Steam Sales: How to Ruin Yourself

Welcome to this special edition of "How to Ruin Yourself with Steam Sales!". Within this special blog, you will witness the many games I have purchased throughout the one week Summer Sale offered by Steam, both old and new. To accompany yourself throughout this magtnificient journey, I have recorded, edited and added a 10 minutes long video for each of the games, totalling to massive 9 videos, resulting in 90 minutes of pure eye pleasure!..

Just kidding ;p I don't have 9 videos of 10 minutes each. While I did purchase what I believe to be 9 games throughout the sales, I have only captured 3 of these titles on video for your viewing pleasure. It is, however, true that one of them lasts for a complete 10 minutes, with a close follower at 8 minutes and a shorter one, standing at 5 minutes and a half. The reasons why I did not capture the other games is mostly because it was not necessary, considering that I will not start them anytime soon and that some of them are sequels to games I have mentioned previously or will mention in this blog.

Steam offers the consumers with incredible sales every now and then. Back when I first downloaded the client, they would have the usual "Weekend Deal" and the "Holiday Sales" during Christmas and New Year. As time went on, they started having "Mid-Week Deal" and now, "Summer Sales", and it is to be expected that they'll grant us yet another useless occasion which will define a period of sales. Summer Sales is the one in question for now, as I did what I do with every single major sales period they present us with: I purchased a lot of games. I ended up buying a total of 9 games and it costed me something like.. the price of one new retail game, maybe 2.

I'll try to keep the descriptions as brief as possible, as 9 games are quite something. I will give bigger explanations to the 3 games with videos and will keep it to a minimum for those who don't. So if you want to simply know which games I have purchased, you can simply look at the logos. Oh yeah, and I've included warnings for my videos :]

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I remember back in the days where the majority of people didn't even have computers. Back in those days, the same friend who had shown me the game "Thief", made me play Rainbow Six, which I remembered ever since. The one thing I remembered the most was how you would make a plan, draw down the routes for each of the teams you controlled, took half an hour to create the perfect plan, only to have it be a complete failure on the field. You then needed to start again from scratch from the beginning. While the game itself was quite amazing, that small part at the beginning of a mission was a real pain and extremely frustrating.

Knowing that this system had been removed in Rainbow Six Vegas, I remembered how much fun I had with the first game in the franchise and decided to grab R6V during the sales. The game is great and I absolutely love how you need to take decisions quite rapidely, otherwise it could mean your demise and the failure of a mission.

Although this game is widely known by a lot of people, it was my first purchase of the sales, hence why it has a video. I decided to record the "Trainyard" section of the first Chapter. Unfortunately, I had to cut it down and do some major editing to the video. Reason being that I had over 20 minutes of footage and well.. yeah, I had to cut it down to 10 minutes for YouTube and the eye viewing pleasure of the ones who will read and watch this.

WARNING: Video contains strong language at a specific point in the mission. View at your own discretion.


Rainbow Six Vegas - Trainyard

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This is the only game I did not purchase during the sale. I actually bought this game on the 24th of June, which was the expected release date. Upon my purchase being completed, I noticed that the developers had made a last minute decision of releasing it to North America on the 29th only. So after having bought it, I had to wait 5 more days before playing it.

As could be expected, Sniper: Ghost Warrior puts you in control of an elite sniper. The game resembles "Sniper Elite", in which you need to take into consideration the speed of wind, the bullet drop at long distances and your personal stress. You can, however, hold your breath for a certain amount of time, which engages a "slow-mo" type of effect allowing for better accuracy. What makes this game a bit more special though is that it adds the all out firing frenzy in the mix, where in some missions you are rushed to the scene with a submachine gun and need to exterminate all enemies in the camp. The main feature of Sniper remains the stealth, however, which is in a "love it / hate it" situation for the moment.

A part of the community complains that the AI spots you no matter where you are, that they get alerted too easily, etc. For my part, I am now on Chapter 13 out of 16, and I have yet to have experienced these issues. I rarely get spotted, whether the enemy is alerted or not. If I miss a shot from a distance, the AI will notice a bullet just grazed his head and will be alerted and will alert any nearby guards, which is entirely logical if you want my opinion. I have no problems stealthing and crawling behind enemies, nor do I have any problems hiding somewhere safe. So in the end, my guess is that the people who complain simply cannot play this game accordingly.

