Steam plunder

As with each Steam sale I tend to avoid the bigger titles, aiming to get more bang or pew pew for my buck.

So in this sale Rachy and I loaded our wallets up in an attempt to avoid the pull of just buying everything. The result of this has been that we have been a little more frugal and mostly buying those titles that are good value for money. A well kept wishlist is all worth it when the Steam Sale comes to town.

It’s worth mentioning that we recently bought a wired controller for the PC, mostly to play the large number of platformers that we have accumulated over the years.  Plus it opens up alot more that suggest a controller as the preferred input method.

So here are the titles I picked up over the last week:

Party of Sin

party of sinFirst up is a fun platformer that features the 7 Sins manifest into humanoid form, each with a unique ability that you have to utilise in order to solve puzzles and defeat enemies. I’ve not put in a massive about of time with this, but the parts I have played was more that adequate to confirm that the game is enjoyable and to my tastes.
End of stage boss fight wasn’t too taxing and a small amount of trial and error saw me overcome this challenge.

The Longest Journey + Dreamfall

I re-bought the classic Funcom titles as I wanted to play them before next years release of the 3rd game, my previous copies have gone walk about.

Sanctum 2

The follow up the Tower Defense/FPS game. Really looking forward to sinking some time into this as I enjoyed the first game alot.

DLC Quest

A title that carries a warning of DLC going too far, rather annoying but fun.

The Witcher 2

I tried the original title out and found it tricky so, for a lower price I thought I’d give the franchise another shot.

Dishonored

Hear many things about Arkane Studios game, this was about 75% which is a good start for my wallet. I’m really looking forward to getting into the midst of the city of Dunwall.

Reus

reus 200px-UNIVERSITY_COMPLETEThis title from Abbey Games is a God Sim, well kind of. You control a number of giants (gods) who help you to shape a grey barren world. As you progress through the set goals the gameplay continually expands into new and differing tasks and activities. You have to balance the development of the world and the civilizations that evolve.

I also picked the following DLC:

Demolition Inc – Levels DLC
Skyrim Hearthfire
Tropico 4: Pirate Heaven DLC
Defense Grid: Containment DLC
Civ V Korea/Wonders DLC Combo

Trading cards

“And for their next trick Valve will distill the essence of gaming and monetise it.”

Whether you are a fan of Valves platform or not, it’s clear to see that the environment is ripe for cash-shop shaping. Given that it’s filed with completionists and achievement hunters it was only just a matter if time, of course I can imagine there were many discussions over what system would work best, before they settled on the Cards.

The trading card system is one that tugs on those same strings that motivated me as a 7 year old collecting football stickers, I never cared for the sport (then or now) but that didn’t matter, the grind to 100% completion drove the culture and excitement. That rippled through everyone partaking in the activity.

Of course the similarity doesn’t end there as for every trading card is a rarer foil version to be coveted by players with more money than sense. Which brings us to the social interaction part of trading cards which is simulated by the community market on Steam.

The launch of the Trading cards wasn’t widely publicised as it transitioned from Beta to live, but it was leading up to the Summer Sale. On each day of the summer sale more games have been “Cardified” with many oldish titles also being selected.

So with the sale done and Trading cards firmly embedded into the player mentality, I suspect that every new title that appears on Steam, cards will appear along side the achievements.

Console yourself

With next Gen consoles glooming on the horizon and I’m already bored of hearing about them.

Despite the quantity of games what I find annoying is the lack of variety of console games. Combined with the fact that new titles serve one purpose, extracting cash from gamers (when prices are compared to the same title on PC) & I find controllers to clunky for manygame types.

Good luck to them but I have no urge to migrate to a new platform, espically with no backward compatibility, that said from an older gaming point of view many old consoles rarely had that feature. NES and SNES for example.

So no consoles for me, oh well everyone knows that PCs are the Next Gen consoles.