Well, this is interesting. While the rest of the world was ogling over what’s coming down the pipe from Google, Steam introduced collectible virtual trading cards that you can earn by playing games, and trade in for bragging rights and prizes.

Sound odd? Sure, but it’s also rather neat. Steam Trading Cards are currently in beta, and themed after the few games that support them. You earn cards by playing the participating games, though you can only earn about half of a game’s total card set on your own. You’ll need to collect the rest of the set by bartering with friends or other Steam users.

Here’s where things get interesting (and potentially valuable): complete a set of cards, and you can craft them into a game badge. These badges can be displayed on your Steam profile, but you’ll also earn random goodies like backgrounds for your Steam profile and (more lucratively) coupons for DLC and discounts on Steam games.

These collectible cards can be sold on Steam’s Community Market, and as of the last hour virtual game cards have been selling for about $2 – $3—which sounds ludicrous. There is of course the potential to earn a badge and get a coupon for 50% off a game or DLC, and… nope, still ludicrous. I’m sure the market prices will level off once that “shiny new feature” smell wears off, more folks get invited to the beta, and a true median price is determined by supply and demand.

The list of supported games is small: Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2, Half-Life 2, and Don’t Starve. Valve will be adding more games over time, but you’ll need to be a member of the new Steam Trading Cards group to get in line for an invite. Good luck!

Following in the footsteps of 2010’s Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light improves upon the gameplay of its predecessor without destroying what made the series great in the first place: the setting. Last Light takes you back to the post-apocalyptic Russian wasteland, employing an excellent soundtrack and bleak, desolate imagery to deliver a first-person shooter with surprising pathos and one of the most genuine game narratives in recent memory.

Boot up Last Light and you’ll be dropped into the boots of Artyom–a man haunted by memories of his mother, or lack thereof–as he attempts to leave the Russian Metro to capture “a dark one”, monstrous remnants of the world before it was devastated by all-out nuclear war. Of course, nothing goes smoothly for Artyom, and along the way you’ll be captured by other survivors and work together with another captive, Pavel, to orchestrate an escape. Arytom’s quest ranges across the Russian wasteland, ultimately leading you through areas devastated by nuclear destruction and nests of enemies mutated by the apocalypse before culminating in one of the coolest and most intense firefight finales I’ve ever experienced.

But frenetic, fast-paced combat is tiresome without a meaningful reason to fight, and Metro: Last Light tells a meaningful story through emotionally-charged flashbacks to the moment the nuclear missiles struck, and how that moment affected the Russian people. It’s a series of powerful scenes scattered throughout the 9-12 hour campaign that don’t force themselves on you, allowing different players to experience as much–or as little–of the narrative as they like. That’s one of Metro’s greatest strengths: it doesn’t force anything on the player. There’s plenty of optional areas to explore at your leisure, allowing you to intuitively control how long you spend in Metro: Last Light’s bleak alternate reality.

Moment to moment, the actions you’re taking in Metro: Last Light are very similar to those you performed in Metro 2033: exploring, scrounging, and fighting for your life with a hodgepodge of unique and innovative post-apocalyptic weapons. Even your weapons tell a story, like the handmade submachine gun that has a magazine that slides left-to-right, through the weapon, as shots are fired. It’s a little thing, but idiosyncratic touches like this do an excellent job of showcasing the unique, alien nature of Metro’s alternate reality Russia.

Of course, those crazy cobbled-together weapons can be customized to fit your tactical preferences using Military-Grade ammunition, high-quality bullets manufactured before the apocalypse and now used in Metro as a form of currency. Paying a gunsmith to modify your armament with a silencer, lasersight, stock or foregrip is a simple way to significantly change the characteristics of each weapon, allowing you to tailor the game to your liking.

Your limited inventory also forces you to make some meaningful tactical decisions: mod a semi-automatic pistol to be fully automatic and pair it with extended clips, for example, and you can use your new pistol to replace the submachine gun in your inventory. That in turn allows you to drop (or sell) the SMG, using the newly-opened space in your three-slot inventory for a long-range tool like the rifle. It’s a seemingly small decision that could mean the difference between living and dying when you’re exploring the wasteland on your own.

