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Instead of wasting your money on Steam/Black Friday sales, get a free game here!

November 15

(Quick shortcut for those not interested in reading the long blog entry: Free Steam games from Johan Ho)

Over quite a few years I’ve been buying almost every Humble Bundle, and I’ve collected a big bunch of extra Steam keys because I already own some of the games in the bundles.

The reason why I still buy those bundles even though I only play maybe 10% of the games I get from bundles, is that I can select the percentage of the money I pay that goes to charity. Basically the money for bundles are just “part of the money I’ve allocated each month for charities” so to say. (The monthly charities I donate money to besides this are currently UNICEF and Red Cross). So when buying bundles, I’ll usually select at least 50% to charity, or occasionally more if I already own many of the games in the bundle. This is also why I never wanted to join their Monthly Bundle, because that bundle only gives a set percentage of 5% to charity.

But I guess I still gave up on buying their book and most of the software bundles, otherwise it feels like there are just too much every month, and I realized I’ll never get around to read any of the books or use the software I’m not that interested in. I haven’t even read all the comic book/manga bundles that I’ve occasionally bought for series I’m interested in. For example they had two bundles for Attack on Titan and Fairy Tail that had most of the released volumes and even spin-off mangas a few years ago… Still haven’t finished those either.

 

In any case, I made a web site to collect all the bundles, and all you need to get a game is to sign in with Facebook and request the game you want!

Once I’ve approved of the request (to make sure it’s not some kind of Facebook bot or unknown person), you should get an e-mail to the game, or you can login to the web site again to see your list of games.

 

Some of the reasons I added the Facebook login is:

  • I didn’t want the game claiming to be completey open to the public, making sure it’s mostly my friends who can get them
  • I wanted to test using the Facebook API I guess (instead of making my own login system)
  • Plus I thought it would be easier to see if a person is actually my friend on Facebook.
    • However, it turns out that after all the “personal information leaks” issues Facebook has faced the last year, they have gotten a lot more strict about what information developers can get, so I can’t even see if someone is on my friend list unless Facebook approves it… And they didn’t because it’s such a niche web site I guess.
      Oh well, I’ll just leave it for now and hope that not too many Facebook bots try to request games…

Notes:

  • I set the limit to a maximum of 1 request per calendar month. So once it is the first day of next month, you can request another game, and you can get a maximum of 12 games per year.
    I thought that it would be easier for people to deal with month numbers than to try to remember “30 days from now I can get another game”.
  • Also, even though some of the keys are for expansions, I haven’t currently added a system to get a game + expansions, so you’ll just have to hope that nobody else picks the expansion while you wait for next month.
  • Lastly, there is some chance that some of the keys won’t work, because a few years back I read some news about people managing to steal Humble Bundle keys by “guessing” the URL, I think?
    Unfortunately I can’t test each key to see if they still work, and even if you say that a key didn’t work, I can’t check if it’s because it was already “broken” or because you already claimed it… So the general rule is that if you request a game and it doesn’t work, you’ll just have to wait until next month to request another game.

On a side note, I finally started working on the new worship web site using Preact and PouchDB, but since this means I basically have to learn a completely new way to code a web site, I haven’t even gotten the login system to work at all… I decided I’ll just learn how to build the UI to look like it’s supposed to look for now, and try to patch actual functionality into it later. *sigh*

 

Posted by on 2018-11-15 in Computer, Games

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Virtual Reality

July 21

I originally pre-ordered an Oculus Rift after the consumer version was finally announced, but after reading about all the “controversies” around the launch of the Rift and the Oculus company after it was bought up by Facebook, I eventually ended up cancelling it and buying the HTC Vive instead.

List of controversies from memory:

These and the fact that HTC Vive already have motion controllers and also better room-scale support (if you walk around in the room, you are also walking around in the game), eventually convinced me to buy it instead. It even arrived quicker than the estimated delivery date for my Oculus Rift pre-order (was stated to arrive in July).

