New Year, New Games: My Steam Sale Haul So Far...

For Christmas this year, I asked for a Steam card. They had them in our local supermarket in two denominations: £20 and £30. I thought I might be lucky and get the thirty quid one.

On Christmas morning, one of the presents under the tree was a small packet. I was sure it was a Steam card but it felt pretty thick. 

It should have. There were seven cards inside. In total they added up to £120. 

I was not as immediately thrilled as I should have been. My reaction was closer to shock. I'd been thinking that with £30, in the sale I'd have been able to grab two or three good games from my wishlist. Or I could have put it towards one of the more expensive games I wanted but hadn't even bothered to wishlist because of the price. It would take a big chunk off the sale tag on one of those, for sure.

With over a hundred pounds to spend, though, choice paralysis set in. When you can buy anything on your wishlist and still have plenty left over, where do you start? I mean, no-one spends over a hundred pounds on video games, do they?

Then I had a clever idea. I added just two of the cards to my Steam wallet: £30 in all. Exactly what I'd been hoping for. That level of choice, I could handle . 

And I'd been right about £30 being enough for a little spending spree. As you can see from the dates on the image above, I bought six games on December 25th, which as some of you may recall was Christmas Day. No hanging about, there!

All six together came to just under the thirty pounds. One, I only bought because it was so cheap. It seemed rude not to. Another wasn't on my wishlist at all, I just happened to spot it while I was browsing and remembered it from when I played the demo.

Those were impulse purchases. The super-cheap game was Spire Horizon Online. £0.67 in the sale. Might as well be free. To be fair, it's only £3.39 full price and it's often on sale for less than a pound. I've managed to resist it up to now but I didn't have money in my Steam wallet those other times.

There's very little chance I'll actually play Spire Horizon Online. I only bought it because it was so cheap my bargain sense kept going off and that was the only way to stop it. Sixty-seven pence was a small price to pay (Literally.) for a quiet mind.

The other reckless buy was Dustborn. I was browsing the "Under £4" titles and it jumped out at me. I remembered it as something I'd played in a Next Fest and enjoyed. It was £2.49 (90% off.) and I had it in the basket before I thought to wonder why it wasn't on my wishlist. 

Looking back at the "microreview" I wrote back when I played the demo, it seems I meant to wishlist it but somehow never did. I must have forgotten. Never mind. I own it now.

The four games I picked up that I had remembered to put on the list were Sovereign Syndicate, Penny Larceny Gig Economy Supervillain, Cat Detective Albert Wilde and Brok the Investigator. The links go to my reviews of the demos. I did play the Penny larceny demo, too, but apparently I never reviewed it, presumably because that wasn't during Next Fest.

All four were at least half-price in the sale and none of them was very expensive to begin with. They also all had the benefit of being games I do genuinely want to play for fun, not just because I might get a few blog posts out of them. When I'll find the time to have that fun is another matter but at least the intention is there.

That was my Christmas Day shopping done but I still had a little over £90 left in the game bank. Not to mention another Steam card of unspecified value (But most likely £30.) I know my friend is holding on to until we meet up because I asked her not post it to me. 

No hurry, though. The sale doesn't end until 5 January. I gave myself a few days to think about it and I had a chat with Mrs. Bhagpuss as well. She advised me to get something I otherwise wouldn't spend the money on, what with my super-power being the ability to get more pleasure from not buying myself things than from actually getting them.

That seemed like good advice so today I added the rest of the cards to my Steam wallet and started spending.

It's harder than it looks, isn't it?

At one point I had nearly the full ninety quid's worth in my basket but I kept taking things out then putting them back in then taking them out again. I had another four excellent games in there that I really would like to play - Old Skies, Wildermyth, Chicken Police: Into the Hive and Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer - but all of them were only 25% or 30% off and it didn't seem like that was enough. I'll bet all of them will go lower some time this year.

I thought very hard about Pantheon and Erenshor but again the discounts were small and both are games that would require a considerable amount more time than I'm likely to be willing to give them. Those two didn't even make it into the basket this time but they stay on the wishlist, unlike several others I removed.  

The games I culled all had substantial discounts but it still wasn't enough even to get them into the basket for further consideration. It seemed like time they went. I figure if I won't buy something even at half-price, with money that's not even real money, there's no point pretending I want it any more.

Two games that were never on the wishlist to begin with did make it into the basket for a while. Cyberpunk 2077 is on sale at 65% off. I thought I always wanted to play that but couldn't because my PC wouldn't run it and anyway it was too expensive. After due consideration, it seems neither of those excuses holds up.

I probably should do a full post about this but it appears my experiment with replacing my old PC with something that cost about a quarter of what a good gaming rig should run has paid off. When I was thinking abut getting Cyberpunk 2077, I went to Can You Run It? to check if I could. And I can. In fact, I can run 99% of the Top 100 games there, many of them at Recommended rather than Minimum spec.

With proof of capacity and a massive price cut, why didn't I buy the game? Because I took a good look at the screenshots and the description and realized I didn't actually like either the look or the sound of it all that much. I think the main reason I wanted to play it was because of how very, very good the anime series was but the game doesn't look as if it would be very much like that. 

I think I need to do a bit more research. I still have a few days to make up my mind. I'd say it's fifty-fifty whether I'll get it or not. 

Ditto the other game I basketed and debasketed, Detroit: Become Human. That's another that looks adjacent to things I like but not congruent with them but it's 90% off so it's not much of a commitment. Still, any money spent on a game you know you're not going to play is money wasted, I guess.

Which is why, in the end I managed to spend almost £40 on one game, Baldur's Gate 3. There's no danger of me not playing that one, although I'm going to have to clear some SSD space before I can start.

It was always the game I was planning on buying this Christmas. If they did boxes any more I'd have had it under the tree. I've been very patient, waiting for the price to come down, but it's clear now that isn't going to happen, or at least not quickly. The current 20% discount is the largest cut I've seen so far so it seemed like the time had come. 

Also, as I mentioned in another post, Mrs Bhagpuss has expressed an interest in playing BG3. If I don't get around to it right away, maybe she can log into my account and play it. (Sometimes it feels like we learned absolutely nothing from illegally sharing accounts in EverQuest, back in the day...)

 Slay The Spire, the eighth and so far final game I bought, was another impulse buy and another giveaway at 90% off. I can't honestly say I ever particularly wanted to play it but I've read so many reports of how great it is and it does look like something I might enjoy, so for £1.99, why not?

That leaves me with a little more than £50 in the wallet but it's not like it'll go off. I'll wait a while and see what comes up. The big sales aren't the only time games get discounted, after all and there are at least half a dozen as-yet unpublished titles on my wishlist, ones that might come out this year, games I'd consider buying at full price.

The other issue is that I did actually buy a few games on Steam last year and I haven't played all of those yet. I don't have any problems never playing games I get for free but it seems like I should at least take a look at the ones I paid money for before buying more. 

