f13.net

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/games/steam/weekend_sale_ID.png)

ID GET!

Oh geez.  Do I?  Don't I?

dayum that is a lot of games for $30

Yes, you do. Then you go buy the X-Com pack as well.  :drill:

I'm just not sure how many of them I'd play at this point.  If Quake 4 was on there I'd be all over it in a heartbeat.  I guess I have been meaning to take Doom 3 for a spin on my new machine, and it'd be nice not to have to dig up the disks.  And I never did play Return to Castle Wolfenstein.  And, Commander Keen!  Nnnngh....

Lack of Quake 4 is why I didn't get it.

That is a good deal, but without Quake Wars: Enemy Territory, I'm just not sure how many of those I'd care to play.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Quake 4 all on-line frag fest, without any single-player content? Wasn't there a 'demo' version, just one map? I played that for a bit, but didn't think that much of it at the time.

Quake 4 had a full campaign and shitty online. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is what you're thinking of where there's no single player worth speaking of.

Ah, right, gocha. The thing is, with Quake, although they did revolutionize FPS back in the day, did it move the bar that much further on since then? Its an honest question, since I haven't played Q4.

Other games seem to have more press regarding FPS; CoD4 for instance, or even Mass Effect for dovetailing good RPG story telling with FPS mechanice.

COD4 did more towards pushing forward the FPS genre than anything else since Quake 3 Arena / UT2k4. I think there's some unsung heroes in the genre, particularly in the competitive arena - namely, War§ow. While TF2 is huge, it's not Counterstrike huge, it's too much of a clusterfuck. Battlefield 2 was pretty huge on a scale level. Enemy Territory was just a mess with no support, much like Unreal 3. Also, I think great strides are being made in 3rd person games. Not necessarily Gears of War either.

Mostly though, I think the baseline for the genre has been set. And it has been set for a while. Since the CS, UT, Q3 days. We need someone to raise that bar far north of Battlfield, TF2, and UT2k4. Left 4 Dead might change some things, maybe not, don't know yet.  But I think as tech develops and broadband allows for more bandwidth, things will progress.

Was the Halo series a step forward? I don't think so. Not in terms of gameplay. In terms of community, maybe, if you call that group a "community." Feels more like a multi-man thunderdome though. 10 idiots enter, 5 idiots leave.

I'm looking forward to a few first person titles also - while they may not be "serious" fps titles, they're at least trying to mix things up. Mirror's Edge, Fracture, Section 8, and They are a few examples.

Short answer: No, I don't think the bar has been moved that much. It's nice to see people experimenting though.

Hah, no.

About the most revolutionary the Quake series has been since the original has been Quake Wars, and that's largely Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on steroids.

The one thing Quake has always done well has been graphics, which unfortunately don't age well, and make getting collections of old versions of Quake largely pointless, in my opinion, unless you're in it for the nostalgia (in which case you probably own them already).

Slightly off topic:  Aren't some of these games (like Doom and Hexen) open source now?  If so, why the hell is Steam charging money for them?

Most of those up through Q3 are Open Source now.

I'm surprised that so many titles are ending up on Steam. Guess they are the defacto download service for games.

Well, it's the only download service that actually brings gamers together in any sort of meaningful way.

I'd have bought this Id pack if I didn't already own everything in it that I might actually play...

Also, their DRM and download policies aren't entirely dickish.