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STEAM | August 2014 - Everybody loves iDLEM@STER

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Casimir

Unconfirmed Member
t1409346000z4.png


Watch this for details

Coming in three weeks, anyone interested in this, I have loved the metro games!

New modes, seemless loading new areas, better graphics and 4K support that nobody has haha!

I fear I need a new PC... oh dear.

Yeah, it looks good, especially the 2033 Redux with the improved combat mechanics and more seamless sequences replacing the loading screens.


lots of precious money later

I know you guys were super worried about my phone situation so hopefully you can sleep now

As long as you can continue to take more crocodile on vacation pics.


Glad it was resolved.
 

sprinkles

Member
After roughly one week of non stop idling Idlemaster finally finished its work! It earned me 15€ already and I haven't even listed everything yet. Thanks jshackles!
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
Did they just remove the purchasing of Lara Croft ToO in russia or am I missing something here?

The RU subs are in the registry but haven't been added to the store yet for whatever reason. The ROW subs are completely region-free, though, which leaves open a loophole that allows traders to buy them at their local price.
 

derExperte

Member
The RU subs are in the registry but haven't been added to the store yet for whatever reason. The ROW subs are completely region-free, though, which leaves open a loophole that allows traders to buy them at their local price.

How does that loophole work again?
 
Looking at twitter, yep the damage has been done. Valve are going to show off Source 2 at gamescom with either L4D3 or HL3. Btw Sierra will also be there and they published the first HL! Clearly no coincidence! It's written in the stars. Not like Source 2 debuted for Dota 2 UGC purposes, nah.
 

Levyne

Banned
So I recently beat The Banner Saga finally after getting sucked into the MMO monster a little bit, here are my thoughts. I hope this is okay to post here.

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I have mixed opinions about The Banner Saga, but I'm still very happy to have played it. Most of the time, when I find games to be surprisingly brief, it's generally to their benefit. However, this is one title where I felt like it ended before it could really shine. I'm appreciative that it didn't drag itself out, but at the same time it's always a bit jarring when the end credits sneak up on you.

The Banner saga is some weird mesh of grid based strategy rpg (Fire Emblem, Tactics Ogre, FFT/A) and...the Oregon trail. And Vikings (or something resembling Vikings). However, only the first part of that hybrid combination does the game feel polished, gameplay wise. The game's most notable feature when it comes to the primary battle engagements is the Armor/Strength duality, as well as Willpower and Exertion mechanics. In order to deal a lot of damage to most enemies, especially Dredge, you first have to spend time working down their armor instead of trying to outright lower their health to zero. This is only a small wrinkle to the normal rpg standby, but it is implemented well enough to have two interesting results. One, it creates some very real consecquential moments where you've got a unit able to do decent armor or strength damage and you can't be certain whether you should really strip the armor down further or if you should take a chunk out of the enemy health so that they might be finished off sooner. Secondly, it creates much needed class specialization where certain units are much more adept at stripping armor while others are better set finishing weakened foes. The game then allows you to use some basic accessory-equipment to either further specialize (giving an armor-break boosting equipment to someone already well equiped to break armor) or to make certain units more versatile. One thing that I suppose I wasn't used to is that the class-roles are specified and listed on the heroes pages, but they still don't seem as iron-clad or strict as those in games such as the Japanese srpgs I listed earlier (where the class given to a unit is much more defining). I couldn't tell you which units were which class off of the top of my head, only what each given unit was good at performing in battle. I suppose it feels a bit more organic this way.

I feel like the willpower-exertion mechanics are the most important (and unique) mechanics of the battles. Exertion allows you to add damage points to your strength hits, break down armor faster, and move further than normal. Morale allows you to add willpower to units as you need it, and replenishes as you defeat enemies. Since exertion determines how much willpower you can add to any action, it was the first thing I upgraded on any unit promotion. The battle animations and sound work is expecially great, and I generally love the look of this game. The battle environments are a bit bland but that's not a real dealbreaker. One thing that I never did gel with was the out-of-battle dialogues, usually set as continously reversing camera shots of the front facing portraits of the various characters. The continuously changing perspective and lack of multiple emotive artworks for each character really made clicking through these dialogues to be a chore at times, and it was sometimes more difficult than it needed to be to determine who was entering and leaving the scene, and even who is all present at any given time.

