Anyone ever play The Ship on steam? Such a tense, paranoia-inducing game - brilliant though!

I used to be one of those guys who swore they would never use steam, mainly because I like to have the actual feel of the game in my hands, I like having the box and an instruction manual to flip thru rather then a document on my computer.

In the lst 6 months all my purchases have been thru steam or direct to drive because of a few factors. Stores like EBgames have made the transition from 85% PC games and 15% console to 99% console and 1% PC. A lot of the big new games coming out require you to log in to an online account while playing even in single player mode. Factors like that and DRM have made the used PC game market dissapear as most of them are not sellable used, even EB games wont take PC games as trade in's anymore.

That being said the last purchases I made from steam were a few days ago, $19.99 got me Fallout 1, 2 and Fallout tactics and $19.99 got me the X-com pack.

Those are some classic games that will keep me busy for a long time

It's strange how this works, I remember when HL2: episode 1 came out and I preordered a hardcopy and installed it that way. I suppose seeing it just end up in my steam games list exactly the same as if I'd purchased online made me think twice about it and by the time ep2 came out I just purchased it on steam. I suppose that was the orange box though which was the deal of the century.

Speaking of which where the hell is episode 3?

I felt like the Episode games were a pretty big drop off from HL2, with the exception of the final sequence of Episode 2, which was awesome. I'll play Episode 3 if it comes along at some point but it's not something I'm dying for.

Somehow I had missed your post on Episode 2 gumpzilla. Frankly I agree with you, HL2 was such a huge ride with so many sections and incredible attention to detail that the following episodes felt either rushed or all too short - this is despite having taken them years to make. I actually preferred Ep1 to 2, they focused on the polish I expect from a HL game way more than they did in Ep2 which felt slightly rushed. The entire antlion caverns section was the work of some chimps in the level design department although the game did pick up somewhat afterwards.

My real hope is that Gabe has taken time from his third lunches to make sure they were developing HL3 in some form all this time as well. Perhaps a return to form at that point, who knows.

By the way Borderlands is 50% off for the weekend. It's buggy for some people and Gearbox have shown zero interest in fixing the problems and prefer to pump out DLC but overall it's quite a fun game.

Except manuals (and strategy guides) stopped being quality 15 years ago.

I think they stopped beeing produced 15 years ago.

It's been a while since I last saw a decent manual. And boxes don't exist anymore, unless you buy a collectors edition.

+1

They pretty much gave up on manuals with the advent of the CD, IIRC.

Trine is 75% off full price at the moment, $5. I got it on one of the earlier reductions and loved it, nice action platformer with some novel puzzles and good dynamic between the three characters. It looks decent as well.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/35700/

Oh and also there is a new DLC level available to those who already own it!
http://store.steampowered.com/news/3700/

Anybody played Torchlight?

Yes, it's the best Diablo game not named Diablo

Space Rangers 2 Reboot!

Somehow I missed this gem when it originally released.

deus ex ($2.50) is the midweek sale, pretty tempting though no idea when I could get to it.

Yeah that is tempting, it's the game of the year edition as well, or both deux ex and the sequel invisible war for $5.00. I've got so many of these cheap old games that I never get around to I'm not sure if I'll go for it either though.