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Steam Sales

6 years ago
The Steam sales are here, and after two hours of checking out good deals (and cross checking them with Steamdb to make sure these deals are indeed the best the games have seen), I bought a grand total of... two games. Stardew Valley and Megalomaniac. Seriously, there's nothing else that's on sale that hasn't already been on sale for the quoted discounts or more / the discount is pitiably incremental (Firewatch is now 55% off, previous lowest was 50% off). There goes all my enthusiasm. Still, what did you buy?

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Got Civ V and Metro 2033 and Last Light Redux. There goes my free time lol.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
That better be Civ V complete, the base game is a 7.5/10, with both xpacs it becomes a 9.5/10. If I didn't hate horror so much, I would have picked up the Metros as well.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Civ V is not Civ V without BNW and GAK! Binged Metro 2033 in one 11 hour sitting (my back). It is not really horror. More like a cinematic adventure fps in a dystopian setting. Heck, I would say Resident Evil 4 has more horror than both Metros combined. Tots worth it!

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Hmm, looks like I might pick them up after all, then. Still have Dark Souls 2 and Alien Isolation on my backlog though (I swear I'll never finish Isolation -_-)

Steam Sales

6 years ago
only 2 things on my wishlist are for sale. will probably give it another week and buy if nothing else comes up. underwhelming summer sale but w/e maybe next year will be big.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
The sales are now stale. Plus, no flash deals, so the price you see now is the final price. The only thing that'll change between now and July 5 is your mental fortitude to hold out. I honestly don't expect great sales anymore, this is the third 'basic' sale of theirs, and to be fair, I think it's fine for the developers and accordingly for the industry as a whole. I wonder if they'd do something like a coupon system though - unlock unique deals just for you that can't be traded, so not all games are sold at a high discount, but individual gamers feel special.

Steam Sales

6 years ago

Never heard of Megalomaniac before, looks like a Donald Trump simulator from the trailer I saw.

I considered getting Stardew Valley a few times, but then I remembered I tried Rune Factory once and I just didn’t get into it, so probably the same thing would happen with this game. Mizal however said it’s very relaxing to just focus on farming and accused me of having too much toxic masculinity to properly enjoy such games.

Don’t have a real gaming computer so Steam is all a bit useless to me, though I was looking at the sales on the Playstation store and cheaper indy games (Some of which are probably on PC)

Not sure if you’ve ever heard of a game called Thea: The Awakening, but I bought that one recently. It’s a weird hybrid of turn based strategy and card driven combat.

The overhead map is pretty much the same for those type of games, with building up your village, sending people to explore, fight, gather resources, etc. It can get a little complex since you can focus on crafting new things to equip your people with since each person in your village has their own inventory slots, along with their own stats, skills, etc. Also there are events that can occur that can result in a CYOA style choices.

However, the part that made me less enthusiastic for the game was the card driven combat. Basically instead of the usual moving your dudes in a tactical battle map when combat begins, your people are represented by a card and you have to play them in such a manner which will be the most beneficial. The cards are randomized a bit so sometimes your strongest fighters only take a supporting role, unless you reshuffle, and depending on how hard you made the game through the options, you might not get the option to reshuffle, or you have to pay to reshuffle.

To make a long story short, the combat plays like a more complex version of Gwent, and if there was anything I actually disliked about Witcher 3, it was that mini-game.

I tried to like the game despite this, but it’s just a slog to me. Playing cards to fight just isn’t fun. I would have preferred a combat system more like Age of Wonders.

Still, if you are into the whole card driven combat thing and turn based strategy (and doesn’t really have a generic fantasy setting) you might like it.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Stardew Valley is a Good Game, and if you don't like it enough that it eats at least one week of your life there is something broken inside of you.

