Steam Sales: An attempt at a comprehensive End User's Guide

It's October now and that means the biggest crunch of Steam Sales is rapidly approaching us. This is a handy-dandy guide to understanding how the Steam Sale structure works for you, the end user, and to buying a giant pile of games you will fundamentally never play but as inexpensively as possible. Ahem.

For reference, I'm going into my fourth year of having a Steam Account. I got an account to get into a sale and that's basically how I frame my entire experience with buying off Steam. In these three years I have accumulated about ~300 Steam games at an average cost of 'give or take' $2. Steam Enhanced gives a figure of $415 spent, but that number is a bit complicated, since I've gotten Steam keys from all over. Anyway, let's begin!

this remains the most honest macro of all

Shootember: Hard Reset

 Expectation is a hell of a thing.

Hard Reset was introduced to me as "an old school" FPS game. For me, that means Doom and ... This is not Doom. I'm just saying that right out because Doom is a piece of nostalgia to me that should not be invoked unless a game really feels old school. Maybe Hard Reset is middle-school, which I think is fair to it. It reminds me a bunch of Quake 3. I think this took a ton of my enjoyment right out of Hard Reset's hands, since telling me I'm going to experience Doom again is just so unfair to any game. I'm generally pretty good about nostalgia, having replayed many of the old games I once remembered fondly. But Doom man, Doom just is.

Doom to me is very similar a discussion as the early Sonic the Hedgehog games, with a wealth of features people can't seem to successfully weave together. Lots of callbacks and references, but they never seem to get there. Doom is essentially a 2d game pretending to be 3d, which is in and of itself a big part of why it works. It also features health packs, key cards, ammo attrition elements, back tracking, secret doors, a "lighting engine" that actually does something and a banging sound track that all add up to a surprisingly easy to mentally integrate atmosphere. Demons from Hell, stuff happened, you are shoot man, go forth and SHOOT. What Doom lacked in story, it made up in sentiment. Shoot man wanted to shoot his foes and felt a sense of accomplishment in trekking through each treacherous environment.

I could go on about Doom for hours, but it was fast, it was fluid, it didn't go out of its way to punish you but attrition kept the game tense. Even many modern elements would work fine in Doom, but the atmosphere is what I miss. I also miss, more than anything, the feel of bleak openness - I honestly think the open world sandbox games are much closer in design to Doom than most modern shooters. The games care less about aiming, more about movement and you feel way more powerful in Saint's Row 3 than you do in most FPS games.

If it sounds like I'm being hard on Hard reset in this comparison, I'm not really. I don't know that it's something they intentionally marketed their game to be or if the gaming press just picked up the idea. If there's one thing media loves, it is to A) bash modern fps games since they're the largest or at least most hyped up market B) Decrying the new school, they flip out and claim everything is old school that isn't a big budget AAA shooter.

Which is bizarre - There are different eras of shooters. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Blakestone Aliens of Gold and a fair number of other early titles represent a fundamentally old school design. There's also middle ground between now and then, with many of the 'old school' elements actually being stuff from middle era or later games. The first Crysis for example barely feels like Doom but it doesn't feel like a chest high man shooter cinematic set piece game either.

Anyway to summarize what I mean, Hard Reset essentially feels like a middle ground shooter. There are attempts at weaving some Doom like elements into the game, but it also feels like it has many modern elements as well. So like I said, expectation is a Hell of a thing, but once you get past the idea it was aiming to be a mix of all three eras you get a better sense of the game and judge it a bit more fairly. You stop thinking "why aren't I playing Doom, I was promised Doom" and instead think "I'm playing Hard Reset at least, which is better than Rage anyway..."

