Holiday Sale Survival Guide

I have no idea where this originated, but it's hilariously accurate.

It's not officially Christmas until I've been saddled with feelings of shame and guilt after adding a dozen games to my already gigantic backlog. Amazon, Valve - why must you tempt me so?

If you're at all concerned about being able to afford food in January, you might want to take a look at the following tips.

1. Use resources like /r/GameDeals and IsThereAnyDeal.com to find the best deals.

While Steam might be the "Granddaddy of Them All" when it comes to offering games at stupid prices during the holidays, there's a lot of other stuff going on elsewhere on the Internet. Sites like Amazon and Green Man Gaming have been offering deals on par with - and occasionally better than - those of Valve's service. Plus, with Origin and Uplay on the prowl, it's increasingly common (albeit somewhat annoying) to find games that simply aren't offered on Steam.

Bottom line - it pays to look around, and using some kind of deal aggregator makes everything super easy. Sites like the aforementioned IsThereAnyDeal.com and Cheapshark.com can also give you an idea of the pricing trends for a given game and whether or not it's been cheaper in the past.

Thanksgiving Deal Overload

It's been a busy week thus far - so much so that I haven't posted in a couple of days - and things are only going to get busier from here. It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year as far as PC gaming is concerned. Hopefully you and your wallet have prepared appropriately.

Deal-watching is going to be kind of a big thing for the next five weeks or so, and reddit's /r/GameDeals and sites like IsThereAnyDeal.com and CheapShark.com are going to be your best friend. Time to shovel another 6 or 7 games onto the backlog pile.

I've already picked up Civilization V Gods and Kings for $7.49 (Amazon), Sleeping Dogs for $13.60 (Green Man Gaming, no longer valid), and KOTOR I and II for $2.49 each (Steam). On the hardware side of things, Newegg has a Gigabyte 660 Ti for $250 after $20 rebate, with Assassin's Creed III and Borderlands 2 included at no cost. There's also a Galaxy 660 Ti for $225 AR, sans Borderlands 2. I'm debating whether to jump on a card this week, pick up a cheap 128GB SSD, or just hold off on everything till the next generation.

Should be an exciting week regardless. Happy hunting.

PSA: Steam Vulnerability

Saw this on Ars Technica today: Steam vulnerability can lead to remote insertion of malicious code

"For instance, a Steam URL can be coded to call a "reinstall" command, which loads a splash image file hosted on an arbitrary Windows Shared Drive controlled by the attacker. By exploiting an integer overflow vulnerability in the way Steam handles that splash image, the attacker can load malicious code into remote memory."

Just a heads up.

Valve's $100 Listing Fee for Steam Greenlight Seems Excessive

Yesterday afternoon Valve announced that they would require a fee of $100 for initial submissions to the Steam Greenlight service. The 100 bucks gets donated to the Child's Play charity since Valve has said that they "have no interest in making money from this."

To me, $100 seems ridiculously high. Obviously Valve is trying to cut down on the amount of "LOL HALF-LIFE 3" submissions, but this feels a little excessive. Someone who wants to submit something stupid for a few laughs is going to think twice when they need to fork over even $5 or $10, let alone $100. I feel like $25 would lower the barrier to entry to a much more reasonable level.

Granted, Steam Greenlight offers indie devs an opportunity for a metric ton of exposure. If your ultimate goal is to get your game listed on Steam, $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things, especially when that money is donated to charity. With that being said, not everyone has 100 bucks of disposable income laying around ready to go - for some people that would cut into the beer and Ramen fund, or even worse, rent money.

Nowadays all you need are a PC and an Internet connection to get started, so a lot of the games getting submitted to Greenlight probably started with a couple of guys in a dorm room. These devs face a steep enough challenge in just getting noticed; monetary barriers don't need to factor in on top of that. Hopefully Valve wises up and adjusts the submission fee before too long.

Valve Launches Steam Greenlight

Valve launched Steam Greenlight today, a service that lets Steam community members give feedback to developers regarding their upcoming titles and vote for games that interest them. According to the press release, Greenlight "allows developers and publishers to post information and media about their game in an effort to convince the Community that the game should be released on Steam."

Each game's page looks pretty similar to a page from the existing Steam store with the addition of some voting buttons:

As of 4:40pm EST the Greenlight page tells me that "277 items are waiting for your rating," though it looks like several games don't exactly abide by the terms of use - there was a submission for Age of Mythology that was removed right before I clicked on it. Still, it looks like a lot of indie developers had circled today's date on their calendar because there's a lot of content up there already.

(As of 4:45pm EST, the page shows 267 items available, so it looks like Valve is trying to weed out submissions that weren't made by original authors and copyright holders.)

Hopefully Steam Greenlight will help indie developers promote their games and ultimately cash in by getting them added to Steam.

Orcs Must Die 2

I bought Orcs Must Die on Steam during Black Friday of last year for a little over 5 bucks, including DLC. At the time I hadn't really heard of it, and to be honest I wasn't really expecting much. Thankfully, the game was worth every penny and then some. A lot of people compare Orcs Must Die to Dungeon Defenders, a game which I really didn't enjoy. While they're both "third-person tower defense" games, Orcs Must Die skipped the grinding/leveling and Diablo-esque item drops of Dungeon Defenders and focused on solid level design and tower defense gameplay. The story isn't anything special, but the game's tone is perfect and most importantly, it's fun.

Orcs Must Die 2 was released on Monday and currently has a critic score of 87 and a user score of 9.4 on Metacritic. While I haven't grabbed a copy yet thanks to my tremendous backlog of games from the last couple of sales, I definitely plan on picking it up some time in the near future. In the mean time, check out the reviews from Ars Technica and the Penny Arcade Report, both of which give the game some high marks.

You can pick up Orcs Must Die 2 on Steam here.

Where to Find Gaming Deals Online

Last night I made a post about the Steam Summer Sale and a current sale that Amazon is running throughout July.  Almost everyone knows about these major events, but sites like these have sales all the time.  I'm a cheap bastard who refuses to pay full price for most game any more - if I wait it'll be on Steam for half price in a couple of months, so unless it's something super exciting I can wait and instead play through my backlog.  Thankfully I've found a couple of useful sites that make it easy to keep track of the offerings of all of these digital download services.

Links and descriptions after the jump.

Steam Summer Sale

The Steam Summer Sale ended this past weekend.  Let's have a moment of silence in remembrance of sales past.

When the dust had settled I had picked up three games for $26-ish: GTA IV, Civilization V GOTY, and Darksiders.  I had played through Episodes from Liberty City but not GTA IV since it seemed like Steam always wanted to bundle them together in the past.  Civ V has been on my radar for a while, and it finally hit a price point that made me jump on it.  Darksiders, on the other hand, was a game I had never looked into previously - a friend recommended it to me and I ended up snagging it for 5 bucks.  As I plow through my gigantic backlog of Steam games I'll be posting my thoughts - stay tuned.

On a side note, Amazon has been discounting digital game downloads all month long.  We're down to the last few days of July, but you can check out these Amazon Digital Deals to get your post-Summer-Sale deals fix.  In addition, as of the time of this post (3am Thursday - why am I still awake?), Newegg has RAGE for $5.99.  The reviews that I've read have been pretty underwhelming, but 6 bucks for a 8-10 hours of campaign isn't the worst deal I've seen.