The Steam Summer Sale is upon us....

[therain93]

[Rust]

I've already fired the first shot on my end. Picked up Borderlands 2 and the Mechomancer Pack.

[FlyingCarcass]

That comic strip is so true. 

[General Idiot]

I'm actually kinda meh on this, since most of the games I want I already have. So unless something pops up that looks really good I'm probably not going to spend any more than I already do on Steam stuff.

.....that said, I did pick up Civilisation V plus the gold edition upgrade plus the brand new expansion that came out a few days ago for a total of about ten bucks less than the normal price of the base game alone, so there's that. I'm still not sure whether that was a good idea or not but we'll see.

[Mantic]

Ehh... I just don't do Steam. They've treated me poorly, and the bundling of Steamworks on physical media forced me to deal with them when I didn't have the bandwidth to deal with such things. So now that I can do digital, I'll download direct from publishers or go to competitors like GamersGate, who don't bundle their online service with physical media. They do sales, too, after all.

Any game that is exclusive to Steam/Steamworks just doesn't get into my wallet, at any price.

[dwturducken]

I don't get the comic, but the dude looks a like Henchman 21 cosplaying Braveheart, which I find amusing.

[Rust]

The comic's pertaining to a guy trying desperately not to spend all his money.

For myself, day two of the sale and still nothing really "grabbing me". That's not saying there aren't plenty of games I'm interested in - but they're not Featured Sales, so there really is no tearing rushing to snap them up before the sale ends. I get paid next week, so I'm holding off until there's some "padding" in the Bank Account.

Compared to last year when I ended up spending about $120 for 40 games - of which I've maybe only played 15 of them and really only 5 of them for any length of time.

I definitely plan on snagging Dungeons next week though. A game in the same vein as Dungeon Keeper? Yes please!

[therain93]

As it would turn out, I did snag a copy of Arkham City GotY this afternoon.
Steam was never really a "problem" while CoH was around, but this past Christmas Valve got my money instead of NCsoft (just like now...)

[Rust]

Today's been an "expensive" day for me. Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 Platinum.

Blood Bowl has a learning curve like a sheer cliff but I oddly am enjoying it. Once I find a team I'm good with I feel the game will go much smoother - but with 23 teams right out of the gate and some of them seemingly deliberately designed to be terrible (Halflings' Team Description even admits this), that's gonna take a bit.

[FlyingCarcass]

I picked up Blood Bowl as well (though I'm kicking myself for getting it earlier in the sale at 50%, ah well) and have been having quite a bit of fun with my Nurgle team (Go Bloody Belchers!).

On a side note, here's a face not even a mother could love. 

[Rust]

Heh. I'm slowly getting...better? (I almost scored a Touchdown!)

For whatever reason I keep gravitating back towards the Lizardmen. Probably because of their decent mix of bulk and speed, but I'm still experimenting with others.

EDIT: I DID IT! I won a game of Blood Bowl! With the High Elves.  1-0 all told, but I'll take that.

[therain93]

Valve got me again....
System Shock 2 and the new Tomb Raider...

[Aggelakis]

I got Defiance (been meaning to get it anyway) and FTL. I've been meaning to get FTL for at least a month now, so that just makes it more awesome.

I also got The Last Remnant, but I can't seem to make it function on my computer. When I have time, I am going to attempt to figure out what's wrong. Hopefully I didn't waste five bucks. :p

[Kederren]

Can these games only be played through 3rd person portal? (i.e. Steam). Does that mean that there are now two people who can pull the plug on you? Does it have to play windowed with ads all around it? How far down has Defiance come from the $60 dollar price?

I might like to play, but these questionshave always held me back.

[Rust]

Can these games only be played through 3rd person portal? (i.e. Steam).

Yes/No. Everything goes through Steam, true but you've got final control over what you do and don't experience while playing the game. You can fully disable the Steam In-Game Community Interface (Shift+Tab), for example.

Does that mean that there are now two people who can pull the plug on you?

Steam isn't like that. Heck, there are some games that Steam has ceased to sell for one reason or another but if you purchased said titles before Steam "pulled them", you still have full access to those games in your library.

Does it have to play windowed with ads all around it?

Nope. Full Screen Mode with optional Community Interface (That is accessed via Shift+Tab and automatically pauses your game when you access it). Beyond that and a "Steam News" window that opens after you exit a game - which is just a brief little blurb about upcoming releases and daily sales occurring. 

