2013 Steam Summer Sale Postmortem

The 2013 Steam Summer sale is over and my wallet survived it. Here’s a little post mortem about my summer sale purchases (sidenote, it felt weird visiting Steam this morning and not seeing any new deals):

Hotline Miami
This game is crazy, but also crazy awesome. The Music is reason alone to buy it (you can get the soundtrack for a bit extra), the 80’s throwback is amazing looking as well. Hard as nails are over the top gory, but one of the best indie games this year.

Endless Space + Disharmony
Haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but 4X games are always awesome if you have an hour to get into them and a day to play them. TotalBiscuit did a WTF is… about it which describes it very well.

DiRT 3
I love Codemasters racing games, and DiRT 2 is one of my longtime favorites. DiRT 3 isn’t as good as the predecessor IMHO, I just miss the atmosphere and I felt that the rally tracks were better. Still, great racer if you like the dirtier type of racing.

RPG Maker VX Ace
Mainly bought it because it was cheap. To the Moon was made with it, so it has a lot of variety. Never discount a game because it was made with a “Game Maker”, since there’s some amazing games made with these.

Total War: Shogun 2 Collection
I played several Total War games, but I never really got into them. I always buy them when they are cheap because they give me an hour or three of fun, so that’s worth it, right?

The Sims 3 + A lot of Addons
A guilty pleasure of mine. The ultimate Sandbox game, especially with all addons. You can activate the Steam keys on Origin. Why would you do that? Because addons that you buy on Amazon (I bought Supernatural since it was cheaper on Amazon) cannot be activated on Steam, but they work on Origin.

Not much to say about it that most people don’t already know – if you like The Sims, then The Sims 3 is awesome, otherwise it won’t convert you.

Organ Trail: Director's Cut
An hommage to The Oregon Trail and the zombie apocalypse. Fun little game, well worth the 1.50$ I paid.

Dust: An Elysian Tail
Haven’t played this too much yet, but definitely one of the bigger indie releases. Fun action game.

The Last Remnant
I played this on the XBox 360 before. It’s a great JRPG with a good fighting system, but undoubtly a JRPG.

Spellforce Complete
An RTS/RPG Hybrid, not really Warcraft III or Baldur’s Gate but something in-between. Great games.

Orcs Must Die! 2
Fun Tower Defense/Action game. Great coop.

Galactic Civilizations Complete Pack
Two of the greatest 4X games ever made. Both show their age (Low Res Excel Sheets) but if you’re willing to dive into them, there is a lot of depth and long-time fun.

Serious Sam 3 BFE Gold
BFE wasn’t as good or impactful as the First and Second Encounter, but still undoubtly a Serious Sam shooter. Shoot a lot of stuff, then more stuff, then more stuff and finally a huge boss.

Anno 2070 - Deep Ocean
Haven’t had a chance to play Anno 2070 yet, but picked up the Expansion anyway. I was a huge Anno 1602 fan back in 1998 (wow, that was 15 years ago. Time flies…) 2070 is interesting because it’s the first in the series set in the future (after 1602 we had 1503, 1701 and 1404), but it’s essentially true to its origins.

SimCity 4 Deluxe
The last good SimCity so far. It aged pretty well if you can get it to run. Cities XL may be an alternative, but SimCity 4 is an amazing game and still great in 2013.

Risen 2: Dark Waters Gold Edition
I could write long article about the history of Gothic, the god-awful Gothic 3, the breakup of the dev team that led to Arcania: Gothic 4 by a new dev team and Risen by the original developers. Neither is as good as Gothic 1 & 2, but Risen is still an enjoyable game, especially at a low price that makes rough edges bearable.

Syberia Collection
Great adventure games. I love French writers and artists because of the crazy ideas they come up with and run with it. Syberia was written by Benoît Sokal and features a great victorian/steampunk-ish atmosphere with a European touch. Some amazing scenery. Puzzles can be hit and miss, but amazing games nevertheless.

Sine Mora
Classic side-scrolling shoot ‘em up. Get a gamepad to play it and enjoy a beautiful game with interesting storytelling and a difficulty that’s surely challenging but not unforgiving. Instead of health you have time – every time you get hit, time decreases. Time also decreases naturally. That allows you to sometimes just fly through stuff while in other situations you have to be extra careful.

GRID
As said above, I love Codemasters racing games, and GRID is possibly my favorite buy during the steam sale. Whereas DiRT focuses on rally and related disciplines, GRID is about racing on concrete tracks with disciplines like a 1on1 race where you get penalized for hitting your opponent of a drift challenge where you get points for drifting, along with your normal race mode.

If you like racing games, GRID is a great buy.