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STEAM | December II 2014 - A thread for people who don't like sale side posters.

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I didn't think this sale was too bad. I got like 12 games and have another 6 I will buy by tomorrow if this bank transfer I'm waiting on finally occurs to bring my account balance out of the negative.
 

autoduelist

Member
Gettysburg won!? That's just awesome, I can't believe it won. Now I need to check my couch to see if I can scape together a purchase. I was planning on getting Door Kickers as my last game, but I almost feel like I should buy Gettysburg just because the community vote finally done good.

Try running the games in question. Doing so should bring up an update progress window.

Yeah, that's what I did. I was just surprised that it didn't do it automatically since the updates were 'queued' and it's set to autoupdate. I was expecting the game I wanted to play to be playable, and it wasn't (no big deal, just odd).

So... I guess this means Elminage Gothic won't make a major sale, and Dominions 4 won't return?

None of my wanted encores came back -- Door Kickers, Age of Wonders 3, and Dominion 4. (though I think D4 was a flash, so it had no chance).

What you see is what remains of the sale.

Is there any chance tomorrow's encores will be different since there are two days of encores?
 

Ventara

Member
Wait, today is the encore? So I guess now I can grab whatever I was waiting for to go on a daily?

Anyways, pretty meh sale. I had most of the stuff that went on sale, and the discounts didn't seem as deep as previous sales for the stuff I wanted.
 

pahamrick

Member
I can still not believe AC IV is seriously going to be the only 'old' AC not getting the 75% off discount again. It has to be a mistake, because now the Freedom Cry stand alone is cheaper than the DLC Freedom Cry for IV.
 

alr1ght

bish gets all the credit :)
I can still not believe AC IV is seriously going to be the only 'old' AC not getting the 75% off discount again. It has to be a mistake, because now the Freedom Cry stand alone is cheaper than the DLC Freedom Cry for IV.

People will pay for the only good AC game.
 
ModBot said:
Instructions for participants:
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.

ModBot Basics:
- This giveaway has a manual blocklist. The giver has identified members who abuse giveaways and restricted them from participating.
- I really appreciate thank you messages, but please send them to me (ANuclearError, 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 giveaway is a raffle. The winners will be selected by random draw 3 hours after the draw was created. Any games not claimed after that point will be given away first come first serve.



Transistor -- MB-F54E2CC6928CCC37 - Taken by Man Puncher. 51 entrants total.
Transistor -- MB-A28D8FB86A25E307 - Taken by AsylumX. 32 entrants total.

t1420061383z1.png

Here we go, 2 copies of what I consider to be my game of they ear for 2014.
 

Knurek

Member
What the hell is wrong with me, I'm thinking of buying Endless Legend

Despite the fact that I have completely untouched Civ5, CivBE, GalCiv 2, Endless Space and shitload of other 4X games.
And despite the fact that it's only 50% off...

Someone tell me to stop.
 

cicero

Member
This is basically my thoughts on the sale, Steam has more titles than ever b ut it feels like this sales are more and more restrictive and safer as we go. I have a feeling we got less titles on sale this year than last year.

I'm sure there are thousands of smaller titles that would love to be featured in a daily or flash.

I thought that the one good thing was the lack of repeat sales in the flash and daily sales. Unfortunately they combined this with a reduced number of flash sales, no Meta game, reduced numbers of games on daily sales, reduced discount percentages compared to discounts on the same games during previous sales, featured daily sales that are 33% and below off, they made a regular sale day into an extra day of encores, and they chose to not extend many of the sales to the entire game franchises. One could say that prices aren't Valve's fault, that Publishers and Devs set the prices, except that Valve provides the suggestions and motivation to reduce them.

With the hugely expanded library of titles added and being added to Steam, there shouldn't be people complaining about a lack of titles available to purchase on decent discounts during their biggest yearly sale. I am tired of seeing the same titles on sale during each sale. At least I didn't have to look at them multiple times this sale. This still felt like a very lazy effort on their part. Like they knew they have the high userbase that is going to suck in money and so why bother doing what was previously done to make people crazy for Steam sales. It feels like the hunger, drive, and care isn't there.

