Days like these are the ones where I wish my laptop didn’t have an integrated graphics card. I really wanted to play Titan Quest and Defense Grid.
I ended up getting Torchlight (the game that works even on netbooks), Freedom Force, and the Shadowgrounds Pack.
To their credit, buying things online via Steam was fairly painless. It irks me, though, to see the Steam icon take up a permanent spot in my system tray. Is there any way to prevent the Steam app from loading up without causing side effects?
By the way, thanks to SenorBeef and everyone else for letting me know about the sales.
I got 60 plus games, depending on how you count expansions. The majority of these were $5 or less, and included some feature titles (Mass Effect, Bioshock, Mirror’s Edge, Torchlight). I bought the THQ pack on the Christmas Eve Sale, and that helped boost my numbers.
I actually used Steam back in the day with the first Half Life game. I don’t how much distribution they were doing then, but I used it at the time to play Team Fortress online. This is my first time buying games, and I only came back because of the sales. I actually re-bought several of the cheap games I own (Bioshock, Battlefield 2, Unreal Tournament) so I didn’t have to be bothered with the discs anymore.
My only complaint is that their address verification system is very unforgiving for credit purchases (if the billing address you supply doesn’t match that of your card down to the spacing, punctuation, and exact abbreviations, your card can be rejected and your account can be locked). I’m sure most people don’t have a problem with it, but in my case tech support hasn’t been particularly helpful.
Not that it really matters now. I binged on the sale and it’s my resolution to not purchase any more games until I’ve played out the ones I already bought.
Anyway, thanks for the heads up. It was you guys who let me know about the deals.
Steam’s weekend deal is Serious Sam HD for 66% off ($6.79)… not my type of game, but I guess it’s a spiritual successor to doom type games, mindless shooters. It looks like they’re going forward with regular sales hopefully - one weekday sale and one weekend sale would be good, with the occasional multiple sales thrown in. That’s what they did between the black friday and Christmas sales. On D2D “AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity” is half off for $5.
Two mid-week deals on steam currently. All of the King’s Bounty games (turn based tactics/rpg hybrid) are 75% off.
And… Zero Gear is having a free week where everyone can download and play the full version of the game until Sunday. I’ve only played it a little bit but it seems basically like Mario Kart PC. Same type of basic racing, powerups you can use against other racers… more customizable player character (I am currently a cigar-smoking Panda with a traffic cone on my head riding a nuclear bomb with hypnowheels) and some different game modes other than racing. In my brief time playing I saw a soccer mode where you split up into teams and try to push a giant soccer ball into opposing goals, and a skeeball type game where you launch your car into the machine. It’s free, you get to test out the full game, and it’s only like a 600mb download so give it a shot. If enough people get it tomorrow night I’ll probably host some SDMB games. You I think you install the demo, and until Sunday it functions like the full game - but I’m not sure. I may have also gotten it from clicking the “try it now free” news popup when I signed on… the game just appeared on my list.
It’s also 25% off ($14.99) for the duration of the sale, or if you want to get it with friends you can get a 4 pack for $30) for $7.50 each.
The game crayon physics is currently on a “pay what you want” sale. They give you a game key after you make a paypal donation of whatever you feel like. It’s an interesting game - you draw objects and then they become a physical part of that world, which you use to solve puzzles.
I haven’t played it much yet, but after playing the demo for 10 minutes it seems clearly worth a few bucks, so I recommend grabbing it. Only thing… don’t send less than 31 cents, because it’s A) a dick move and B) transactions below that amount actually end up costing them money. I could see them doing something cool like this and getting repaid by an army of douchebags all sending $.01 and costing them money.
I want to buy Mirror’s Edge. I had downloaded it from torrent and I liked it very much.
The boxed version costs 10 euros and has an extra audio cd but it also has Securom so the disk has to be inserted to play. The steam vesrion is more expensive, there’s no audio cd but there’s no copy protection hassle.
Alright, everyone on the planet should be getting Dirt 2 since it’s 50% off ($20) this weekend. Act fast because I’m not positive when “weekend” deals end. Usually after midnight PST on Sunday night/Monday morning, but I wouldn’t chance it.
I’ve told people to get it and they’ve said “well I don’t really like racing games”. I don’t care! It will rip your face off anyway! I don’t like racing games either for the most part, but I’ve been having a blast. It’s way more fun to skirt the edge of a gravel road on the side of a mountain in Croatia or splash through a muddy jungle track in Malaysia than to race on some tarmac race track somewhere. And it’s the most beautiful racing game you’ve ever seen (best if you have a dx11 card, but still looks fantastic on other cards). The visual damage model is pretty awesome - there are all sorts of horrible things you can do to your car. It runs a fine balance between serious and arcade - it’s not a sim racer that you need to be a driving master to succeed at, but it’s got enough realism to feel like you’re really racing a car. The multiplayer, if you get some friends together and play in custom games, is a ton of fun… the default/ranked multiplayer not so much. The only thing that really sucks about is that the interface is pure console retardation, but once you get into a race that doesn’t matter.
Anyway, you can give the demo a try on steam. That won’t really show you how awesome the multiplayer is, but it’s something. At $20 it’s easily worth picking up. We’ve been running some SDMB races and so far we’ve had 5 of us racing together, it’d be cool if we could pick up a few more and run full 8 man races. You’ll want some sort of analog control, whether it be a joystick or a gamepad or whatever - you can play the game on a keyboard but I’m guessing it would be frustrating.
I should add that when some people first start the demo or the game, it sometimes crashes to desktop and fails to launch. It uses some default setting that pisses off some computers. The way to fix this is (on steam) to right click the game on your games list, go to properties, click “Set launch options”, and then enter “-safemode” into that box without the quotes. That launches the game in a low res/low graphics setting, and you can then go into the options and set up whatever resolution/settings you like. Then remove the -safemode switch, and all subsequent times you run the game will fire up fine, under your specified options.
Alternately if you download the demo from codemaster’s site, there will be a “launch in safe mode” option in the start menu.
If you really want it I can gift it to you and you can hit me back on paypal next week.
It’s the publishers who decide what the price and availability will be for different regions - not sure why they made it more expensive there. Sometimes the prices are more in line, sometimes not.
S’okay, I pretty much tripled my Steam inventory during their New Year’s sales so I have plenty to keep my busy. I’ll probably pick up the sequel when I’m finished with the original.
This weekend’s steam deal is awesome. Company of Heroes games for 75% off. Not only that, but you can get them bundled - there’s a Gold Pack that has Company of Heroes and Opposing Fronts, the first expansion, for $7.50, and there’s a complete pack that has the game and both expansions for $12.50.
The game and first expansion have all the important stuff - all the factions. The third expansion just adds a campaign and different game types and isn’t crucial. Still, $12.50 for all 3 is a great deal, but if you don’t want to spend that much for some reason, $7.50 for the first 2 is ridiculously good. Highly recommended if you like RTS games at all - they’re very well done. The original game has a 93 meta score, which is like top 10-20 games of all time territory.
Last chance to grab Company of Heroes. At the very least, I would grab the original at $5, but the first expansion is definitely good and would only be an extra $2.50. If you’re not all that interested, you can skip the second expansion.
I really wanted to play Titan Quest and Defense Grid.
