Yep. I’ve never had any problems gifting myself games that are region locked where I am via a dummy US steam account.
Today’s sales:
Mount and blade franchise 75%: Warband $7.50, With Fire and Sword $4
Trine $2 (90%)
Fallout New Vegas $15 and DLC 70% off
Doom Franchise 75% off, doom 3 $5, complete pack $9
Singularity $7.50 (75%)
Frozen Synapse $12.50 (50%)
Serious Sam franchise 80% off
Bully: Scholarship edition $4
R.U.S.E. $10 and dlc 66% off
Bionic Commando Franchise: Bionic Commando $10, Bionic Commando Rearmed $5
Homefront $25 (50%)
Alpha Protocol $5 (75%)
Activities for M&B: Warband, Fortix 2, Homefront, Trine, Serious Sam HD: First Encounter, and the freebie is to post a screenshot.
Trine is one of my favorite platforming games ever and I pimp it every time it pops up. At $2 it’s a steal.
Mount and Blade is a really good game. You don’t need the complete pack because there’s no reason to buy the original mount and blade - warband includes everything it did and more. Fire and sword isn’t as good as warband but it’s worth the $4 there.
Has anyone played RUSE? I’ve been looking into it for a while but I’ve never pulled the trigger.
I bought Serious Sam las ttime around. It’s good clean stupid FPS fun, very old-school.
Trine? Short, reasonably entertaining, priced about right IMO.
Bully? Sheesh, guys, if you’re gonna port a game, make an effort. I really wanted to like it, but gave up after a few hours. Just not very fun.
I’m considering Fallout:NV. I’ve never played any fallout game before. How would this be as a starting point?
It’s completely stand-alone - you actually start with the good ol’ amnesia thing on account of getting shot in the head, so it’s very fitting if you haven’t played any of the others. 
I have it already, I’m just wondering if I should get the DLCs for 3e each.
I’m curious about Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword. Is it completely standalone? Does it have much of a story? (I’m not generally into completely open-world games if there’s no story to hold it together - that’s the main reason I haven’t yet picked up the other Mount and Blade games)
I agree that Trine is good fun, by the way, and certainly worth $2.
Best Buy is selling new vegas for $10 here: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Fallout+New+Vegas+-+Windows/9701395.p?id=1218152460888&skuId=9701395&st=new%20vegas&lp=4&cp=1 and you can get store pickup so no shipping charges.
Steam’s sale is $15, so unless it’s worth $5 to not have to drive down to best buy it’s a better deal.
Anyway it’s a good game but the main problem is it’s really, really easy - getting shot in the head apparently turns you into an unstoppable killing machine. If you don’t mind that, it’s worthwhile and there’s a TON of content if you do all the sidequests and such.
As for the DLCs, I’m undecided on those too. From what I’ve read Honest Hearts is maybe only 5 - 6 hours of gameplay and Dead Money is maybe 10 - 12 if you explore a lot. They are only $3 each on sale but that still seems pretty short.
Yes on both. Fire & Sword has more of a story than the previous two because it’s based on a novel or two. Definitely worth $3.74.
I have RUSE and play it some. Overall I’d say its a decent game. The biggest problem I have with it is that its (at least in my experience) really hard to find humans to play with, and the AI is pretty weak, so the single player is not very fun. Its inferior to other WWII RTS games like company of heroes, but it has enough of a unique feel that I still go back to it every once in a while.
Fire and Sword is standalone, and it has a more cohesive plot than Warband. At least so far, I’m a few hours into it.
People here seem to like Mount & Blade a lot, and yet according to Metcritic, it received largely negative reviews. Why is that?
Well, if you look at the user scores, the original M&B has a 9.0 user score with 284 reviews and Warband has 8.6 with 132 ratings. So it doesn’t impress critics, but it’s well liked amongst players. And… in my experience, the games where when the player reviews and critic reviews are different, the ones with the lower critical scores and higher player scores tend to be good games, and the reverse (say modern warfare 2 or dragon age 2) tend to be shitty ones. To reiterate, Warband has everything M&B has and it’s better, so there’s no need to play the original M&B.
M&B is a pretty technically primitive game, the graphics are outdated, there’s no voice acting, the story is pretty minimal, there’s not a huge variety to the game. It was developed for its first 2 years by a husband and wife team in turkey - it wasn’t until after the game enjoyed some success that they hired a little more staff and kept developing it continuously over the years. It’s still pretty primitive, but solid. Price may also be a factor - it’s always been a bit too pricey to be a budget game, yet the production values are definitely in budget game territory. Not a factor here, since it’s $7.
What it does, though - raising and training an army, actually engaging in medieval style combat - it does very well. If you enjoy hitting someone in the face with a lance at full gallop, or shooting people in the dick with realistic archery, you’ll like the game.