Belated Shootember! Splinter Cell Conviction OR Adventures in uPlay

choke 'em out UNDER THE CLOWN

I didn't buy this game, but I've wanted to try a Splinter Cell thingie for a while, so when my friend offered to give me a free copy generated via a nvidia promotion I was all excitebike. Or, well ok, not so much excited as vaguely interested. The promotion was for the deluxe edition of Splinter Cell: Black List, but for some reason also came with a free copy of this game, which is pretty nice given I hadn't played any of them. It's pretty weird that a deluxe edition (ie, purchased by the game's core audience) would come with an extra game but hey that's really nice of them.

uPlay though, man oh man is uPlay a thing. I have two experiences previous with uPlay: One, I installed it to add a key from one of the Assassin's Creed games. I think Brotherhood, or something. The key was generated via a pricing error, so it was eventually revoked. I'm not upset about that, but it's worth pointing out that Electronic Arts had a pricing error that gave up hundreds of thousands of copies of games and they didn't revoke a single one. It worked too, that's why I have Origin and have actually given them money for Origin titles - Kingdoms of Amalur through Gamersgate, but certainly more of a success than nothing. My other experience is installing uPlay to figure out what I actually had on the account and the entire process being a bit well into irritating.

This latest experience is just a hassle. My friend gave me the code amazon had spat out. This code then goes into the nvidia website, which requires a webform. That gives me a coupon code for the ubistore, which uses my uplay account credentials. But it isn't uplay, really, because upon finishing the checkout process after getting all my ducks in a row (and it changing my address to a US postal code matched to Alberta, Canada which is a place I do not live in) it spat out ... An email. The email gave me the Conviction code, which I would then I have to input into uplay myself. But there was no Blacklist code!

No, that code shows up later, because this was before the release date. My word, there are so many more steps here than if it was on Steam. And most of them involve using outdated storefront software and gee wilkers mister ubisoft, get your damn shit together! Later it gave me Blacklist anyway and emailed me to let me know, but there's just so many things about this whole experience that gives me the feeling uplay is a year too early. Then an Installshield Wizard popped up and I honestly thought I'd traveled back in time.

I don't know overmuch about Splinter Cell, beyond the main character having a name I like and something about Tom Clancy which to my understanding is like a kiss of death? A friend of mine read spy novels by the dozens and Tom Clancy apparently upsets him. But this series has been going on long enough that something about it must be worth playing, right? And then the voice actor for Sam Fisher becomes apparent and it's the guy who played Ultra Magnus in Transformers Prime. UM was a space cop in the IDW run, and it's hard not to connect everything in my head and it's just so awesome. Sam Fisher, duly appointed enforcer of the awesome accord. Hells yea.

And then I remembered this is this VA's last game and damn it now I get why people were mad!

Mark of the Ninja: An actual ninja game

"Stealth game" is a confusing and often contradictory path to follow down in any gaming discussion. You will often hear of it in extremely mixed tones. Forced stealth section is uttered by some gamers in the same way a lad or lass might discuss their latest date getting food poisoning mid-way through coitus. On the other hand, stealth genre done right is spoken in low, reverent whispers, like finding the holy grail and its hot sister, the holier grailia. There's also a middle ground, which is generally made up of high pitched whining. Reviews of DX:HE often shrieked about how sometimes you couldn't manage to not kill someone and reading people discuss Crysis games has always been unbelievable. The usual complaint being that the Crysis suit powers were "too wimpy", because turning nearly invisible before point blanking someone with a shotgun is a really wimpy power.
 
Mark of the Ninja is a stealth game, and thankfully sold as one, so people didn't begin shrieking like a wounded squirrel at it. You would think that a ninja game would advertise that alone, but for generations ninja has basically meant 'samurai who kicks people and throws smokebombs'. I can't even fully blame Naruto with its brain damaged orange jump suit wearing lead character, as the West has had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles going for almost my entire lifespan. There's actually a fair bit of common ground between the two eve. Given ninjas might be very well made up in the first placenesides...

I digress. Mark of the Ninja is about a ninja of the assassin-y type, which is actually not as cool as I would have liked. It has a pretty tight revenge for the Clan plot which ... Honestly, I wish you just did ninja missions megaman style. You know like, steal Woodman's grain, swindle Metalman's strongbox, leave Gutsman's corpse swinging by his robo-innards in the temple gate... I'm getting off track here, but wouldn't that be cool? Regardless, Mark of the Ninja is a 2D platformer and good lord does that ever fix so many issues with stealth games. Admittedly many of those issues could be fixed but Mark of the Ninja straight up equates sound traveling distance, sight lines and patrolling paths in a really tight way that almost surprises you in how robust it is.

