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STEAM announcements & updates 2012 Thread 2 - Bad Rats Daily Deal for next 6 months

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T

TheOnlyMook

Member
I kind of want to get CS:S at $6.80, but I can't help but think it'll be cheaper during the Summer Sale. That and CS:GO is right around the corner. Decisions, decisions...
 
M

MRORANGE

Member
Buttonbasher said:
Can you speak to the "video extras" that the Steam page mentions, or maybe even the application in general?
Click to expand...

To my knowledge the application was done by the same guys who did the "last hours of portal" although this is not as interactive, It's basically a DVD menu.

You get a commentary option from Super meatboy, mini interviews with other game devs (1-5mins) and subtitles for other languages, as well as some info on the making of the film.

this is the menu:

iJabVlONKFnIX.jpg
 
Boss Doggie

Boss Doggie

all my loli wolf companions are so moe
MRORANGE said:
Oh yeah Indie Game : The Movie is quite good, movie wasn't too pretentious and Phil Fish's over-dramatical breakdowns were quite hilariously bad.

Well worth it, plus you get the mp4 file of the video DRM free.

Click to expand...

"Wasn't too pretentious" implies it's still pretentious though :p

I still wouldn't touch it.

Megasoum said:
From Dust is on sale on Gamefly for 4$... Was any of the problem fixed with the PC version?
Click to expand...

IIRC it's still locked in 30fps and it has shitty controls.
 
M

morningbus

Serious Sam is a wicked gahbidge series for chowdaheads.
SteveWinwood said:
When is fez coming to steam? I mean it's only a matter of time right? I'm guessing next spring.
Click to expand...

Sorry bro, it's never happening. It's only meant for Saturday morning couch gaming, an experience available exclusively on Microsoft Xbox Entertainment Systems.
 
L

Levyne

Banned
ShaneB said:
:D Now you have to tell us which one you're actually playing, because as was said, it's pretty special when people in this thread are actually playing their games! :p
Click to expand...

I'll probably play Amnesia first...I had it for onlive but it was no fun to play it (or anything that I have tried) that way.
 
K

Keikaku

Member
Hey GAF this isn't directly related to Steam but I was looking around for a place to buy Football Manager 2012 and found it for $10.18 over at GamersGate.

I wanted to get everyone's opinion: Do you think I can get better than 66% off for it on Steam anytime soon?
 
V

Visualante2

Member
Keikaku said:
I wanted to get everyone's opinion: Do you think I can get better than 66% off for it on Steam anytime soon?
Click to expand...
Chances between 75% and 50% are probably half and half. I'd just take the current deal, but if the money is that tight then wait for the Summer sale.
 
P

plc268

Member
I remember playing the Darkspore beta and being completely bored by it.

Debating if I should try it again at $5.
 
H

HoosTrax

Member
Was Spore any good? All I can recall about it was the massive DRM controversy, but not much about the actual game (seemed like it underwhelmed).
 
1

1-D_FTW

Member
SteveWinwood said:
Oh. I thought it was still xbla only. I haven't really been following it.

I love Saturday morning couch gaming.
Click to expand...

Nah. It hasn't been confirmed. I'm just making a bitter and cynical prediction based on the other thread this morning. Seems like MS published games on XBLA are going to be Windows 8 marketplace exclusive.
 
S

SteveWinwood

Member
Normal spore is 5 bucks too. I'll be picking that up probably.

1-D_FTW said:
Nah. It wasn't been confirmed. I'm just making a bitter and cynical prediction based on the other thread this morning. Seems like MS published games on XBLA are going to be Windows 8 marketplace exclusive.
Click to expand...
Oh fuck off Microsoft.
 
S

ShaneB

Member
Khold said:
I'll probably play Amnesia first...I had it for onlive but it was no fun to play it (or anything that I have tried) that way.
Click to expand...

You're a brave man. I bought Amnesia and it didn't work on my old laptop. Now that I can run it, I realize I think I'm too terrified to play it. I mean, I like scary games, but I hear Amnesia just takes it to a whole new level.

When I played Silent Hill 2 when it was released I was too scared to even move. I figured, nothing can happen if I stay still and don't go anywhere!
 