The in-between battle treks with the caravan were not super enjoyable. I was given a unit count of clansmen, fighters, and varl but I didn't really know what this represented and only tried to keep the numbers high because that's what you're expected to do, right? A handful of times the game would tell me that the enemy force was so large and my force was compartively large but I couldn't really tell what numbers the game was crunching underneath. While other moments of open-ended choice and consecquence within these sections was enjoyable (do you help the random caravan you come accross, do you punish the drunk, do you demand goods from the traders if your supplies are low, etc), the various off-screen battle tactician moments (do you charge in, do you pull back, you have x forces against their y forces) seemed to be more random and less consequential. In the last two chapters of the game, I had made a dumb mistake and lost most of my unit count but it didn't seem to matter at all.

That said, in general I enjoyed the challenge of the game. I played through on Normal mode, and I even lost two battles (one of which I am sure you are supposed to lose :p ) but the game ended up allowing the journey to progress with those loses, which makes the prospect of a replay to see if I could either avoid or overcome though encounters to be somewhat appealing. The last battle of the game took a few tries, but at the same time, I didn't realize it was the last battle. It didn't really seem appropriately grandiose when considering some of the things introduced before that point that I thought I would be tackling. I'm unsure how much the ending can change depending on your choices, so I might have to do some reading. I just wish the game was a little longer. Some of the units in the game I felt like only saw 3-4 battles, and with the number of units you get in total (quite a few) and the frequency in which the become available and unavailable, and the low-map limit of who all you can bring into any given battle, I just felt like there were a few things I was unable to ever get to try. While I had some units level up many times, but the end of the game I had some units only often enough to have promoted once. But again, I suppose that allows for some variety in re-plays.

Great art, but I wish there was more to the dialogue sections, retweaked caravan between battle-mechanics, some larger more interesting maps would be neat, and more chances to be able to bring units into battle which a lower frequency of units becoming unavailable. Though not to any extreme extent, having some limitations on those sorts of things is a great way to force yourself to try out different strategies rather than just bringing your strongest units every time. Lastly, the overarching story and narrative were interesting enough, but sometimes it felt messy and cluttered. You find yourself moving from one outpost to the next, each with exotics names, and never in one place for too long. Yes, there's a fairly nice in game map that helps to try to put things into place mentally, but when the purpose of most encampments is to simply upgrade your units and merch and be on your way, there wasn't a lot of incentive to really keep track of much. A large part of the game boils down to someone declaring that you need to leave place x and head to place y for reason z, and that's really all of the motivation I needed or wanted.
 

kudoboi

Member
Looking at twitter, yep the damage has been done. Valve are going to show off Source 2 at gamescom with either L4D3 or HL3. Btw Sierra will also be there and they published the first HL! Clearly no coincidence! It's written in the stars. Not like Source 2 debuted for Dota 2 UGC purposes, nah.

isnt sierra under activision though? also, whats on twitter that makes you so sure?
 

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
This would be funny if it wasn't so deeply sad.

Sad indeed. I hate when companies pull this kind of crap.

Also, this ad caught my eye. Does anyone know: do developers have access to these review statistics, or are they basing this off Enhanced Steam?

 

jblank83

Member
So I recently beat The Banner Saga finally after getting sucked into the MMO monster a little bit, here are my thoughts. I hope this is okay to post here.

I've written my thoughts several times, in addition to an official review. My thoughts mostly echo yours. In short: a decent but flawed and frustrating game.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
How does that loophole work again?

It's probably the one thing about Steam that I'm not sure of, haha. Someone PM'd me about it earlier in the year:

You open a page with ?cc=us, add the game to your cart and click "Purchase as gift" after the page loads up you open a page with ?cc=ru (and don't do anything else with it). Go back to the original tab and finish the purchase. You will get a US version of the game (because Steam remember appid of the us game) but with RU price (because you're in the RU region now).

Interesting fact is, you can even purchase things which don't exist, for example there is no Payday 2 4pack in RU, but if you use the glitch you'll be able to purchase it and the price will be 1499 rub. I don't know where Steam gets that price from.

Not sure what to think of this, basically you're paying them less than you should.

But the info didn't check out at all -- Steam just converted the cart to USD. I replied asking if he was sure he got the details right, but he never got back to me, which leads me to believe he just made the above up and wasn't expecting me to actually verify the process.

Edit: A couple of people have tried the above and said that it should work for them. Maybe I've just been testing the wrong games, haha, although I used SteamDB to ensure the ROW subs were completely region-free. Alternatively, perhaps it only works with PayPal.

Edit edit: Oh, and I'm sure this goes without saying, but I'd be wary of using the loophole regularly or, you know, at all.
 

zkylon

zkylewd
Fine, I'll give The Void a try tonight if I decide not to finish GoW 1 yet. You (Zky) had mentioned the Easy mod before, but I'd rather try the original difficulty first. I'll download it if it gets too frustrating, though.

yea i mean

you gotta be prepared for like screwing yourself and having to start over

a lot of people won't like that and stop playing it but the void is a game you just try stuff out and discover how it's played as you go. sometimes you don't discover shit fast enough and you're dead but you know next time goes a lot smoother
 

ModBot

Not a mod, just a bot.
This is a scheduled automated repost on behalf of KingDirk, who is running this raffle.

