Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

I don't really understand Steam trading cards. I know they appear in my Steam inventory when I play games and I am vaguely aware that they come in sets which can be collected to make something else ( badges apparently ). I have never made a badge and I never even been fortunate enough to acquire a complete set. In fact I don't think that is even without actively buying cards. I would happily ignore the whole business except for the fact that they are trade-able. Trading cards can be bought and sold on the Steam community market for real money (well actually Steam credit but given that I have an ongoing healthy expenditure on games it amounts to the same thing). Every time you examine a trading card in your inventory it tells you how much similar cards are selling for on the Steam market. This causes me angst. There is a market out there with buyers and sellers. There is money to be made and money to be lost.  I image that Gevlon Goblin , if he ever discovers the Steam market...

I have almost 300 games in my Steam library an I appear to have crossed a threshold where it is now genuinely difficult to find a particular game among the multitude. I can search for a game if I know part of the title but sadly even that simple hurdle often defeats my middle aged brain. "What is the name of that strategy game I picked up on sale last week ...grrrgh". The built in filters: Games, Software, Recent, Installed and Favourites are very little help. (Recent means recently played and not recently acquired). I have started using the Favourites label to tag games I am particularly keen to find later but if I had no interest in playing a game at all I probably wouldn't add it to Steam in the first place. I do try to rein in my acquisitive tendencies when buying new games but holiday sales and gaming bundles have thwarted my efforts. I do have a personal rule not to buy a game unless there is a real chance I will play it in the near future. Holiday sales present...

It has been over 6 Months since I bought anything on Steam. These days my bargain conscious euro's go to Steam's competitors including Amazon, Green Man, Gog, Gamer's Gate and others even when I am buying games that install on Steam. A few years ago Steam sales of AAA games were the pinnacle of gaming value and at that time I was spending hundreds of euros in the Steam store. Nowadays however whenever I see something for sale on Steam I automatically look around to see if I can get it cheaper somewhere else. My lack of Steam purchases in over half a year shows that I almost always can. It is particularly telling that I didn't buy a single game from the Steam Christmas sale because I had already acquired everything I wanted at better prices from other online retailers. I suppose this is a natural consequence of Steam having such a dominant position in PC gaming. Competitors know that they have to beat Steam to get business and they do. This is free market competitio...

Like many gamers I am looking forward to Steam's post Christmas sale. It is a great opportunity to pad out ones gaming library with some bargains. Valve generally adds a bit of showmanship with holiday achievements and such so it is always a fun event event though I never seem to have quite as much free time for gaming over the holiday period anticipated. What then for the also rans of digital game distribution? Surely the overwhelming dominance of Steam must send them into pits of despair as they consider that what should be their best selling period of the year is so completely overshadowed by the looming behemoth that is the Steam Sale. Well this year I am pleased to note that the GoGs, Gamestop's,  Game Flys and other distributors are not sitting back and waiting for Steam to roll over their Yuletide hopes and dreams. In a masterful display of competitive strategy they are getting their retaliation in first by holding substantial sales before Christmas. In my case at...

I signed up to Ubisoft's new Steam lookalike game download service in order to avail of some of  the sweet launch offers (From dust €1, Driver San Fran €1). The good: + Well, it does actually work. You buy a game through the client, download it and run it from within the client. + You can use Paypal to pay for your games  Hurray! + Ubisoft finally seem to grasp the reality of the PC games download market. There is none of the old extended download service nonsense( where you had to pay extra just to be allowed re-download your own games) +It has an offline mode and it works! Need to be online to download game of course and for first run. + Surprisingly realistic pricing. Older titles are selling for €10 and their launch sale had some serious bargains. +has achievements and friends and chat and other stuff you expect from a game client. The bad: - After buying a game it took more than an hour to show up in my games library. Perhaps this was server overload due to the...

The growth of Amazon's digital download games department has produced the first serious competitor to Steam. Amazon's retail clout cannot be ignored and they generally offer some great bargains. Amazon's Summer sale for example undercuts Steam on many games. I love Steam and it is my gaming platform of choice but competition between suppliers can only be good for us customers so lets have more of it. Amazon don't have their own PC client so many of their games even register on Steam - giving the best of both worlds. I wish they would just hurry up and extend this service to those of us who live outside the US. I know it is possible to fake a US address but it feels a bit dodgy.

