Saturday Morning Gaming: Gems in the Steam Spring Sale
I hear complaints about how the Steam Sales just ain’t good anymore and, yeah, I get it but I realized that most of the problem is that I purchased most of the games I want the last time they went on a deep sale so of *COURSE* they’re not registering for me. Why would they? I got this game back when it was 50% off.
And so, with that said, let me point out that there are some *AWESOME* games on sale this week.
Doom 2016. Holy cow, was this game good. Penny Arcade called it “Playable Sugar” back in 2016 and that’s pretty much spot-on. It’s 90% off.
If you played Doom back when Clinton was president, this game somehow magically rekindles what it felt like to play Doom back then. It’s just *FUN*.
The two Pathfinder masterpieces are on sale. Kingmaker is on sale for 85% off for $3. Wrath of the Righteous is on sale for $4.
If looking at those makes you remember Planescape: Torment fondly, the Enhanced Edition is 50% off and you can play that again for a mere $10. They’ve updated the graphics so the game plays exactly like you remember in 1999.
If you’re not into shooting stuff and you’re not into D&D, well, Europa Universalis IV is 90% off for a mere $5. Stare at a map. Watch the colors change. The starter edition (the one that comes with 9 DLCs) is on sale for 80% off.
The stuff from the last year or so isn’t going to be on deep sale yet, sadly (a bunch of stuff from 20%-40% off on those) but if, for some reason, you never got around to the above? Any one of those games is good for 20+ hours and if you pick up two of them, that’s a weeks’ worth of full-time fun.
So… what are you playing?
I got EU4 and all the DLC during the winter sale and have spent way too much time on it. I’m a sucker for Paradox games (HOI4 and Stellaris mainly), but this one is LOOONG. Consistent with Paradox, it requires a lot of reading guides and watching videos to understand the mechanics and where to find stuff in the UI, but it has been fun!
The other game I’ve been playing a lot is Old World. It’s currently 75% off at $10, and the DLC is mostly 30% off. It’s another 4X game that I think Civ 7 has stolen some ideas from and is kind of a blend of Crusader Kings and Civilization. Plays similar to Civ, but it has a lot of narrative-driven events, and you control a dynasty and deal with factions in ways that Civ doesn’t do. It’s in a really good state right now.
As a tangent, I loved Civ 6, but I am not buying Civ 7 until they get stuff fixed. I’m also annoyed at their DLC monetization, so I may wait a year until there is (hopefully) a discount.Report
My favorite review of EU4 was “I mostly watch tutorials on Youtube”.Report
Lol, that is so true. The learning curve is steep.
I found that ChatGPT is pretty good at giving specific EU4 advice that helps cut down on the need to watch videos, but its info database is a couple of patches old, so like all things AI, it sometimes give bad advice or suggests things that simply aren’t possible anymore.Report
Oh my gosh! Playing EU4 with an AI buddy! That’s absolutely nuts! I love it!Report
AI has been super valuable for helping learn and deal with the non-intuitive UI – much quicker than Google (which is crap these days anyway), or Reddit or Youtube.Report
All the good use cases for AI/ChatGPT seem to be the kind of Intelligent Assistant things that they imagined we’d have back in the late 1990s.Report