Metro’s score is one of the best in the business and continues to establish not only the singular tone for any particular moment within the game, but a consistent and omnipresent theme throughout the entire narrative experience. Pair this with the spot-on sound effects–terrifying gunfire, wet gurgling screams, the frantic cries of communication between both enemies and the occasional comrade–and you’ll a sense of aural immersion to rival that of any great blockbuster war flick. The sound design remains exceptional throughout the game, tbough there’s a bit of weirdness with characters occasionally acting out of sync with their audio.

Unfortunately, for as strong as Metro: Last Light is, it suffers from a myriad of bugs and issues that can often disrupt the atmosphere it works so hard to evoke. Crashes to the desktop and random minimization happen all too frequently, destroying any sense of pacing that you might have.

Occasional hard locks and freezes join the list of serious technical problems, but by far the most frustrating bug I came across was the seemingly random times that the player would become immobile and unresponsive, regardless of whether I was using the keyboard or the gamepad. It usually happens when both the protagonist and an enemy–especially the mutated creatures–make a melee attack at the same time, causing Artyom to become unresponsive, almost as if stunned.

Bugs aside, Metro: Last Light still isn’t for everyone. It suffers from a lack of direction that often left me backtracking and searching the same areas multiple times before figuring out what to do or where to go. Some may find this lack of guidance charming, but it feels like even the most simple of navigational suggestions are absent and the experience suffers for it.

But the main challenge of Metro: Last Light isn’t just poor directions–the game is hard. The two difficulty settings, Normal and Ranger (a special, harder difficulty setting that was made available as DLC to players who pre-ordered the game) are a perfect balance of what you want in a game like Metro. I can’t speak to Ranger mode, but Normal is just hard enough that it forces you to slow down and think tactically in situations where, in other first-person shooters, you’d normally just run through guns blazing. That kind of recklessness will get you killed immediately in Last Light.

Despite its technical flaws and poor guidance, Metro: Last Light is a uniquely challenging and heartfelt experience, a bleak first-person shooter that does more with its narrative that some films. It works well as an isolated experience too, making it a great entry point into the Metro series.

It’s only been a couple of months since the launch of SimCity and the debacle that followed (which still lingers today), but Maxis and EA want to cleanse your palate with a new addition to the Sims franchise: The Sims 4 is coming to PC and Mac in 2014.

Electronic Arts

EA writes on their blog: “The Sims franchise is fueled by the passion and creativity of its millions of fans around the world. Their continued devotion to the franchise ignites the fire of creativity of the team at The Sims Studio, driving them to continually improve and innovate on one of the world’s most successful simulation game that has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.”

Before the SimCity boondoggle, the announcement of a new Sims game would barely be newsworthy. But in a post-SimCity world, any new EA game is worth scrutinizing: Will a constant connection be required? Will multiplayer features be shoehorned in? Will extravagant features be promised but then redacted until further notice? Or will it all come together smoothly, and redeem EA in the eyes of an audience still smarting over the belly-flop that was the SimCity launch? I guess we’ll find out in 2014. And no, I’m not bitter at all!

(Okay, I’m a little bitter.)

Slay my foes, and then eat their skulls? Well, that’s hardly sporting. Or sanitary. But the horde of undead foes I’m facing in 17Bits’  Skulls of the Shogun certainly won’t hesitate to tap into the unparalleled power that a calcium-rich snack will offer, so it’s a case of getting them before they get us, really. And who doesn’t enjoy crushing the occasional skull?

As befits a turn-based strategy game, securing resources is the linchpin for success. And Skulls offers no shortage of resources to manage, some less obvious than others. The most important is rice—rice paddies are strewn about the game’s single- and multi-player maps, and while the dead don’t have much need for food (besides skulls, but I’ll get to that) haunting rice paddies will allow you to stockpile the rice you’ll need to acquire resource number two: soldiers.