I am a week behind the time with this news but I just noticed that Lotro is now available on the Steam platform. I spend more time in Lotro than any other mmorpg so I have a special love for the game even though I am not playing it at the moment. Checking the Steam forums indicates that a number of new players have been tempted to try it since its Steam release. Good news all round I think.

I didn't blow the bank this year but nevertheless I have stocked my gaming cupboard quite well between sales, presents and impulse purchasing over the holiday period. The list of acquisitions is as follows: Orcs Must Die+DLC, Steam, €4.96: This is great fun, I spent several days playing it and I am still only half way through the campaign. Between Sanctum and his game I have come to the conclusion that I cannot enjoy tower defence unless I actually participate in the action myself alongside the towers. Dungeons of Dredmor, Steam, €1.47 : Highly regarded roguelike game but not really my cup of tea. I played just enough to get the holiday achievement. Railworks 3 +DLC , Steam, €3.49 To be honest I will probably only dabble in the game but I have had my eye on this train simulator for ages so I had to buy it when it came on sale (90% off). Batman Arkham City, Gamers Gate, £11.98  I really enjoyed Arkham Asylum and this is supposed to  be better. I am looking forwar...

Over the last few days I have surprised myself by how much fun I am having collecting Steam Christmas achievements. Ostensibly these are for Steam related prizes but the prizes themselves have so far been unexciting: a free game I am unlikely to ever play, discounts off several others I have no interest in and several lumps of coal. Collecting the achievements themselves however provides an interesting excuse to look at games I might otherwise never had played. Apart from a couple of "click this box to win" achievements most of them require you to achieve a certain goal in one of the games that is currently on sale on Steam. Many can be completed fairly quickly by an entry level character but others require hours of play to get to the correct spot in game. Happily there is help at hand in the Steam forums with guides and even save games to help achievement collectors towards their goals. Of course it is a waste money to buy games just to earn a fairly worthless prize so ...

Tom (name changed for reasons of confidentiality) is a real life friend. His kids play with our kids. Tom and his wife have come to parties in our house and we have had dinner with them. There is nothing unusual in this except that Tom is also a gamer. Those under the age of 35 may find it hard to believe that this is unusual among men of my generation. For most of my generation gaming ended decades ago ago when the pursuit of the opposite sex became a more pressing concern than pushing coins into a Space Invaders machine. Sure they may have enjoy a few games of Wii Sports with their own kids but that is the extent of their knowledge of the modern state of the game. Anyhow Tom is a gamer and I want to talk about our gaming relationship. A few years back this amounted to no more than brief conversations about the latest Call of Duty while our wives discussed other issues. The we realised we were both on Steam and we added each other to friends lists. While conflicting real life timet...

My exasperation at regional pricing differences for Deus Ex Human Revolution led me to stumble across a wide range of "grey market" resellers who Sell activation codes for Steam games at substantial discount over US /European prices. Intrigued I spent some time researching these before concluding that it would be better to stay away from them but just in case it could be useful to others I will summarise my opinions on the subject here: 1. There are a wide number of websites selling cheap Steam codes. Some of these sites seem to be very dodgy, some of them seem to be run as legitmate businesses. 2. The business model is to buy games cheaply in bulk in a low cost market (Eastern Europe or perhaps Asia) and then resell the code to customers in higher priced markets (America / Australia / Western Europe) at a profit. 3. In many cases the code is taken from a boxed retail copy and the supplier may offer a scan of the box. I am not sure what extra protection this provides....

A magic vending machine at the start of Dead Space 2 spews out the best equipment in the game for nothing.   In the original Dead Space you had to collect cash and other loot from corpses in order to exchange for increasingly better weapons and armour which gradually became available from vending machines as you progressed through the game. Dead Space 2 (bought recently in Steam Sale) appears to use the same mechanic so I was quite surprised to find that that the very first vending machine I came across seemed to be surprisingly well stocked. Not only did it contain upgraded versions of all of the game's weapons and armour but it was giving them all away for free! My first thought was that this was some kind of tutorial mode. I have seen similar things in other games where your character starts out with all his powers but a triggered event at the end of the tutorial strips them all away until you earn them back through the course of the game. This is not the case here howe...