There are four other games in the image at the top of the post as well as the ones I've mentioned. Two of those, Ashes of Creation and Stein's;Gate, I have played a little. AoC I've written about here. I like it well enough but not so well I'd rather play it than all the other MMORPGs I could be playing. Stein's;Gate I found unexpectedly boring. Steam says I played for 38 minutes but I can tell you it felt a lot longer...

Of the other two, I can't even remember what Beyond Two Souls is or how I came to own it. Road 96 I bought at deep discount after reading Tyler's review, which made it sound like exactly my sort of thing. Whether it really is or not, I can't say because I have yet to find the time to take a look at it.

Anyway, those are the games I've got lined up for the coming months. No doubt my experiences with some or all of them will turn up here.

Eventually. 

 

Get To The Back Of The Line, You Two!

This seems to be buying season. Or acquiring season, at least. Since I last posted about adding seven more games to my collection, just a few days ago, I've added a couple more. 

The first was a freebie from Amazon in celebration of Prime Day, a spurious self-generated "event" the megacorp has been trying to hype into something worth caring about for weeks now. All it is, of course, is a generally disappointing sale in which anything I'm vaguely interested in is never discounted enough to make me feel it's worth buying and anything I'm really interested in has barely any money off at all.

I wonder a lot about both the psychology and the commercial effectiveness of big sales like this. Everyone does them but I never see any feedback about how successful they are in terms of raising revenue. Do they really generate enough additional sales - purchases that otherwise would not have happened at all - to offset the money lost on purchases people were always going to make anyway and most likely would have made at a higher price? 

Sales are only ever really satisfying if you were already dead set on buying something pretty much right now and suddenly there it is at half price. That counts as a genuine saving in my book. It's less exciting but still quite nice when purchases you were definitely going to have to make at some point, just not necessarily right now, turn up at a discount. That also counts as a real saving, I 'd say.

Anything you otherwise might or might not have bought doesn't count as any kind of "saving", regardless of how much less you had to spend to get your hands on it compared to if you'd bought it at another time. That's extra money you've now spent that would otherwise still be in your pocket.

From the seller's perspective, it's the reverse, of course, although making you buy something now, even for less than you might have paid later, may be what they're after. In my limited experience, businesses are constantly trying to finesse when the money comes in as well as how much of it there is.

So far, Amazon has yet to persuade me to buy anything purely because of Prime Day. I may or may not have bought something during the event in previous years - I have no idea whether I have or not - but if I did it was entirely co-incidental. I buy stuff from Amazon all the time but only ever things I need or at least believe I need when I buy them, which admittedly isn't quite the same thing. 

I don't go trawling through the warehouse deals looking for bargains or anything like that but purely because they make such a huge deal of it, I do fall into the trap of browsing the Prime Day offer every year (Or however often it happens. I have no idea if it's more than once a year. It might well be because it sure isn't really a "Day".) It never takes long. It's always so dispiriting. I must remember not to bother next time.

I wouldn't be here, posting about the dumb sale at all if it wasn't for one thing: Prime Gaming also likes to get in on the action. I'm fairly sure they already gave away some extra games as some kind of pre-event but today they're handing out four more to celebrate the thing finally happening and for a miracle one of them is something I actually want!

The four games are Football Manager 2024 (No thanks.) Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (Bleh.) Amnesia (Much too scary.) and...

Marvel's Midnight Suns

That's the one! I remember it from when it came out and tanked. According to GameRant, the complaints at the time revolved around the "narrative elements that had players navigate an all-star lineup of Marvel heroes through some fairly mundane slice-of-life interactions." 

I've been droning on since at least the 1980s about how super-hero comics are primarily soap-operas and how the fights are largely incidental to the mundane slice-of-life interactions between the huge, sprawling casts, so that sounds much more like a recommendation than a caveat to me. I hope it turns out to be true.

As for the combat, the game was developed by Firaxis Games, the people who made the X-Com series among other well-known titles. I didn't get on with X-Com at all but that was because of the setting and the graphics, not the gameplay, which I otherwise liked well enough. I'm far more interested in a tactical RPG based on super-heroes than one centered on a bunch of far-right military types battling faceless aliens with xenophobic and genocidal tendencies to the fore on both sides, a scenario in which I'd just as soon leave them both to it and hope they wipe each other out.

Of course, Midnight Suns isn't a particularly generous gift from Prime. It's been on deep discount almost since it crashed and burned on launch back in December 2022. Currently you can pick it up in the Steam Sale for 85% off, which is a very good discount indeed. The only problem there is that it was a full-price game to begin with so even at that price it'll still cost you $10. 

I'd like to play Midnight Suns but based on my logic as outlined in the intro to the post, I wouldn't consider it a "bargain" at 85% off. For that to be true, I'd have had to have had a definite intent to buy and I certainly did not.  At a cost of absolutely nothing at all, though, a bargain it sure is!

Whether it's any good or not is another question. I'm optimistic but it's going to have to join the ever-growing line of games waiting to be played. As soon as I get around to playing it, I'll be sure to let everyone know.

The other fresh addition to my stable of games did cost me something. And I very much wasn't about to buy it anyway for the simple reason that until this morning I'd never heard of it. 

I was wondering when the Steam Sale was going to end, in case I decided to buy one of the titles on my wishlist (Most likely Sovereign Syndicate at 60% off...). While I was looking at that I thought I might as well check the Deep Discount section, in case they'd added anything interesting late in the day (The sale has two days left to run.) As it turned out, they had. Or quite possibly they hadn't but I'd missed it the last time I checked.

The game I didn't recall being on the list before and which I ended up buying was

Beyond: Two Souls

This one's "a unique psychological action thriller" originally produced for the Playstation 3 all the way back in 2013, although it didn't make it to PC until six years later. It was developer Quantic Dream's follow-up to the much-publicized Heavy Rain, a game even I remember. 

That was all back when the idea of video games turning into something that played like movies you could control was all over the mainstream media.  There was a lot of talk about new forms of storytelling and immersion and of course VR got in on the act and in the end... what happened? 

Nothing much, other than that games continued to become more filmic and everyone got used to it, so they stopped banging on about it like it was the beginning of a new age, I guess. Now we all just expect games to be like that at least some of the time and we only get excited when they do it particularly well. We're long past the dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs stage or I hope we are.

This particular, probably transitional, example features two big Hollywood names - Elliot Page (Viktor from Umbrella Academy) and Willem Defoe (Everything from Platoon to a whole bunch of arthouse films I really like.), which was the main thing that drew me to it. I like both of those actors so if they're in it all the time it's probably going to be worth a look.

Especially at a very attractive 90% off. And the game was only £16.99 to begin with, so that means I had to stump up just £1.69. (That's $2.29 to save you the trouble.) I had an ice-cream yesterday that cost more than that and it lasted me about two minutes. I'm pretty sure I'll get more for my money out of Beyond: Two Souls than that.