How far down has Defiance come from the $60 dollar price?

When it was on sale (The Summer Sale has rotating deals at 45 hour intervals) it was $14 I believe.


I avoided Steam for quite awhile because I distrusted the whole "Digital Distribution" business, but consider this - Valve made Steam successful by making it work for the gaming industry. And unlike EA's Origin service, Valve is a private company not beholden to shareholders or the stock market - only the customers that use the service.

[saipaman]

Valve would be committing suicide if they started disabling (legal) keys for games they had sold in the past.

Their entire business model involves selling keys.

[Rust]

Pretty much.

And as for fears that Valve may go belly up...Valve has become the "Too Big to Fail" business of PC Gaming. Origin wishes it had half the support Steam has, and Steam is very, very friendly to Indie Developers.

So yeah. While there's no much that can be done in the event of a Steam supported MMO shuts down, all those single player games are going to remain perfectly viable and available.

[Rust]

Expensive (Relatively speaking) day for me.

Tropico 4 Bundle
Mount & Blade Collection
Torchlight II
Risen II: Dark Waters Gold Edition
X-Com: Enemy Unknown (plus DLC)

All tallied that's $43. Heck of a lot of entertainment there for forty bucks.

[Captain Electric]

Some nice grabs there.

I'm going to wait until the end to show and tell my loot. It's spread across Steam, Gamers Gate, and GOG.com. There are some days when I feel very much like the picture in the OP! I am holding out and budgeting for one big purchase or a couple medium ones. If they don't materialize, I have a laundry list of $3 to $5 games I'm going to snap up on the last day. Either way, I'll come out victorious!!!! You can take my money, but you can't take my Freedom!!! HAHAHAHAHAHahhahahHAahAHAHAhahahhahahahahaahhhhhhhhhaaa...

Sorry...lost it there for a sec....

[Rust]

The biggest boon to me is if it's anything like last year, I'll be so blitzed and inundated with games by the end of the sale that it'll be 2014 before I make another gaming purchase.

The biggest downfall to me is if it's anything like last year, I'll be so blitzed and inundated with games by 2014 that I still won't have played the games I bought this year when next year's Summer Sale rolls around.

Seriously. I'm squatting on so many triple A titles...

[FatherXmas]

All I got was the Total War Shogun 2 bundle at 75% off.  Took 12 hours to download.

[Captain Electric]

The biggest boon to me is if it's anything like last year, I'll be so blitzed and inundated with games by the end of the sale that it'll be 2014 before I make another gaming purchase.

The biggest downfall to me is if it's anything like last year, I'll be so blitzed and inundated with games by 2014 that I still won't have played the games I bought this year when next year's Summer Sale rolls around.

Seriously. I'm squatting on so many triple A titles...

http://steamcommunity.com/id/captain-electric/games?tab=all

And that's just my Steam library. Trust me I feel your pain.

[therain93]

Expensive (Relatively speaking) day for me.

Tropico 4 Bundle
Mount & Blade Collection
Torchlight II
Risen II: Dark Waters Gold Edition
X-Com: Enemy Unknown (plus DLC)

All tallied that's $43. Heck of a lot of entertainment there for forty bucks.

Xcom is particularly awesome.  I started torchlight and enjoyed it, but tabled it because of other goodness ( ' ;

[Rust]

http://steamcommunity.com/id/captain-electric/games?tab=all

And that's just my Steam library. Trust me I feel your pain.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198014132755/games?tab=all

Since we're sharing.

[eabrace]

I managed to behave myself pretty well this time around.  I think I only picked up three games or so.  I probably would have gotten a few more, but I already had some of the ones I thought looked interesting. 

That brings me up to 86 games in the library now - most of which I haven't ever installed (yet).

[FatherXmas]

Oh no, Torchlight II is calling me.

Edit: and bought.

[Yoru-hime]

I might have missed this entirely, if not for you guys. Not sure whether to thank or curse you all!

Portal 2
Baldur's Gate Enhanced
LEGO Lord of the Rings
Batman: Arkham City

so far...

Edit:

FTL
Civ V Gold Edition

[FlyingCarcass]

Well, I already spent the $50 I allocated for this sale.

Picked up:

Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition
Far Cry 2
FTL: Faster than Light
Jagged Alliance 2 Gold
Just Cause 2
NBA 2K13
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
Operation Flashpoint: Red River
Stronghold Collection (Stronghold, Stronghold Crusader Extreme, Stronghold Legends, and Stronghold 2)
X-COM Apocalypse

Of course now I wonder how many of these I'll actually get around to any time soon.   

