At least it doesn’t fill up the closet!
Take a look at your hard drive and think again. 
Speaking of which, I’ve been having to clear hard drive space to download all these games. I have 1.2tb of storage at my disposal, which you’d think would be a lot, but I manage to find ways to fill it up. Oh well - not like I need to have every game I own installed at once, and steam redownloads games ridiculously fast for me - during low usage times I can max out my connection at around 3 megabytes/sec from steam.
It’s tempting to get a new hard drive though when you can get a very high quality 1tb drive for $100, or a great 640gb drive for $70. The WD special/black edition drives in those sizes are both big and surprisingly fast.
Edit: And I want an SSD so badly to replace my raptor, but they’re too pricey for me now still. The tech is advancing so fast, I bet we’ll be able to get them under $200 in a year.
Looks like Direct2Drive is having a big after Christmas sale. Some of them are deals that Steam also has, some aren’t. I’ve never used D2D so I can’t speak to the quality of the software, maybe someone else can.
But some of the deals are very good and there are a lot of them.
$7.50 for Mount and Blade is tempting, lots of people on the SDMB rave about it.
New Steam daily deals:
Prototype: $20
Dragon Age: Origins $37.50 (Digital Deluxe Edition $48.75)
Torchlight $5
Star Wars Premier Pack $25 (9 star wars games)
Universe At Wear: Earth Assault $5
Lumines Base+ADvance Pack $3
Apparently they are trying to force me to buy Torchlight. Everyone tells me to get it but I’m not sure how many D2 clones I need, but at $5 I can’t pass that up.
Well, $5 is my what the hell price point. Way to make me buy Torchlight, Steam. And I don’t even much care for Diablo style games.
Is Torchlight significantly better than Titan Quest+expansion? I’ve played a few minutes of the demo for Torchlight and they seem to be roughly the same game. Torchlight has a lot more character classes and possibly more detailed skill trees. Both games are roughly equivelant in art design (so far) with different styles. I doubt I’ll end up playing both too much - is Torchlight the better game?
Very nice game, indeed; my only complaint is the static weather. M&B has a large modding community that continually comes up with interesting ways to change the vanilla game. I’ve seen people working on a medieval Nordic mod, a Fallout 3 mod, and even–for an earlier version–a Firefly mod.
ETA: you can check out the game before buying by downloading from TaleWorlds. You need to pay if you want to go higher than level 6, IIRC.
The thing about D2D is that they only license a certain number of installs, similar to Spore.
Hmm, that is some lame. Can you unregister/unlicense a copy and then get one of the downloads back, or is it a bandwidth limiting measure so X installs is all you get? And what is the number of installs?
To be honest, it might have been just the one game (Oblivion, IIRC) but that and a previous encounter with their customer service about a game asking for a CD put me off from investigating. I haven’t bought anything from D2D since May of last year.
Oh yeah, the number of installs for that game was 5.
Went ahead and got the demo of torchlight. Was obvious within a few minutes of playing that it would be worth the $5, I recommend grabbing it, or at least trying the demo. It’s got that unidentifiable video game crack factor.
Torchlight is IME much shorter than Titan Quest, but it has randomized dungeons so new playthroughs are more different. TL was glitchier, but also has an active development team, so that may be fixed in the future(don’t play pet classes). Balancewise they are similar, both with OP abilities, and abilities that don’t scale for crap late game, though TQ has a respec option to fix issues like that. Both also have rather arcane stats that make little or no sense without dredging through the forums, though TQ probably is the worst offender.
Oh, and TQ has far more character classes. There are 8? different masteries, and your character can pick one or two masteries, and those can all be built multiple ways, for a very wide variety of possibilities.
Add that to the(imo) far superior setting, and MP capabilities, and I’d say TQ is the better game, though TL has a few things going for it too.
I’ve beaten Titan Quest and the expansion, while I’ve only played the Torchlight demo, but I did like TQ a lot. It is very similar to Diablo 2, and many skills are similar. You can actually pick 2 different classes in TQ and skills from both, so that adds quite a bit of flexibility. The random item system, acts/act bosses, town portal/waypoints, red/blue potions, etc, are lifted straight from D2, but in a Greek mythology setting. At the time, I thought the graphics were quite beautiful (and still do). The areas are huge, the enemies are pretty varied, and you can experiment to try to find that perfect build.
From what little I played of Torchlight, it seemed more similar to Fate, which was a one-town, one-dungeon, casual game. It did seem fast paced and fun from the demo, and it is $5 on Steam, so I’ll probably pick it up.
It seemed like the exact same game to me, which makes me regret buying it as i now own both.
I can’t find the Star Wars Premier pack. Their search feature sucks. Any help please?
-Joe
That daily special is over.
I’m not certain that there is a regular “Premier” package. It may have been made up for yesterday’s sale.
The daily sales run from 9am PST until 9am PST the next day, and then they dissapeare and are replaced by a new one. The star wars one was yesterday.
Today’s deals:
Deadspace $10
Hearts of Iron III $7.50
Zombie Driver $2.50
Day of Defeat: Source $2.50
Complete Popcap Collection $50
Is the Popcap collection worth it? There are 30 games there, which puts them at under $2 each, but I’m not sure how many good games Popcap has. Certainly they struck gold with bejewled and peggle, but are the other ones good? I was thinking of gifting it to my mom to try to ease her into gaming.
Hearts of Iron 3 is good I hear. The Hearts of Iron series is a very detailed strategy game where you control any country in the world in the 1930s-1940s period, including all sorts of details from running an economy, directing research, diplomacy, trade, military operations, etc. It’s highly detailed and very accurate yet flexible … at least from my experience with previous games. If you are into WW2 and/or very detailed strategy games I would recommend it at that price.
Anyone who is really into WWII gaming should definitely get Hearts of Iron. Paradox’s programmers are amazingly detailed in their approach to simulation of all the aspects of international strife. Indeed, the only complaint anyone ever raised about Victoria was that it was too detailed; it made the game almost impossible to complete in anything like a reasonable amount of time. But they ironed all that out of Hearts of Iron. 