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STEAM | August 2017 - Toot toot, Cold Steel Warrior, shaka brah

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Erekiddo

Member
No Man's Sky is $20 and some change after my 10% Humble Bundle discount and credit. That's about what I wanted to pay for it in the first place.

Has the game significantly improved since launch?
 

Jadax

Member
No Man's Sky is $20 and some change after my 10% Humble Bundle discount and credit. That's about what I wanted to pay for it in the first place.

Has the game significantly improved since launch?

It's a fun game if you don't go into it expecting it to meet the hype. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit.
 

Mivey

Member
So, finally got to cleaning up old Humble keys of games I already had, or was never interested in ever playing.
ModBot said:
Instructions for Mivey:
Press the quote button to the left of this PM, select the quoted text, copy, and paste in the thread. You can remove these lines from the version you paste. Your giveaway will be automatically reposted on your behalf.

Instructions for participants:
I am giving away 43 Steam keys. To enter this giveaway, send a PM to ModBot with any subject line. In the body, copy and paste the entire line from the message below that corresponds to the game you want. (if you include more than one game, you will be blocked from entering). Confused? Watch this GIF tutorial or ask for help.
Want to make your own ModBot giveaway? Click here for a quick tutorial thread. Please give generously.

ModBot Basics:
- I really appreciate thank you messages, but please send them to me (Mivey, not ModBot!) via PM instead of in thread.
- Do not trade keys you win off-site to enrich yourself. Don't try to claim games you have no interest in collecting or playing. Don't claim games to give them to friends off-site.
- If the key is already taken you will not receive a reply. Replies may take a minute or two.

Rules for this Giveaway:
- If you are a lurker you are not eligible for this giveaway. You need five or more posts in either the current Steam thread or the previous one to be eligible
- This is a free for all! You can enter for multiple games on the list below. Send an individual PM for each game you'd like to win.
- If you won a game from ModBot in the last day, you are not eligible for this giveaway.
- This giveaway is a raffle. The winners will be selected by random draw 24 hours after the draw was created. Any games not claimed after that point will be given away first come first serve.



t1cxE6r.gif
Sid Meier's Civilization V -- MB-B61E147CAE4D292F - Taken by famfrit. 3 entrants total.
t1cxE6r.gif
Stronghold Crusader 2 -- MB-AE073B72D12F09DB - Taken by Javier23. 4 entrants total.
140 -- MB-EA4567ACAA1F5703
Beholder -- MB-302097CC3108C76F - Taken by Jalal. 8 entrants total.
Bit Blaster XL -- MB-B6A74EEDAD25937F
Chroma Squad -- MB-DC19713C7A0398EC
Coin Crypt -- MB-1E9DAC036A8B0377
Contraption Maker -- MB-CECBE7745DDE917B - Taken by illusionary. 1 entrants total.
Contraption Maker #2 -- MB-68AD995A546CE508
Crashlands -- MB-73ABE7AFD155C7CA - Taken by Monooboe. 7 entrants total.
Curious Expedition -- MB-73259A5FCD81AA86 - Taken by Zeknurn. 12 entrants total.
DEADBOLT -- MB-C7386792F81578D2 - Taken by kionedrik. 17 entrants total.
DeadCore -- MB-FF88ABD425711A4B - Taken by FeedMeAStrayCat. 2 entrants total.
Door Kickers -- MB-A1405583262DC78D - Taken by Zeneric. 7 entrants total.
Duet -- MB-DC27542C60574042
Dungeons 2 -- MB-92C43B58474FAA10
Else Heart.Break() -- MB-4842D49DF5ADCD69 - Taken by PandaPedinte. 2 entrants total.
Epic Battle Fantasy 4 -- MB-7CB179C870E48C90 - Taken by PaulSane. 4 entrants total.
Evoland 2 -- MB-B7095C6E9A7CE8E8 - Taken by lazerfox. 8 entrants total.
Expand - Soundtrack Edition -- MB-475E79AE579DCD92
FORCED -- MB-CAFE3E033BE364EC
Goat Simulator: GOATY -- MB-6EDF1C08A85CDAF8 - Taken by Zeeman. 9 entrants total.
Homefront -- MB-9B60FF1D4EC417AC - Taken by alr1ght. 5 entrants total.
Human Resource Machine -- MB-4E73D615A4506DDF
Lost Planet 3 Complete Pack -- MB-8278D2BE13D3F568 - Taken by Dec. 14 entrants total.
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime -- MB-F0FFF50B88B1B47F - Taken by spindoctor. 9 entrants total.
MirrorMoon EP -- MB-2558590FB6096DF2 - Taken by KainXVIII. 4 entrants total.
Peggle Deluxe, Bejeweled 3, Bookworm Deluxe, Escape Rosecliff Island, and Feeding Frenzy 2 Deluxe -- MB-4B46AF250AE79BD4 - Taken by Vlad. 6 entrants total.
Pixel Piracy -- MB-E83F54A54B10F29E
Platformines -- MB-3E97D5007BEFF7F7 - Taken by longlivegaming. 1 entrants total.
Regency Solitaire -- MB-08D2F0DE31A77EB3 - Taken by thesaucetastic. 6 entrants total.
Rust (Early Access) -- MB-D52817B822C1AE2C - Taken by Grug. 5 entrants total.
Sacred Franchise Pack -- MB-F9ADCBFA25E87FD3 - Taken by Madventure. 8 entrants total.
Saints Row 2 -- MB-75FE6CC591624DCA
Saints Row The Third -- MB-58083F370C03F835 - Taken by Platy. 2 entrants total.
Shantae and the Pirate's Curse -- MB-B8CC44339ABA77A4 - Taken by Demon Lizardman. 10 entrants total.
Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds Saga -- MB-B0352F892BC17475 - Taken by Grief.exe. 2 entrants total.
Star Wars: X-Wing vs TIE Fighter - Balance of Power Campaigns -- MB-08C5C238BBC495CA - Taken by laserlaser. 2 entrants total.
Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance -- MB-05A53B0E0EC7C645 - Taken by KenOD. 4 entrants total.
Super Mega Baseball: Extra Innings -- MB-9ED9ACFF24F84189 - Taken by Zia. 1 entrants total.
Tulpa -- MB-95EC93F047CD03FB
Windward -- MB-B2828E323439543C - Taken by Jalal. 5 entrants total.
Ziggurat -- MB-3B848A8BD50686AF - Taken by yuraya. 7 entrants total.


