Just as a pro tip for anyone who wants to get Dark Souls 2. The Humble Bundle Monthly has DS2 as the main game for the same price but you will get 5 more games later as well as a 10% discount on HB store.

 

Oh fuck my wallet.

 

Killing floor is free.

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/killing-floor

 

June 22nd: Warlocke chips a tooth, incurring an as of yet unknown financial outlay at the dentist. Steam sale starts.

July 5th: Warlocke's dentist appointment, when he'll finally find out how deep he'll be taking it in the... wallet. Steam sale ends.

Good grief... :facepalm

 

Speaking of the Steam Sale...

I'm looking for some single player games to play. I'm an RPG guy usually but I do play FPS so I'm looking at getting the below games (and trying to stay within a budget) :

Witcher - either the bundle or the GOTY for 3 only. Not sure which so I thought I'd ask for advice. Does it play like Skyrim (which I found generally clunky and un enjoyable)? If so I may drop this.

Metro Redux Bundle - I watched someone play one of these games and they looked fun. I'm okay with some scares and tension and generally enjoy FPS shooters.

Kingdom New Lands - heard about this game from a reddit thread, looks very much up my alley.

Anything you guys strong recommend / thoughts for the steam sale on a budget? I'm buying a house so I can spend a fair amount of money and justify it as being all the money I'll spend for a few months (I budget 10 or 20 dollars a month for video games). I expect not to buy games again until Christmas.

 

I do have it already though I never beat it. I got up to the point where you can increase the difficulty through the shrines or whatever, raised the difficulty too much and then rage quit, never to return.

Also going to pick up Hollow Knight for my wife, since she loves platformers.

 

If you enjoyed Bastion, might want to check out Transistor. By the same guys, with a pretty different combat style and yet another amazing (yet simplistic) plot/soundtrack.

 

Witcher 3, by far. Get the GOTY edition, as the DLC is stellar.

You can fairly safely avoid the first two games. They don't have a ton to do with the third game, and also aren't very good.

 

If you don't mind rouge like games then I can safely say Dead Cells is a great game for being EA. It is like $11 on bundlestars with the discount code RED5 https://www.bundlestars.com/en/game/dead-cells.

Transistor is also a great buy for the price made by the same people who made Bastion smooth game play great sound track.

 

If you like grand strategy games I cant recommend Europa Universales 4 enough. It's currently discounted as is much of it's DLC. It takes a bit to get the hang of but once you do you can have thousands of hours of fun.

 

Haha I already have EU 4 and Hearts of Iron, and CK2. Pulled the trigger on all that stuff last night before I thought better of it and I'm tapped out.

I installed the Witcher 3 last night and hope to play it today. Everyone keeps saying how good the game is and blah blah blah so hopefully I'll get a lot of enjoyment out of it. At $25 for a AAA with all the DLC I won't feel too guilty if I don't enjoy it like crazy. Plus I have the metro games if I want to shoot things up.

Funny thing though, I have an SSD for my main hard drive and a traditional one I install all my games to. The traditional one is 1 tb, and I realized I literally did not have space to install the 50+ gigs of Witcher so I had to go and clean up some space.

WoW is now 100 gigs in its totality. Since I haven't played it for 6+ months I took it and every other game I haven't played in months, plus a few videos and self recordings of my league games.

I was just surprised how much stuff I had. I never thought I'd fill a 1 tb drive.

 

IMO Skyrim is probably the most overrated game of all time. The base game is dreadfully boring, and the combat is still pretty bad (but an improvement from Oblivion, which was an improvement on Morrowind), and the plot is kind of the generic with the player character being "random guy is actually the blah blah with the special gimmick power blah blah, destiny, etc." People will always counter with "mods, blah blah," but that's a different thing altogether. That being said, Witcher 3 is leagues better than Skyrim. Better gameplay, better plot, more interesting world, better combat, better characters, better player character. Can be a bit tedious at times if you're a completionist, but that's the pain we put on ourselves. Oh, and the built in Gwent game isn't really that fun but it's technically optional most of the time.

I've bought a bunch of stuff for the steam sale already:

FTL: I've seen tons of hype over this game, so it was the first one I got. It's was pretty good, but the variance was a bit annoying. I'd be crushing every encounter until near the end where suddenly I get boarded by 4 guys and get smashed by missiles. I'm not sure what the trick was, maybe drones? I only managed to finish a run one time, using the ship with the built in gun, leveled that thing up to 4. Other than that, I found the clone version of the game I played last year (Battlevoid Harbinger) to actually be more enjoyable

Darkest Dungeon: Was okay, but I really didn't like the stress mechanic. Only made it to week 4 or 5 before I stopped playing. I didn't have anyone die, but it wasn't a very enjoyable game. Maybe if I had dedicated several days to actually learning the ins and outs of all the mechanics.

