By the time this post goes live the Steam Summer sale should be about 15 minutes in the past. Another one for the books.
There we go again!
My enthusiasm for the sale was at pretty low ebb, as it has been for a few years now. Steam puts things on my wishlist on sale as often as Safeway discounts canned corn, and both generate about the same level of excitement these days.
So it is probably a bit of a surprise that I actually bought a few games during the sale. Though, to be fair to Steam and its sale, I did not purchase anything that was on my wishlist or anything that they were pushing at me during the sale. These came from outside recommendations.
Anyway, what did I buy?
- MMORPG Tycoon 2
I mentioned this in the June month in review post already, but Lum was playing this and posting about it on Twitter. It is in early access and wasn’t even on sale, but seemed meta enough to take a shot at. My initial game, Attractive Nuisance, would tend to suggest that the title of the game perhaps ought to be WoW Clone Tycoon, but I haven’t dived into hard mode yet, which is launching a free to play game with monetization fun to deal with.
- Art of Rally
This came up as part of a post on Ars Technica about the best titles in the Steam summer sale for under $25. It also happened to coincide with me starting up on the whole immersion topic when I was making a mental list of games I missed and Need for Speed: World popped into my head. I was able to achieve some serious “in the zone” time with it and the TRON: Legacy sound track. This is a cool little game set in the golden age of rally racing in the 60s and 70s. However, it really needs a controller to play it, so I am going to try and dig out the one I have for my PC before I pass judgement on it beyond the fact that you shouldn’t bother with just keyboard and mouse.
That said, it is a very nice, stylized racing game. Could be a winner. We shall see. It will also be available on consoles soon, including the Switch, so it might be a better choice there… controllers being part of the bargain.
The Fermi Paradox
One of my favorite episodes of This American Life involves David Kestenbaum talking about why the Fermi Paradox, summed up as “where is everybody?” in the universe, makes him sad. It makes me sad too, though so does the immense size of the universe and the relatively slow speed at which light travels. We can barely get to the moon and Mars seems like a distant dream still, so how do we even consider other stars?
Anyway, The Fermi Paradox lets you play God over the rise and fall of sentient life in a corner of our galaxy where you make choices that guide civilizations along the path up the technology tree and get to see who fails or goes extinct and who, if anyone, makes it to the stars. This is also in early access and is currently pretty raw, but there could be the germ of a good game here.
- Flashing Lights
This is more of a special mention, because I purchased it on sale during a previous sale, but only started playing it during this past summer sale. This went on my list because I was interested in the Grand Theft Auto V mod that let you play as the police, but I wasn’t up to getting into GTA V that deep. This sat on my wishlist for quite a while before I eventually bought it. It lets you play as fire, medical, or police responders, but the fun is running around in a police cruiser. This is also in early access.
Play Time
I did follow my current Steam rule, which is not to buy a game unless I plan to play it that day. I have between 30 minutes and 3 hours on each of these titles. Not enough to write a review yet, but close enough to an initial impression blog post I suppose. I am sure I will get to those.
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