Steam Holiday Sale 2011

Having already bought a holiday sale's worth of stuff in Steam's Autumn sale last year, I was looking to take things a bit easier when the real deal rolled into town on the 19th of December. 'How did that go?', you ask. Well...

Monday, 19 December 2011

Dark Void Zero €0.79
Fable The Lost Chapters €2.24
FLOCK! €1.99

The first day of the holiday sale kicked off with a nice surprise: the original Fable making an unexpected appearance on Steam. Always wanted to try this out and it'll be the perfect way to gear up for the pure gaming ecstasy that will undoubtedly be Fable: The Journey.

Equally surprising were a set of uncharacteristicly deep discounts from Capcom. Out of those I decided to go for Flock (maybe just because the screen shots vaguely remind me of Space Station Silicon Valley), and Dark Void Zero, which seemed to be received pretty when when it hit DSiWare. Can't believe the stupid lost game backstory they made up for it lives on though, years later and on another platform. Well, at least they left out the Jimmy Fallon bit. Ugh!

Tuesday, 20 December 2011

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale €3.74

I'm not really sure what I'm in for here, but everyone seems to love this, so what the hell.

Wednesday, 21 December 2011

The Sherlock Holmes Collection €8.74
Swords and Soldiers HD €2.49

The further away I get the sale itself the more I'm questioning the wisdom of throwing down for six freaking Sherlock Holmes adventure games at once. Six! I've heard some positive buzz about these and I've enjoyed what little I've read of Mr. Holmes escapades, but I don't know - The voice acting seems kind of cruddy and they look kind of cheap and nasty. I was only going to try out one for €2.50, but for €6.24 more I just couldn't resist grabbing the whole pack. Weighing less on my mind though is Swords and Soldiers, which looks like a pretty neat spin on a strategy game.

Monday, 26 December 2011

Bastion €4.75
FarCry €2.49
Rock of Ages €1.99
Worms Ultimate Mayhem + Reloaded €6.18
Worms Reloaded DLC €4.32
Worms Blast €1.49
Worms Crazy Golf €1.99

With the Steam store recently loaded up with Worms games, as somewhat of fan from back in the day, I was hoping for an awesome value Worms pack all sale long. I finally got my wish here, well almost. The pack itself still seemed a bit pricey, but with the 75% discount applied to all the individual parts, (through a series of spreadsheets and flow charts) I was able to work a way of grabbing everything I wanted for an even lower price.

Bastion and Rock of Ages were two pretty recent games I was eagerly awaiting to show up as daily deals. Bastion looks freaking amazing from everything I've seen and I was kicking myself after passing it up a few weeks earlier in the Autumn sale. Rock of Ages, on the other hand, just looks totally insane, and I want to be part of that insanity.

My final purchase for the day was Far Cry. Not sure if this is really any good or if it was strictly the graphics that had people going nuts at the time, but I've always been curious to find out and I don't think it's ever been on sale for this little before.

Saturday, 31 December 2011

Ankh 2: Heart of Osiris €1.11
Hitman Collection €4.99
Magicka: The Stars Are Left €1.49
Magicka: Vietnam €1.24

Did you know that Hitman 2 on the GameCube takes up a full 59 block memory card to save? Despite having a copy since 2006, I've never made it past the second or third level as I've always needed
whatever card my save was on for something else later on. Well, that and my general dislike for stealth. I decided several years ago that the best way to solve the save problem would be to pick up the PC version at some point and now I have, along with Hitman 1 and Blood Money. Yay, me! That's probably not going to fix my generally low tolerance level with stealth games, but I find the idea of the Hitman games so neat, I'm determined to stick it out and at least try getting to the end of one of them.

I also thought I'd try out one of the Ankh games - Telltale-looking adventure games set in Ancient Egypt. I always see them show up on the cheaper end of of my Steam catalogue trawling come sale time, but they never looked promising enough to take a chance on them at €3 or €4. For a little over a Euro though? I'll give this a shot.

And my last buy, on my day of purchases saw me grabbing two more bits of cut-price DLC from my still-unplayed copy of Magicka. A Steam copy that I actually acquired through a bizarre trading sequence on Green Man Gaming, originally starting out with 1 penny copies of Defcon, Darwinia and Uplink.

TOTAL: €52.03

A pretty nice haul that's not exactly going to break the bank, but may just send The Backloggery's servers into another meltdown. :D Pretty happy that I walked away with Bastion and Rock of Ages, and all the Worms stuff. Still not sure about those Sherlock Holmes games, but on the upside, at least I managed to avoid loading up on the usual bunch of random sub-€2 games like every other year; Chrome, Caster, Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood, Tidalis - those are the type of Steam games I've got so little intention of playing at this stage that I've mentally blocked their presence on the Library tab.