It's all relative, isn't it? At least, that's the rationalization.

 

Anyway, if nothing else, all these new games give me something to write about without having to... y'know... play any of them  Following on from yesterday's post, the forecast is for a lengthy spell of very hot, very sunny weather starting today so it might be a while before I get to any of them. Still, nice to know they're there, isn't it?

Well, "there" for a given value of "thereness" that is. I'm sure everyone's been following the progress of the Stop Killing Games campaign in Europe? I haven't. First I heard of it was when Tobold posted about it although Wilhelm might have mentioned it when he was talking about game preservation. Other than that I'd managed to avoid it until now.

My uninformed take on it is that it's entitled twaddle but I'm not going to elaborate because I don't care to give it even the one or two molecules of oxygen a personal blog can muster.  I mention it only because, when I bought Beyond: Two Souls on Steam, I had to acknowledge my acceptance of the EULA, the very first line of which read, all in capitals,

THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED. IT IS NOT SOLD.

That seems clear enough. I guess the courts would need to confirm the validity of EULAs with that provision at some point but once that's done, the entire problem - if we're going to call it a problem - goes away.

Doesn't it? 

Buy One, Get Six Free

So, finally, as if anyone cared, here are the five games I claimed from Amazon Prime gaming in June. Or was it July? And why are there six of them?

Do. Not. Ask. I am beyond trying to make sense of the Prime Gaming offer now. The information in the "blog" that Amazon sends out each month, usually late, doesn't match what I see when I go to the website. 

The blog itself, which is in fact a press release, so why they call it a blog beats me - it's not like blogs are fashionable any more - is laid out so chaotically it's actively off-putting, with huge lists of games in various formats that repeat themselves and overlap. I can't be bothered trying to unpick it any more.

There's this whole, rolling release schedule that makes no sense, particularly since the whole supposed thrill of the new they seemed to be trying to inculcate, whereby we'd all rush to get the next batch of games each week, is completely undermined by most of the games then sitting there for a month or more, waiting to be picked like a bunch of schoolkids hoping for a spot in the team.

Add to that a whole new bunch of games they're throwing in just now in anticipation of Prime Day (Which actually lasts about a week so clearly the entire company shares the same lack of interest in calling anything by its proper name or acknowledging any kind of conventional calendar.) and it just all becomes so much more trouble to decode than it could possibly be worth.

Much easier just to check the website every couple of weeks and claim whatever's new that looks good. Who cares what offer its in or when it arrived or when it's leaving? Snapshot and be done with it, I say!

The games I claimed at the end of June were:

Stray Gods  

Not Stray Gods: Orpheus as it says above but let's not get into all that again. Already covered in a previous post. Naturally, I haven't played it yet. I haven't played any of the games I claimed. Let's be realistic - I don't claim them to play them. I claim them so I'll have them should I ever want to play them, which I most likely won't. I'd love to blame it on late-stage capitalism but actually I think it's more likely just me.

The Last Show of Mr. Chardish

75% off in the Steam Summer Sale with a "Very Positive" review rating, although since that's only from 71 reviews and the game came out five years ago, I'm not sure it has much authority. More like no-one's really tried it. It's a puzzle mystery game about an actress who goes back to an abandoned theater to recall her past history with the eponymous director. Mostly I took this one because the screenshots looked pretty. 

Fate: Undiscovered Realms

20% off in the sale with a Very Positive rating. The sequel to FATE, which I may or may not own on some platform or other. Certainly never played it. It's a dungeon crawler and I occasionally get the fleeting urge to play one of those so I guess it's good to have one on hand for those few minutes every decade or so. The screenshots are incredibly blurry for something that's supposed to encourage people to want to buy it. I hope the game doesn't actually look like that...

Dark Envoy

64% off in the sale with a Mostly Positive rating. Even the highlighted pro reviews they've chosen to promote it on the store page are lukewarm at best so I don't have a lot of hope for this but then it's often better to go in expecting nothing much and be mildly surprised to find its not as bad as you thought it would be than to anticipate greatness and get something that's merely very good. It's a "cRPG", which is a term though we'd gotten rid of around the turn of the millennium, when we stopped putting the word "computer" in front of everything we needed a computer for. Baldur's Gate on a budget is what they mean, anyway. A very small budget...

Wild Country

20% off and Mixed. Mixed is not good. It's a "cozy-competitive" card game, whatever the heck that means. I don't play many deck-builders, mostly because I find building decks about as engaging as picking talents from a talent tree. I thought these were exactly the kind of tedious, faux-administrative tasks computers were designed to do for us but apparently in some quarters they're considered to be too enjoyable to hand off to a machine. I picked this one despite the genre and mechanics because it has amusing-looking funny animals, some of whom wear hats.

All of those are probably from June's offer, if anyone cares. July's offer looks poor so far but I don't remember most of  the games I've just been talking about coming up in the conversation when June's slate was announced so I'm hopeful something better will turn up, unnanounced. 

Of the July games available so far, I've only taken one:

TOEM

This one has a massive 80% off in the Steam sale right now and and Overwhelmingly Positive rating. It's a hand-drawn, black-and-white photography adventure in which you wander about, chatting to a bunch of people and solving their problems by taking photographs. You'd think, given the crazy amount of screenshots I take, I'd be all over photo games but I've only ever played one or two. Should make a nice change of pace when I'm in the mood. When that's going to be is another question.

And since I've been plugging the Steam Sale all through this post, it's nice to be able to end with something I actually bought there! Yes, I paid money for a game, something that seems hard to justify given how many games I get for free and how many of those I haven't even looked at yet, but it was sooo cheap...

Steins;Gate

A whopping 90% off and Overwhelmingly Positive. Also the only game I've ever seen to use a semi-colon in the title in quite such an aggressive manner. It looks right in my wheelhouse, being "a time-travel, science fiction interactive visual novel". Can't really walk away from something like that.

Obviously, I haven't played it yet. The description on the Steam page gleefully claims "30-50 hours of reading time", which is something I've never seen offered as a positive feature of a video game before. I could read several full-length novels in thirty hours, let alone fifty, so the writing damn well better be good! 

And that's my list of acquisitions for June and the very beginning of July. I'm still wavering on a couple of wishlist purchases in the dying days of the sale. As I just suggested, it's increasingly hard to justify buying anything even at huge discounts unless I absolutely, positively need to play it right now. For a time it made sense to build up a cushion of games to fall back on should the need arise but I think I'm fully furnished with those now. 

I'll take a bet with myself that, when I post about the Steam Winter Sale, as I inevitably will, I won't have played Steins;Gate or any other games I might buy in the Summer Sale. 

If I win that bet, will I also have lost it?

Just Because It's Costing You Nothing Doesn't mean You Can't Complain

I may not be playing many games at the moment but that's not going to stop me collecting more. 