HTC Vive

HTC Vive

The HTC Vive was developed by Valve in cooperation with HTC, and Steam already had VR support for quite a while, with a decent list of VR games by now. However, most of the games are made by indie developers and it is quite apparent that many of them lack the polish of games from larger companies. It has some similarities to the games found on app stores in the early days of smartphones, a bunch of mediocre games and also some gems, but even among those many are under development (“early access” as Steam calls it). Many of the games are also very arcade-like, without any story or campaign modes, but instead having wave-based level progression, which can be fun too, but is not really my favorite type of games.

I already have 73 games in my VR library (some of them are free demos, but I did buy quite a few during Steam’s summer sale), so I’m not going to go through all of them, but here’s a short list of the games I liked slightly more than others:


A Chair in a Room
A Chair in a Room – Greenwater: One of the more complete VR games, this is a short horror adventure game in the style of old “point and click” adventure games. With jumpscares. I haven’t actually played this game till completion yet since one of my friends finished it when I was demoing VR to some of my friends, and I haven’t really felt like playing it after reaching the first jumpscare parts of the game…

MIND Path to Thalamus
MIND Path to Thalamus: I got this game from a Humble Bundle a while ago, and was happy to see that it got VR support added. It’s also an adventure game, but mostly exploration based, with some slightly physics based puzzles.

The Solus Project
Another game in the similar vein is The Solus Project, which is also a mostly exploration-based adventure game, but with some survival elements (you have to eat food, drink water and sleep at regular intervals in order to not die).

The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed
The final similar VR game is The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed, this one however got enough money through its Kickstarter to feature full voice acting, and while it’s a lot shorter than the previous two, it feels quite a bit more polished. Hopefully they will be able to finish all the episodes of the game.

Portal Stories: VR
Portal Stories: VR: A fan-made game in the Portal universe, it is a pretty short game consisting of 10 puzzle stages using a “blinking” device rather than the portal gun. The puzzles are pretty good and it is also voice acted with some dialogue that fits pretty well with the humor in the Portal games. Would’ve loved to see more stages for this game.

These five games are the most “story-rich” VR games of the ones I’ve tried so far, which is why they stand out the most to me.

Other noticable games are:

  • Vanishing Realms, a decent but unfinished action RPG
  • Fantastic Contraption, a game where you have to build machines in 3D in order to transport a “balloon” to the target area
  • Final Approach, a flight control game very much like the old mobile game (iOS), but in 3D
  • Ruckus Ridge VR Party, a somewhat unpolished party game where one person uses the Vive while three others uses normal controllers, and they have to “fight” each other in order to get a high score. It’s one of the few party games available for VR, so it’s worth a mention even if it has some playability issues.

In other news, since last post:

  • I’ve been trying to eat vegetarian food as much as possible because of environmental reasons. (In short: Producing meat causes more pollution than cars and other transportation, according to a report by United Nations.) Though I still eat meat sometimes…
  • I’m still biking to work too. I found out I have actually lost about 5kg over the past year, I assume it’s most likely because of this and the previous point.
  • I experimented with making an “augmented reality” / “escape room” type of game using a web page mixed with real world clues. It worked all right, but took so much work that I had to take a break from it after planning two of those.
  • Bought a Pebble Time, mainly because I thought it’d be fun to switch between different geeky watch faces:

  • Went to Easter and Summer Camp, also had a church BBQ

    Church BBQ

    Church BBQ

  • Painted the fence of my balcony, looks quite nice now! Though the “floor” looks very shabby in comparison now. Should probably paint that too later…

    Painted the balcony "wall" and some of the outdoors furniture.

    Painted the balcony “wall” and some of the outdoors furniture.

