With a big backlog already, especially of Steam games and the big Holiday Sale coming up, the last thing I needed around Thanksgiving time was a third fully-fledged Steam sale this year. Gabe though, obviously thought otherwise. Who was I to argue?
Day 1: Wednesday, 23 November 2011
Critical Mass €1.12
Cthulhu Saves the World & Breath of Death VII Pack €0.68
I-Fluid €1.25
Insecticide: Part 1 €0.74
Madballs in... Babo:Invasion €2.24
Musaic Box €1.24
The Oddbox €3.74
Roogoo €0.74
Turba €2.25
Day one's purchases were mostly heavily discounted indie games I've had my eye on for a while. I know the conventional wisdom is to wait for daily deals, but if these were dalies later the savings would only be a matter of cents. I'm particularly interested in trying out Cthulhu Saves the World here. Any coverage I seen of it makes it look awesome, though I can't help feeling that I should get around to playing FFVI and Chrono Trigger first for a bit of context. Not too difficult as they've both been languishing in my backlog for about a year.
The only daily I bought on day one was The Oddbox. Last I heard Stranger's Wrath still wasn't fully patched, but for that price, I'm willing to take a chance on on, in the hope they'll get it running properly at some stage. Am I crazy or is the plan to update the Oddbox version to HD version from PSN at some stage too? If so, this could work out pretty well for me in the end.
Day 3: Friday, 25 November 2011
Eversion €1.00
Garry's Mod €2.49
The Mawesome Pack €2.99
Serious Sam HD: Gold Edition €3.99
After skipping day two, I went on to grab the Serious Sam pack from the day three's deals. I've actually had the original versions of both games for a few years now. Quite enjoyed the couple of hours I put into The First Encounter, but now do I pick back up from where I left off there or switch over to the HD version instead? Ah, First World problems.
Eversion looks like a fun, little retro throwback for €1, though I hear it gets kind of weird later on.
I'm not sure I'll get a whole lot out of Garry's Mod - fiddling around with level editor-type stuff isn't really my thing, but €2.50 was certainly the cheapest I've ever seen it going for, so I decided to give it a go. It'll stop me mulling over it's purchase every Steam sale, if nothing else.
The Maw, I've heard mixed things about and I'm not really as big a fan of Twisted Pixel as most people, but €3 for the game and all the DLC seemed like the right price to try it out at.
Day 5: Sunday, 27 November 2011
Doc Clock: Toasted Sandwich of Time €1.25
Red Faction II €1.69
SiN + SiN Episodes: Emergence €3.00
Unreal Gold €2.49
I rounded off my Autumn Sale purchases with Doc Clock: an interesting-looking little puzzle game and a trio of old-ish first person shooters.
I bought the original Red Faction in the 2009 Holiday Sale, only playing it at last a few weeks ago. For the most part, I enjoyed it. It's a pretty competent shooter, taking a lot of inspiration from the original Half-Life. Of course the big gimmick is the G-Mod stuff and whenever I busted through a wall with explosives it never failed to feel a little magical, even ten years after the game came out. Whoever came up with that sequence with the bomb at the ending though can fuck right off though - easily the most frustrating bit of gaming I've had to force myself through in recent years.
Red Faction 2 fared a bit less well critically, but with most of the criticism seemingly levelled at the its short play time, I don't think I have too much to worry about after paying less than €2 for it.
The SiN + SiN: Episodes pack seemed like pretty a good deal at €3. I really don't know much about either game. I remember seeing SiN in a feature on upcoming shooters in an issue of Arcade once and I've often heard Sin Episodes tossed around as an example of the failure of episodic content, but that's about it. I'm having a bit of trouble getting SiN to run at the moment, so maybe that's the way things are going to stay. :D
The original Unreal is something I've wanted to pick up since I first laid my hands on a PC in 1998. I remember reading an article at the time on the gaming section of RTE's teletext service raving about the graphics, which got me quite excited about it at the time, but running it on an outdated 486 with no graphics acceleration wasn't really going to fly.
Sale Total: €32.90
If I did my maths right, the total of all that comes to €32.90 - certainly more than I've spent in past Thanksgiving sales, but this is the first really conventional one they've done with store-wide discounts as well as daily deals. I thought they really delivered a nice selection of deals this time, especially on older stuff like SiN, Insecticide, The Maw etc., stuff I've been interested in for a while, but that never seemed to drop much at sale time. Overall, I'm pretty happy with my haul to Euro ratio, my ever-increasing tower of a backlog: less so.