I was more excited to check out what Nuuvem and GreenManGaming had to offer each day. I KNEW I was going to get something cheap that I felt was a great deal. If the Russian connection ever opens again I am going to suck them dry, and I will feel no guilt in doing so.
 

Panda Rin

Member
What the hell is wrong with me, I'm thinking of buying Endless Legend

Despite the fact that I have completely untouched Civ5, CivBE, GalCiv 2, Endless Space and shitload of other 4X games.
And despite the fact that it's only 50% off...

Someone tell me to stop.

If it makes it any easier, it's my favorite 4X.
 

Monooboe

Member
What the hell is wrong with me, I'm thinking of buying Endless Legend

Despite the fact that I have completely untouched Civ5, CivBE, GalCiv 2, Endless Space and shitload of other 4X games.
And despite the fact that it's only 50% off...

Someone tell me to stop.

Maybe that's the game you will actually play?;)
 

Dr Dogg

Member
Urgh right sorry if I've not replied to the abundance of chat messages I've had over the past week but I've not really had access to a decent PC and the chat via web browser is rubbish. So sorry if it's come across if I've been ignoring some of youse but I'm out on the piss in an hour and I'll get to it tomorrow in a rather worse for wear state. Happy Bloody New Year!
 

CheesecakeRecipe

Stormy Grey
What the hell is wrong with me, I'm thinking of buying Endless Legend

Despite the fact that I have completely untouched Civ5, CivBE, GalCiv 2, Endless Space and shitload of other 4X games.
And despite the fact that it's only 50% off...

Someone tell me to stop.

Stop worrying and learn to love the Endless Legend.
 
Urgh right sorry if I've not replied to the abundance of chat messages I've had over the past week but I've not really had access to a decent PC and the chat via web browser is rubbish. So sorry if it's come across if I've been ignoring some of youse but I'm out on the piss in an hour and I'll get to it tomorrow in a rather worse for wear state. Happy Bloody New Year!

This is the most British post in the thread.
 

autoduelist

Member
Someone win Transistor and give it a good home! Fantastic game, imo. Strategic combat, similar in a way to a solo character SRPG. You add 'subroutines' to your character to give it unique attacks, there's free roam during combat except when your turn is charged up you pause the game and take your time to setup and unleash a series of commands. Great soundtrack. Play through twice, the ng+ is superior (harder, allows you to have all subroutines twice for better combinations).

Oh right, Dominion 4 was a flash sale.

:(

I only discovered it right after the sale ended when I asked about a fantasy wargame and was given that as a suggestion. I don't know how I skipped over it on sale day, I usually look at everything.

Unfortunately not, hence the 48-hour "Daily" Deal grid on the front page being significantly larger than usual.

Dang. I don't know if this saved me money (since I won't buy Age of Wonders 3 without it's daily price or cost me money (since I doubt I can skip Door Kickers). Darn.

EDIT RECOMMENDATION:
For those on the fence, pick up Dungeon of the Endless.

It's a roguelike - though it's realtime but you can pause with spacebar at any time to set up commands. You have a small crew (2 to start, up to 4) that you can give different assignments to.

Each level has many rooms, opening a door starts a turn and gives you resources, a new room with something in it, and possibly combat. As you go through the level you can build resource generators to get more resources per door, and you'll also earn 'dust'. Dust lets you power up rooms so you can use them, and lit rooms won't potentially spawn mobs when you open a new door.

In addition to 'major' modules that you build in rooms for resource gen, you can also build minor modules that do things like attack/slow/debuff your enemies or heal/buff your guys.

In this way, you've got a roguelike that's also a base builder that's also a tower defense game.