J

jaundicejuice

Member
You'd be better off putting that 5$ towards Diablo 3. After all who knows how long EA will keep their always on DRM servers for. Dark Spore has the exact same online implementation as Diablo 3, functionally there is no single player experience if their servers go down.
 
K

Keikaku

Member
Darkspore as reviewed by Eurogamer
It's hard to shift the cynical feeling that Darkspore, Maxis' action RPG, is more about finding a way to recycle the no-doubt expensive character-editing tech created for the divisive oddity Spore than it is about creating a top-notch dungeon crawler. That's not to say it's bad, as dungeons crawlers go. But you can smell an air of 'systems first, personality later'. It's a robot with a toothy grin crudely painted on its cold, metal face.

Darkspore is a game about having an assortment of semi-customised cartoon monsters beat up a load of other cartoon monsters while hunting for loot to make them more efficient beater-uppers. It's sci-fi Diablo, more or less, but with a reasonably advanced character creator and the sort of tone you'd expect from a 70-year-old chemistry lecturer.

The voiceover-led plot – something about evil genetically modified beasties up to generalised no good, who must be stopped by non-evil genetically modified beasties – is so tediously presented and explained that not a single detail of it remains in my consciousness. Its tiresome prattle seems almost as procedurally generated as some of the creatures and levels are.

A limping, character-free morass of uninspired sci-fi tropes, read in a monotone by an unhappy-sounding woman with a vocoder, Darkspore's story is drier than a yard of Jacob's Crackers. It doesn't even remotely gel with the cheerfully over-the-top combat, claymation-style characters or general air of innocent violence. A shame, because it only adds to the sense that this is a game designed by committee; if it were removed entirely, Darkspore would likely have more personality, not less.

Occasionally something in the background looks lovely, but visually Darkspore is mostly forgettable. There are moments when Darkspore seems much more sure of itself. The invention denied the plot finds its way into your creatures' powers. Each of your heroes – of which there are 100 to be unlocked in total, although most are variations on earlier characters – has four active abilities in addition to what, in most cases, is a distinctive standard attack. There's impressive variety to these: one ED-209-type fellow can unleash a volley of 15 missiles; a purple, taloned beastie performs a stoutly effective teleportation attack; a spindly plant-thing can sprout a giant healing tree or summon two insectoid defenders.

Experimenting with new creatures' powers and wiping out a good dozen enemies with a button press is where Darkspore finds its voice. If playing solo, you enter missions with a squad of three beasties, only one of which you can control at any one time. However, each chap's third power is shared with the group, meaning you have five abilities at your disposal no matter who steps up to bat. The wise man creates his squads with this in mind, devising effective combos based on what's shared with whom.

With everything looking a bit sludgy in motion, health bars are key to knowing what's going on. In an irksome wrinkle, your creatures take double damage from enemies of the same assignation (e.g. Bio, Necro, Plasma, Robo), although the reverse doesn't appear to be true. There are other negative combinations to be discovered – generally by noticing that particular creatures fall over worryingly quickly. This means certain squads tackling certain levels are on a suicide mission, and favoured creatures must regularly be benched. This, in turn, ties in to a bloody odd gambling element to the game; once you complete a level, you're offered the option to immediately progress to the next, harder one with the same squad, without any chance to change members or equip new loot, and with the promise of bonus rewards if you can pull it off.

I often found myself weighing the desire for mega-kit against the likely tedium of carving straight into another long, samey level without downtime and possibly having to repeat it later if things went South. Then there was the risk of having selected a squad that was quite blatantly going to get its little pseudo-plasticine bottom kicked because the promised mission was populated solely by matching monsters. Tackling Darkspore on a mission-by-mission basis is a reasonably sure way to make it through the game, but if you want a shot at the rarest loot, you need to consciously put yourself on thin ice.

This system is clearly intended to promote strategy and diversity as well as risk-taking, but all too often it means sighing resignedly, returning to the Editor and laboriously upgrading your squad or assembling a new one. As the game progresses, you unlock the option to have additional squads to hand, which mercifully frees things up, but it leaves a slightly bitter taste in the mouth. Is the game artificially withholding key features like this (other 'upgrades', play modes and even player-versus-player are treated similarly) until several hours in, purely to create a veneer of evolution?

