1861

Welcome to Ubisoft’s DRM. You’ve got to be online whenever you launch the game and you have to sign in, etc etc.

1862

Wait, what’s the deal with Two Worlds II? There is a stand alone game and a tower defense version??? Is the TD game any good? Is there a package that has em both together?

1863

I found it in one of the options menus, it was like “enable gold ship”. I have ultra but it probably won’t make a difference.

1864

I really enjoyed the hell out of Sanctum, and I’m glad it came back as one of the final day summer camp deals.

It’s a fairly short game, but there are tons of achievements to work through, as well as four-player co-op. The four-pack is exceptional value and even the single at $3.75 is very very worthwhile. It’s going to be impossible to go back to “standard” tower defense and I confess I’ll probably wish for scatter laser towers in the next FPS I play :-)

Built on the Unreal engine, it can be a little graphically demanding–there’s noticeable stutter when all the towers are going, although I’m playing on a notebook (Geforce 540M) and should probably just turn the textures down.

1865

Thanks. BTW, what’s the diff between regular Beat Hazard and Beat Hazard “classic”?

1866

I believe “classic” doesn’t have the stuff from Ultra.

1867

Backlog Fatigue is definitely setting in

Self $29.03
SpaceChem
Solar 2
Frozen Synapse
Monday Night Combat
Atom Zombie Smasher

Gifts $50.85
The Wizard’s Pen
Bioshock 2
Fallout 3 - GOTY
Mystery P.I Bundle
Amnesia

Christmas 2009 $50.95 self + $7.48 gifting = $58.43 or $7.30 per title
Christmas 2010 $68.96 self + $38.19 gifting = $107.15 or $4.87 per title (not breaking up collections)
Summer 2011 $29.03 self +$50.85 gifting = $79.88 or $7.99 per title

1868

Ugh, my embarrassing tally (though much came from the Paradox Complete collection):

Achtung Panzer - Kharkov 1943
Arsenal of Democracy
Atom Zombie Smasher
Audiosuf
Beat Hazard
Ben There, Dan That!
Children of the Nile
Cities in Motion
Cities XL 2011
Commander: Conquest of the Americas
Crusaders: Thy Kingdom Come
Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game
East India Company
Elven Legacy
Europa Universalis III
Europa Universalis: Rome
For the Glory
Hearts of Iron II: Complete
Hearts of Iron III
Hinterland
HOARD
King Arthur - The Role-playing Wargame
King’s Bounty pack
The Kings’ Crusade
Knights of Honor
Lead and Gold - Gangs of the Wild West
Magicka
Majesty 2
Majesty: Gold Edition
Mosby’s Confederacy
Mount & Blade pack
Neverwinter Nights 2: Platinum
Penumbra
Pride of Nations
Rise of Prussia
Sam & Max episodes 1, 2, and 3
Ship Simulator Extremes
Sword of the Stars
Take Command: Second Manassas
Terraria
Time Gentlemen, Please!
Trine
Victoria II
Victoria: Revolutions
Woody Two-Legs Attack of the Zombie Pirates

1869

I’m still obsessing over what prizes to get with my tickets. I can’t imagine that I’d ever have time for Winter Voices, but an extra quest! I channeled my anxiety into trying to get more tickets, but that didn’t help - more tickets means more choices…

In case anyone is looking for their last ticket, there are several helpful videos on youtube. The spacechem one is here. I was stunned to see how easy it was to get the bit trip runner ticket.

1870

I can’t get it to work at any settings. No matter how deliberate I am with the mouse, the swinging rock still teleports around and hits me as if I’m shaking the mouse back and forth. Is it supposed to do that?

1871

Okay, I picked up the New Vegas DLC – thanks to Papageno for the heads-up – and took a chance on Borderlands. That should soothe my itchy trigger finger until the winter sale.

1872

I think my Steam games collection might last me a lifetime, which is both cool and sad at the same time.

1873

If you think you might play Winter Voices, that one may or may not be available later. Some of the others, like the SpaceChem DLC, will be separately purchaseable soon. Some already are, like the AI War expansion and the Defense Grid DLC.

1874

Conviction and the two Assassin’s Creed games no longer have to be online all the time, at least. Only reason I was willing to consider them, although if I’d known that there was more than Steam left over (Steam doesn’t tell you) I wouldn’t have.

1875

Here is what I purchased and my thoughts on this year’s sale.

Myself:
Neverwinter Nights 2: Platinum
Terraria
The Longest Journey
Risen
Sanctum
Trine
FONV DLC - Dead Money, Honest Hearts
Two Worlds II
Magicka w/DLC
JC2 DLC

Gifted:
The Longest Journey
Magicka X3
Torchlight
Sanctun X3
Terraria X3

Prizes collected include the steam punk skins for killing floor and sun glasses for tf2.

