If you have not downloaded and played Osmos (for only $2, for gosh sakes!!!), you are missing out on an incredibly addicting game!!!
And it has awesome graphics and a cool, modern digital soothing soundtrack, though I’m sure a bunch of you would prefer to play it to heavy metal. 
Okay, so they originally had Civ 4 + expacks as a daily deal, but then removed the expacks. But then I just noticed they discounted the Civ 4 complete pack to $13 (which is a ridiculously good deal) - but since that isn’t mentioned in the daily sale, I’m not sure if that ends in 2 hours (when new daily sales spring up) or if that’s now part of the sale that runs to Jan 3.
Anyway, if you’re interested in the game and you see this within 2 hours, buy it now at $13.
Today’s deals are pretty bad.
Medieval 2: Total War $5 (great deal - except wasn’t this the normal sale price anyway?)
Street Fighter IV $30
Shattered Horizon $15
Crysis Maximum Edition (game+expack) $40. It’s not even discounted, so I don’t know why this is part of the daily deals.
Multiwinia + Darwinia $7.50
Half-life: Source $7.50 (I suppose hl1 is worth it but you can get it as part of a lot of valve bundles)
Oh, they screwed up the initial batch. Now there are some huge deals.
Shattered Horizon: $5
Street Fighter IV: $9.99
Half-life: Source $2.50
Multiwinia + Darwinia $3
Crysis Maximum Edition $13.59
Medieval 2: Total War: $5
Now I can pretty much recommend all those games, even though I haven’t played some. Shattered Horizon is a space-based FPS with low/no grav environments and suits with thrusters. I’ve heard good things about it.
I heard good things about Street Fighter 4 being a high quality port
The Crysis games took a lot of undeserved criticism early on, they’re pretty good, and modern mid-range systems will run them fine
It might influence your decision to know that someone is making a Mechwarrior mod for Crysis, a total conversion. I’ve never played it so I can’t say it’s great but it looks cool and I know there’s a lot of buzz for it in the community.
You get both the game and expack for $14, plus mods like that, so I may get it.
Does anyone want a guest pass for Shattered Horizon? I would just suggest you look at any of these videos and if it looks cool to you, just buy it - it’s only $5 for the next 15 hours. But if you want to try it out first, I have guest passes that let you play the full game for a limited time, tell me your steam name.
Played it - it’s pretty fun, looks pretty good. It doesn’t have a ton of depth so it won’t be a game you get hundreds of hours out of, but it’s unique and interesting and I’m sure you’d get $5 worth of entertainment out of it if the premise seems appealing to you.
Today’s deals:
Mass Effect $4.99
Portal $4.99
Sam & Max Complete $14.99
DOOM Pack Complete $13.59
Devil May Cry 4 $22.49
RedLynx Trials 2: Second Edition $2.49
These sales are killing my wallet. The deals are just so good, and I now have like a years’s worth of games to play.
I especially love seeing games that I bought for $50 in the store a year ago, only cost $5 on Steam. And the Steam versions are better. I don’t have to keep track of dozens of discs, CD keys, and I can easily play on any platform and Steam Cloud saves my game on their servers (so I don’t have to dig my save files out and put them on a flash drive).
I also don’t have to worry about DRM, which was turning me off PC gaming, and things like activation limits (I’m looking at you, initial release of Bioshock). I remember being worried about botching an install of Bioshock, and losing an activation, or just trying it out on my laptop, and also losing an activation.
Awesome service. It’s annoying when the servers get full, and you can’t download a game for a bit, but that’s probably because of extra traffic from the holiday sale.
Anyone know if Mass Effect is worth it? The reviews seem pretty positive.
Mass Effect is a great game. The only bad marks I’d give it are for lackluster side quests and the overall flow of the Citadel part of the game.
Most of the side quests involve some boring planet exploration. Very repetitive mostly because all of the side quest planets are the same featureless landscape but also because the side quests themselves aren’t really very interesting.
Also, It’s too easy and tempting to spend hours in the citadel which clashes a bit with the action based parts of the rest of the main quest. They really should have split up the citadel into 3 parts, each with it’s own narrative and set of side quests.
The main quest and the action however are superb, interesting, and engaging. Worth the $40 price tag, nevermind the on sale price.
Yeah, I hear nothing but good stuff about Mass Effect. Portal is a must buy for $5 if you don’t have it already for some reason.
I have gotten literally like 40 games since these last 2 sales. I’m overwhelmed. I think “hmm what should I play? Well let’s open my steam games list and see” and then my head asplodes.
The front page says “deals through january 3rd” - I would hope the word “through” is inclusive, because I only plan to buy some of the games after I’ve seen all of the daily sales, and I don’t want to accidentally find that I missed the sale on Midnight of the morning of Jan 3.
So why take the chance? Just buy them today.
Well, the chance is that the game I buy today will be even further discounted tomorrow. That’s happened a few times in this sale. Hence wanting to wait until the last day to buy non-daily deal stuff.
Today’s deals:
Trine $4.99
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 $10.19
Painkiller: Collectors Pack $8.74
Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind Game of the Year Edition $4.99
Counter-strike: Source $4.99
Trine is a really pretty, fun light hearted/casual platformer game that totally is worth $5.
CSS is still hugely active (like… hundreds of thousands of players per day) so if for some reason you don’t have it but wanted to try obviously now is the time.
I payed $8 for Trine a couple days ago, but I can’t complain too much about a $3 difference. 
I agree with SenorBeef - definitely worth it.
I might pick up Morrowind - I enjoyed Oblivion, and I did play through character creation + a tiny bit of Morrowind, but I don’t remember anything about it.
And the way they have their server list setup is so great. Tons of dedicated servers, a bunch of filters to help you find what you want and custom maps and custom game types as well.
I dunno dude, I hear the future of gaming is just being randomly dropped into a standardized game setting and running your server off the home connection of whichever player’s router has the right NAT settings.
I’m guessing they’ll be until the end of Sunday at least, given that they’re still listing a countdown until the next set of deals. Also, on the steam forums, it appears everyone is waiting for (and wildly guessing at) the last day’s deals.
I just bought Trine based wholly on y’all’s recommendation; if Witcher doesn’t go on sale tomorrow, I’ll buy that one.
This sale is definitely letting me atone for years of pirating computer games. I used to justify pirating games by saying I’d pay for it if I liked it and played it a lot, but then I never seemed to get around to actually buying them. It was one of my new-years resolutions to resolve this. During this sale, of the games I torrented in the past, I’ve bought Civ4, Half Life 2, KOTOR, Painkiller, Freedom Force, Oddworld, Sid Meier’s Pirates, X-Com, and Morrowind. I’ve easily sunk 1,000 hours into those games alone in the past couple years. Somehow I feel better morally.
OTOH, the problem I had with a Civ 4 expansion purchased from D2D requesting a CD led me to torrenting Civ 4 Complete* for the no-CD patch.
*I had already purchased the individual components separately.