Deepest Dungeons of Doom. Felt a bit too archaeic for me. I'm all for 2D rpgs, but this one felt and looked right out of the NES, and it just wasn't that appealing to me once I installed it. It was only $0.49 so no big deal. I'm more of a fan of Castlevania SOTN, Diablo 2, or Baldur's gate type RPGs. This one was kind of just generic.

RPG Maker 2003. Funnily enough, this was the first one I tried. $2.50, hard to go wrong.

Dungeons of Dreadmor. This one seems like it's going to be more my styles. Haven't played it yet

RPG Maker XP. $4.99 I figured I should try a version that is a little bit newer than the 2003 version, and I actually started doing some things in it, before I bit the bullet and got MV. I would like to say I got MV in the Steam Sale as well, because it is on sale, but I'd be lying

X:COM Enemy Unknown, complete pack. $10 for a bunch of stuff. Heard lots of great things about this series, decided to get this one while it was cheap and hold it for a rainy day. I'll get to it eventually.

Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal. Kind of a new take on a tower defense game. It was pretty fun. The only issue is that the levels seemed to take forever. Like, level 4 took me 20 or 30 minutes, and in a game with upwards of 100 levels, I don't really want to be spending that much time per level. It would get grindy real fast I feel like.

Dungeon Warfare. Kind of a reverse RPG thing, where you're the overlord of the Dungeon rather than the adventures, except this one is a tower defense I think. There's been a few versions of this type of rpg over the years (first one I played was Dungeon Keeper 2), but this one seemed interesting, and it was on sale. Haven't played it yet though.

 

I recommend Stick of Truth.

 

Arc Eternal is great, but you're right in that later levels really slow down. I often end up tabbing out of it once I've got my laser nursery set up (somewhere to build and charge them, before dropping them beyond the front lines to extend my border), and only coming back in every few minutes once I've knocked back the creep.

I picked up Sunless Sea, and it's pretty good.

When Prince Albert died, Queen Victoria went into mourning. In our world, she mourned the rest of her life, not so in others. Mysterious figures offered her the chance to live with him again, in exchange for London. She accepted, at which point London was stolen by bats, and put on an underground cavern. You zail the zea, and try to find your father's bones.

It seems a mix between Dark Souls (for the lore being hidden, and something you have to search for), the Lovecraft Mythos (there is nothing 'neath the waves of the UnderZee, on this, everyone agrees), and a trading sim.

I lost my first captain to a giant crab. His rival was lost to pirates near the gates of Hell. Her student sailed off the edge of the map, and lost his entire crew to madness and cannibalism. Burning food to fuel his way back to port, the lighthouse was within sight when the drowned men pulled him to slumber neath the waters.

I also picked up Eurotrucker (either it's memetic, or actually good, let's find out), VVVV, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Ori, Deathwatch, and The Swapper. I've been tempted with a few other things, but nothing major yet.

 

I love the lore and worldbuilding of Sunless Sea, but the gameplay itself is pretty repetitive and dull. Still recommend it though, it's a lot of fun to read everything.

 

I will, once again, recommend the Trails in the Sky series, especially since the 3rd just released and Trails of Cold Steel will be available soon for PC

Best JRPG series in my opinion

First game

Second game

Third game

Cold Steel

 

Video Game/Steam Pet Peeve: I'm sick to death of people describing games as "Roguelike."

Do you know what games are like Rogue?
Rogue. Angband. Nethack.

Really, what most people mean these days when they say "Roguelike" is that the game in question has randomized items and/or perma-death instead of allowing saves.

To me, the most important aspect of a Roguelike is that it has completely randomized level architecture, for near-infinite replayability. Guess what almost none of the so-called Roguelike games on Steam has?

 

I'm going to toss in a special mention for ADoM (Ancient Domains of Mystery), both for the randomized almost everything(world over-map was mostly static, and a few specific locations as well, but the rest of the layout was randomized), and also for originally(and still as an alternate setting) being done in ASCII graphics. I used to play it about a decade ago, originally. Although I admit that while I did beat it, I did copy the save file... only died maybe three times, and mostly to recklessness, rather than rng, on that run.

That being said, there are only a few, yeah, that would fit the traditional concept of roguelike(here I'm willing to drop the ASCII aspect), that are currently listed in the store.

 

Anyone else trying to access pages on the Steam store and getting blank Access Denied pages?