But I'm not even bothering with the sale this year, I already have way too many games I'll never play or when install.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
I tried Stardew Valley but could not stick with it for more than 1 hour. But at the same time I also cried like a little bitch at the end of To The Moon. I wonder if I am broken.....or...you know....the game is? (hides, plz donut hart me)

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Yeah, it's like Sims 3 that way. Once you're hooked, there's no escaping its vortex until someone dies of old age (in or out of game)

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Wait, Gwent was a mini game? I thought Gewnt was the real game and everything else was just filler -_-

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Lol, I loved Gwent for allowing a break from the main game combat, and the Gwent quests were fantastic

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Megalomaniac is a two trick pony, it's a fairly witty satire, but it runs out of jokes (forever) by the second hour. Not bad for two dollars, so no regrets there.

Stardew was something I'd bought earlier but didn't feel I'd enjoy by the 2 hour mark so got it refunded (six months back). This time, I saw some more advanced gameplay, and I was sincerely impressed. I'm going into it with no mechanical knowledge of the game, and with no guides to support me, and it's a refreshing blast of joy. The game has a lot of honest, authentic care put into it (I understand that outside of the sounds, every thing was made by one guy working alone for 3-5 years, the care shows). The game cares for its player, and that comes across well. I'm one season in, haven't done anything but farm and lately go spelunking, but I can see myself honestly sinking a couple dozen hours into this one no sweat. It's a great palate cleanser from the other stuff I've been playing as well. The game could probably run on Windows 95 though, it has no 'high end graphics' to see for miles, but that again is kind of part of its charm. If anything, I suspect you wouldn't like it because there's no scope to go rogue/blood knight, but that's kind of the entire point. The main villain is Jojamart, the evilly generic hybrid spawn of Walmart (ops) and Amazon (logo) and a bad management team from the looks of it, and the most they do is offer 50% discounts to bankrupt the local economy.

I got access to Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, and the Nonary games as well, so I'll be proceeding to those after this lovely diversion.

Thea looks interesting, I'll check it out.

Steam Sales

6 years ago

Lol. I don’t always need a BloodKnight/Rogue path, but I think for a game like Stardew Valley which focusing on building up your farm and such, I’d need a “hardcore” mode where there’s a bit more risk involved. (Weather, dying, NPCs refusing to be cooperative, etc)

Would have been cool to have an actual “aging” process for the town too, so you (And the NPCs) eventually grow old and die and you just continue playing as one of your children instead.

They could even get around the whole complexities of needing another unique NPC for those that die by just doing a generation Xerox thing and their children are exactly like them, or someone new moves into the town and has a similar personality.

And yes, for those of us that must live forever, there could have still been a quest/mission/etc. that allowed you to find an eternal youth fountain or mix up some sort of youth elixir.

But I imagine adding stuff like death would defeat the purpose of the game.

In any case, while on the topic of building sims, going to also suggest Sheltered if you’re into survival type games. I’ve mentioned this one before in the past on here, but I recently started playing it again now that some of bugs got fixed. (a quick glance on Steam it says its currently only $3.74)

Sheltered is basically a more complex, yet smaller scope version of “Fallout Shelter.” It’s a lot more grim than Fallout Shelter.

You create a family of four with a pet and slowly build up your semi-stocked shelter. Naturally you have go out on the surface to gather more supplies.

A lot of the focus is on crafting and gathering things that are generally going to make your family’s life easier in the shelter. But there is a lot to do. Besides the usual food/water/sleep needs, you also got bathroom and hygiene (Yours and the shelters since that can get dirty over time, attracting vermin) to think about.

The shelter also has a generator, water filter, oxygen filter all of which that will eventually deteriorate over time so those need ongoing maintenance  The generator needs fuel too, so that’s another concern. Upgrading and expanding your shelter will eventually be necessary.

And that’s all the basic stuff to worry about and it’s definitely not only things. Radiation on the surface when going out, hostile people trying to get into the shelter, food poisoning, your family getting stressed out from various things, etc.

