Free game scored for completing one of the goals: Anomaly Warzone Earth. Normal price $10, currently 50% off, was 66% off on daily deal yesterday. But for me, free. Thank you, Steam!
Oh, hey, the “You Monster” portal-themed Defense Grid DLC is only $1.25 today.
I’ve got 50% off L.A. Noire - only usable after the new year, but it’s still $22 cheaper than the sale price. If anyone wants the voucher, I’ll trade it for a copy of Trine when its objective unlocks and it enters the daily sale - it should be $2.50 at that point.
The coupon thing is sort of perplexing to me. Aside from a few golden coupons, they don’t become valid until after the sale ends. At which point they seem to give you the same discount or worse that you’d get from just buying the game now in the sale.
The only thing I can see as a benefit is if the game you want goes on sale after Jan 2 but before they expire in march - and you could stack the coupon with the new sale. Still, seems like a narrowly-focused gimmick.
I picked up Payday last night. It’s fun for a 4-man FPS but it looks to be very short. Just six maps and while I only played the first map, it all took place in the bank building (naturally) as opposed to the large L4D style maps. It was a large bank building but a bank building nonetheless. Needless to say, there’s a lot of back and forth involved: run upstairs to the manager’s office… now downstairs to the security office… now back upstairs to the floor over the vault… now…
I played the map once single player and once multiplayer (for the achievement) and completing both took me under an hour.
I’d say try it if you’re the sort to play a game for 15-20 hours and then say “I got my ten bucks worth out of that so it’s all good”. If you’re the sort to complain that Portal is too short at ~5 hours to spend $2.50 on, I’d definitely give Payday a pass.
I read on their forums that it has some variation in running the same map. The secondary objectives can change and such, and the places you meet resistance can change, but yeah, not a ton of content.
I decided that - as a 4 player coop game, you don’t need a thriving multiplayer community to play it - so I’ll wait till it hits $5 and I’m sure a bunch of other SDMBers will get it too and that price and we can play together. No pubs needed.
The game changed slightly over the two plays – the bank manager was in a different office, for instance, so you can’t just speed run it blindfolded. The physical layout looked identical though; no change-ups to what room is where. And I can’t speak for the resistance changing since playing with three other independent living people is different than three AIs who follow you like puppy dogs. There weren’t any appreciable differences between the two runs for me.
I think waiting until it hits $5 is a valid decision. I think I’ll get my ten-spot out of it but I tend to rotate out of games fairly quickly so replay value and a long-term community isn’t as important to me as the initial experience.
So, something odd. The Ship was an innovative sourcemod with unique gameplay released as one of the first non-valve games on steam. The original studio died and it was forgotten about because there was never anyone around to put it on sale.
The premise is that you have 8-16 players on various ships, who are each given a different target to assassinate. You will have one target to assassinate, and one person will have you as their target. You also have various sim-style needs to take care of - sleep, bathroom, etc. - you need to plan it in a way that doesn’t leave you vulnerable to your attacker, but if you don’t take care of them, you could piss yourself or fall asleep on the floor. There are murder weapons scattered around the ship in various places, and the longer it’s been since they’ve been used, the higher their value becomes. So if “Butcher knife” becomes a high price weapons, you’ll have to start planning your route to take you through the kitchen to grab one… and your assassin might have the same idea.
Anyway, it’s really unique and I’ve been wanting to grab it for a few years but unwilling to pay $20 for it. But I’ll give it a go at $2 a copy. The multiplayer is mostly dead but we could schedule SDMB events to get servers going.
A new small dev studio bought out the rights to the game for nothing and has decided to improve it. I told them on the forums that they need to make it visible and cheap on the sales to have any chance of reviving it, but instead they tried a different, weirder strategy:
So it sounds like with a $10 purchase, you’ll be able to give out 5 copies in total (2 to friends, 2 to friends of friends, your copy), making the game $2. Which is the right price, but it’s a weird marketing strategy which no one will see because it won’t appear on a daily sale.
Anyway, check it out. If you’re interested, get involved in group buys or just buy it yourself for $10 and give out the extra copies.
Today’s Dailies:
Blur - $4.99 (75%)
Divinity II - $9.99 (75%)
Warhammer: Space Marine - $24.00 (50%)
Brink - $4.99 (75%)
Limbo - $2.49 (75%)
Silent Hill: Homecoming - $9.99 (75%)
Mass Effect - $4.99 (75%)
Mass Effect 2 - $4.99 (75%)
Torchlight - $3.74 (75%)
Alien Breed Franchise (75%)
Operation Flashpoint: Red River - $8.99 (80%)
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising - $2.99 (80%)
Avalon: the Black Fortress - $2.49 (75%)
Skydrift - $4.99 (50%)
New deals:
Torchlight $3.75
Divinity 2 $10
Mass Effect 1-2 $5 each
Brink $5
Limbo $2.50
Operation flashpoint dragon rising $3, red river $9 (80%)
Blur $5
Alien Breed trilogy $2.50 each or $5.75 for all
Silent Hill Homecoming $10
Space Marine $25
Avalon: The Black Fortress $2.50
Skydrift $5
Achievements/tickets for:
Defcon
Rise of the immortals
Polynomial
Space Marine
Post Apocalyptic Mayhem
Toki Tori
We should get SDMB games going of defcon to get the achievement… I really love that game. It’s not on the daily sale but it’s $2.50 throughout the sale or just $5 for the whole introversion pack (Darwinia, multiwinia, uplink, defcon) - easily worth it.
Sigh Should have waited for the sale to buy Batman. Ah well.
No one should ever buy any single player game at full price, it just doesn’t make sense. On the other hand, you people who do it anyway are the reason they can sustain this model without prices collapsing across the board (and risking the funding of future games), so thanks for that, I guess.
Be very careful of LA Noire at present, especially if you run vista64. There are a lot of gamers unable to run this. Suggested solutions from Rockstar involve everything from running with admin priviledges to a complete re-install of Windows.
Also if you have any software requiring .net4.0 tough. It’ll run with 3.5 but not 4.0.
I’ve just noticed that there are three different indie bundles: The Super, the Awesome, and the Mega Indie Bundles. Each has a different set of 10 games for $20, or $2 per game. If I were to spend my money on just one of the bundles, which one should it be?
I’m getting Limbo for sure.
What can anybody tell me about Space Marine? What is it comparable to and is it any good?
None of them. Get the Humble Indie Bundle #4, which is running on a different site (but most of the games are Steam codes.) I haven’t been a fan of the Humble bundle in the past, but you get so many good games for only $5.25 that the $20 Steam packs just aren’t worth it.
personally, i’ve since come to value the price of games on Steam at $10. any extra you pay is a premium for getting the game right then, as opposed to waiting months or years for the price to drop during a sale. for example, i’ve got both Mass Effect titles cheap during their sales, but i doubt i’ll wait when the third title comes.
this only applies to games or companies i trust of course. with the common practice* of release-buggy-and-patch-later, buying at full price really does make little sense.
- of course, as a side effect of this rule of thumb, i don’t actually know if this is still the case anymore..
So… Divinity II? Any good?
The tickets don’t apply to titles released after January 2nd, so they really are just fundamentally useless. I don’t know what Valve was thinking.
I’ve already got TF2 installed, so it was just a matter of getting the updates. I’ve been a bit put off by the slow rate of item drops relative to the number of available items, and it is 10GB by now, so I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is just looking for the extra objective.
I’ve downloaded Rise of Immortals for today’s objective but haven’t been able to start playing yet, as the website you must access to register your account seems to have been crashed by all the new players.