Ooh! Sidebar! Is that a legitimate way to look at all those gaming backlogs everyone keeps complaining about? I've been in the habit of referring to mine as a Gaming Library, in an attempt to add some gravitas and alleviate some guilt (Guilt, I should clarify, that I personally do not feel but which I understand to be some kind of a general problem among the community.) by suggesting a large stack of unplayed games represents a resource rather than an obligation but how would it be if instead we re-framed our backlogs as Collections? 

Collections are cool. Everyone loves them. Every item they contain exists to be owned, treasured, curated and occasionally looked at but no-one expects you to use any of them. Collections are always growing, too. It's part of their charm and appeal. Adding to them is a hobby in itself and it gives other people something to give you as a present when they're stuck for ideas of their own.

And you can forget about the sunk cost. Sure, some collections hold their value and even increase but many don't and no-one cares. In fact, it's often considered crass to know, or certainly to talk about, how much your collection cost or how much it might make at auction if you sold it - which of course you never would.. The true value of collections lies in the pure, innocent pleasure that comes from owning and appreciating them.

There! Now don't you feel better about that backlog?

Also, congratulations to me for yet again de-railing one of my own posts. One sentence I got out before it happened! That has to be a record.

Getting back to the point, as Wilhelm thoughtfully reminded us all yesterday, the Steam Summer Sale has just started. I thought I probably at least ought to take a look at how that affected my wishlist, on the basis that if I'm still not willing to commit at two-thirds off, there's probably not much point that game staying on the list.

Definitely Maybe

As it turns out, only five games out of thirty-eight meet that criterion and I have no inclination to buy any of them. Added to that, two games on the list are currently on offer for less than a pound and I still don't feel like paying for them, which strongly  suggests I might not even take them if they were free. 

And yet I haven't de-listed any of them. The counter-argument is why bother? It's not like a Steam wishlist takes up any space. I'm not going to trip over it or have to get the ladder out to shove half of it in the attic so I can make space for more.

It's not even as though having a bunch of games on there you're never going to buy makes it any harder to see the ones you might. The list's sortable eight different ways, including by how big a discount you can get and how long a game's been on there, which seem to me to be about the only two pieces of information I'd be likely to want to know before deciding whether or what to buy.

No, I think I'm more minded to leave everything alone, just on the off-chance that something might eventually catch my eye. It seems a bit ridiculous to try and second-guess future me by taking games off now that I might feel differently about in the future.

And yet, with all that taken fully under consideration, I did take one game off the list. What's more, it was one of the games I almost certainly would have bought at some point, when the discount felt right. I had a good reason. The best.

There are quite a few games on the list I'm always quite close to buying and a lot more I'm not. I could fairly reliably sort them into four  categories:

1. Definitely going to buy on Day One at full price. Just waiting for it to release.
2. Almost certainly will buy one day. Just a question of when and for how much.
3. Probably will buy one day but only when it's a real bargain.
4. Unlikely to buy, no matter how cheap it gets.

The first three categories seem completely legit but the last is iffy. Why even put a game on the list if you're almost certain not to buy it at any price? 

Well, a couple of reasons at least. For one, it supposedly helps the developers to have as many wishlist votes as possible in the run-up to launch. I play a lot of demos in Next Fests for games I think are quite good but aren't for me and I often wishlist those just to be supportive. Costs me nothing and they seem to appreciate it.

The other reason is so I can keep an eye on certain titles I might want to blog about. Having them on the wishlist helps remind me they exist and also occasionally gets me an email from Steam if something changes.

Of course, both of those arguments cease to have much validity once the games launch. At that point, I probably should remove them. I tend not to for one very good reason: I'm too lazy. Doing nothing is always the easier option.

Not at any price.

On my current wishlist there are two games in Category 1: Nighthawks and Nivalis. Nivalis has a 2025 release date but Nighthawks, which I added to the list in 2021, still just says TBA and I suspect it may never arrive.

Category 2 has ten games, Category 3 has seven and everything else is in the last one. That means exactly half of the games on my wishlist are games I am most likely never going to buy. Worse, I'd take them on a free offer but even then I'd be highly unlikely ever to play them.

And I don't care. That's fine. They're not in my way. They can just stay there unless they for some reason start to annoy me. That happens occasionally. I can have moods.

But even with your wishlist split up into categories, you have to be so careful! Can you imagine anything more infuriating than buying a game in Cat 2 for, oh, let's say, 30% off in the Summer Sale, meaning it's actually costing you £17.99, still in my opinion a not-inconsiderable sum for a video game you aren't desperate to play Right Now, only to find - literally five minutes later! - you could have had it FOR FREE on another gaming platform?

Boy, that would suck, wouldn't it? Lucky that never happened!

Relax! It didn't. It was close, though. 

Last night, after I read Wilhelm's post, I went straight to Steam and checked the discounts on my wishlist. The best ones were all on games in Cat 4 but there were a few 50% or even 60% offers in Cat 3 that I was highly tempted by and still am. 

Nothing in Cat 2 had more than 30% off and it wasn't quite enough to get me to pull the trigger, which turned out to be just as well when, on a whim, I also decided to check Prime Gaming this morning. 

Prime Says...

In theory, there shouldn't have been any reason for me to do that. Although the Prime offers roll over, there's supposed to be an announcement at the start of each calendar month telling you what's new. There's a blog about it and they send out an email. I even wrote about the June offer back at the beginning of the month, so I ought to know what's on it, right?

Yeah, like hell I do! Either I can't read or Prime can't keep the record straight. Maybe both.

When I opened the web page today, I saw a bunch of new games had been added that I cannot remember seeing on the blog post. And I'm pretty sure I'd have remembered if something from my fricken' Steam wishlist was on there. Which it was.

Or was it...?

There seems to be some confusion over that. Pay attention, now, because this gets complicated and I'm not going to make it any plainer with my explanation.

Claim says...

The Prime Gaming website very clearly shows Stray Gods: Orpheus Edition, the most expensive version, a compilation of the base game and the DLC but with a label underneath that says "Stray Gods: Orpheus", which is just the DLC on its own. When you click through to claim it, the display changes to the page you see at the head of this post, which only mentions the DLC. 

When you do claim it, though, the confirmation plainly says you just got the twofer. And then you go to Good Old Games to install it and what do you find? 

Yep, you guessed it! Neither! Instead, you appear to have received the original, base game - Stray Gods.

It's clear I'm not going to find out what I've actually got until I install it so talk amongst yourselves while I do just that. I'll go make myself a coffee while it's downloading...

GOG Says...

Well, that's made everything clear as mud. The game I've just acquired is definitely the original Stray Gods, not the DLC or the two-pack... but it apparently comes with a saved game in which Act 1 has already been completed. 

Wasn't me! My "Played" time on GOG shows just one minute, the time it took me to log in just now.