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~Kinggi~

Banned
No Man's Sky is $20 and some change after my 10% Humble Bundle discount and credit. That's about what I wanted to pay for it in the first place.

Has the game significantly improved since launch?

Yeah and it is suspected this week a bitg thing is happening since they have had an ARG going last 2 months.
 

Knurek

Member
WPHsyrK.png


I am done, done, DONE with this game. Took me two months of playing it pretty much exclusively.

I'm free, free to start a 2 hour HOPA or another short game, like that Trails in Cold Steel port.

Free...

What's this, SubaHibi Kickstarter?

ESTIMATED DELIVERY
Aug 2017?

vader.jpg
 

hesho

Member
I wish the Steam releases of Grandia and Lunar that were in the SteamDB leak a few years back ever came to fruition.

talk about bringing back an old wound :(

pretty sad about that too. I'm guessing gungho gave up on steam after grandia 2 sales. Heck grandia 2 wasn't even on sale during the summer sale either.
 

QFNS

Unconfirmed Member
talk about bringing back an old wound :(

pretty sad about that too. I'm guessing gungho gave up on steam after grandia 2 sales. Heck grandia 2 wasn't even on sale during the summer sale either.

Which is really too bad because that Grandia 2 port is pretty good AND that game is dope. Lunar and Grandia 1 would be amazing.
 

Hektor

Member
Man i played only two matches in which i got Top ten and op 20, as well as like 4 early deaths in between and i already got my first crate sold for 2$.

I'll have the money the game did cost back in no time.
 
I'm curious about some hidden object games, let's see if someguyinahat is around...

Hidden Object Bundle 4 in 1



The bundle is on sale, is it worth it?

You rang?!

Hmm. Of those, I've only played House of 1000 Doors Palm of Zoroaster. And it was...okay. Not great. I've played worse. The other House of 1000 Doors game is better...slightly.

If I were you, I'd probably pass on that bundle.
 

Sarcasm

Member
No Man's Sky is $20 and some change after my 10% Humble Bundle discount and credit. That's about what I wanted to pay for it in the first place.

Has the game significantly improved since launch?

I would say so. The loop is improved. Content definitely. Especially with things you can do.
 

Ascheroth

Member
That's one game that would require a Hard Mode.
The battle system was fantastic, but the lack of challenge in the game made any strategy pretty much unnecessary.
Speaking about Hard modes, Cold Steel is fantastic on Hard.
It's not excrutiatingly difficult but you do have to pay at least a modicum of attention to your party and Quartz compositions.
 

Momentary

Banned
Speaking about Hard modes, Cold Steel is fantastic on Hard.
It's not excrutiatingly difficult but you do have to pay at least a modicum of attention to your party and Quartz compositions.

