Saturday, December 29, 2012

Steam Holiday Sale 12-29

Main Sale

The Elder Scrolls - Same deal as during the Autumn sale, where Skyrim and it's two DLCs are 50% off, while Oblivion and Morrowind are both 75% off, making those last two $4.99. A bit suprising that a game that's over a year old is still so high in price (it's regular price hasn't been reduced yet), but that does seem to be how Bethesda rolls with their successes.

The Witcher - Two different games for sale here. If you're into RPGs, I recommend you give these a try. I polished off The Witcher earlier this month, and it'll be an upcoming review. There are issues with the game, mostly technical (it did not seem to get along well with Windows 7 64bit), but also cases where lines by the same character are voiced by entirely different people. Still, an incredible game with a great story, emphasis on choice and detective work, and a focus on preparing for combat as much as actually fighting, more than worth it at $2.49. I'm going to assume the same for Witcher 2, which is $7.49, though I do know it uses a new engine and that they have changed the combat system. Also, when you start up 2, it does ask for your save data from 1. What it does with that, I do not know, since I stopped about 10 seconds in because I didn't want to get sucked into another 50 hours of game time coming right off of the original.

Grand Theft Auto - Everything from GTA III to IV is on sale today, ranging in price from $2.49 to $7.49. I only dabbled into IV a bit, and it seemed fine. Personally, I've never been a huge fan of the series, but that might also be because I missed the boat when III came out, since it wasn't available on the system I was playing.

Payday The Heist - The only non-franchise sale today. This is a squad based game similar to Left 4 Dead, in that a group of four people must work together to overcome obstacles and complete objectives. Except instead of running from one end of the level to the other, all while killing zombies, you're doing things like taking hostages, drilling through bank vaults, and fighting off waves of swat officers. I could definitely like this game, but I feel to really enjoy it you need a group of people.

Galactic Civilizations - Multiple ways to go bout purchasing these games. Either individual, as a pack for $6.24, or as part of the Stardock pack, which includes the still on sale Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion for $49.99. If that last pack was a bit less, and included other games like Sin: Trinity, I would jump all over it, but alas, no.

Bioshock - The original Bioshock was quite ground breaking. The second less so, but it was still a good game. They would both make a great addition to anyone who is a fan of shooters with rpg elements. While each game is $4.99, and the pack is $9.99 (that's right, it will actually cost you $0.01 more to buy the pack), you might want to head over to Amazon, where you can still get the games bundled with the incredible Spec Ops: The Line for an amazing $9.99, the same price, which is more than worth it because Spec Ops might just be the best, most adult, game I have ever played. Or, if not, I've still got my two Steam keys left over from that bundle, so maybe we could work something out ;-)


Flash Sales:
Transformers  -Two different games, and then DLC for one. Ranges from $4.99 to $29.99
Air Conflicts - $14.99
Fortune Summoners, Chantelise - A tale of Two Sisters, and Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale - $4.99, $2.49, and $4.99 respectively
Sonic Franchise - Just like the other day, various prices
Portal Franchise - Reviewed! In case you missed it, it's another repeat
X Superbox - Half the price it was last year at $9.99


Community Choice:
Chivalry Medieval Warfare - $12.49


Bonus Sale
Over at greenmangaming.com today's deal is on Spec Ops: The Line, and you can still use that 30% off coupon (GMG30-DPLIM-DN831) to get it down to $5.25. The real question though is if that is a better deal than Amazon's (back there under bioshock), but I guess that depends on if you already have the other games or not.

4 comments:

  1. GalCiv 2 is fantastic if you want a turn based strategy game in space.

    Don't recall having any issues with Witcher 2 on Win7 x64 here.

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    1. Hopefully I won't have any issues with Witcher 2, other than the one that I've already realized where I can't run the game at max settings.

      The issues I ran into with The Witcher were pretty bad, and not unique to just myself, but also not the same for everyone. Mostly it crashed, a lot. This would generally happen during loading screens, and when half the game takes place in a city where you are constantly entering and exiting houses, well, that's not good. Thankfully there is a quicksave function, but when each save is about 18 megabytes, and you have over 500 of them by the end of the game, you end up creating this huge slowdown whenever you go to the load game screen, since it needs to process over 9 gigabytes. If it hadn't been such a good game in other respects, I might have gotten a bit feed up with it. Plus, you recommended it, and so far you are 2/2 with that and Frozen Synapse.

      Also, don't be surprised if that paragraph shows up in the review, since I'm currently working on trying to get completely caught up by the end of the day, in the event that I do some kind of "game of my year" awards.

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  2. Ubersmapling is the only setting on Witcher 2 that's completely ludicrous in terms of system requirements, and that doesn't improve visuals that much. You can get by pretty nicely with much more humane hardware.

    I ran through it with an overclocked GTX 460 and it was pretty capable, something faster would help (I suspect the game would have appreciated some FSAA but it wasn't viable for me) but it wouldn't be a dramatic difference.
    It's definitely one of the most visually impressive games out there.

    The only issues I had with the original Witcher were loading times, which were ridiculously long. That was patched out long ago though. Never had any crashes at all.

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    1. The Witcher II is one of a handful of games I haven't been able to run at max settings. The game did give me some recommend settings that were lower, but I put everything at max just to see. I'll probably end up taking the game's advice in the end.

      I'm getting close to the point where I'd almost consider building a new PC. Did this one back in 09, and it seems that every 4 years or so is about right. Though I usually have only run into issues with not being able to run games after a new generation of consoles comes out, so maybe this one can hang on a bit longer. As a stop gap, I could always upgrade my graphics card (it's a GTX 295), because the MB and CPU should be fine as long as I don't want USB 3 or SATA III.

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