I guess a save might make sense if I'd just acquired Stray Gods on Steam, which is where I played the demo almost exactly two years ago. I think the demo was Act 1 so I can see how progress there might have been saved towards a future purchase of the full game on the same platform.

But I just got this version from Amazon Prime Gaming and they delivered it to me on GOG, and yet somehow it looks like it knows I already played through Act 1 on a Steam demo, so how does that work? I don't even use the same email address for Steam and Prime. Or the same user name.

As they say in the movies, something's not right...

And this post has not gone at all how I expected, either. I'm live-blogging again and it's all falling apart. The plan when I started was to write about the new games that appeared on Prime and the five that I claimed today but I think I'm just going to cut my losses and save that for a separate post. In fact, I'll probably wait until they announce the games for July, because I bet these are some of them.

Just a couple of extra details and thoughts to finish. 

To re-enforce my message about being careful not to buy stuff on one platform that you already own on another, while I was checking GoG for this post I spotted I already own Kerbal Space Program there. That's on deep discount in the Steam Sale right now and I was looking at it last night and thinking about getting it. Good thing I didn't.

Also, does any of this suggest maybe someone at Prime Gaming is using an AI assistant? In my experience they have real trouble picking up fine details like the difference between a game and its expansions or DLC. Or maybe no-one at Amazon really cares about Prime Gaming any more. that tracks.

And finally, what's up with GOG, anyway? Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not wrong.) but doesn't it stand for Good Old Games? With the emphasis on Old, I always thought. Stray Gods came out in 2023. That's two years ago. 

Is that what we're calling "old" now?  I have food in my cupboards older than that and it's still in date.

They All Rolled Over And Two Fell Out : The Steam Winter Sale

Happy New Year everyone! 

And with that out of the way, rest assured this is safe place! There will be no resolutions, predictions, reviews or any other acknowledgment of the change of date. There may be some looking ahead or looking back but nothing that mightn't just as easily crop up in a post here at any time of year.

For example, I'm about to recount my time with this year's Steam Winter Sale, which is only seasonal in the loosest sense of the word. It's still going, by the way, in case you haven't committed. You still have until 10AM Pacific tomorrow to make your mind up. Unless you're reading this after then, of course, in which case I guess you'll have to wait for the next one.

This year, I bought some games in the sale, which might well be the first time ever. It wasn't as as many as it could have been but it was still quite a few for me. 

I took my time over it, too. I had a good look at what was on offer when the sale began and picked out half a dozen likely prospects. For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me now but presumably related to me planning some kind of blog post about it, I took a screenshot of my Basket so I can confirm the six games I picked. I'm pretty sure I'd have forgotten the ones I didn't buy already, otherwise.

I can remember how I made my choices though. My thinking went like this:

Divinity Original Sin: played D:OS2 a few years ago and enjoyed it, until it annoyed me and I stopped. Never finished it but I clocked up over ninety hours, making it my sixth most-played game on Steam. It seems a fair bet that I'd get some value out of the original, although you do have to assume the sequel improved on it, so it could feel disappointing in comparison. The deciding factor here, though, was the price. At 90% off it seems positively rude to refuse.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister - Lost Valley: This is DLC for the main game, which I played last year and mostly enjoyed until the very end, when I couldn't beat the final boss. That was fine because I realised I didn't need to anyway, since when you do the game just stops so why even bother? This DLC adds a complete campaign, starting at Level 1 using fresh characters, so it's basically a new game on top of the old one. Reviews are decent and although the discount isn't huge, it was cheap to begin with so why not?

Cloudpunk: Had this on my Wishlist for a while. Not sure when I added it or how I came to hear of it but it very much looks like my sort of thing. It's a cross between NeoCab, which I loved but which apparently took me less than five hours to finish. (Seemed like a lot more but in a good way...) and Cyberpunk 2099, which I really would like to try but is a) still too pricy for me even at 50% off and b) might not run well on my aging PC. 65% is a very attractive discount and again this one wasn't very expensive even at full price.

Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain, Hello Goodboy, Cats and the Other Lives: I added all three of these to my Wishlist after I played their demos at various Next Fests. They've all been on sale before and I haven't succumbed so either the discounts back then weren't great or I don't want to play them as much as all that. 80% on Cats... is very appealing and 65% on Goodboy is pretty sweet. 40% on Penny isn't all that tempting but conversely it's definitely the demo, of the three, that I enjoyed the most.

I am quite good at not rushing to judgment on this sort of thing and the sale does run for a while so I left the six in my basket until after Christmas, then sat down and had another look. In the second round, only Penny Larceny failed to make the cut. I do want to play it but I'm pretty sure I can do better than 40% off - although now I check, that's the best offer there's ever been for the game on Steam so maybe I can't.

I still didn't press the Buy button. I gave it another couple of days for the final thrill of the hunt to dissipate, then I went back a third time. I was about to buy all five when it occured to me that there was one game in the list that I didn't really remember much about: Hello Goodboy. All I could recall was the obvious fact that it had a dog in it. 

That lack of recognition seemed concerning. I could remember quite a lot about both Cats and the Other lives and Penny Larceny so not knowing anything about Hello Goodboy other than what I could deduce from the title and the thumbnail seemed odd. 

So I did a little digging, by which I mean I read some of the Steam Reviews. The common theme among them seemed to be how very short the game was. That made me wonder just how much more entertainment I was likely to get out of the full game than I'd already gotten from the demo. Added to that, it's one of those games where extended gameplay comes from replaying the whole thing several times to see all the different endings, something I almost never do. I pretty much always accept whatever ending I get and move on.

With that new information, I not only took Hello Goodboy out of my basket, I culled it from my Wishlist, too. I should probably go back and do that to a few more games I added after playing Next Fest demos. As I've said a few times, for me there are often quite substantial diminishing returns from full games after I've played the demo. I can be something of a tapas gamer at times.

That left me with the four titles shown above, which I duly purchased, although not without a modicum of confusion as to what I'd actually bought. Somewhat confusingly Solasta: Lost Valley appears on the invoice but doesn't merit it's own spot in my Library, being subsumed as DLC into its parental Solasta tab and I seem to have been gifted not only the listed D:OS - Enhanced Edition but also D:OS Classic as well, which does apear in its own right in the Library. What the difference beteen them might be or why anyone would want both I have no idea and most likely I'll never find out because I'm sure I won't be playing both.

The whole enterprise cost me less than £20, well under my budget, so I may yet add another game or two before the sale ends. On the other hand, there's the small issue of finding the time to play whatever I buy, so maybe not.

On that, I have already made a start, at least. I put an hour and a half into Cloudpunk over the last two evenings. I'm loving it so far but I find it takes too much concentration to stick with for much more than an hour at a stretch. I can see why some reviewers describe it as a chill experience - certainly I haven't had to fight anything yet - but they must be considerably better at flying a hovercar than I am.