I like it because you need to make sure about your initial character placement for the start of battle. You gotta ask yourself if you're in a zone with a high concentraition of enemies with AoEs. If you are, then you sacrifice group buffs for survivability. Being grouped up in an ambush like that results in quick death. If you're in a zone with single target heavy hitters then group up for group buffs. Finally a recent JRPG that requires thought for combat. (I haven't played the other games in the series.)
 
Rocket League

I own it on everything under the sun (and Switch when it launches on that).

Paint it Back.
Downwell.
Unexplored.

Heard endless praise for PiB on GAF, so should look into that, need to get back into Downwell, refunded Unexplored - wasn't my bag.

Seconding Unexplored.

Throwing in Nuclear Throne and One Way Heroics: Plus.

Nuclear Throne I own and should really get to. I liked One Way Heroics - everyone who hasn't played that should. Cheap as hell too.
 
It's finally over, and one more game down, so here are some impressions for the visual novel...what do they call it when it's a girl who's looking for bachelors? "Otome?" That...it's 1931: Scheherezade at the Library of Pergamum.

The story: You play literally-just-turned-18 (a bit on the nose, there, game?) Scheherezade "Sadie" Keating, daughter of two famous archaeologists who vanished ten years before the game starts. She lives with her Aunt Evelyn and her butler Bigglesworth, and also taking part in raising her is Evelyn's beau Rudeger von Prenzwald (aka, "German guy who's TOTALLY not gonna betray you, wink wink.") You spend the year getting into all sorts of crazy hijinks in various countries, hitting upon major discoveries mostly by blind luck. And of course, you run into several eligible gentlemen: your college professor, your childhood friend, a British spy, a roguish treasure hunter, and a 3,000 year old mummy who died when he was 18. ...Yeah, you heard that right. The game doesn't spare you any mysticism. You get to encounter everything from voodoo to South American nature guardians to Native American ghosts...and even a made-up snake cult from a lost civilization underneath New York City. So throw realism out the window!

Speaking of realism, Sadie herself is kind of a Mary Sue. They give her a bunch of skills. At age 18, she's already brilliant at history, the game implies that she knows more than her professor does, she knows several languages, does magic tricks on the side, knows how to fire a gun, etc. etc. The only fault they give her is that she is terrible at driving a car. As shown above, this game doesn't really spare the stereotypes either, not even for women. (I guess the "evil German" stereotype fits right in, then. I guess we can't have a story about an archaeologist without a German looking for a mystical artifact to control the world. It's just...you know...what they DO.)

So in terms of the STORY, it's pretty dumb, stereotypical, and borderline insulting. HOWEVER.

The audio and dialogue: The way in which it's told, the dialogue, is great. Characters are witty, sarcastic, charming. Standouts include Aunt Evelyn, known for her lavish parties and continuing to booze in the age of Prohibition, and classmate Steven, who gets to be the butt of jokes and comes across as an annoying pervert (remarking on the "chassis" of another classmate,) but near the end gets to show some conviction himself as he takes a stand against stolen Native American artifacts, and proves he's "not all bad." Humour abounds (the game casually throws out storylines like "Sadie forgets whether they drive on the left or the right in Australia, so she just decides to drive down the middle.") So...great characters, great repartee, too bad the plot itself isn't great.

There's no voice acting to speak of, but if you hit the "V" key they have text-to-speech voicing where everything is spoken in a flat female voice, just for the benefit of the visually impaired I suppose.

The music is pretty darn good. Each location has its own music, and some characters have their own theme music. Lots of jazzy trumpets. No complaints on the musical front.

The graphics: Some characters come off better than others. Sadie is pretty cute and spunky-looking, even if they gave her these big pupil-less eyes. Her best friend Anna has even bigger brown eyes and she looks heavily medicated. Other characters look downright maniacal when they shouldn't be (a minor character named Claudia Tello has "excited" expressions that make her look like she's going to knife everyone in the room.) The guys look more normal than the girls, at least...although several of them have that problem where the eyes overlap the hair. The backgrounds are location-based, but simple, and get the point across. New York's is probably the best, showing off the art deco.

The gameplay: Ahem. Yes, well, there are issues. I'll try to overlook the fact that when you start the game, it forces your mouse to the center of the screen, so if you click to get past the splash screen, you might end up clicking the dead-center icon which is "quit game." And no, they don't ask if you're sure, if you click it, it QUITS.

