I been playing? Well, that is the question! I finally set up a Steam account - most people I know found it crazy that I didn't have one! I guess I was dubious about the whole thing.. then forgot about it for a long while! I never needed it when I was at Blizzard as I was more than happy logging into WoW for a few hours and massing many hours playing and watching Starcraft 2 and then Diablo 3.

So, my first impressions of Steam is pretty good! The whole reason I set up one, was because I got given a beta invitation for Dota 2. Which is a pretty darn fun game, when you get the hang of it! It's a MOBA - which means Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. I'll go into a bit more details about that at another time!

After I had played a few too many hours of Dota 2, the Christmas sale started on Steam.. oh boy, such an incredible amount of savings were to be had! Why hadn't I started up Steam before??

I managed to pick up a couple of games - X-Com: Enemy Unknown, Civilisation V: Gods and Kings expansion, Age of Empires 3, Bioshock 1&2..

I plan to write some sort of reviews for all of them as I play through them but since I bought them I haven't had too much time to sit down and get nitty gritty with all of them! Most of my game-time was spent playing X-Com and Civ 5... purely because I remember playing the first X-Com games and the first Civ games oh so many moons ago!

Then I picked up another game, Ace of Spades - which I didn't think I would be too keen on, since I hadn't played Minecraft.. and this is very much like Minecraft but with guns! You can check out the launch trailer here.

That's me for now I think, promise I will be back soon!

Ciao for now!

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