You can accept new people into the shelter, but you have to keep track of their loyalty meter. If its not working out between a recruit and the family, it’s probably better to do your best to try to get that person killed off as opposed to telling them to leave so they don’t break or steal anything on the way out.

The game is also one of the rare newer games that has child death since you start out with two and they can die just like anyone else. In fact you can send your kids on the surface to explore and have them kill other people. (Child soldiers for the win)

Oddly food is a lot harder to get than water since there typically is enough rain going through your filter that you probably won’t die of dehydration as long as you’re not taking showers constantly and being smart with the rationing.

Food on the other hand is either canned (Which you need to either find or trade for) or fresh meat from trapping animals on the surface. The problem though lies with needing a freezer to store meat and those aren’t immediately easy to build since you have to get the parts for one first. You can trap all the mutant animals you want but unless you at least have a freezer you won’t be able to eat them. It's one of the few things I don’t like about the game since I’d say you should at least be able to cook the meat and eat it immediately.

And it wouldn't’t be a post apocalyptic sim if you couldn't just cannibalize your dead if you really need to. Though you have the same problems there too, you need a freezer to store the chunks of long pig in.

Still despite the game’s weird obsession with freezers, I think it’s one of the better attempts at a post apocalyptic survival sim.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Sheltered was on my wish list since when you made that thread awhile back so I went ahead and grabbed it. (As well as This War of Mine which was also $4.)

So all my grimdark depressing survival gaming needs covered for the time being, I do believe.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
I haven't played Sheltered, but I got all the dark, modern, pseudo-despair I needed from TWoM. I'm checked out from the genre for now.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
The TWOM people have a game called Orwell that looks interesting, have you heard anything about it? Basically the player is Big Brother and rifles through people's online activities and private lives trying to find terrorists. I might grab it at $5 anyway.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
I've played the first episode, which is free to play as a demo. The UI was weird, the concept was interesting but didn't feel too engaging in what I experienced, and I hear that it's an alright experience on the whole, though with some logical issues. Beholder is another in this genre, but that's even worse than the previous two, mechanically speaking. Papers, please is a solid, slightly lighterhearted cousin to these games.

Steam Sales

6 years ago

Alright, having completed enough of Stardew Valley than is probably healthy, I can say I rate it very highly for its systems design. It has so. many. freaking. things. to do, and yet they're all very simple at their core. The game is marvelously complex, but at the same time extremely accessible. I'd compare it to the free form structure of a Dwarf Fortress, but with a fixed story, and everything's near saccharine levels of niceness (all dialogue options are 'nice,' people become more wholesome as you gain hearts with them - there is no anti-heart/evil path at all). What makes the game excel, is that you're given a free form goal (run a farm), and nothing else.

You're gradually eased into new ways to run that farm and make money, and while everything is extremely simple mechanically, the combination of so many systems means that you're pretty much never bored - until around fifty hours in, and that only lasts a few hours - because you're constantly doing new things or old things in new ways. I went through a fishing phase > a farming phase > an animal rearing + farming phase > a Santa Claus phase (giving gifts to get friendship levels to unlock story content) > to a end dungeon raid phase that was surprisingly fun 70 hours in > to a radical farm re-engineering phase, and at each level, you can still always do the things you did earlier. The game adds on to your mental model very gently, and there are a ton of interactions that are there that you wouldn't have thought off in the first place.

Beyond that, I think I've mentioned earlier about a play that ran near the turn of the century, where the artists had rented a mansion, and characters physically moved throughout the run-time, meeting other characters and having interactions. You as the audience physically followed whichever character you wanted to (or none at all, just stand in one place and see what happens). I really feel like I missed out on an opportunity to see that form of character development and building in action ... until Stardew Valley. Each character has a pre-scripted thing they do every day, and like that play, you'll be able to learn more about the character and their motivations by how they behave, and it's fantastic storytelling that few games have access to, and fewer do well.