Can’t have much of an army without soldiers; haunt a shrine, and you’ll be able to spend rice on the game’s three primary units: infantry, cavalry and archers. Infantry will form the backbone of your army, offering decent attack power and strong defensive capabilities. Cavalry have meager defenses, but their expansive movement range allows them to dive in and out of combat quickly, helpful for capturing buildings or harassing enemies. And then there are your archers: their powerful attacks are devastating and the extra range means they can only be counterattacked by other archers, but they can’t hit enemies in melee range, so you’ll need to keep them protected. And no one needs to be protected as much as your general—he’s a powerful fighter in his own right, but once he’s slain it’s game over.

To prevent wars of attrition the rice supply is limited—your troops are soldiers, not farmers, and after a few turns you’ll exhaust the supply of rice in individual paddies. That makes every soldier precious, and figuring out the right unit composition and holding enough ground to keep the rice flowing (and deny the enemy from doing the same) adds a delightful level of strategy—simple but clever game design at its finest.

This leads me to resource number three: space. Skulls of the Shogun’s battlefields are small. Not claustrophobically so, but you’ll need to carefully consider every move you make, as the limited rice supply means your troops are precious. Positioning is key: you can issue five orders per turn, with each order consisting of movement, taking an action like attacking, haunting a location, or eating a skull, and then making one last limited bit of movement. Leave a solider in a bad spot and they’ll be open to a attack, and if can’t field more units or properly defend your general, well, game over.

You’ll also need to take the environment into account. Ducking into bamboo will make your units 20 percent harder to hit, which I’ve seen work phenomenally with cavalry behind enemy lines. Rice paddies are also a useful position to cluster around, as they heal any allied unit who’s standing on them at the start of every turn. Some maps offer monk shrines: haunting a monk shrine will give you access to monks, whose powerful spells can heal allies or devastate enemies. They’re useful but vulnerable, as they can be removed from the battlefield if an enemy captures your shrine.

That all sound a bit simple? Well, sure. The game’s charm is infectious; while the campaign isn’t especially demanding, it’s fun and dare I say, hilarious. You play as General Akamoto, a powerful, arrogant samurai who’s rallying an army of undead soldiers to get a bit of old-fashioned revenge on the underling who betrayed him. Along the way, you’ll circumvent bureaucracy, flirt with gods, and banter with underlings while exploring beautifully animated landscapes and terrain.

This isn’t the most convoluted of strategy titles, but I rather like that—the game is delightfully easy to pick up and play, but like an (undead) onion there are layers here worth picking apart. Units can knock each other about—infantry excel at this—which can allow you to forcibly re-position your enemies into a location that’s a bit more appealing to you, or knock them off of a map’s edge and get them out of the fight in one fell swoop. You can avoid this positioning your units side by side to form a spirit wall, which prevents them from being knocked about and also keeps enemies from passing through—great for keeping weaker units like archers protected. With judicious use of spirit walls, choke points, and natural barriers like rocks and hills, you’ll be sure to rack up plenty of the last and most important resource, skulls.

When a unit dies, their skull falls to the ground. Eat a skull and your troops will regain some of the health they’ve lost and gain a few additional total hit points. Eat three skulls and they’ll become a demon, capable of making two attacks in a single turn: absolutely devastating in the right hands. Being something of a coward I like feeding skulls to my archers and creeping towards an enemy general, hoping to take him out in one concentrated attack. You might be tempted to rack up a few skulls and feed them to your general, which isn’t a bad idea. But generals start every battle in a meditative trance, gaining more hit points with every turn that passes without them moving or taking an action.

It’s all a very fun balancing act: acquire resources while preventing the enemy from doing the same, and hold out for a shot at the other general (or generals), who will either be meditating to become as powerful as possible, or darting about the battlefield wreaking havoc if they’re a bit less cautious (read: craven) than I am. A general who’s spent most of the game meditating is a fearsome sight, doubly-so if they wake up from their long nap and consume enough skulls to acquire demon status.  

I’ve neglected to mention a platform (or a price) because Skulls is available just about everywhere—provided you’re throughly enmeshed in Microsoft’s ecosystem. Starting a match on the Xbox 360 and then switching over to a Windows Phone when you’re on the go is phenomenal, and while asynchronous turn-based strategy games might lend themselves a bit better to this sort of thing I can’t wait for more games to offer this multi-platform functionality. Skulls’ simple gameplay mechanics and structure lends itself well to switching between a console controller, touch on a mobile phone, and a mouse and keyboard, should your choose to play it on a Windows 8 PC or Windows tablet. I found playing the game on a Windows Phone (in my case, the Nokia Lumia 810′s 4.3-inch display) could feel a bit cramped, but there wasn’t anything I couldn’t solve by simply zooming in; if you have a larger phone, I imagine it won’t be a problem.