Looking at how much I spent and how many of these games I will actually ending up playing, I am asking myself why I didn’t just get a couple A list games instead. There were some kick ass sales on games that I already owned e.g., Borderlands GOTY for $7.50. The games that I kind of wanted didn’t get that cheap e.g., Shogun $29.99. My personal game of the sale is Two Worlds II, which I am enjoying much more than I thought I would. Next up is Risen or a playthrough of FNV DLC.

1876

Well, bummer. I finally had time to try Portal 2 that I bought and it just sits there forever (about 3 minutes now) saying “Preparing to launch Portal 2”.

1877

I’ve got a fair number of games that I ended up buying cheap on Steam, played for a few minutes / half an hour, and decided I never wanted to play them again. I ended up creating a Steam category for them just so they don’t clutter up my list of games when I view my Steam library.

My Steam library seems to fall into 4 categories:

  • A-list games I paid full price for, like Civ V and Fallout New Vegas. None of these have been duds, which is unusual.
  • A-list games I played on the XBox 360 originally, and bought really cheap on Steam because I wanted a PC version. Borderlands is the standout success here; I think I paid ~$10 or so for it last year, and got 90 hours of play out of it.
  • Indie games I bought elsewhere, but migrated to Steam, such as Spacechem and Defense Grid.
  • Games I bought cheap on Steam, and hated.

So far then, when I’ve purchased something on sale on Steam that I hadn’t tried out elsewhere first, I’ve regretted it. Maybe this sale will break that streak.

1878

This sale already broke that streak of yours, which I didn’t even have, because I got Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath (actually the whole Oddboxx). Never played it despite having owned the original XBox version (I ditched my XBox before playing it, and then they never got it working with the 360’s backwards compatibility).

After wrangling some alt-tab and mode-switching oddities, and getting my custom keyboard setup memorized, it’s all solidly good now – really enjoying it.

My total damage:

  • Oddboxx (80% off, $8.47)
  • SpaceChem (75% off, $5.00)
  • Children of the Nile (75% off, $5.00)
  • Gratuitous Space Battles (75% off, $5.00)
  • Tropico 3 Gold (75% off, $5.00)
  • Kane & Lynch 2 (75% off, $5.00)
  • Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor (75% off, $5.00)

Total $38.74 or thereabouts. Feeling damned good about the value-for-money ratio here. Yes, some of these won’t make it out of my backlog, but considering I got them all for less than a single full-price game, that’s acceptable. Stranger’s Wrath has already redeemed the sale.

1879

I’m proud of the restraint I showed this sale. I didn’t buy games just to get tickets, and I didn’t play (many) games just to get tickets. In the end I got 9 tickets, which were basically the freebies.

On the other hand I bought:

The Hitman Collection
Sam and Max Complete
Terraria
The Wonderful End of the World
Time Gentlemen, Please!
Blueberry Garden
Atom Zombie Smasher
3 DLC packs for Civ V
Transformers
DAO: Ultimate
Fallout: NV
Men of War: Assault Squad
Darksiders
Magicka Complete
Medal of Honor
DOW2: Retribution
SpaceChem
Singularity

Which is probably too many games, but those of you with gigantic lists make me feel better. Of course, the reason I didn’t buy more is because I already own many of the sales, and thus far, I’ve only bought one game twice (Dragon Age, because the Ultimate was the same price as the expansion).

I’m much more likely to fire up an indie game and play it for an hour or two than I am the bigger studio games, just because I think of them as commitments that I shouldn’t have spent money on if I wasn’t going to play them through. That’s got to change. Transformers? It was an impulse, so I’m going to treat it as a throwaway. Same with MoH.

I didn’t buy games from the Steam Christmas sale until this one and my backlog hasn’t really gone down much.

1880

So the Steam Summer Sale (this is the first I’ve participated in) was pretty cool if for no other reason than it made me play a lot of games I’ve heard about never actually played. The cost was low enough that there was no reason not to.

  • SC:Conviction was not very good. Great high concept and ideas but super unpolished, and I learned about Ubi’s ridiculous UPLAY-required DRM in the process.

  • Hinterland: A lot of fun, but wore out for me after about 6 hours of play

  • HOMM V: Heard so much about it, but failed the tutorial somehow because I never collected enough peasants to continue? I couldn’t find any more on the map and I guess I let some flee that I shouldn’t have – but now I can’t continue the game, so yeah.

  • King’s Bounty: played about 4-5 hours, had fun, lost interest when it started feeling tedious