On the whole, it's a feel good game, out and out - you have no costs of running the farm whatsoever, being knocked out in a dungeon (the only place you can 'die') is like GTA - you wake up in your bed with less money and lose a few items, and the only 'evaluation' happens near 80 hours in, and if you were taking thing seriously you should have reached max levels everything and have over a million in the bank by then (clearing most of the requirements for the best appraisal). The character development itself is alright, it's not outstanding writing by and far, but by making the characters revolve around what they are (e.g. a writer will hang out at the museum, the town smith closes shop from 4-7 PM to practice his craft, people visit the church on Sunday and there's a lady's aerobics class on Tuesdays) and not just what they say (most/all other games), the game makes for a fascinating example of scripted-emergent storytelling (e.g. you can figure out the true parentage of one of the characters by where they spend their time, somewhere no other characters walk to, except that character's mother). I highly recommend it, and despite me calling it saccharine, the townsfolk have a lot of issues (and they don't all resolve neatly with a bow on top, especially the alcoholics), and with 28 of them, that's a lot of story real estate to mine. I'd highly recommend buying it, it's a unique and rewarding experience, and I understand online co-op will be patched in at a later date, and that'll be a whole other type of an experience.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Do we want to start a CYS Steam group or anything? Or is the idea of voluntarily associating with any of you mongoloids outside the site a symptom of brain trauma?

Steam Sales

6 years ago

We already have one. It's just very old and nobody really does anything in it. It's good to know that the members are alive though.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
What's it called?

Eh, if they're not active on the site, fuck em, we should make a new one. (Does Seth use it? iirc it was in question at one point whether he was still alive, hiding in shame over his failed VN, still just salty over the Kiel thing, or what, and IDK if that ever got figured out.)

Anyway today I blew $300 on a Ruger that probably would have been better spent on a laptop that could be taken into town to allow me to actually download a few of my games. I am experiencing the buyer's remorse. (Though it's nothing like the regrets I feel over what I spent on the damn hedgehog...)

Steam Sales

6 years ago

I'm not super sure what it's called, I think it'it's just something generic like "CYS Steam Group" or the like. It's got some semi-active people, like Betaband, Frank, and Negative (I think?) Other than that it's mostly people who I only know are alive because they like Civ games.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
This is one (there are two), amusingly this was apparently made because the old one was dead, in time it too has fallen. Wouldn't mind another one, if it's actually active.

Steam Sales

6 years ago

Picked up Arma 3 to ease my worse addictions of other things and get involved in the community. surpringly is it's really cool and I made a lot more friends already then I ever did on any other steam game.

Also picked up Company of heros 2, just as a collection to the first one, haven't even touched it yet 

Steam Sales

6 years ago
ARMA 3 is one more of those games that I'd love to play, but I know it requires more of a time commitment then I can manage (Others in this category that I own: Banished, Cities: Skylines, CMANO, Crusader Kings II, DIRT Rally, N++, Offworld Trading Company's higher difficulties, Project CARS, TW: Warhammer, Wargame: Airland battle).

IMO CoH2 is sheer trash compared to the original, they redesigned everything for the worse, I'd honestly consider refunding it.

Steam Sales

6 years ago

Nah, only if you end up joining a clan or something similar would you need to commit, and thats if its hardcore. Theres plenty of casual servers and game modes to just jump on and kill shit and call it a day. Usually just jump on a hunger games or GTA styled map and that's good enough for like a hour if I'm tight in time. Honestly Arma 3 with all the DLC is a reallyyyyyyy big steal for just 25 bucks rather than 70.

I don't plan on playing COH 2 anytime soon, just felt the need to buy it to complete a collection, pretty stupid reason now that I think about it. I'll probably touch that new eastern front mod that just came out for the first game instead

Steam Sales

6 years ago
I would recommed Project Reality (free foreva!) for ultra serious hardcore military action. It is pure tits!

