Steam Holiday Sales (1/2: Repeat deals)

[TEEEPO]

how long are the gta episodes?

[Bebpo]

I've heard 8 hours or so thrown around.

[Hitler Stole My Potato]

Yeah, that's about right.  There's really not a lot of filler in either of them but they're both worth playing, especially Gay Tony.

Anyone know anything about Amnesia The Dark Descent?  I read that there's basically no combat, so it's a lot of creeping around.  I used to like stuff like that but I don't know if I have the patience for it anymore.  Might be worth trying out for only 6 bucks.

[Bebpo]

It's great if you like macabre horror tales

[chronovore]

THIRTY DOLLARS, YO

ALSO WHAT'S YOU NFS NAME

I don't have it; I picked it up for Cormacaroni as a thank-you, but I didn't think it would be on sale this soon after launch.

[Cormacaroni]

Ya mug!  But it was sweet

If it makes you feel better, most of the things I gifted went on sale almost immediately as well. I bought Stalker Call of Pripyat 3 separate times at $10, $15 and $15...then it went on sale for $5 along with the base game

That's steam for ya, what are you gonna do. If you don't like paying these trivial amounts of money for games, just pirate the things and stfu.

[Cormacaroni]

btw, if anyone can gift me Dead Space before the sale runs out, I'll hit them back. Been meaning to play it forever!

[Joe Molotov]

btw, if anyone can gift me Dead Space before the sale runs out, I'll hit them back. Been meaning to play it forever!

I got your back, bro. 

[Joe Molotov]

I played a little Call of Cthulhu on the Xbox back in the day, and it was pretty awesome.

[Cormacaroni]

Joe

My own personal Santa!

Giving you a game that Sho Nuff recommends from your wishlist. I hear it's a bit on the broken side but hopefully you can have some fun with it once you get done with the dwarf porn sims.

[Cormacaroni]

haha, you beat me to it!

Yeah, Sho Nuff actually left his copy of the Xbox game with me when he left Japan. He is familiar with the mythos whereas I am not (I've never read the original Lovecraft, just stuff by Clark Ashton Smith and so on), but I remember him saying it was pretty crazy, if rather busted as a pure shooter.

[Joe Molotov]

I've moved on from Dwarves, I'm all about the Mystic Elves now.

[Eel O'Brian]

I had Fuel and The Indie Fright pack sitting in my cart so I figured why not, one last hurrah before the sale is over.  I flip-flopped over Fuel for the whole sale, knowing I could get a disc copy for around $4, but eventually not having to keep up with boxes and discs won out.  Between the Gamefly sale, D2D, and Steam, I spent about $75 on myself, way more than I intended to, but still just $10 more than a new game plus tax would cost here for a fuckton more games.  I ended up gifting around $150 worth of stuff in total.

I was gifted the following games (I'll leave out the names in case the people don't want their names known):

Indie Kids Pack
BC Kings
Chime
Silverfall
Silverfall Earth Awakening
Westward Collection
AI War Fleet Command
Wings of Prey
BiA: Earned in Blood
Splinter Cell
The Witcher 2 (  Polacks )
CivCity Rome
Take Command: 2nd Manassas
Tropico Reloaded
Sid Meier's Railroads
Dimensity
Indie 2D Pack
The Polynomial
Shattered Union

Thanks to everyone who gifted them to me!

[Great Rumbler]

The Void is €9 on (euro) Steam at the moment and is also part of the Indie Fright Pack which is just €5. On the American Steam store I believe it's just $5!

The Void is a russian-made dating sim with a starvation element in survival horror trappings. It is one of my favorite games of the forever and I think anyone who likes 'games are art', eastern bloc games or digital art installations should pick this up. Now, this isn't to say that it isn't a proper game for it is very proper. The mechanics are real interesting; you grow and collect color in the world which you use as a resource to keep yourself alive, but in turn also have to use for everything else that you do (attack enemies, plant trees which will in turn grow more color,  feed girls, etc.), even staying alive depletes your color, so the entire game has a real strong focus on resource management.

This is Ice-Pick Lodge's second title, their previous being Pathologic which is also an amazing game, but marred by a horrid translation. The Void, surprisingly, features fantastic voice work fully realizing the sense of famish in the characters. The world is also drab and horribly depressing (in that quaint Russian way), so when your trees sprout color it really feels like you managed to pull yourself out of the heroin addled hole the game seems so adamant on pushing you down into. 

Trailer in spoiler

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[youtube=560,345][/youtube]

[close]

If the game sounds interesting, but you're too much of a knob gobbler to deal with the difficulty inherent in a russian indie game there is a fantastic Let's Play on Something Awful that concluded half a year or so ago. I don't know if you can access the thread without a membership, but all the videos are on viddler.

The Void is pretty interesting so far, not something that I would get into a play for three or four hours straights, but it's definitely something that I wouldn't mind booting up for 30 minutes or so a day and slowly working my way through.

[brob]

The Void has a time passage system, counted in cycles, so it lends itself pretty well to that style of play I feel. Last few times I've played it I did it more or less a cycle or two at a time.

Their previous game, Pathologic, did this as well, although that's a game set in a realistic town and uses a more conventional day/night cycle. But it's a nice way to play it since that game can seem incredibly daunting (what, with it's innumerable fail-states that don't let you know straight away that you've triggered them, so you can have the misfortune of saving after).