Fire and Sword was done by a different developer without any real technical advancements - just more story and a different time period. I haven’t played it enough yet to really say if it’s good or not - so far it’s fun but not as good as warband - so the bad reviews may be earned there. If you aren’t sure about the series, and want to try it out, Warband is definitely the one to get.
I’ve crossed the 400 game barrier.
Muha. MUhahaha.
Thanks, Lute Skywatcher and SenorBeef! Fire and Sword is now bought 
Today’s sales:
Civ 5 $25 and dlc (50%)
Monday night combat $3.75 or $12.24 for 4 pack
Beat Hazard Complete (game + ultra expansion that adds multiplayer and misc other stuff) $3.24 (75%)
Wings of Prey $4.50 (85%)
AI Fleet Command $3 (85%) or pack with dlc $4.50
Guild wars franchise 50% off - Trilogy with Guild Wars, Factions, and Nightfall for $15
Stalker Franchise 75% off
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare $10 (50%)
King Arthur The Role Playing Wargame complete pack $3 (85%)
Need for Speed franchise 68% off. At the time of this post individual games aren’t discounted but you can get a 4 pack of Undercover, Hot Pursuit, Shift, and Shift 2 for $35. They will probably update the individual discounts soon
Deus Ex $2.50 (75%)
Return to Monkey Island franchise 50% off - $5 for either the remake of Monkey Island special edition or Monkey Island 2. The newer chapters of monkey island games doesn’t appear to be on sale.
Monday Night Combat is a good game and we’ve been running SDMBer games of it. Kind of a steep learning curve for the first few hours but we can teach you.
The Stalker series is good but kind of oddly priced. Shadow of Chernobyl is $5, its sequel Clear Sky is $2.50, and the third installment Call of Pripyat is $3.75. Not sure what’s up with their pricing. I’ve only played SOC, so I don’t know what to recommend if you only want to get one. If you do get SOC, use the… it’s either called 2009 or 2010 complete mod, does a lot of good stuff.
Beat Hazard is a clinical epilepsy stimulator designed as a music game. It’s like a top-down arcade shooter where the intensity of the music dictates the power of your weapons and number of types of enemy. Not bad. If someone gets the ultra version (that has coop/head to head play) and you don’t listen to horrible music I’ll play with you.
Wings of prey is sort of a dumbed down casualish consolized flight sim.
Heard King Arthur was fun, haven’t played it yet, but you get a ton of content for $3.
I was hoping Civ 5 would be cheaper as it has been cheaper in non-steam places a few times. We have had some good SDMB multiplayer games going with up to 8 people. Check in with us in this thread if you buy it and are interested in playing with us.
Dang. If I cared at all about Guild Wars any more I’d be on that bundle sale.
Beat Hazard sounds like fun. Sounds like a shooter version of Audiosurf, which is entertaining if you can find the right music for it (anything less than power metal gets a little sleepy).
Oh right and the activities. They’re for AI War, MNC, Beat Hazard, Foreign Legion Buckets of Blood, Nation Red, And Yet It Moves, and the freebie is to play any game demo.
And the need for speed games seem to have settled into being 40% off.
Oh, and you can pick up both Monkey Island together games for $7.50
Here go another few bucks on King Arthur DLC…
I heartily recommend King Arthur at this price: might as well get the full collection (i.e. with all DLC). It’s like an Arthurian fantasy version of Total War, except plot-based in the vanilla game (the Druids and Saxons expansions apparently introduce your standard “take over the map whenever you feel like trying” gameplay and basic diplomacy actions), and you’ll need to use hero units (the Knights) as by the end they can win battles virtually by themselves. The strategic map leads to both tactical battles and to “choose your own adventure”-style text adventure quests. The game balance is a little off - I consider it a new type of alignment-based difficulty slider - but I really enjoy it and have played through it twice.
I also recommend the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. I’ve played Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat. In my opinion CoP has better gameplay and is more streamlined, but SoC was incredibly atmospheric at the time (although sometimes hard and sometimes a bit of a slog to get through). I’m now wondering if I should get Clear Sky too.
Oh, just found out - there’s a Stalker: Call of Pripyat loyalty bonus (which means you own one of the previous two games) that takes another 50% off the game. That’s why it’s $3.75 to me, people who haven’t bought the games it’s $7.50. But if you want either of the other games, buy that first, and then buy the call of pripyat after - the loyalty discount should apply then.
Edit: People on the forum said that’s unnecesary, and if you add them all to your cart you’ll get the discount. Test it out before buying.
The CoP price might be for the “loyalty promo” version which requires you to have either SoC or CS before you can buy it. That still makes the prices weird at least here in euro-land: CoP alone was 7.49e, but SoC + CoP bought in that order cost a total of 6e. :dubious:
ETA – I’m too slow. 