The solo campaign is compulsive enough, built as it is upon the perennial allure of splatting monsters and collecting items with bigger numbers. But as the game wears on, it increasingly feels like a treadmill. There's some aesthetic variety to the levels, and a slow trickle of huge bosses fitted with interestingly brutal powers of their own, but behind that it's the same experience recycled and not blessed with the sense of escalation and place that helps the Diablo games rise above their simple mechanics.

Things liven up a little in co-op play. One to three other players in the mix means multiple heroes, tougher enemies and, most of all, more complicated and colourful ability combos. (Presuming you find decent buddies, anyway – partnering with a silent, selfish loot-fiend makes for pretty sour times.) In both solo or co-op, Darkspore is one of those games that could happily sit on your hard drive for months or years, forever able to offer an hour or two of pleasant, ambient time-killing and that vague buzz of satisfaction that comes from beating a boss and coming home with better loot. But when played intensively, it can end up feeling like a chore.

The characters look pretty great in the editor, but like horrible-coloured custard in the game itself. It would linger longer on the palate if the character creator was anywhere near as free or ludicrous as the marketing implies. Heroes' basic shapes are fixed, bar some minor adjustments to things like scale or spike size and location, although every upgrade you add (split into categories such as weapon, feet, defence and utility) is a visual one too. These can be resized, relocated and rotated to varying degrees. But due to a combination of the game's rather muddy, washed-out aesthetic, the need to have the camera fully zoomed-out to play effectively, and the inflexibility of the core creature shapes, you don't exactly end up with something you want to send pictures of home to mother.

For a game built, in theory, around the concept of creating unique beasties, everything ends up looking the same: lumpy with sharp bits stuck on and covered in what looks like watered-down poster paint. Maybe the harsh restrictions upon technology we already know is capable of so much more are a result of the infamous genital-creatures everyone built and shared online in Spore. That would be a shame, because jumping into a co-op match with a stranger and finding you're sharing your screen with a tower of bright green ambulatory testicles would cheer things up no end.

If you can actually play it from this perspective, you're a better person than me. The stipulation that you have to be online to play, even solo – replete with DRM-style annoyances like logging you out and costing you progress if you have the temerity to leave the game alt-tabbed for too long – makes Darkspore seem even more like a game that's afraid of kicking back and relaxing. It's competent enough, but this game comes from Maxis, the once hyper-inventive creators of The Sims, Sim City and even the ambitious but confused Spore itself. You can't help but expect even its failures to be fascinating – or at least more interesting than this.

While never terrible, Darkspore feels like it's had its heart surgically removed. All the components for a giddily stupid, aesthetically imaginative action RPG are here. Somehow, however, they combine into a shambling golem that knows its basic purpose, but not a whole lot else.
Click to expand...
 
H

HoosTrax

Member
DarkSpore doesn't really speak to me tbh.

SPORE Complete for $14.99 - yay or nay? (The base game is also $4.99, not sure if the expansions are worth $5 each)
 
S

Silex

Member
Buy Darkspore™
DAILY DEAL! Offer ends in 23:44:30
-75%
$4.99 USD

Buy Darkspore™ 4-Pack
DAILY DEAL! Offer ends in 23:44:30
-75%
$37.49 USD


lol EA
 
S

Silex

Member
Khold said:
I see the four pack at 14.99...
Click to expand...

Well, they like to give higher prices and screw the "Rest of the world" region (as well as EU and just about any non USA region afaik).
Looks like in this case they only raised the price of the 4 pack. Oh well

Oh, also:

Buy SPORE™
-75%
$9.99 USD


Buy SPORE™ + SPORE™ Galactic Adventures
Includes 2 items: SPORE™, SPORE™ Galactic Adventures
-75%
$9.99 USD
Click to expand...
 
Kelegacy

Kelegacy

XBOX - RECORD ME LOVING DOWN MY WOMAN GOOD
I would love to buy Rune since I owned it in college but I might wait for the summer sale. Not sure if I should bite on either Spore games.
 
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