Zoso blogged that unusually for him he hasn't bought anything yet in Steam's Summer sale. I noticed a similar lack of enthusiasm myself and when I asked in Twitter quite a few respondents commented that they had yet to be tempted by the bargains on offer. From my own perspective neither the games nor the pricing has been all that tempting although I have picked up one game so far: Darksiders. Significantly none of the triple A games seem to have the sort of spectacular discounts that I remember from previous sales . In fact none of the bargains has surprised me. Everything I have seen so far has already been on sale already at some time and probably will be again so I don't feel any need to take a plunge. Perhaps there is juicier fare to come later or perhaps we are just jaded with too many sales. On the other hand could it be that maybe the era of give away sales is drawing to  a close and the time of game pricing madness is coming to an end?

this I never buy new releases but as soon as I can scrape the cash together I am going to break my self imposed rule for this game . Mind you I won't be buying it off Steam despite my ongoing love affair with digital download.  While Steam and its digital download rivals continue to provide unbelievable value on slightly older games they remain the worst place to buy new releases. Mafia 2 digital download from Steam: €49.99, Mafia 2 in a box from the first online retailer I tried: €34.99. Over 40% extra is too much to pay for the instant gratification of digital download. I have said it before and I will say it again: We live in an era of game pricing madness.

You can run Steam games in offline mode without an internet connection but it is not exactly obvious how to do so. It is also very easy to "break" offline mode and put steam into a limbo state that can only be fixed by going online again. Here are the steps I used to ensure that my Steam games remained playable in offline mode for the duration of a recent vacation without reliable internet access. 1. The most important thing is to prepare in advance and set up offline mode while you still have a good internet connection. If you simply try to run Steam without an internet connection it will hang for a long time. It may eventually offer you the choice of going to offline mode but don't count on it and don't count on your games being playable. 2. While you still have a good internet connection - log into Steam and check that all of the games in your library are fully up to date and ready to play. Any game that does not have a "ready to play" status will not...

... if you don't want to spend money. Steam summer sale is on and they have a truck load of silly prices on some excellent games. Best of all are their one day only offers - today I picked up Bioshock 2 and the complete Overlord pack for less than €20 all in. I assume that a new round of today onlys will kick in soon so be quick . I have commented on the complete unpredictability of PC game prices before. A game that costs €50 today may be available for €10 tomorrow. I wonder is this the new reality or is it a temporary phenomenon. I am sure these sales are making money or else they wouldn't be repeated so often but surely there comes a point at which they cannibalise full price sales. I know that I personally almost never buy a game a full price any more - instead waiting for the inevitable sale. If everybody does that won't game companies lose out or will the increased volume of sales more than compensate for the discounted prices? Could this possibly herald in a new...

Thank you to Winged Nazgul for pointing me to the fact that Steam is doing a Madballs special this weekend with free play for the weekend and 75% off the game itself. Madballs is a fast paced third person shooter with single player and multiplayer elements. I have dabbled a bit in both and it seems like a lot of fun. The plot is completely incomprehensible but all you really need to know is that you play a small ugly ball who rolls around a lot and shoots stuff. I guess the best description is that it is kind of mad! If you have any interest at all in an anarchic shooter then now is the time to indulge because the Steam sale has ensured that there are plenty of people around to play multiplayer with. If you buy the base game then most of the characters and weapons are locked but you unlock them as you play through either single player or multiplayer campaigns. A nice touch is that impatient types can spend a few pennies (literally) more for the anarchy unlock pack which unlocks ever...

Pretty much every week-end since Christmas there has been something tempting on sale over at Steam and I have grown used to a steady stream of €5 and €10 and  €15 purchases expanding my games collection. For the last few weeks however there hasn't been anything tempting on offer so I have not indulged. Now I find am experiencing withdrawal symptoms and I ache for the endorphin hit that only expenditure on impulse can provide.

There used to be a fairly established pattern of game pricing. New releases were sold at top prices. If you shopped around you might get a special offer or pre-order discount but otherwise you could wait about a  month and get the game for perhaps 75% of its new price.  Six months or so after release most games could be picked up for half their new price and after a year those titles migrated to the bargain shelves at a quarter of their original price or even less. This was a very reliable pattern - only a tiny number of titles had sufficient staying power to buck the trend of price decay. Age of Empires and Medal of Honour Allied Assault being two that I can remember but they were  the exceptions that proved the rule. The last year has seen a revolution in pc game pricing spear headed by Steam and their fellow digital download distributors.  They have finally broken free from the artifical restrictions which held digital download prices higher than the high street...