  • Been watching a lot of TV shows and anime. Stranger Things was pretty awesome, Game of Thrones season 6 was being very Game of Throney, Netflix has started licensing a little bit more anime shows in Norway too, plus the ones I watch on Crunchyroll. Jojo Part 4 is amazing, Ace Attorney is somewhat mediocre but still enjoyable as a fan of the game series, and Food Wars/Shokugeki no Soma is fun to watch, even though I try to eat vegetarian food nowadays.
  • Some of the non-VR games I was most excited to play lately: Zero Time Dilemma was probably my most anticipated game this year, pretty much “binge” played it through a weekend. A great end on an awesome game trilogy. Shovel Knight really was a pretty good old-school style platforming game. Kirby: Planet Robobot was a fun new entry in the Kirby series.

Currently I’m in my week long home vacation now after summer camp, and decided to just stay home most of the time, doing some chores and binge watching TV and games until I have finished some of the stuff I have been wanting to do but not had time to finish.

 

Posted by on 2016-07-21 in Games

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Persona 4 is crack

June 21

I finished Sticker Star and started playing Persona 4 Golden shortly after writing my previous blog post, and after that Persona 4 has mostly replaced most other gaming for the last month. The game is strangely addicting for being a game where you spend several hours playing through some kind of “school sim” game before you even get to anything like a dungeon. But then again, that “sim” part is probably the actual reason why it this game is so addicting and considered a great game by many. Because secretly everybody loves to play The Sims, even though most people don’t want to admit it. Or something.

Persona 4 Golden School Lecture

This is a game where part of the gameplay consists of listening to school lectures. How can it be any good??

A friend asked me if I recommended this game, and I was cautiously saying something like “it’s not like standard RPGs so you may or may not like it”. After all I do enjoy playing visual novel style games like Virtue’s Last Reward, Corpse Party and Ever 17, which may also be part of the reason why I like this game, which also has a lot of dialogue.

I do also love the music, although once I start listening closely to the lyrics it does seem to be some kind of broken Engrish. But the tunes are nice! I’ve been looking into buying the soundtrack, but ordering the CD from a store in Japan feels like a pain. I wish there was an easier way to buy Japanese MP3s outside of Japan, most western music services/stores just doesn’t seem to have much access to those. (Spotify, WIMP and iTunes though I haven’t tried that last one lately since I don’t want to install it.)

Other than that I’ve also been buying every single Humble Bundle ever, even those for games that I don’t know if I’ll ever intend to play. My Steam account is bursting with random games. Some of them seem quite good too, just don’t know when I’ll get around to play them. Oh well, not a problem just leaving them there “forever”.

 

I visited some friends and family in Stockholm in May, had quite a bit of fun!

Grumpy bear and happy slimes

Happy slimes and grumpy bear! My friend thought that the contrast between their facial expressions was rather hilarious.

One of my relatives had a childrens birthday party for her young daughter. Some of the kids came over and gave me a hug when I arrived even though I haven’t met them before, so adorable! Also apparently my grade school age cousin is into Minecraft.

Exhibit A

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit B

I don’t want to start playing this or WoW. Just playing “single-playthrough” games is already taking up enough time.

I went to two grilling trips with my church, once with just the youth group (we actually had an orienteering game first, my group won!) and once with the whole church. Was quite lucky with the weather both times too.

My excellently rare steak "burger"! It was delicious!

My excellently rare steak “burger”! It was delicious!

And we had a bachelor party for my brother who’s getting married! Made him do a bunch of embarassing stuff, also went to Ekeberg to play frisbee golf, though I must say the highlight was climbing trees at the Climbing Park at Oslo Summer Park! (Even though we went to Big Horn Steakhouse for dinner.)

Oslo Climbing Park

It’s perfectly safe.

I bought a portable hammock. It is awesome. Bought it from Coolstuff.no, but my uncle actually found it cheaper at Finn.no.

Transformers hammock!

Transformers hammock! Sorry about the mess in the background, I just ripped the packaging material off the hammock the fastest I could so that I could try it out right away.

 

Posted by on 2013-06-21 in Games, Rambling

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