Steam Summer Sale 2011

[Sky]

Grabbed Warband, just because. Also got the F:NV DLCs.

Really considering the new Drakensang and its DLC, probably grab those the last day. Also considering the two Eschalons, played the demo enough to know it's enjoyable, but the fixed res and small items/text means I'll have to play it on the laptop, so that puts it into the maybe category.

Lots of other stuff that's somewhat compelling but I can't really see buying it now when I already have a huge backlog. Maybe the xmas sale.

[Riggswolfe]

Grabbed Warband, just because. Also got the F:NV DLCs.

Really considering the new Drakensang and its DLC, probably grab those the last day. Also considering the two Eschalons, played the demo enough to know it's enjoyable, but the fixed res and small items/text means I'll have to play it on the laptop, so that puts it into the maybe category.

Lots of other stuff that's somewhat compelling but I can't really see buying it now when I already have a huge backlog. Maybe the xmas sale.

Fair warning about the new Drakensang. It was fun to play but the voice acting was hurt your ears bad.

I'm debating the FO:NV DLC. It says I have to have New Vegas on steam to play. My copy is retail but shows up in the steam library so I'm guessing it more or less applies.

[Bunk]

I would not count on that. It won't even let me order the Sims expansions even though I have a retail Sims 3 registered through Steam.

[Morfiend]

Picked up TW2 yesterday and played for about five hours. It satisfies an itch anyway. Loot's fun, crafting seems fun, magic system is fun, combat is less bad than Witcher 2. The voice acting and character animations are pretty  , but the world is pretty. Seems like I'll get good value for being under $20.

Oh, and to all those that hated scaled leveling in Oblivion (myself included), this game gives you the opposite. "Oh look, there's a cave I was given a quest for at level two, lets see what's inside!" Followed by the loud sclurching sound of my body being cleaved in twain by the first swing from the monster just inside the cave.

I have had this same experience. Horrible voice acting and character models, but the world is nice, and combat is fun. I also went exploring in a cave and found a skeleton that was killing me in two hits. It was very refreshing after the scaling levels of a lot of recent rpgs.

[Rasix]

For anyone on the fence for the last 75 minutes, Alpha Protocol and New Vegas are totally worth the money.

Like I've said here before, Alpha Protocol is a complete technical and gameplay mess.  But the conversation system and plot structure are worth $5 alone just to play with.  It's a pity that I heard (here I think) that they rewrote the dialogue/plot somewhat to be more Jack Bauer and less James Bond, but it still works rather well and highlights some of the best aspects of an Obsidian game (while swimming in the worst).

New Vegas was leaps better than Fallout 3. Mainly because they got the setting and feel of a Fallout game right, where vanilla Fallout 3 felt a lot more.. vanilla.  The DC metro area was better done than Vegas, but it was also a headache to navigate.  I think combat broke down a bit more in Vegas (some stuff was just shockingly ineffective towards the end), but it didn't matter as the game wasn't overly difficult to complete and gave you a few ways of doing so.

I put 15 hours into one play through of Alpha Protocol and 45 into New Vegas.  Good gaming deals there.

[Morfiend]

Damnit Ras, now I went and bought Alpha Protocol, and on a whim grabbed Singularity also.

I have so many games to play now.

[Rasix]

Damnit Ras, now I went and bought Alpha Protocol, and on a whim grabbed Singularity also.

I have so many games to play now.

Be sure to check out the BiiF for tweaks you'll probably want to do to the interface if you plan on playing with a keyboard and mouse.  Game is pretty much unplayable if you don't (imo).

[Sky]

Fair warning about the new Drakensang. It was fun to play but the voice acting was hurt your ears bad.

Yeah, I expect a good ol' eurojank. All good in my book.

[Paelos]

Today's sales are pretty lame. Typical mid-week stuff. I think I'll buy the AI Fleet game.

[Malakili]

Civ 5 DLC is all dirt cheap today, I picked it all up.

[Amaron]

Yea today is kind of dumb.  It's not that those games are bad but you either own them or you don't care about them.   Only the Civ5 DLC is worthwhile.

[Ragnoros]

Joining the GuildWars party late for $15. Remind me again which of the trilogy is most fun/I should start with?

[Morfiend]

Joining the GuildWars party late for $15. Remind me again which of the trilogy is most fun/I should start with?

I'm tempted on this. I wanted to try some of the GW stuff past the vanilla client, but I never wanted to pay like $60 to get it all at this late stage in the game.

[DraconianOne]

I'm tempted by the S.T.A.L.K.E.R stuff - is Clear Sky the one to miss or Call of Pripyat?

[jakonovski]

I'm tempted by the S.T.A.L.K.E.R stuff - is Clear Sky the one to miss or Call of Pripyat?

CoP is the most polished game of the lot, but I found Clear Sky more engaging myself. I'd get them both.

[tgr]

clear sky is the one with activation-based tages, though.

[Ingmar]

I don't actually think F&S is bad, mind you, but if you're new to M&B, Warband is more... accessible. F&S has some frustrating aspects to it.

[Sky]

Joining the GuildWars party late for $15. Remind me again which of the trilogy is most fun/I should start with?

I'm also tempted by this. But I think you want the North one for the heroes? I only pay passing attention to GW talk, mostly the stuff that cropped up in the GW2 thread.

And I buckled on the Civ V DLC, not sure why. I'm happily enjoying FFH2 :p Guess I'll download Civ V again and give it another whirl when I wrap up my latest FFH2 game.

[Ard]

Joining the GuildWars party late for $15. Remind me again which of the trilogy is most fun/I should start with?

I'm also tempted by this. But I think you want the North one for the heroes? I only pay passing attention to GW talk, mostly the stuff that cropped up in the GW2 thread.