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chronomac

Member
I played an hour of One Finger Death Punch last night, which was fun as hell. When I quit the game I got 13 achievements all at once, which I thought was a lot for an hour and that it was weirdly implemented. Then I looked and found that the game has 152 total!
 

Parsnip

Member
This just in, I'm still terrible at Street Fighter.
But I'm going to blame the controller.
I wish they'd uncouple fight binds from menu binds.
 

Ozium

Member
One thing nice about the Steam UI update is that it's easier to wishlist Coming Soon games by opening a new window with the middle mouse button instead of clicking the game & backing out.

woah... game changer

Does this even meet Kickstarter rules?

Does 'wanna make videos' work as a product/goal?

Hope it fails.

worked for feminist frequency and tons of other youtubers

So maybe instead of monthly threads we'll be having bi weekly.

*semi-weekly

Wow, Molyneux really outdid himself with Godus....
Is this in the Steam version too?

No... Not yet at least.

The new Shadowrun Online is 67% off at Bundlestars, still in Early Access.
Huh.

Yeah it's been on there for a couple weeks, when they had SpeedRunners for 2.50 I noticed that... Kind of shocked tbqh

Jet Gunner is a pretty frustrating game. Do not recommend.

It's good, if you didn't grow up playing NES games then you probably won't like it.
 

Ozium

Member
Has the dev patched controller support back in? He kinda killed my excitement for it when he removed it the other day. Apparently a lot of people had problems with them though.

I didnt have any problems with the controller support, it worked great... I had a problem in that fullscreen was borked.. so I complained. then they fixed it, yay fullscreen works now...

but the controller support was taken out... OK

He said he'll put it back in the next update... Why he just took it out wholesale is odd, because not every user had a problem with it, and it's an option.

From the forum:

why would you use an analog stick for a 2d NES style action platformer..

this is why I don't get why he just took it out completely while working on a fix...
 

Grief.exe

Member
It has been a relatively exciting week as far as PC gaming goes.

  • RErelease announced
  • Sleeping Dogs Definitive
  • Source 2
  • Master Chief Collection retail entry
  • Rise Son of Rome announced
  • Activision puts up Sierra teaser site

Probably missed some, let me know and I will update.
 

Sub Zero

his body's cold as ice, but he's got a heart of gold
Wow, Molyneux really outdid himself with Godus....
Is this in the Steam version too?

I loved that he was calling the new Dungeon Keeper ridiculous and then went on to use the same scummy microtransaction model for Godus. What a hypocrite
 
It has been a relatively exciting week as far as PC gaming goes.

  • RErelease announced
  • Sleeping Dogs Definitive
  • Source 2
  • Master Chief Collection retail entry
  • Rise Son of Rome announced

Probably missed some, let me know and I will update.

Sierra might be back from the dead.
 
From the forum:

Oh, that's good to hear


I didnt have any problems with the controller support, it worked great... I had a problem in that fullscreen was borked.. so I complained. then they fixed it, yay fullscreen works now...

but the controller support was taken out... OK

He said he'll put it back in the next update... Why he just took it out wholesale is odd, because not every user had a problem with it, and it's an option.



why would you use an analog stick for a 2d NES style action platformer..

this is why I don't get why he just took it out completely while working on a fix...

Yeah reading the thread about all that was pretty interesting. He didn't seem to respond well to all the criticism about the game.
 

Tizoc

Member
It has been a relatively exciting week as far as PC gaming goes.

  • RErelease announced
  • Sleeping Dogs Definitive
  • Source 2
  • Master Chief Collection retail entry
  • Rise Son of Rome announced

Probably missed some, let me know and I will update.

I'm hoping SEGA announces some slick stuff for Steam during Gamescom XO
 

Fox318

Member
It has been a relatively exciting week as far as PC gaming goes.

  • RErelease announced
  • Sleeping Dogs Definitive
  • Source 2
  • Master Chief Collection retail entry
  • Rise Son of Rome announced

Probably missed some, let me know and I will update.

The GOG Games redundancy debate.
 
It has been a relatively exciting week as far as PC gaming goes.

  • RErelease announced
  • Sleeping Dogs Definitive
  • Source 2
  • Master Chief Collection retail entry
  • Rise Son of Rome announced

Probably missed some, let me know and I will update.

That we can finally hide games in out steam libraries? :)
 
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