Japan Heat Wave

I've not done a non-gaming Japan post in a while but given the current situation out here I feel now is a good time to do so.

IT'S. FUCKIN. HOT.

Now I know Japan isn't anything quite like England when it comes to weather.  Japan actually has weather other than overcast and rainy for starters and usually temperatures hit about 30-something degrees in the summer however this year the weather has been taking the piss a little bit.

It's now at the point where the news is having to report on the number of people who are DYING from just how hot it is.  This is insane considering that Japan has a pretty good relationship with the air conditioner but even a short amount of time is enough to drain someone of all their life force and leave them as a dry husk on the pavement.  Lord help if you if you're a child or over 70.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/07/23/national/temperature-tokyo-hits-nationwide-high-year-mercury-rises-40-8-western-city-ome/#.W1cIW8J9hEY

Luckily for me, I'm more than happy to sit underneath my AC with a huge bottle of ice water and a stack of video games.  I defy you to try and tell me that global warming isn't a thing, come over here and say it to my thermometer

Steam Summer Sale

Just as I'm promising myself to try and not buy any more new games so that I can whittle through my backlog, the steam Summer sale starts up and my wallet is about to take another beatdown.

The weird thing is, for someone who has owned Steam for a long time the sale season isn't really such a big deal anymore.  Sure, there will always be some games that I'd like to pick up on the cheap but I already own a lot of what's worth playing and at time of writing I've been feeling a little underwhelmed by the current sales.  Obviously something off my wishlist will crop up for an insanely low price but the phase of me buying everything ever because it costs about 80p is long gone, which is a little sad for me really.

Anyway, this year Steam have decided to roll out a little mini game that goes with the sale.  The Monster Summer Game is a clicker game where players work together to kill as many square looking monster things as they can within a day.  As people kill the monsters it unlocks sales on certain games so there is actually a pretty decent benefit to playing this thing.  Also as you play you can be granted up to 3 steam summer sale trading cards a day which is great if you're like me and just sell them off instantly.  Get some discounts on those already cheap games.

Granted a clicker game isn't going to blow anyone's minds but it's nice to see Steam trying to inject just a little bit more fun into their sale events.  It gives steam users something to look forward too ever sale other than just reduced prices on games.  If you have a few minutes to kill then it's worth just checking out but if you have a decent amount of free time you SHOULD be cracking through all those delicious cheap games you just bought.

Steam Sale! DRM discussion inbound!

Well shit, I'm surprised it's not started already, I was really hoping it would have happened by now.

Anyway, if you are not a user of Steam, at certain times during the year Steam do this massive sale thing where they will slash the prices of pretty much all their games by huge amounts.  I'm talking about being able to get games for insane things like 75% off the original price, it's a great time to get some cheap games if you're on a bit of a budget.

So I want to take this moment to talk about Steam itself, since there are a number of communities that like to yell "fuck Steam! fuck DRM!" and this tends to people on the other side of the camp getting all overly defensive and everything turns into a massive rage war between the two sides.

Well lets face some facts, Steam is essentially a form of DRM.  You buy a game and you can only use it on your Steam account, you can't lend the games to anyone or even sell them back (although I've heard about people in the EU getting refunds).  If something happened to Steam, you are more than likely going to lose your entire library and all the raging in the world wont return your collection or your money.

So from that brief paragraph describing Steam as a form of DRM you might think that anyone who uses Steam a lot must be fucking stupid right?  Well no, not really.  You see, while there is all these drawbacks with Steam, the software does offer you quite a lot.  It gives you everything in one place and provides a shit ton of feature for connecting with people and playing with friends.  But none of that really matters when you look at the prices of shit on Steam.

If you're willing to have some patience with it, Steam will give you a massive amount of games for basically no money.  Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single game in my entire library that I have paid over £20 for and with the introduction of the Steam Marketplace, I've been able to sell my virtual items and use that money to get free games.

So Steam is essentially DRM done right in a way.  It's annoying that I'm limited with what I can do when it comes to my collection but I paid so little for the 200 games I've bought over 7 years that I really don't care.  As long as you follow their rules then Steam is a great, cheap gaming platform that you can have a lot of fun with for very little money.

Ideally, no DRM would be best but in this day and age we know that's never going to fucking happen, so long live steam and their insane sales!

Unless you're GoG, those guys are great