Steam holiday sale Dec 20-Jan 2

The Game Room
1

I was originally going to put the steam Holiday sale in with the treasure hunt sale thread, but on second thought there’s not much reason for newbies to the thread to scroll through 2 pages worth of discussion on a now completed sale/contest. Since the holiday sale is the big event for the year, I’m going to give it its own thread.

Like previous Christmas sales, this is a combination of almost everything in the steam catalog being 33%+ off, but also with a set of about ten daily deals that are only good for 24 hours that are discounted further than that. I typically recommend that you don’t rush to buy anything that’s not in a daily sale, since it may come up later. So you might buy a $50 game for $25 because it’s 50% off, but then find 3 days later it’s on the daily sale for 75% off.

The main store page is here, or of course in your steam client.

Some publishers have their entire catalogs with a minimum of a certain percent off.
THQ is 33-50%
Valve is 50%
Square Enix is 50%
Ubisoft is 25%
Codemasters is 33%
2K is 33%
Bethesda is 25%
EA is 25-50%
PopCap is 30%
LucasArts is 50%
id is 25%

There are a bunch of smaller publishers too. You can look at page 16 of the virtual catalog on the main page. These are just the base discounts - many games will be discounted further.

Many of the publishers also release gigantic packs of all their games for a heavy discount. These are often insanely good values.

The 2k pack has over $400 worth of games for $80.
The THQ pack has $400 worth for $50
The Square Enix pack has $600 worth of games for $75.
The Valve pack has a ton of good games for $25, but probably stuff you already own.

There are a bunch of other packs - I won’t list everything right now - but check out page 14.

There are also crazy value packs of indie game - 5 games for $5.

Smarts pack: Puzzle Dimension, Quantz, Droplitz, Puzzle Agent, Lumines
Fright pack: Zombie Driver, The Void, Scourge Project, The Path, Burn Zombie Burn
Flight pack: Flotilla, Gratuitous Space Battles, Dogfighter, Guns of Icarus, Everyday Shooter
Mix pack: Plain Sight, Eufloria, Cogs, Darwinia, Defcon
Kids pack:
Max & the Magic marker, Crayon Physics, Toki Tori, Delve Deeper, Secrets of Magic Crystals
Beat pack: Beat Hazard, Rythm Zone, Chime, Turbo, bit.trip
Future pack: Hacker Evolution, Uplink, System Protocol one, Twin Sector.
Adventure Pack: Mr. Robot, Jolly Rover, Gish, Samorost 2, And Yet It Moves
2d pack: Super laser racer, Geometry Wars, VVVVVVV, Bullet Candy, Galcon Fusion
Fantasy pack: Nyxquest, Faerie Solitaire, Spectromancer, Bob Came in Pieces, Fortix
Brain pack: Zen Bound 2, Diamond Den, Puzzle Bots, Windosill, Big Brain Wolf

I pretty much recommend buying all of those. The games are a buck each and you’re supporting small developers.

And… today’s daily deals. Every day there will be a set of new deals that only last 24 hours, with the new set replacing the old set at 10am PST.

Battlefield Bad Company 2: $6.79
Deus Ex Collection: $3
Fallout 3 GOTY: $20
Lego Batman: $5
Peggle Complete: $8
Super Meat Boy: $3.75
Titan Quest Gold: $5
F1 2010: $20
F.E.A.R. Complete Pack: $10
Portal $3.75, or if you own HL2, $2.25
Prince of Persia: All games 75% off, Forgotten Sands $5, all others $2.50
The Oddboxx (all oddworld games): $12.50

I’ll be back with recommendations later when I have time to process everything.

Discuss, recommend, etc. etc.

2

I"m thinking of picking up Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Super Meat Boy. Has anyone played those two? What do they think?

3

Super meat boy is crazy fun. A cool shoutout to the crazy hard platformers of old.

It IS hard though, but half the fun, IMHO, is completing a level and then watching all your meatboys run out and get turned to mush!

F1 2010 is a great racing game. More arcade than sim, but a lot of fun and very challenging. If you like the sport and enjoy simmi racers definitely give it a shot.

4

Bad Company 2 is weird. It’s an awesome FPS with great graphics and good gameplay. It should be the perfect game. But for some reason, it just can’t hold my attention for more than half an hour at a time. I don’t think I’m the only one either. Of the 15 friends I have that own the game, I can only think of one that actually plays it.

For $6 though, it’s a great deal.

5

Pondering Titan Quest, though honestly WoW sucks up so much of my anti-social time that I might not play it for months.

6

between giving it away for free and discounting orange box every other week does anyone actually not own portal at this point?