More on that one, no doubt, when I get further into the story. So far it seems charmingly episodic but I suspect there's a more robust narrative lurking beneath the surface. Cyberpunk tales are rarely heartwarming, after all.

A Tactical Choice

The Steam Summer Sale ends in a few days. Back when it started, I spent maybe an hour going through the offers. I spotted a number of decent bargains and no fewer than eighteen of the entries on my wishlist were on sale for anything up to seventy-five per cent off. Surely there had to be something I could buy?

Well, nope. Apparently there wasn't. I looked at everything, on and off the wishlist, trying to imagine myself playing any of them across the summer and I couldn't do it. I could see myself playing them at some point but I definitely didn't get the feeling that point would be any time soon.

That's the problem with sales. If you're not going to play a game tonight or tomorrow or next week or even next month, is there any point buying it today? 

I guess there could be. Games aren't perishable. They don't go off. You could, quite reasonably, buy a game in the summer with the intention of playing it in the autumn or the winter or next spring. If it seemed likely you might do that, and if the game was on sale right now at a good discount, it might even seem like a sensible thing to do.

Except that games on Steam go on sale all the time. Not only are there the big Summer and Winter sales, there are numerous publisher sales and themed events plus the perpetual drip drip drip of everyday discounts that just never stops. 

There's not even much of an argument in favor of nailing down a good discount when you see it, even on a game you're sure you'll play "one day", just in case it never comes up for sale at that price again. Game pricing doesn't work that way. Once the discounts begin, they tend to keep on coming and they have a habit of getting bigger as the game ages out of the market.

It's true that at some point the price might hit a floor and stop falling . It might well bounce around a bit between big sales. It's never going to go all the way back up. If you miss a bargain in one sale it doesn't matter; there may well be a better deal in the enxt.

It's a very different mechanism from what  I'm used to in the book trade. At work, over the years, I've frequently had to explain to bemused customers that the brand new books on sale at half-price aren't commercial disasters we're trying to get rid of - they're the most hotly-anticpated, keenly-selling successes of the moment. 

For some reason that still isn't entirely clear to me after the best part of thirty years in the business, very successful books are often at their cheapest on publication. If you want to buy a just-published novel at half price, don't hang about. The first couple of weeks is your beat bet for a bargain. You might be lucky and pick up the same book for half-price a year later, just before the paperback comes out, when booksellers will try to get rid of any final, few copies they might have lying around but chances are any that didn't sell will have been returned to the publishers by then.

Even less comprehensible is the way the better-known and more successful the author is, the bigger the
discount is likely to be. Regular, mid-range writers have to hope someone's willing to pay full price for their new book, even though it's had little publicity and there's not much demand. Famous authors latest efforts get piled high next to the tills at half-price on the day of publication.

It's not quite as ruthless as it was a few years ago. Reading is hot right now and has been at least since Tik-Tok became a thing. A lot more books go undiscounted. Even so, rule of thumb remains get in quick if you want to buy cheap. If there isn't any money off when the book comes out, it's unlikely there'll be a discount later. (Caveat: that's how it is in the UK. I have no idea if it works like that in other territories...)

With games, it's pretty much the exact opposite. Wait long enough and you'll be able to pick up not just the game you wanted but all the DLC, for a fraction of the original cost. You might even get it all neatly packaged up together in an Ultimate Edition, assuming the game was successful to merit one.

With all of that in mind, I'd about reached the stage of writing off the Steam Summer Sale altogether. I just couldn't justify buying anything, even for cheap. (I almost stumped up for Penny Larceny but once again the game fell at the last hurdle; I do want to play it but I don't want to play it now. Also, it's only £9.99 full price. A 30% discount taking it down to £6.99 barely makes a difference. Sometimes full price is already low enough that a discount just isn't much of an incentive.)

And then last night I bought a game after all!

It wasn't on a whim but it was an almost-instantaneous decision. The moment I saw the discount I didn't hesitate. So what was it and why was it different this time?

I'd played Wuthering Waves in the morning and EverQuest 2 in the afternoon and I felt like playing something different in the evening... but what? Nothing came to mind, so while I was thinking about it I passed the time checking my feeds, which was when I noticed Tipa had posted about her experiences playtesting The White Raven, a game I'd not heard of before. 

It didn't really sound like my sort of thing but Tipa compared aspects of TWR to Baldur's Gate 3, a game I definitely want to play. That one, I definitely would play right away but I'm waiting for a good deal. 

I realise it might take a while. BG3 is in the Steam Summer Sale but only at 20% off. Then again, last time it was only down 10% so the needle is moving in the right direction. I'm waiting until it hits at least 50% off, which I suspect could still be a while. Like years.

BG3 might be out of contention but what about something similar? I had a think about what it was about The White Raven and Baldur's Gate that was making me itchy to play and it occured to me pretty quickly it wasn't the the deep storytelling or the top-class voice acting so much as the magic-based tactical combat. That was the itch I was trying to scratch. I wanted to throw fireballs at goblins again.

The last game I played where I got to indulge that urge was The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos, which I got free with Amazon Prime. That one turned out to be much more entertaining than I expected, a common theme in reviews of the game, whose charms seemed to take everyone by surprise. Something like that would be perfect. 

Unfortunately I couldn't think of anything like that, although something exactly the same was an option. There's a confusing amount of DLC in the Naheulbeuk series, all of it relatively cheap, so that seemed like an obvious fix. What put me off was knowing there had to be a good chance most of it would eventually pitch up on Prime for free, since that's Amazon's established pattern with franchises once they start giving them away. It would be really annoying to buy a bunch of sequels now, only to have them appear in the Prime offer a month or two down the line.

I couldn't come up with anything else but I thought I might know someone who could. For a given value of "someone", that is. I thought I'd ask Gemini, Google's AI, to suggest something suitable. It would either solve my problem or give me something to laugh about. 

I was even hoping Gemini might come up with a hidden gem or two. It did not.

It did, however, give me five extremely solid recommendations: 

Baldur's Gate 3 
Divinity: Original Sin 2
XCom 2
Battle Brothers
Solasta: Crown of the Magister

The question I asked was "Please give me the names of some games similar to The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk." You can't really fault that for an answer.

I've covered why I'm not considering BG3 at this time. D:OS2 I've already played. The XCom series doesn't have magic-based combat. Battle Brothers has one of those names that make me think "Nope" without even bothering to find out any more about it.

Solasta, though...

I remember Tobold posting about that one a few times. He rated it highly and he plays a lot of these sorts of games. I remember him saying it might be as good as BG3, in terms of the tactical gameplay, even if the story and acting weren't on the same level. And since it was the tactical gameplay I was mostly interested in...

So I checked and guess what? It's in the Steam sale with a whopping 70% discount. 

I can take a hint. I bought it without hesitation.

Then, as if to prove a point but actually because I really wanted to, I played it. An hour last night and another this morning, which was all the time I had available.