There’s another problem here, and that’s the pricing. If you want to play Skulls on the Xbox 360, you’ll need to pay 800 Microsoft points (that’s $10 in real-world currency). It’s also $10 on Windows 8. And if you want to play it on your phone, that’s another $5. Honestly, that’s not very expensive—I think the game is well worth $25, and you only need to buy it on the platforms you’ll actually be playing it on. But it sets a really bad precedent.

If you’ve ever owned multiple iOS devices, you’ve likely run into this problem before: iPad and iPhone versions of apps that require you to purchase them multiple times. There’s a case to be made that developing for a new platform requires new resources and development time, and folks should be compensated. That’s totally fair. But to be frank, the average consumer doesn’t really care: they see an app they purchased and enjoyed on one device being incompatible with another, and scoff at needing to purchase the same thing multiple times.

To be quite honest, if Skulls of the Shogun were available as a sort of “universal app” and cost $20 to $30, I wouldn’t have though twice about picking it up, knowing I could play it on anything with a Microsoft badge. And since my Windows Live account carries across all of the platforms that Microsoft services, it stands to reason that the content I purchase, when feasible, should be available too: my achievements, music and movies already do, so games seem like a logical next step.

Skulls of the Shogun is phenomenal: the combat is simple but clever, the campaign is hilarious and fun, and multiplayer matches amongst friends and random strangers are a great way to pass the time—whether you’re sitting on the couch, at your desk at work, or waiting for a bus. Give the free trial a spin and if you’re convinced, grab some friends and get to crushing some skulls.

What’s the most difficult thing you did in the last year?  Now stop. Before you answer, can it compare to creating a full-fledged indie game—slated to be approved on Steam—created entirely with QBASIC? Probably not.

QBASIC is a software interpreter for the BASIC programming language that showed up in 1991, and basic it is. Here’s a little video of a game created by IBM to show off the awesome power of QBASIC when it first launched:

You get the idea after about 45 seconds. Now, over 20 years later—but with the exact same programming tools—we have Black Annex. Check out this trailer with actual gameplay—and I can’t say it enough—using the same programming language that the above video was “showing off.”

Not only are the simple visuals awesome, but the gameplay actually looks complex and tough to master—not something you’d expect from a programming language with simple loops and statements.

It’s an isometric corporate sabotage and infiltration game. What that means exactly I’m not sure but you can choose your own playstyle and outfit agents to “steal, destroy, kidnap and kill” as you wish.

But why QBASIC when there are so many other powerful tools out there that would probably be simpler to use? Lance McDonald, the game’s creator, hearkened back to when he made games as a kid with QBASIC and wanted to make a love letter to the great games of the ’90s.

“When I sat down to make Black Annex a year ago, I didn’t want to ‘learn’ how to make a game—I realized I already knew how to make a game. I just had to go back to the tools I knew” McDonald said. He also mentioned that he mailed a QBASIC game to Epic MegaGames when he was 9 and never heard back. He had something to prove.

Black Annex was just announced last week and has already gained a lot of steam (pun intended) on Steam’s Greenlight program, where users can vote on smaller games they’d like to see made available for purchase on the Steam platform.

“It would be amazing for the game development community,” said McDonald when asked about Black Annex’s potential ascension to Steam. “It would show that even old, abandoned tools and the most basic pieces of software can still be put in the hands of someone who wants to create their dream and result in beautiful things happening.”

A couple more fun facts about the game:

• Black Annex requires at least a 2.6GHz processor due to the scope of the project and the unoptimized multi-dimensional arrays.
• The game’s catchy tune is by Abducted by Sharks
• It will support mods (meaning customized missions, levels, etc.)
• The game is a 12000 line .bas (BASIC) file. Yeesh!