Anyway, the original prince of persia games (sands of time, warrior within, two thrones) for $2.50 each are great deals if you like action platformer type games. I’ve not played any of the others so I can’t comment on them.

Deus ex, if you’ve somehow manage to not play it, is also an excellent game for $3. Invisible war is… not quite as good… but you can consider it a freebie.

Bad company 2 is pretty good if you like online shooters. It’s got an ok single player campaign too, but don’t buy it just for that.

7

Cool. My SO recently installed the Steam client on her system so she can get in on these sales.

8

Just thought I’d say thank you for putting this OP together.

Nothing is grabbing me day 1 but I’ve bought so much off of Steam this last month already.

9

Wow, thanks for the heads up.

Man, all these amazing games and I’m stuck on a laptop with integrated graphics. Grr. Now if only Valve would buy OnLive and integrate it into Steam… can you say “world peace”?

10

How long will these last? I know one of my gifts for xmas is a steam wallet influx of cash. If the sales are over before xmas, I can maybe beg to get the gift now :slight_smile:

Anyone replying, keep in mind that I’ll b using this thread as my proof! ::wink::

11

That would rock. Imagine if you could play the game on your main rig, continue the game on your low powered HTPC, go to work and on the commute whip out your ipad and continue the game there.

Man that would be sweet.

12

These sales will be coming to a close 5 minutes before whenever you get the money is. UNLESS IT COMES FAST.

Actually, it really would be useful to have the money now rather than on Christmas, since there will be 5 daily sale periods and you might miss on a steep daily sale discount of something you want.

13

Titan Quest is a great deal. It’ll take you hours to complete the game on normal, then you have epic and heroic. Then you have 8 other classes to try.

14

I’ll probably get at least one Prince of Persia game, but I don’t think I’m interested enough to grab them all. I think people told me Sands of Time was the best one, but that’s before Forgotten Sands came out. So if I’m only going to grab one - go with Sands of Time?

And does it play well with an xbox 360 controller? Easy to set up? The game is pre-360 I think.

15

Sands of Time is classic. I don’t think the other games improved on it at all, although Two Thrones was enjoyable.

The 360 controller is almost exactly the same as the original X-Box controller, so you should be fine.

16

My ranking of the Sands of time trilogy:

  1. Sands of Time
  2. Two Thrones
  3. Warrior Within

Sands of Time has a lot of charm, the sequels less so (though TT comes pretty close). Warrior Within’s plot is especially asinine. For some reason they decided to make the lovable wise cracking Prince from the first one into a massive douche. Two Thrones tries to redeem the character and, more or less, succeeds in this. From a purely gameplay perspective the sequels are better. WW had some nice improvement to the platforming and the combat is fun and nuanced in a way the first one wasn’t. TT takes the gameplay from WW with minor improvements and makes the Prince likeable again. It succeeded in giving the trilogy a satisfying conclusion.

Scores:
Sands of Time 9 / 10
Warrior Within 8 / 10
Two Thrones 8.5 / 10

For some reason I couldn’t get the retail version of Sands of Time to work properly with the XBOX360 controller. The game didn’t respond when I tried to push left on the left analogue stick. It worked fine with my €5 generic controller.

17

Oh, there’s one pack I missed. The indie “heavy hitters” pack has Trine, Braid, Audiosurf, Shattered Horizon, World of Goo, Osmos, Zeno Clash, and The Maw for $20 (82% off). I’ve played all but the last two and if you don’t have those games that pack is easily worth it. They are all (the first 6) great. There’s also an indie daily sale that’s not listed on the main page of daily sales - in today’s case it’s Sol Survivor for $5. I’ll try to list those in future updates.

18

I am, of course, way way way behind the times when it comes to gaming. My ex-wife was a huge Portal fan, and I’d always meant to try it, but didn’t want to spend the money in case it frustrated me. At this price, I will finally be picking it up when I get home.

Thanks to the OP!

19

I have put over 200 hours into Titan Quest and its expansion. They’re ridiculously addictive. And when you’ve finished your first playthrough, you don’t have 8 other classes to try: due to their weird multiclassing system, you have 71 other classes to try. I’ve got 3 characters above level 30, and one in the early 20s, and between them I’ve tried out all classes except one (Spirit). Finding cool combinations is great.

The only one here that’s tempting to me is Fallout, and it’s not deeply discounted enough; I’ll probably wait to get it over the summer. When Batman goes back on sale, I’m so there.

20

Is Super Meat Boy locked at an asinine frame rate or something? It strikes me as odd that my Q6600 @ 3.0 and 8800GTS is pulling 20 fps (as per Fraps) in level 2 - 1. Is that level smooth for everyone else?