[Aggelakis]

Arghhhhhhhhh they had to put Magicka on stupid-sale (75% off). I had to get it. I have been eyeballing it for long enough that I was just gonna pony up anyway on payday. The 75% off made it fit in my current paycheck budget!

[Rust]

Spotted Towns on Flash Sale for $5. Decided to give it a whirl.

[therain93]

So, in the end, Valve made some $$$
 
Batman: Arkham City GOTY
System Shock 2
Tomb Raider Survival Edition + Tomb of the Lost Adventurer DLC
Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition
Deadpool
 
All totaled, about $60.00 or 4 months of subtime to City of Heroes.  I'm hoping nothing else goes on sale these last two days (  ' ;

[therain93]

Nifty little app:  http://steamplaytime.appspot.com/
 
Punch in your steam id or the url to your steam home page and it will calculate how large of a gaming backlog you have ( ' ;
 
According to it, I'm only about 257 hours into 1,036.  Of course, some games have more replayability than other, so I probably have much more to play....

[Captain Electric]

*Rolls around in a pile of new games*

Steam
http://steamcommunity.com/id/captain-electric/games?tab=all
Fallout New Vegas Ultimate Edition
Forge
Shadowrun Returns
The Walking Dead Series
Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten
Orcs Must Die 2
Demigod 
Qube 
Rock of Ages
Botanicula
Samorost2
Plants vs. Zombies GOTY Edition
Proteus
Greed: Black Border
Puzzle Dimension 
iBomber Defense

GOG.com
Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages
Humans Must Answer

Gamers Gate
http://www.gamersgate.com/profile/CaptainElectric
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Collection (<-- I LOVE THIS GAME )
Cold War

[Rust]

Demigod's a bit of a bust since League of Legends hit the scene. S'fun, but I've got zero idea how well the community has weathered the blitz of LoL and DotA2 going Free to Play.


The Walking Dead is a masterpiece of a narrative driven by player interaction. I played the first episode and just couldn't jump right into the second one. I'm still "winding down" off the emotional rush of the first chapter.

I last played it on January 7th.

[Captain Electric]

For some reason I was under the impression LoL was a couple of years older than Demigod, but I just checked and it came out later during the same year. Both games came out later in the same year I started playing City of Heroes, so it's no wonder I don't know much about either, except for what I've heard about LoL's terrible community--well, that and LoL/Dota's stranglehold on the genre they inhabit. But yeah, I pretty much didn't touch anything besides CoH for the next couple of years except Ultima Online and PoxNora (always faithful standbys), and the occasional DoW or MOO2 match. Come to think of it, CoH's closure finally made me catch up with the times.

I only picked up Demigod for its single player stuff. The whole warring pantheon thing and just the look and feel of the game is what got me--especially for the 2 or 3 bucks I paid for it. The screenshots on Steam look amazing. Still, I had assumed that its multiplayer community was dead on arrival. But I'd pretty much assume this about any game within that genre that isn't LoL or Dota. Even if a game has a potential, you're going to see shills and fans coming in from the established games on launch day and "complaining" about how dead the new game already is. This will always kill the competition. And since you can't cure that problem, I don't ever expect to see a successful game like that outside of LoL and Dota.

I last played it on January 7th.

You should just admit that you've stopped playing hehe. I don't blame you. When I bought Walking Dead, I updated my status with, "I like good games, but I hate zombies. Winner of over 90 Game Of The Year awards. But still. Why'd it have to be zombies?" One of our fellow CoHers on my Steam friend list replied and was like, "I hear you." 

I seriously do not like zombies. Playing through the first part of Solomon Island in TSW was terrifying. This is pretty much my kryptonite.

[Captain Electric]

I think the games I'm most looking forward to are Shadowrun Returns and Defender's Quest. I even have a thread in this forum about Shadowrun Returns. And Defender's Quest just looks amazing to me (Edit: game mechanics-wise ). Lots of new/neat things there for tower defense fans.

Oh, and I'm also hoping Greed feels kind of like a science fiction Torchlight. I'm just basing that off the screenshots. It probably won't. I'd love something like that though. That's why Steam sales are good. You just never know.