So far, I'm enjoying it, although I can hardly comment on the tactical gameplay I bought it for because I've yet to encounter any. Also, again as if to prove a point, the voice acting is arguably less convinving than the AI in Ales and Tales. 

As far as getting my money's-worth goes, though... two hours in and I'm not only still in the Tutorial, I haven't even finished going round the shops yet!

At this rate, Solasta will probably last me until the Steam Winter Sale.

Different Class

When I went to log in to Nightingale yesterday, I noticed the minimally interactive banner (You can click it and it changes very slightly but only once.) at the top of the screen announcing the Steam Spring Sale. It doesn't feel much like Spring outside but if Steam says it is I guess it must be. 

As time goes on I become more and more enmeshed in the Steam ecosystem I resisted for so long. I used to see people talking about Steam sales and shake my head at the idea of anyone falling for such an entry-level marketing ploy. Now I hear the news and go "Ooh! I wonder if there's anything good?"

There wasn't, not really. I can't claim to have gone through the entire list line by line but I flicked all the way to the end of the main page, where what I imagine are meant to be the most enticing offers are, and didn't see much I was interested in. Not at those discounts, anyway.

Of course, there were some very heavy reductions, some of them even on titles I have wishlisted, but they're games that regularly go on sale. Horizon Zero Dawn : Complete Collection, for example, has been 75% off several times since I put it on my wishlist.

The problem with that one and several other bargains I noticed is that the cost isn't what's stopping me. It's knowing I won't play them. I don't even claim free titles from Prime any more unless I'm almost certain I'm going to play them almost immediately. 

Horizon Zero Dawn looks great in principle but in practice I'm pretty sure the gameplay wouldn't suit me very well. £9.99 may not be much but it's still a waste of money if the game's just going to sit there in my Steam library gathering virtual dust. Rather than buying it because it's on offer I should probably just take it off my wishlist.

There's an argument for culling the list quite severely. It's full of titles that have been on offer numerous times without triggering a purchase. For most of them, though, that is price-related. Discounts between 20%-40% just don't seem generous enough to make me think "I'd better jump on that!"

Even at half-price I rarely bite. There are four titles on the list at 50% or more off in the current sale but I haven't gone for any of them... yet. In every case, what that tells me is that I'm not really as keen to play them as I thought I was when I put them on. All of them are titles I wishlisted after playing demos in various NextFests and as I've said a few times, for a lot of games an hour-long demo is probably about as much as I ever needed.

There's also the salutory fact that the last several games I bought in Steam sales I either haven't even started yet or, worse, played for a while then somehow forgot to finish. If that was because I wasn't enjoying them it would be one thing but actually my hit rate on picking games I enjoy is extremely good. I'm just very bad at sticking with them for long enough to get to the credits.

Then there's the issue of timing. When I put Coreborn on the list, for example, I had space in my schedule for a new MMO/Survival title. Now I really don't, even at 70% off.

Perhaps most important of all, though, is that a lot of the games on my wishlist just aren't very expensive to begin with. If I wanted to play them - as in right now - I'd be happy to pay full price. For a discount to work its magic it needs to be attached to a game I'm already teetering on the edge of buying anyway. Then even a small reduction is enough to nudge me over.

And that's how I came to buy Class of '09 last night. I've been thinking about it ever since I somehow stumbled across a playthrough on YouTube a few weeks ago. There are lots of playthroughs of the game on YouTube. I'm going to embed one here but please pay serious attention to the warning that comes with the game itself:  

This game contains reference to sexual themes and explicit criminal acts such as drug solicitation, substance abuse, homicide, physical assault, sexual assault, fraud, and self-harm. 

Boy, does it ever. And the rest. That's just scratching the surface of the ways Class of '09 could offend, upset, disturb or outrage. If you're ready for it after all that, go ahead, don't let me stop you.

Tell you what, let's just have the intro. I'm not convinced clips work out of context and I'm not expecting anyone to watch a whole playthrough.

I've played two games of Class of '09 now. I think that's how it works. You just keep playing in the forlorn hope of getting any kind of acceptable conclusion. Catharsis.

My first run, Nicole hung herself. That was cheery.

My second run she's hiding at home because she thinks something she posted on the internet is going to get her school burned down by extremists. Compared to some of the endings I've seen, that doesn't really seem like such a bad outcome.

If Class of '09 was just sweary, boundary-breaking shocksploitation, obviously I wouldn't be here writing about it now. It's a lot more than that. It's witty, smart, funny, sweary, boundary-breaking shocksploitation, with very good voice acting. 

It didn't surprise me in the least to discover there have been attempts to shift the property to other media. It would make a great animated TV show, not least since one of its acknowledged inspirations is Daria. 

A Kickstarter looking to fund an anime based on the game raised $132k on a 35k ask last year, enough to make an 11 minute pilot episode. That's yet to come but there's a three minute teaser made for the Kickstarter that's really good.

It'd be nice if that all goes somewhere further than a pilot but for now the game's the thing and I plan on playing it plenty. I particularly appreciate the structure, which seems to resolve itself into shortish, TV-like episodes as you hit the inevitable buffers on every playthrough. More games should come in bite-sized chunks.

When I've seen a lot more of Nicole's fractal life, no doubt there'll be another post. There are supposed to be thirteen endings but how many branches before you get to them I couldn't say. It's too early to make any solid statements about how looped the gameplay is or whether there's ever any real sense of progress or achievement. I suspect there isn't and I imagine that's the point.

The one thing about the game that slightly worries me is that it's the sole creation of one guy, Max Field, who might just possibly be a bit of a dick. Here's an interview with him that kind of gives that impression. I'm not entirely comfortable with all of this supposed female psychological insight coming purely from a male perspective, either, although that leads onto a whole corridor of doors I really don't want to open.

He sure pisses the racists off, though, so at least he has that going for him.

Anyway, judge the work, not the creator, I guess. I can recommend an entertaining, if not entirely helpful, book on navigating that cultural minefield if anyone's interested. I liked it more than Rachel Cooke from the Guardian did but I can't argue with most of her criticisms. It's all over the place.

And we're getting off the subject again, aren't we? Back to the game. Or should I say games?

There's a sequel called Class of '09: The Re-Up, too, which I cannot imagine not wanting to play once I'm done with this one. It may have to wait for another sale though. At the moment it's a derisory 20% down although there's a double pack of both games (That I now realise is the one I should have got.) for 45% off.

I guess sales do have their uses, on occasion.

Temptation All Around

It's Friday! How about a few notes and queries? Okay, then. Here we go...

Gonna Make You An Offer...

Steam has a sale on. Steam always has a sale on, but this one is more interesting than most. It's a 2K Pubisher Sale and although I didn't immediately recognize the name, I certainly recognized the games: Civilization, Borderlands, Bio-Shock, X-Com...