Since you'll rarely have enough dust to light all rooms, eventually you'll be fighting hoards too strong for any single solider (and possibly your whole team) so you'll need to light rooms in their journey and arm them with minor modules to wear them down before they get to your chokehold (where you're waiting for them, preferably buffed and them debuffed).

Add in some lewt finding, and other stuff, and this game is SOLID. It's surprisingly difficult, though, especially as you're learning, and I do have a few interface quibbles (depending on dungeon layout, there can be quite a bit of multitasking and you'll lose character to not paying attention until you learn the ropes). Also, it's sometimes hard to tell how powerful enemies are (which sucks).

Still, very highly recommended if the above sounds appealing to you. It's a brilliant combination of great game mechanics.
 

baterism

Member
I completely forgot about encore. Another whole 2 days to avoid buying more games then. But DS2 looks interesting... DS1 need to be available on my reg before I get any DS series though.
 
If you gotta get Endless Legend, try doing it via multiplayer with friends. Also, start off playing as the dragons, absurdly OP if you have a vague idea on what you're doing. If you read their faction strengths/weakness o'course.
 

Lomax

Member
What the hell is wrong with me, I'm thinking of buying Endless Legend

Despite the fact that I have completely untouched Civ5, CivBE, GalCiv 2, Endless Space and shitload of other 4X games.
And despite the fact that it's only 50% off...

Someone tell me to stop.

The questing system and faction design is truly unique compared to those games. It's the first 4x in a long while to really hook into me for a long period of time. The combat isn't great, but once I just switched to doing auto combat every time the play flow felt smooth and continuous.
 

derExperte

Member
Encore? Shit.

Gettysburg won? Sweet. Like with one of the earlier votes I think because the other two are more well known but kinda on the same level they divided the voters.
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
The auctions were pretty good. I spent about $3.50 in Steam credit and got about $25 worth of games at sale prices, over $30 at original MSRP.

The sale was pretty butt, though.
- Featured deals tended to be smaller than in the past, more from the 25-50% range than the 50-80%+ range; steep discounts tended to be retreads of games that had been discounted many times in the past. It seems the store is finally settling into a pattern of slow ratcheting discounts for maximum price stratification... which means you'll still eventually get the games you want, but there'll be fewer surprisingly deep discounts
- Fewer opportunities to vote, and fewer overall featured games despite a larger body of games to choose from
- More high quality games than ever not receiving a discount at all (Samurai Gunn's unwillingness to discount even a little is crazy at this point)
- No mascots
- The art only changed every two days
- The video art was interesting I guess but seemed fairly low quality, like it was compressed or aliased or something.
- Overall low quality backgrounds and emotes (although the candycane shiv is cool)
- Double recap day at the end is lazy as heck
+ On the positive side, more and more games available sub 0.49, including some games at 0.09 and 0.19 which is pretty impressive. It seems like devs have more freedom to do bonkers discounts than they once did.

I'd also add that I felt GMG sucked, Amazon had nothing, Humble had crummy sales and no bundles, Bundlestars didn't launch a major bundle, Groupees had relatively little, IndieGala was a drag--so I would say there was relatively little excitement in the gaming scene in general. Nintendo, always a laggard on sales, didn't have much going on. MS was smaller than usual because of the generational transition. Sony's was pretty much on par with usual.

Oh well, at some point you need to stop buying games and start playing them, and at least I got to do some of that over Christmas.
 

Turfster

Member
The Marvellous Miss Take is pretty good.

It's great.

How long is it? $10 still seems too high for a short stealth game. It looks fantastic and is on my wishlist, but I am already so, so, soooo past budget.

I'm at like 15 hours and I still haven't gotten par times on everything.
Even if you don't go for par/ghost, you still have like 25 maps you can do with 3 different characters that have different play styles and objectives.
 

cicero

Member
Gettysburg won!? That's just awesome, I can't believe it won. Now I need to check my couch to see if I can scape together a purchase. I was planning on getting Door Kickers as my last game, but I almost feel like I should buy Gettysburg just because the community vote finally done good.