I'd be VERY surprised if anything on my list beats Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which I already started playing a week or two ago. It's a fun hack n'slash with a deep story, nice crafting systems, great voice acting and fun world to explore. This is going down as one of my favorite games of all time. Even though it's a single-player game, I wish MMORPGs were made to feel more like Reckoning in the polishing department. The voice acting in Neverwinter for example will sound terrible after playing Reckoning, and the animations and cut scenes and things like that in NW will look pretty stiff and amateur.

[Rust]

I only picked up Demigod for its single player stuff. The whole warring pantheon thing and just the look and feel of the game is what got me--especially for the 2 or 3 bucks I paid for it.

I hate to be the one to break your heart (especially since you bought it for the same reason I did) but Demigod has no single player content beyond a match with the A.I.

Part of the reason I was so irritated with the game inititally was because I felt it was false advertising on its part, not stressing the fact it was a multiplayer experience.

Still, for that price it's worth a few rounds. The Oak was a personal favorite of mine. He starts out nigh-useless but get a few levels onto him and he starts becoming a steamroller.

You should just admit that you've stopped playing hehe.

Oh no, I fully intend to going back and finishing up. It's just...as someone put it to me, The Walking Dead boils down to "Making horrible decisions in front of children."

Combine the finale of Episode One with what you have to do at the very start of Episode Two...yeah. The game is fantastic, but it's not something you realistically can just breeze through. Telltale did an amazing job putting emotional weight behind the game and getting the player invested.






On a unrelated note, a friend and I finished our Summer Getaway badges and with it I got a profile background, a Steam chat emote, and a game coupon. The coupon is for Sniper Elite V2 at 33% - taking it down to $20.09. I'm not interested in the game in the slightest, but it has a expiration date of July 29th and I'd hate to see it go to waste. As it is tradable, I'm curious if anyone here wants it?

[Captain Electric]

Nah it's no big deal, $2 or $3 covers "a match with the A.I.", and Demigod was so non-priority for me, I tacked it onto my purchase at the very end as an afterthought. The taco salad I bought today was more expensive and I only enjoyed it once, naturally.

I think the reason I bought Walking Dead is related to why I kept playing TSW (I did finally stop later, but just because it's not my main game). I haven't really played any psychological horror games or overly gory games in years. They're much more realistic now, and combined with this thing I have called an overactive imagination, there can be deep immersion when I'm really into a game (or book or movie or whatever). TSW was hard to stomach in places, and even though I'm not in the habit of freaking myself out unnecessarily, I tended to play late at night with all the lights off for added effect. I just found it so amazing that the game was having an emotional impact on me. I've played a number of games over the years that elicited other kinds of emotional reactions, like anger or sympathy when bad things happened to good characters. Feeling fear over a video game was unique. It wasn't pleasurable at all, and yet I kept going back for more because, well I don't know why exactly. I guess there was another part of it that was pleasurable, and may have been therapeutic too, facing down waves of zombies until I could do it without feeling much sensitiveness. Well it wasn't the process that was pleasurable, but the victory over the fear that feels good--when you and your friends are all "safe" for the moment, and the monsters are destroyed. Taking something that repulsed me initially, learning how to face it (and destroy it), that part of The Secret World is probably symbolic in some subconscious way, and The Secret World is very good at raising the stakes and dredging up bigger and scarier monsters to reward my determination.

That was a very long paragraph!

Anyway, all of this was somewhere in the back of my mind when I made the Walking Dead purchase. I have avoided the TV show and don't read the Walking Dead comics either. But I am a fan of TellTale Games, and I know they can deliver a good story.

[FlyingCarcass]

I'm recycling an old topic since I don't want to start a new one, and while this is neither about Steam nor summer, I figured I'd out to spread the word to my fellow CoHless CoHers that gog.com (Good Old Games, it's owned by the guys that make the Witcher games) is giving away free copies of Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics today and tomorrow. (Just note that the servers are a bit slow due to the load).

[Arachnion]

I'm recycling an old topic since I don't want to start a new one, and while this is neither about Steam nor summer, I figured I'd out to spread the word to my fellow CoHless CoHers that gog.com (Good Old Games, it's owned by the guys that make the Witcher games) is giving away free copies of Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics today and tomorrow. (Just note that the servers are a bit slow due to the load).

Yeah, I just made a thread about it!

Didn't see your post here beforehand.

Thought I'd come in here and say "HEY GUYS, CROSSPOSTING.."

http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,9441.0.html