Almost like they really did want to make a ninja game or something.

Rest in Peace you crazy THQ fellows: Darksiders 2: Death Lives: This title makes no sense: Attack of the Colons

It's kinda hard right off the bat to take a game seriously when the title is just so grimdark. I feel like it's the most evident flaw in the game's marketing. Tell me I'm in for a treat when I play Darksiders 2, the prequel sequel to a nice looking new IP? Alright! Tell me I'm in for a treat when I'm up to play Darksiders 2: DEATH LIVES and my mouth does that thing where I try to sound out the words because they were so stupid in the air a moment ago. It's just a struggle.

I mean, are we going for Lovecraft here, twisted eons, even death may die? Probably not. It's just an odd looking marketing blurb, but hey we live in an era where Microsoft knowingly marketed into a press release where people came out of it going 'Ah yes, the Xbone' rather than giving their console a name that didn't shorten into a phallic reference. C'mon guys, it isn't hard. You just look at the words and go 'can this be shortened into a penis joke?'

Then again, it worked for Nintendo. Maybe dongs are the new hotness. Or wait, maybe they were when the Wii was burning up sales they were and now Microsoft is riding coat tails of a dying trend? I'm getting sidetracked here. Darksiders 2: Death Lives. Terrible title. And honestly, after finishing Darksiders itself, terrible sequel concept. I mean right from the get go you end with this super bad ass moment and instead you swerve, make a U turn, and get to work on a Death-centric parallel prequel? Death the guy, not Death the concept, which is centric in like 99% of video games.

It's not all that difficult to look at stuff like this and realize why the game was, to my understanding, a bit of a failure. I'm not trying to rag on the Vigil boys, because they seem like cool dudes, but rather the marketing team that dreamed this one up. Ugh. Seriously, Death Lives? Death Lives where? Detroit? The other decisions rapidly scale up to form a game more cobbled together, less unified, but none of them really stand out like that.

But this is probably the last true Darksiders game, unless the IP ends up back in Vigil crew's hands over at Crytek. Granted, that doesn't mean the next game will be bad - Assuming it exists at all, which it probably won't. I guess Death doesn't live. (The Nordic guys did comment here here but that's well into the territory of All Well and Good, But)

They Bleed Pixels: They Sure Do

I don't know if I like indie games. I certainly buy indie games, but I don't think I've played more than 10% of the ones I now own. Between bundles, more bundles and the odd nice looking little title I end up buying lots of them. They litter my backlog. I've reviewed only a handful.

One of the games I don't like, but did play, was Super Meat Boy. There's lots to like, don't get me wrong, but SMB falls for me on two issues. One, I find it pretty outright boring. Two, it's just ugly. There's care and detail put into the sprite work, but the puerile love of raspberry jam upon every surface just felt like something a 13 year old would dream up. When I was 13 I thought rare steak was icky cuz blood came out! At this age, that protein saturated solution - Not blood, by the way - Just looks very dull indeed. I've read it's a really popular indie game, but I have a feeling it's popular in that way that doesn't matter to me. There's games people like, and there's games people like but talk about. You'll see a common thread in the latter group are, from time to time, that they feel accomplishment in finishing a difficult game.

I don't care if you've ever done anything in any single player game ever because it was difficult. What you do in your own time, man.

Anyway, I have no idea why I'd want to buy They Bleed Pixels. I thought the game's art assets looked neat, but I knew full on it was described as "like Super Meat Boy, but there's some combat". Does that sound good, knowing I didn't like the other game in the mix? Does adding combat to anything you don't like make them good games?

But then they added steam cards to They Bleed and it went on sale on GMG (which finally works with my visa, I don't know what changed but hurray!) for a price that when you get like 50 cents a card ends up mostly paying for the game. I think I'll try anything at twenty five cents. Hell I bought the RIP trilogy for a dollar and I can't even amass the effort to be mad at that.

Oh hells yea the summer sale is on, I wonder what's on sa....

Oh, oh right. Better luck in a couple hours I guess.