So far, so impressive, but wait! Check out the discounts: 90%! 91%!! 93%!!! Apart from a couple of measly half-price offers on games that cost less than $5 full price, everything is two-thirds off or better. 

Cuts this big raise a couple of awkward questions:  

1. Just how big does a bargain  have to be before you feel you have to take it, even though you don't really want it?
2. If you call yourself a gamer but you've never played these classics, at these prices is there any excuse not to try them now?

I can answer the second quite easily. I don't call myself a gamer. I grudgingly accept "Gamer" as a useful if misleading shorthand term but I wouldn't self-identify as one. I certainly don't feel the need to have personally played every classic game, although I do believe I ought to recognize the names and know a little a bit about most of them. 

The first is a bit harder. I do like a bargain and these are some really good deals. A few of the games I can eliminate quite easily on the grounds of genre or subject. I'm never going to start playing 4X games or at least I can't see it happening. Others, though, are harder to turn down. Bio-Shock is right in my area of interest and I'm increasingly beginning to realise how much I like the tactical, turn-based gameplay that's often descibed as "X-Com style". It does seem strange to enjoy the copies but ignore the originals.

In the end, though, is a bargain really a bargain if, after you buy it, it just sits there, unused? These are all games I've thought about playing before and decided against. If they were sitting in my Steam library, would I be any more likely to play them? The scores of DVDs in this house, still with the shrink-wraps unbroken, suggest otherwise.

And then there's the sheer scale of the offers. The two X-Com Collections comprise 26 games! Who has time for that? Even the Bio-Shock Collection, with just three full games and some DLC, would probably take weeks to play through. 

The games are mosly available in the sale individually, some of them for absolute peanuts. I am very tempted to drop a few pounds just to have a few in my collection. But in the end, truism though it may be, money is money. A tenner for half a dozen games that could give me entertainment for months is an objective bargain but I already have a ton of games I haven't played that I got for nothing, which has to the best bargain of all. And am I playing those?

I'm still dithering. I might crack and buy a couple of titles. The sale is on for a couple of days. I'm working all weekend, luckily, which should give me something of a sanity buffer until the temptation disappears. 

Weirdly, the game in the sale that started me thinking about all this wasn't any of the big names I've mentioned. It's right down at the bottom of the list, among the flurry of after-thoughts and also-rans: Freedom Force, the first super-hero game I ever played. 

Freedom Force came out more than two decades ago, in 2002. It had a lengthy demo, which was included on a disc on the cover of some magazine I bought back then. I remember playing that demo and not thinking it was all that great. And yet I can still remember it with startling clarity.

I certainly didn't buy the full game when it was released although I have a vague idea I might have picked it up free from some service or offer at some point. It's entirely possible I already own it, somehow. And yet I can't quite shift the feeling it would be nice to have it on Steam, where I could not play it so much more easily than I'm not playing it wherever else I have it.

It's 75% off. They're asking £1.07 for it. It would be rude not to take them up on an offer like that. Wouldn't it? 

Always On The Internet (Slight Reprise)

And now a couple of updates on Nightingale. Just be thankful you're not getting a full post.

There were two announcements from Inflexion Games waiting when I logged into Steam this morning. One confirmed the arrival of Nightingale on GeForce Now. The other apologised for the game being always online and promised an offline version "as soon as feasible".

It made me think. I've been playing my games through an internet connection for so long now I'd all but forgotten it was even possible to play video games without one. When I log in to Prime Gaming or Steam and launch a game, I literally never even think about whether I'm playing on or offline. 

I haven't had any of the reported connectivity issues with Nightingale that others have. Well, that's not strictly true. I've had two disconnections, both of which were immediately resolvable by logging back in. That's so insignificant I wouldn't even class it as an inconvenience, let alone a problem.

It is true, however, that I'm playing entirely solo and that I have no plans to play Nightingale in multiplayer or co-op in the future.  I guess I don't need to be online for that, although I had been assuming the servers were doing some of the heavy lifting, not my PC. My question is, if a game like this moves offline, isn't the client PC on which it runs going to need to be more powerful? Or is that not how these things work?

Of course, if my PC wasn't up to running Nightingale, I could still play anyway, using GeForce Now. I was all over that for a while with New World, before I upgraded my RAM and video card last year. My then-set-up was able to run New World but after an hour or so it would grind to a halt and have to be re-booted. It also made some worrying noises and kept the room warm without my needing to use the wall heater.

That was why, as soon as I had the components installed, the first game I fired up to test them with was New World. It ran smoothly, didn't bog down, and my PC purred along, quiet and cool as you like. The ironic thing was that once I could play New World locally, I didn't much want to. 

Playing on GeForce Now was efficient and effective but it was also just annoying enough to make me not want to bother after a while. There were a few extra steps every time you wanted to log in and because I was too mean to pay the subscription I was stuck with the free service, which made me queue for a server in the evenings and booted me out once an hour.

I could re-queue and start again an unlimited number of times but it just made me less interested in playing, overall. I would absolutely use the service to play a game I wanted to play that wouldn't run at all on my machine but in the case of Nightingale, I can't see the point.

...That You Can't Refuse

On the topic of how much of a bargain does something have to be before you buy, how much of a bribe does it take to get you to come back? 

We're all used to MMORPGs running campaigns to get people to log in again to games they used to play. I used to jump on those. Now I mostly ignore them.

I did acquire most of my ingrained gaming habits back in the days of EverQuest and its imitators, though. I do have certain triggers and one of them is xp. If I hear a game's giving big, bonus xp - double or treble, say - it does often  make me feel like taking them up on the offer. Even if its a game I haven't thought about playing in years. 

Enter Black Desert with its 800% XP Bonus. Eight. Hundred. Per Cent. I mean I can't even. 

There are some strings. It's a community event. The titular 800% is predicated on players working to gether to gather a total of 30,000,000 Seals of Sincerity. That sounds like a lot but who knows? 

The whole thing is Ostensibly on behalf of the game's eight anniversary although it t may also have something to do with Pearl Abyss's finances, which as Nosy Gamer reported, don't look that bright right now. I'm sure they'd love for a bunch of lapsed BD players to come back to the fold.

There are some titles and other goodies you can claim, too. I do like a title...

I definitely didn't have "Play Black Desert" on my spring schedule but damn! 800%! I wonder if I still have the game installed?

And finally.

Always End With A Song

Mrs Bhagpuss tipped me to this one. "She's got a candy-floss voice and it's about losing love or something. You'd like it". And she was right. She knows me so well...

Also, it has 50m views on YouTube and it was #1 in the UK last year so why the heck I needed Mrs Bhagpuss to tell me about it beats me. What do I have these damn music feeds for?

Strangers - Kenya Grace

I just love the way she stretches the vowels. And the skittering drum & bass production. And the shimmering whispers. It's weird how everything that used to be avant garde ends up going mainstream.

Weird and very wonderful.