None of my wanted encores came back -- Door Kickers, Age of Wonders 3, and Dominion 4. (though I think D4 was a flash, so it had no chance).
Many people regretting not going with Dominions 4, I picked that up at the last moment. So glad I did. I hope it comes back up for you all. :(

I want to fly away with Child of Light, but Ultimate General: Gettysburg calls out to me to take up arms as a Johnny Reb and slay my brother. Why couldn't they just have priced Nuclear Throne at 50% off instead of all of this free copy trickery. It sucked up too much of my money...
 

Phawx

Member
The auctions were pretty good. I spent about $3.50 in Steam credit and got about $25 worth of games at sale prices, over $30 at original MSRP.

The sale was pretty butt, though.
- Featured deals tended to be smaller than in the past, more from the 25-50% range than the 50-80%+ range; steep discounts tended to be retreads of games that had been discounted many times in the past. It seems the store is finally settling into a pattern of slow ratcheting discounts for maximum price stratification... which means you'll still eventually get the games you want, but there'll be fewer surprisingly deep discounts
- Fewer opportunities to vote, and fewer overall featured games despite a larger body of games to choose from
- More high quality games than ever not receiving a discount at all (Samurai Gunn's unwillingness to discount even a little is crazy at this point)
- No mascots
- The art only changed every two days
- The video art was interesting I guess but seemed fairly low quality, like it was compressed or aliased or something.
- Overall low quality backgrounds and emotes (although the candycane shiv is cool)
- Double recap day at the end is lazy as heck
+ On the positive side, more and more games available sub 0.49, including some games at 0.09 and 0.19 which is pretty impressive. It seems like devs have more freedom to do bonkers discounts than they once did.

I'd also add that I felt GMG sucked, Amazon had nothing, Humble had crummy sales and no bundles, Bundlestars didn't launch a major bundle, Groupees had relatively little, IndieGala was a drag--so I would say there was relatively little excitement in the gaming scene in general. Nintendo, always a laggard on sales, didn't have much going on. MS was smaller than usual because of the generational transition. Sony's was pretty much on par with usual.

Oh well, at some point you need to stop buying games and start playing them, and at least I got to do some of that over Christmas.

Agreed. I'm pretty bummed their wasn't a meta game. Normally at this time I'd be buying holiday cards like a madman, but I'm happy to not do it anymore. I have zero interest with increasing my level anymore.

I do want to craft the Heroine's Quest badge, just because of the exclusivity of it. But I'm waiting to craft because I'd actually want a coupon OVER the xmas card.
 

Stallion Free

Cock Encumbered
So weird seeing TF2 randomly show up in this way in a movie (Chef).

I'd also add that I felt GMG sucked, Amazon had nothing, Humble had crummy sales and no bundles, Bundlestars didn't launch a major bundle, Groupees had relatively little, IndieGala was a drag--so I would say there was relatively little excitement in the gaming scene in general. Nintendo, always a laggard on sales, didn't have much going on. MS was smaller than usual because of the generational transition. Sony's was pretty much on par with usual.

Oh well, at some point you need to stop buying games and start playing them, and at least I got to do some of that over Christmas.

This is why I find most of the sale criticism eye-rolling.
 

Uzzy

Member
Well, with the encore sale on I grabbed a few of the smaller titles on my wishlist that I had been looking at, and I'm done. Even after spending £80 I feel a bit disappointed with the sale. Stumpokapow already said most of what I'd say, but I'd add that the importance of the Steam sales has diminished quite a bit over the years, with great deals on all kinds of games available from dozens of different stores out there all year round.

Ah well, time to start playing some games and start that 52 games in a year challenge.
 

Lomax

Member
The auctions were pretty good. I spent about $3.50 in Steam credit and got about $25 worth of games at sale prices, over $30 at original MSRP.