Every single parts of the video were taken during the first mission, and also taken before I found out that you could hold your breath for better accuracy. Due to this, I held my breath only once for the video, but for the rest of the time I had to go through the painful proccess of nailing it perfectly. It is played on Medium, which is the reason why a red dot shows the landmark of the bullet, but it does not take into consideration the enemy movements.

The video contains a lot of ghosting, though I fail to find the cause of this. It does not occur when playing the game, nor did it occur while I was actually recording, but for some reason it occurs in the video, sorry for that.

WARNING: Video contains beautiful blood splatters and a surprise ending that could offend some people. View at your discretion.


Sniper: Ghost Warrior - One Shot, One Kill

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Here comes my little personal gem of a game this month. Metro 2033 is a newly released game which is considered by many as one, it not the best looking game out for both PC and X360, although the PC version is easily and by far much better looking than the console version. It is also considered, for PC that is, as the new benchmarking video game out there. The previous one was Crysis, but it has finally been surpassed by Metro 2033 in terms of requirements.

At first, I wasn't so sure about this game. While it does support DX11 and due to the small amount of games supporting DirectX 11 mixed with my desire to put my new system to the test, I still wasn't convinced at paying the full retail price for that game, especially that it seems to have gotten mixed reactions. As lucky as I am though, it finally made it to the front page of Steam with a nice 50% off tag and let me tell you: I would of definitely paid full price for it. The game reminds me of Dead Space due to the strange creatures and the uneasy feeling you can be left with throughout a playthrough, but also reminds me of Bioshock due to the futuristic setting, yet it seems to come from an older age in the past. You are in the future, yet you use a simple compass, lighted up with a lighter to follow your objectives location.

Despite seeming like a relatively short game, it definitely seems like one precious gem that I will not soon forget. For the video and your viewing pleasure, I decided to record the game with DirectX 11 enabled (with both Advanced DOF and Tesselation options turned on, only available with DX11) at "Very High" settings, the highest of them all. I actually play the game on "High" rather than "Very High" since it can get choppy sometimes, but for the purpose of the video, I just wanted to give you some eye candy.

WARNING: Strong language at some point, strange creatures, strange everything. View at your own discretion.


Metro 2033 - Prologue

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And now let's talk about the other games, or rather just show which other games I have purchased. I didn't make any videos, but I took the time to make the logos. Since there isn't anything special to be said about these, it's up to you whether you read it or not.


With so much positive talk surrounding this game, whether it comes from reviews, friends or blogs on NoobFeed, I just couldn't pass over the $10 price tag on Steam. RPG isn't my type of game, but after playing through the beginning of Borderlands and experiencing the strange mix that it is between RPG and FPS, I must say it definitely opened up some new doors within my already widely opened range of tastes. I'm keeping this one for later, as I want to finish up a few games before starting it for good.


I had been told about these games from a coworker after he knew that I had purchased Rainbow Six Vegas, so why not purchase it while it's on sale? Sales are made for one thing and that is to purchase games you normally wouldn't, aren't they? I started playing a little bit and am liking so far, though it doesn't seem to grow on me as much as R6V, but definitely not a regretable purchase. I'll keep this one for after I've went through the Vegas franchise.


Speaking of which, I also purchased Vegas 2. Why limit myself to only the first game if both of them are on sale? To top it off, Vegas 2 was actually cheaper than the first one, and so I was considering buying R6V2 only, but it was too hard to only get the second one of a 2 games franchise, so I decided to buy both of them.


Both games were on my wishlist for a while since I am quite loving Shadow of Chernobyl. The current sales made it even easier for me to purchase both games and so I did just that. I now have the complete series and am looking forward to playing each of them, but for that I'd first need to complete SoC. Eventually I will.

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As you can see, I have plenty of gaming to do, which is fine since I don't have any new games planned up until January 2011. Of course, I have Amnesia: The Dark Descent planned which comes out on September 8th, but being that it is Amnesia, I'll probably eat it for breakfast and be done in a matter of days with it, assuming it is the same length as Penumbra.

Well that sums it up, and if that wasn't enough, I actually had to write this monster twice since the first time around I accidentally googled over my current tab, making me lose every single progress I had done with the blog, which was actually finished and only needed to be submitted. In the end, it turned out even longer than the original lol. Hope you had fun watching me spend money! Now that the sales are over, I will be back to blogging about different things, such as Amnesia news (hey, someone needs to get down with the indies for NoobFeed, right?) and eventually that blog about Megaman, which has seen a major delay due to personal issues and also due to massive overtime at work which isn't even needed, but we are still forced into.

Have a great time out there people!