Nightfall is the one that starts you with heroes, which is where you want to start first if you've never played before.  Eye of the North is the one that's an actual expansion and not a stand alone.  If you want to work towards unlocks for Guild Wars 2 however, you need it, and $10 is about as cheap as I've ever seen it (although amazon is calling me a liar as we speak since I looked it up and it's $9 there).

On the upside, they recently made it so you can use a full hero party (npcs you control that you can kit out how you like), so you can effectively treat it like a single player game.  I finally just finished the whole storyline solo like a week ago.

The free trial is here:  http://guildwars.com/freetrial/
It's an incremental downloader and can get you in game to look around within a few minutes.  You'll have nasty initial zone load times but at least you can take a quick look.  I don't know if it lets you pick which campaign to start in or if you always end up in Prophecies or not.  If you end up in Prophecies, my condolences, because it's awful, and won't give you an actual feel for the game as it currently is.

[Hawkbit]

Ard puts on a pretty accurate description.  There are some folks that still actively, if only casually, play it around here.  It's a lot of fun to play with someone else who just wants to have fun. 

Also, I suspect that unless they close the servers, it will still have a solid population once GW2 launches.  I can see myself flipping back and forth between them. 

[Ard]

It's going to continue for quite a while after launch since you can still accrue hall of monument unlocks after guild wars 2 releases.  I fully expect to see a wave of people who never touched GW1 pick it up on the cheap after they find they like GW2 to get the unlocks.  They're also doing a series of fairly large free content updates to guild wars 1 as a ramp up to guild wars 2.

[Lantyssa]

As Ard says, start with Nightfall.  Prophecies is okay to do once you have a feel for the game, but it's long and slow.  Being able to bring an established party to it helps a lot.

Today's sales are pretty lame. Typical mid-week stuff. I think I'll buy the AI Fleet game.

I'd been considering the AI Wars game for a while now since (Can't remember if it was Stormwaltz or IainC) first mentioned it.  At $5 for it and all the expansions I'm going to grab it.

Have to wait until I get home though.  For some reason Steam won't let me log in from my work machine, nor will they send me the confirmation e-mail.

[Hoax]

Looking long and hard at King Arthur, I bought it for a couple of friends for xmas and I didn't hear them rave about it but $4.50 for the collection seems a no brainer since Game of Thrones has me in the mood for something like this.

Anything I should know?

[Sky]

For some reason Steam won't let me log in from my work machine,

They make it too goddamned easy for me. I'm sure some steambot snuck in and installed the mac client here. Wasn't me, nossireebob.

Let's talk more about how much GW1 sucks. 

[bhodi]

I now own the games. All of them.

I didn't like King Arthur, I got it last steam sale. But I never cared about the Arthurian myth, so in the end for me it was just a mediocre fps/strategy game with broken archers.

Adding a game called "Nexus: The Jupiter Incident" to the list for the last day. I'm tired of typing so I'll just copy paste. I recommend what I buy, but you may not share my tastes :)

Today, 5 games for less than the price of the carwash I got on the way home.

You now own Monday Night Combat, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat - Discount Check, AI War: Fleet Command, AI War: The Zenith Remnant, AI War: Children of Neinzul, AI War: Light of the Spire, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Ownership Check, Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition.
You now own Singularity, Frozen Synapse.
You now own Assassin's Creed II, Assassin's Creed II - Deluxe CD Key, Assassin's Creed 2 - Mac.
You now own Dark Messiah Might and Magic Single Player, Dark Messiah Might and Magic Multi-Player, Devil May Cry 4, SpaceChem.
You now own The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Warhammer® 40,000®: Dawn of War® II – Retribution, [ The entire Telltale Pack ]

[Strazos]

Oh Dark Messiah...How I loved the MP during open beta.

I've been trying to limit my purchases, just because I'll never have time for all the stuff I could buy.

[Baldrake]

Dammit, I thought I'd get through today without buying anything. Then I cracked and got the Civ 5 DLC. Vikings, what can I say...

[Thrawn]

I passed 200 games on my Steam account today but I can't decide if I'm proud of ashamed of the fact.

[Strazos]

Shit, I thought my 140 was excessive. 

[Tebonas]

Oh, you can see how many games you bought on Steam?

Edit: Damn, 287

[5150]

I was tempted by Guildwars just to get them on Steam but 50% off isn't enough to justify this when I already own 3 of the collectors editions and Eye of the North.

Is Monday Night Combat any good (just strikes me as a more quicky TF2)?

[Amaron]

Anyone know a minimal fuss small free game demo to play for the ticket off the top of their head?

[Trippy]

Anyone know a minimal fuss small free game demo to play for the ticket off the top of their head?

Atom Zombie Smasher is one of the smaller ones. There's also: Fortix 2 and Dwarfs?! though those are larger downloads. I got it playing the Nation Red demo cause I was deciding whether to buy it (I did).

[CaptainNapkin]

Anyone know a minimal fuss small free game demo to play for the ticket off the top of their head?

Eschalon Book 1 Demo is under 90meg.

[Bann]

So far I've pulled the trigger on Frozen Synapse and eschalon 1 and 2. Only played the tutorial so far in FS, and mucked around a bit in the eschalons. I want to like them. Part of me is holding out hope that they are the spun up version of DCSS I've been wishing existed for years, but I get the sense that they are not that. The walkspeed was very slow for me on a netbook. I also had 3 or 4 timeouts in my bloodbowl match this week which was very disappointing. With the steam sale going on and me looking at all the games I own on steam that I no longer have a computer that will run, I snapped yesterday and ordered a new desktop.

So I'm either at ~20 bucks or $1020 so far this steam sale. 

Helms speed dating bloodbowl league, HERE I COME!