You people are useless! USELESS!!!111!!
I bought it anyways. It’ll probably be a month or two before I get to do any real playing.
-Joe
Yeah, missing the sale sucks. It’s amazing how many people who play games on Steam every day had no idea there was a summer sale going on. I told a few people on my friends list and they were all surprised.
L4D2 is worth the full price though. So buy it and play with us. 
New daily deals:
Team Fortress 2 $6.79
Street Fighter IV $10
Arma 2 $20
GTA 4 $5
Osmos $2.50
Numen: Contest of heroes $7.50
Commandos Collection $3.75
X-com Complete Pack $3.74
TF2 is definitely worth it at that price if you don’t already have it for some reason.
Arma 2 has hefty system requirements and it’s not the most polished game, but it’s extremely ambitious - it’s a combat simulator modelling soldiers and dozens of vehicles. If you have good hardware and you’re into that sort of thing, it’s worth it.
Osmos is a great little puzzle type game, definitely worth $2.50. Well, it’s not a pure puzzle game because it’s real time and requires a degree of precision. Just check out the video.
GTA 4 I might finally get around to getting. I’ve avoided it thus far because rockstars’s half ass port is supposed to be a clusterfuck, but maybe they cleaned it up by now?
The x-com games are old, but classics. I’m pretty sure steam integrates whatever you need to play (dosbox and settings) so it’ll work right away, but I’ve never tried it myself. If you can deal with the old ass interface and old graphics some of them are great games.
You can also get Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead bundled with Arma for $50. Since Arrowhead is normally $40, you’d be getting arma 2 effectively for $10. If for some reason you were convinced you wanted both but didn’t have Arma 2 yet.
Look at the Operation Arrowhead trailer in HD on steam. Holy shit that looks amazing.
Yay! You know about the Global Channel for Dopers (CECIL), yes?
I do not…
This is awesome. I’ve been stocking up on the puzzle games; gives me something to pass the time when I have to work weekends.
I’ve picked up Peggle Deluxe, Peggle Nights, Bejeweled 2, Chains, And Yet It Moves, Chuzzle Deluxe, Osmos, and Toki Tori, and barely spent 40 bucks.
Look under “Tabs”, Search/Join Channel, look for CECIL, join it. Then right click on a chat tab and add it to that tab, otherwise you can’t see it (do this with every new character). On rare occasions a glitch will drop the added channels and you’ll need to re-add them, by the way.
Search is useful to find other global channels as well; global channels are really the best way of finding teams and events in CoX. “Global channel” by the way refers to the fact that it is accessible anywhere in the game.
Also, if you need help there’s a good sized Help file, assessable by typing /help or from the menu. There’s also a channel called help, accessible by typing /hc and your message; make sure you are on the tab with Help in it or you can’t see any responses.
You can also split the chat tab into top-and-bottom windows, pick a tab and choose move to bottom/top.
Oh, and you might want to register on the CoX forums; the community there is a pretty good one, unlike the forums for certain other games.
One initial problem was the overreliance on Rockstar Social Club. I’m pretty sure they fixed that. The system requirements are still onerous, especially in the video section. It’s partially tied to you card’s actual memory, so even if you have a relatively new card with only 256 or 512k, then it limits you to that much. There are command line ways to get around it.
The Commandos series is older but fun. It’s a WWII overhead stealth game with multiple characters with different abilities (sniper, sapper etc.).
Me and at least 1 friend are going to be playing Arma 2 more now, so if you want to play coop missions with us and stuff you can. $20 is probably about as cheap as the game will get anytime soon. It’s technically very demanding and not perfectly polished but it’s the only game in town for that type of game - giant world military combat sim. I recommend it if the idea appeals to you and you have a beefy computer.
Man, Zeno Clash is one weird game.
Reports about that were what made me leery of the “free Portal” deal – my spyware-sense started tingling.
What are you referring to by “reports about that”? I googled stuff like “portal spyware” or “valve portal spyware” and nothing comes up.
Valve is about the most upstanding, decent company there is. I’d find it hard to believe they’d pull some sort of shit like that. Do you (or Attack from the 3rd dimension) have any information about this?
What do you mean by “spends its free time loading up stuff”? How does it does it open websites “when it wakes up”? What sort? I’ve never heard of the behavior you’re describing.
My copy of Portal does no such thing, it acts like any other game.
All Steam games, as far as I can tell automatically download updates to themselves. Team Fortress 2 has been getting them quite a lot lately, but I’ve seen all the other games I play also just start downloading an update when I start Steam.
You can stop it in your Settings tab.
A few weeks ago I had Portal download a tiny update nearly every day for a few days. I haven’t played Portal in a while but I remember reading that Valve was making small in-game changes (like new graffiti on certain walls) that are teasers for Portal 2.
Maybe this isn’t the thread for it, but a pet peeve is that Steam puts “Released September 26, 2009” or whatever next to their titles. This is the date added to Steam, they should say it was “added” then, but anyway I really couldn’t give a shit when that is. I want to know the release date of the original game so I can figure out which is the expansion or whatever. Instead I have to go to Wikipedia and manually type out the title and figure it out from there.
Of today’s specials, Left 4 Dead is the big temptation–but I’m really not much of a multiplayer player. Is the game worth getting for single player?
It’s playable but most of the fun comes from the multiplayer aspect. If you can, buy Left 4 Dead 2 instead and play some games with us.
Most of us aren’t very good anyway. 
Left 4 Dead 2 feels a lot better for some reason. I bought Left 4 Dead when it first came out, and I’ve played it for about 10 hours. I think there’s been some weeks where we’ve played Left 4 Dead 2 for 20 hours! So, yeah, Left 4 Dead 2 is a lot more playable, even if I don’t really know why.
I’ve only ever played Left 4 Dead as single player, and I’d say it’s worth getting. Especially for only $6.80!