Steam Sales

6 years ago

I have acquired Fallout 3 GOTY and New Vegas Ultimate.

I also got the classic 1, 2, and Tactics.

My total was $24.97. That's less than both Fallout 4 and it's season pass.

 

Life is good.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
get stalker. now!

Steam Sales

6 years ago

... No.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
but...it is justt....2 buck. pls i beg mr tim

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Yeah, it's nearly criminal how cheap older (but still excellent) games sell for. Things like Wolfenstein The New Order, Shadow of Mordor, The Witcher 3 Complete, and the Metro duo are laughably cheap. I'd argue (and probably with no chance of losing), that games on sale are the cheapest form of high quality long-form entertainment available. The Witcher 3 - Complete is easily 150 hours + on just one playthrough, for $25, and in the second playthrough or NG+ there's a slew of content you may have never seen (or chosen alternate dialogue options), the value for money is INSANE. For comparison, that's the price of two standard books or five movies, it's a no-contest.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Holy Shit! The Witcher Trilogy is filthy cheap right now! I almost feel criminal for buying it.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
It's outrageous in India, the entire GOTY edition (which I pre-ordered for the full $76.48 USD, before Indian rupee pricing came along) is Rs 499. For reference, the Rupee's ~65 to a dollar. So, the best RPG game of the last decade is worth a cup of coffee in the US. THAT feels criminal (for the record I do not regret my purchase at all, though it remains the most I've paid for a single game ever, unless we're taking inflation into account, in which case it'd probably be Command and Conquer Generals + Zero Hour). For context, a burger at McDonalds in India is ~Rs 100 (180 if it's non-veg), so three Indian McDonald's burgers.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
You realize the morally correct action here is to let us all transfer money to your Steam account so you can buy us cheap gift copies of whatever games we want, right?

Steam Sales

6 years ago

Too late, Valve patched that bug a month ago. Now gifting only works within region, so I can't gift to regions where the price is significantly higher than what I bought it for. Additionally, I can only gift directly to an account, I can't buy copies on sale to gift later.

For a comparison of what games cost between regions, checkout Steamdb.info.

Most games used to launch at around 999 INR, but that's spiked to 2000 INR this year, and bigger publishers (2K, Activision Blizzard) maintain price parity with US rates (which leads to a ton of piracy, and seeing how they're charging INR 7000 for Shadow of Mordor's sequel, I wish them all the best in getting sales in India). The alleviate that, by the way, by dropping the MRP over time, the new Doom started at INR 4200, dropped to 3000 after 4 months, dropped to 2000 in June this year (not the price after discount, the price before discount), so now a year after launch I can buy it for 3200 INR less than what it launched for (I still won't, though)

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Damn, that sucks. I'm guessing Valve just pissed off a bunch of Australians then...

e: wait that REALLY sucks. Legitimate gifting to people on your friends list just can't happen at all now if they're not in your country? I guess I should actually log into Steam at some point and check this out. Gift inventories are just not a thing anymore?

Hope they're not surprised at the hit they take during the Christmas sale then...

Steam Sales

6 years ago
It was allegedly to stop cheaters at Counter Strike GO (they'd buy tons of copies on sale, then play with hacks on accounts, and once banned would use another of the stockpiled keys on a new account). Now they have to make multiple accounts in advance for that. It doesn't help people who want to stock up on gifts, but it makes Valve more money, and perhaps game devs a little more money (if people decide to buy the game for full price during an event, such as a birthday, if they decide to just not buy the game then it's a failed gamble). It perhaps also helps reduce the second hand game market (places like G2A), but yeah, it ruins plans to buy a game to gift in advance. Also, if the gift is returned (not accepted) you don't get to re-gift it, the money is refunded, which means that if you bought it and planned to gift it to B if A didn't accept, and the sale ended - well, hard luck. Valve dodges a LOT of criticism they deserve due the the 'patron lawd of gaming Good Man Gabe, PC MASTURRR Race' image, which they're doing less and less to justify these days.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
I ended up buying a few things after all, and other sites were having sales as well. It looks like Humble Bundle's sale just started, and I went ahead and signed up for a month of their service for the 10% discount.