The sale was pretty butt, though.
- Featured deals tended to be smaller than in the past, more from the 25-50% range than the 50-80%+ range; steep discounts tended to be retreads of games that had been discounted many times in the past. It seems the store is finally settling into a pattern of slow ratcheting discounts for maximum price stratification... which means you'll still eventually get the games you want, but there'll be fewer surprisingly deep discounts
- Fewer opportunities to vote, and fewer overall featured games despite a larger body of games to choose from
- More high quality games than ever not receiving a discount at all (Samurai Gunn's unwillingness to discount even a little is crazy at this point)
- No mascots
- The art only changed every two days
- The video art was interesting I guess but seemed fairly low quality, like it was compressed or aliased or something.
- Overall low quality backgrounds and emotes (although the candycane shiv is cool)
- Double recap day at the end is lazy as heck
+ On the positive side, more and more games available sub 0.49, including some games at 0.09 and 0.19 which is pretty impressive. It seems like devs have more freedom to do bonkers discounts than they once did.

I'd also add that I felt GMG sucked, Amazon had nothing, Humble had crummy sales and no bundles, Bundlestars didn't launch a major bundle, Groupees had relatively little, IndieGala was a drag--so I would say there was relatively little excitement in the gaming scene in general. Nintendo, always a laggard on sales, didn't have much going on. MS was smaller than usual because of the generational transition. Sony's was pretty much on par with usual.

Oh well, at some point you need to stop buying games and start playing them, and at least I got to do some of that over Christmas.

Pretty much my sentiments exactly. I do think the 25-50% dominance of dailies is only because the dailies themselves were dominated by recent releases, which was of course a symptom of having so few dailies when compared to volume of recent releases. We saw quite a few of last year's releases hit record lows (75-80% off).
 
man, it was a long shot, but I really hoped to see styx go back down :( I missed the flash and dammit all to hell! gaben hath forsaken me!

Overall I agree with others... It was an oddly disappointing run this time.
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
In the spirit of playing games, I played through Inescapable yesterday. It's $4.99 (no discount during the Holiday sale because ???). Here is my positive Steam review:

This is a mild recommendation with some hesitation.

Inescapable is a short (90-120 minute) puzzle platformer in the basic style of a Metroidvania (new areas are unlocked as you get upgrades or items). I would say its look is inspired by early PC or Amiga games, its tone is inspired by lonely sci-fi like The Dig, and its platforming is inspired by games like Flashback, Blackthorne, or Prince of Persia. I liked all three of those things and that's in large part why I'm recommending the game. It tells the story of a mining company ship that crash-lands on a planet and what your player character finds on the surface. Combat is a secondary focus, primarily you just platform and solve puzzles.

My hesitations: The game's default control bindings on a controller are poor, so you'll want to rebind them. The game is short and ends somewhat abruptly. The controls don't quite have the precision they need for some of the late game platforming. But the serious limitation is that the game does not have a map or minimap--for a Metroidvania, this is a problem. Often times, I'd get a new item and say "okay, I need to go find this room to use it"... and then spent a while trying to actually find the room. This could have been mitigated if I kept a paper map, but I didn't because I didn't know I'd need to until it was too late.

I disagree with some of the feedback from other reviews: At the time I played the game, it did not have unavoidable fall damage for most of the game. Items were always clear to me.

I just wanted to end with a little discussion of the plot or theme. The ending is basically an extended quote from David Foster Wallace about the nature of heroism. I did find it interesting, and it did connect to the game in a tangential way... but I couldn't help but feel that the game could do more to earn this critical perspective. It's a pity, because I really liked the text and lore throughout the game and wish there were a little more of it, building towards the ending.

At the time I played the game it did not have achievements or cards, so playing the game is a one-and-done. Again, my verdict is a very mild recommendation and I recommend you read carefully to understand whether you'd like the same things about it as I did.

Edit: Oh, and Year Walk has a "play on New Year's Eve" achievement. You just need to boot the game up to get it.
 
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