The Future is Steam-y

Oh, Steam. You and your crack-pushing holiday deals.

14 games for $38.

Notable items not on that receipt:

  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R. bundle ($8.74). Purchased and beat both games long ago. Very solid FPS games.
  • SPAZ, or Space Pirates and Zombies ($11.24). Played the demo, wasn’t too impressed. Also, it’s difficult for someone to keep their indie cred (and suspension of disbelief) when the introduction is voiced by Totalbiscuit.
  • Borderlands ($4.99). Purchased and beat long ago. It’s a pretty terrible PC port unless you download a mod, but otherwise was entertaining enough.
  • Dead Island ($37.49). Still way too expensive for my tastes.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines ($5). Already purchased from prior Steam deal, haven’t installed yet.
  • F.E.A.R. Collection ($6.79). I may end up breaking down and buying these, even though I have FEAR 1 and an expansion pack on that archaic “DVD in a cardboard box” format that was all the rage in the early 21st century.
  • Resident Evil 5 ($9.99). I’m not completely convinced RE-style games will be as entertaining on the PC. I did buy Silent Hill 5 of course, but that is because I swore an allegiance to the series years ago while running away from skinless babies wielding scalpels.
  • LIMBO ($7.49). God damn you, Steam. I bought this on 9/18, like 1.5 months ago.
  • Bioshock ($4.99) & Bioshock 2 ($4.99). Purchased and beat both a while ago.
  • Terraria ($4.99). I have reasons to believe that this will be part of a future IndieRoyal bundle. Then again, that list also has Minecraft on it, which will never be coming to Steam according to Notch (something to do with updates/DLC issues).
  • Dead Space pack ($13.59). Purchased both in a prior deal, beat the first, haven’t installed the second yet.

Incidentally, you may or may not have heard of IndieRoyale. It’s basically like the Humble Bundle, minus the charity – the game bundles start at $1.99 and go up 1 penny in price each time someone buys the minimum (and goes down if they pay more). The games currently up are Ares: Extinction Agenda, Gemini Rue, Sanctum, and Nimbus. I bought mine for $2.70, and the currently price as of this writing is $3.89 (and it looks like it spiked to $6 yesterday).

I honestly cannot imagine ever going back to buying games at Wal-Mart of Gamestop or other such places. Maybe if I was more of a console gamer? But I absolutely see this as the future.

Posted on October 29, 2011, in Commentary and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.

  1. Why does being voiced by TB hurt your indie street-cred? Knowing TB from his WoW Radio times, he probably didn’t ask much for it, if anything at all. Ego is rather important to him and being in a game is different from being “just” a youtube celebrity. (This also isn’t the first game he has done voice work for, and I don’t recall Savage 2 being any less indie for it.)

    Not that I enjoyed the SPAZ demo much myself.

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    • I put TB on the same level as the Penny Arcade guys in terms of “indie cred” – they are not celebrities in the traditional sense, but they are very known qualities. And it seemed rather crazy for a game that was developed by two (2) guys to have an introduction voiced by TB. It would be like having Felicia Day voice a Minecraft introduction (although arguably Minecraft is mainstream at this point).

      Not that I want to come across as an indie snob or anything. It was just hearing TB in the intro immediately took me out of the game; I half expected to hear some irate rant about, well, anything and everything as soon as I recognized the voice.

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  2. It would be like having Felicia Day voice a Minecraft introduction.

    Sounds like an awesome idea to me.

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