Have you ever looked at your steam library and thought “Huh, I should play every single game in alphabetical order and then write about the experience in my blog?” Well don’t you dare ’cause I got there first, and that would be plagiarism, you opportunistic hacks.
Hello, and welcome to Steam A to Z! Here you’ll find brief wittering about a game followed by the customary rating out of 10. We begin with the game at the top of the pile – 140:
140
140 is a fantastic rhythm-based platformer. Play as a shape, collect spheres, and bring them back to the ominous giant sunken eyes in the ground, then reflect on the meaning of it all (reflection optional). The soundtrack is gloriously bouncy and perfectly accompanies the movements of the level around you. Also, the developer Jeppe Carlsen worked on Playdead’s black-and-white abject misery simulator Limbo. Developers are weird.
Rating: Actually very good, and somewhat unexpected at that / 10
A.I.M.2 Clan Wars
A.I.M. 2 Clan Wars is an RTS set on Venus. Or, it’s an FPS where you shoot the evolutionary precursor fish wandering onto land for the first time. Or, it’s a mobile game about clicking root vegetables until world hunger is eradicated. A.I.M.2 Clan Wars could be any combination, or none, of these. I’ll never know because the bugger crashed repeatedly before I could play. For what it’s worth, I was treated to an overly long cutscene involving carnivorous plants and spaceships and no narrative structure whatsoever before it crashed. So that’s nice.
Rating: It’s fun reviewing games that don’t let you actually play them / 10
Age of Empires 2: HD Edition
AoE has the most hours clocked on my steam account with 134 hours of combined play recorded. Bear in mind, however, I’m pretty sure at least half of that is time spent waiting in a lobby for the bloody multiplayer game to start. I’m going to put the blame squarely on U.K internet services for that one, though. An absolute RTS classic, AoE’s charm and appeal has persisted through the years. Absolutely recommended for someone looking to get into the RTS genre who is terrified by actually having to learn Starcraft 2. Or, more accurately, having to learn the art of repeated failure.
Rating: I’ve played 134 hours. Yeah, it’s alright / 10
Agricultural Simulator: Historical Farming
How great would it be to say that Agricultural Simulator: Historical Farming is actually brilliant. A revolutionary take on the historical farming scene (oft maligned as it is) that puts other shoddy simulators to shame. Oh, how great indeed.
So, this game is utter arse.
It runs at around five frames per second unless the graphics are turned right down. This on a machine that can render the beautiful worlds of titles such as Skyrim or Crysis 2 without much fuss. That’s not a brag, coincidentally, but a statement of confusion. Rest assured, AgSimHisFar, as I’m never going to abbreviate it again, isn’t a looker. I mean, you can tell that the sad clucking objects roaming around the barren wasteland are chickens, and that the creature near the kennel whose blank eyes express a world of suffering is a dog, but you never really feel that you’re in a passable world.
I eventually, after much clicking, managed to drive a small tractor. And I didn’t know what to do. I drove and drove all around the village. And I didn’t know what to do. I looked at the river; a long, meandering, completely featureless blue ditch scarring the landscape. And I didn’t know what to do. I saw a bush in the distance, and not really knowing what to do, I crashed into it. The tractor subsided, and began to slowly tilt. My demise was imminent. My head met the ground and then passed through. As the tractor continued to tilt, my whole torso became submerged into the Earth. The tractor was upside down. I was rooted now. I would live out my days right here; The man who tilted, sitting on his tractor, and taking in the Earth from within. Now I knew what to do.
Rating: Now I am become soil / 10