Humble Monthly netted me criminally cheap Pillars of Eternity, and for some reason it came packaged with NBA 2K17, which I'm just sort of bemused by. Like, it seems to be about people of color and their balls? That's all I can figure out. I'm not sure what to do with it tbh.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
I'm a yearly subscriber to the humble monthly, and it's been the best value for money I've gotten in gaming by far. Ended up with a few games during the sale - Stardew Valley, Megalomaniac, The Nonary Games (all three), HITMAN, Thimbleweed Park, and the impressive Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (highly recommended). From this month's bundle Armello broke my heart though, I'd been eyeing it for months, and when I finally played it (11 games in a row, I'm trying to use dice/probability in my own game so wanted to see how this one did things), it just felt criminally random. NBA 2K17 is a whopping 60 gigs to download, so I doubt I'll be getting to it for a while, still have the abovementioned games and Dark Souls 2 to barrel through before I work my way to it.

Steam Sales

6 years ago
Nuuvem looks like an interesting site, and they've got hugely discounted games right now. I've only browsed a bit since I'm at the end of what a sane person can reasonably spend on video games I'll likely never play at this point, but you don't have Alien: Isolation for some reason it's 75% off. Use coupon code SORRYGABE and it's only eight dollars.

Though Nuuvem is a Brazilian site and there might be some regional weirdness going on with it, just fyi. I'm not sure why, but in particular if you're in the UK you're just SOL pretty much 100% of the time.

Though, the good news:



Finally, a gaming site that doesn't marginalize and ignore their customers among the penguin population.

Steam Sales

6 years ago

Antarctica is basically populated exclusively by fuckin' nerds. 

Steam Sales

6 years ago

I ended up getting Fallout 4, Portal ,Portal 2 ,Life is Strange, Turmoil , 7 Days to die, Kindergarten , Left 4 Dead 2 , and Game Dev Tycoon. 

Steam Sales

6 years ago
How's Kindergarten? It seemed interesting but not too interesting. Not a fan of FO4 though (unless you have a few hundred hours and no idea of any better way to use them)

Steam Sales

6 years ago

If you've seen the clickbait titles about everyone being dead or getting up to some wacky hijinks, then it's pretty much exactly like that: South Park, Children doing things they shouldn't, but with actual, charming adventure game humor rather than celebrities, politics, and religion randomly thrown into a sea of mind-numbing edge. It's a fun, charming bout of puzzling and trial and error until you finish the game and find all the alternate paths.

But there are plenty of better ways to use those hundreds of FO4 hours honestly. Any of the previous fallout games comes to mind.

Steam Sales

6 years ago

Personally I prefer the previous fallout games but I do like the ability to establish settlements. What I enjoyed the most about New Vegas is the availability to join more than just the 2 main factions. I felt like Fallout 3s main story line was okay but they could've done more with it. Although the dlcs are pretty good in my opinion. 

Steam Sales

6 years ago

I do love FO3's DLC. I wish they did more Lovecraftian stuff, but the next two games don't seem nearly burnt or swampy enough to pull it off the same way.

Steam Sales

6 years ago

Well, considering New Vegas is in the desert-like Mojave wasteland, within parts of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, you can't really expect it to be swampy. Unless you count the fog-like clouds of death in the Sierra Madre as swampy.

The Divide was pretty burnt, imo.

Steam Sales

6 years ago

Actually, the Sierra Madre would've worked as amother different kind of Lovecraft-lite setting if they added that kind of bent to it instead of a heist movie thing, but they only had room for one gimmick, seeing as they already made a whole fucking new area to piss around in. Besides it was fine as a haunted casino anyway.