Another Steam Summer Sale has come and gone.
Summer Sale 2017 Version
I logged in every day and collected all the stickers from the event. I managed to get one full set of the trading cards so I could turn those in. I even added about a dozen new games to my wishlist as ran through my daily queue.
But the real question is; did I buy anything?
Well, yes. Yes I did. As I noted previously, I went into this sale keen to buy some titles. I was l was looking for something new, something to shake up the current, slightly stale state of my gaming. I showed up to chew gum and buy games… and I was all out of gum. So what did I buy.
Mini Metro
I already posted about this game at the start of the sale. I actually liked it enough that I bought the iOS version to play on my iPad Air 2… which I notice actually has a higher screen resolution than the 19th century steam powered monitor on my computer. Hrmm… Anyway, good stuff, but still light fare. I like it on the iPad because I can play while I watch TV.
RimWorld
This has been on my list for a while, but Early Access is a bit of a red flag for me. However, after SynCaine wrote about it I decided it might be worth the gamble.
I bought it, I played for a couple of hours, then I stopped. I didn’t stop because the game was bad. I stopped because this game really needs a rainy day when my wife and daughter are out and I have an excuse to not do anything else for hours at a stretch. My impressions were good, but I didn’t want to jump in until I had time to really immerse myself in it. So now it sits in my Steam library waiting for its time.
Civilization VI
The inevitable purchase. Having owned every Sid Meier game in the series up to this point, it was only a matter of time before I grabbed this one.
However, I am mildly disappointed with it. I only have a couple of hours in, but my disappointment was almost immediate. Upon starting off it seemed like they spent a lot more time making graphics and spiffy animations and other things that, for me, just get in the way of the actual mechanics of the game. Classically, the first 100 or so turns of a Civilization game are the most exciting part, or so legend say. However, as the series has progressed, the free wheeling aspect of the initial phase of the game has been toned down. Civilization VI, subjectively, feels like the culmination of this to me.
Also, the AI remains as dopey as ever. I had a scout on automatic. He went up an isthmus and got hung up on a barbarian camp there. I took over and moved him in another direction as there were other unexplored areas he could have chosen. I left him on the edge of unexplored plains and set him to automatic again… and he ran straight back to the same damn barbarian camp.
I might need a rainy day to dig into this as well, but my immediate, superficial response to Civ VI is a hearty “Meh” and a desire to figure out where my Civ II disk went. Civ II remains my favorite in the series.
And that was it. Three games. Not exactly an overflowing bag of loot. There were a few titles I was strongly considering buying… I was at home on the evening of the fourth wondering if I should pull the trigger on any of them… but ended up not doing so. The key contenders were:
Doom
I put this on my wishlist after it came out because people who were into it were so jazzed up about it. I haven’t been much on shooters for at least a decade, but Doom was so well received that the sale price almost made me take the plunge.
Saints Row IV
I put this on my wishlist on a whim at one point due to somebody going on about how great the Saints Row series is. I’ve never played any of it… I’ve never even seen it played. But it seems whimsical and silly in its style, and the price was down at the eight dollar level for the sale. And then something in the back of my head said, “Isn’t this series something of a parody of the Grand Theft Auto series?” and I was afraid I might not appreciate the reference unless I played something from the original.
Grand Theft Auto V
So I went looking for the current champion of the genre. It has the reviews. It has history. It has Target Australia on its case. What is not to love? But when I got to the store page on Steam the reviews were atrocious. I gather, reading the more recent ones, that Rockstar did something to piss off its user base, but I wasn’t sure how deep I needed to go into reviews to find any other objection, so I decided to give it a pass. So, reviews make a difference.
At the end of the day I purchased three new games, with is three more than I bought in the last Summer Sale when I was feeling a “sale weariness” around Steam. If the three I considered strongly, but did not purchase, I am still open to them down the road if somebody has something to add to their reputation. They are still on my wishlist.
The odd side effect of the sale though has been my jumping back into some older games after reading about new ones. But that is a topic for another post.
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