The gameplay is sort of a time-management thing: your day is split up into three parts, but during school some of your time choices for you. Think Persona. You can either build up your skills (there are 35 skills in the game which fall under 7 traits. The traits can be increased in other ways such as succeeding checks, and how high your traits are determine how fast you learn the skills. Got it? It's confusing. Generally a skill-building action improves two skills at a time.) You can get inspirations (which are basically skill bonus cards, and while it's not explained, these are WAY more crucial than they let on. The better your skill, the better your inspiration cards in that skill get. So if you only have 10 skill in something, you might get a "General +1, skill A +4, skill B +4" but if you have 100 skill you might get "General +12, Trait Type +10, four other skills +7-9.") And finally, you can go on adventures, which have various skill checks. The game implies that these bonus inspiration cards will be helpful...but let's put it this way. Suppose you have to make a Problem Solving check. If you have 100 Problem Solving, it will give you +10 for the check. But the check itself might require 55. So each check might make you use 3-5 cards. And each adventure contains 5-12 checks. Starting to see the problem? You start with a max 10 cards, and can work up to a max of 20, but even that will feel paltry in the end. Some adventures contain "rests" which allow you to stop and get more cards before continuing, and some have checks in red, which force you to get past the check to continue. (It might even be recommended to fail a red check so you can go replenish cards.) You can fail the regular checks, which increases your stress. What does stress do? IT MAKES THE CHECKS EVEN HARDER. Each point of stress adds a point to the difficulty of the check. So you can end up cascade-failing an adventure. Early on, this is very possible. Early midgame, you're getting better skills and cards, and things go better. Late midgame, they ramp up the difficulty even more and you're back to failing. By the endgame, I just gave up and started failing everything, not even bothering to get cards. (Getting 100 stress is an achievement too, you know!)

By the end of the game, checks were going well past 100. I played the game on "normal," but I absolutely recommend "easy" if you're going for achievements, as apparently it cuts the difficulty checks in half. In fact, I recommend "easy" period. As far as I can tell, it's nigh impossible to get certain achievements on normal, and literally impossible if you play on hard (which increases the difficulty checks to 150%. Why would ANYONE?) Actually...if you're going for achievements, I don't recommend this game at all unless you have dozens of hours to kill, since some achievements require you to play an exact way with no room for anything else. Honestly...even Persona 3 was more forgiving in terms of your time management.

The length: My first playthrough, profile says 27 hours but it was actually more like 25, since I was alt-tabbing. There is replayability, but...I dunno if I want to put myself through it again.

The verdict: I liked it. I disliked it. It was smart. It was dumb. I recommend it. I don't recommend it. Play it. Don't play it. Just like a character build in a well-balanced RPG, for every benefit to this game, there's a drawback. This really is one of the first games that I liked and disliked at the same time. If you're willing to live with the stereotypes and fiddly gameplay, go for it. If not, I'm sure there are other visual novels that are worth your time.
 

ModBot

Not a mod, just a bot.
Thanks to an anonymous benefactor, I am giving away 2 Steam keys. To enter this giveaway, send a PM to ModBot with any subject line. In the body, copy and paste the entire line from the message below that corresponds to the game you want. (if you include more than one game, you will be blocked from entering). Confused? Watch this GIF tutorial or ask for help.
Want to make your own ModBot giveaway? Click here for a quick tutorial thread. Please give generously.

ModBot Basics:
- Do not trade keys you win off-site to enrich yourself. Don't try to claim games you have no interest in collecting or playing. Don't claim games to give them to friends off-site.
- If the key is already taken you will not receive a reply. Replies may take a minute or two.

Mystery Key -- MB-0FCAF41898D4946C - Taken by purseowner
Mystery Key #2 -- MB-77696DC81360B714 - Taken by Jawmuncher
 

FLD

Member

That's interesting because there are SteamDB entries for both games and they haven't been touched in a while. I vaguely remember one of the devs behind the Grandia II port teasing that they were coming but I assumed they had been abandoned given the long silence and lack of activity on SteamDB. Hopefully I was wrong.
 

DeputyVanHalen

Neo Member
The thing that annoys me most about Lunar re-releases since PS1 is that it's always only Silver Star and then Eternal Blue never gets re-released.
 

Jawmuncher

Member
Lost planet 2 is coming back per the store page

===AUGUST 7, 2017===

Hello Lost Planet fans,

We apologize for the removal of Lost Planet 2's "Add to Cart" button on the Steam Store page. This removal is temporary as we work on replenishing the Games for Windows Live (GFWL) keys that are supposed to come with purchases of the game. We will issue an update to this announcement once GFWL keys have been restored. We apologize for any inconvenience!

Best Regards,

CAPCOM USA Customer Support

For the latest news and information from CAPCOM, please visit us at Capcom-Unity[www.capcom-unity.com].

So same thing as Operation raccoon ciry
 
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