I used to buy Steam games without a care in the world. Now to spend even 5 bucks I make myself go through a quality control checklist so vast it would impress a space shuttle commander. There's just been too many abandoned games, terrible sequels, fake reviews, unnecessary game launchers and disappointing Steam sales. That's not to say there isn't still an excellent bunch of games on there, but they're all hidden deep in the forest and I have to go sniff em out like a basset hound.
Well ok but I did say it was long. Tbh, my checklist is almost a minigame itself now 🤣
So once I've found a game that looks interesting, I do the following:
Google video search for the game's title and filter to past week, then month, then year and that shows me how many people are actually talking about this game right now and who's doing the talking.
I look at the Steam reviews and initially filter to only show negative ones. I find it's a lot easier to see if the game's been review bombed that way. Also, a lot of negative reviews complain about features I find positive so that's helpful too "This game was way too easy! I finished it in 30 hours and I still had all my hair at the end, harumph!". I also check phrases like "Abandoned by the devs" or "Yet another asset flip" or "Beware! The EULA is a privacy nightmare".
I then switch to positive reviews and read the short ones. The dissertations are just way too much detail at this stage (or any stage really for me).
At some point early on I check the Steam update history. If the last update was years ago I factor that in. I also try to keep on top of relevant news like that time the entire staff of Annapurna Interactive quit, making a sequel to Stray unlikely.
Also, if it hasn't had that many recent updates I'll join the Discord and see how active that is. That's usually so revealing. Often in a positive way like with the G-Rebels devs.
Then I go through my top YT game reviewers like Raptor, Scarlett Seeker, Splattercat Gaming, Orbital Potato and Nookrium and see if they've talked about the game.
I look for the title on Allkeyshop to see if there's a cheaper EU unlockable Steam game key available.
I check for trainers in case I need an escape hatch if it turns out to be too grindy or tedious but still worth playing.
If all the searches have been positive so far I'll wishlist it around this point. If there's a demo I'll play it. If it looks amazing from the start I'll install the demo after looking at a couple of gameplay videos.
I also have a 21:9 monitor so I hop into the Steam discussion group for the game and look for confirmation that it's compatible.
If it's too expensive I'll check SteamDB and look at it's price history. My personal limit is <7 bucks for an old game and <18 for a relatively new one (unless something exceptional suddenly appears like Eriksholm).
I'll check if there any Steam sales coming and if the theme is likely to match the game I'm looking at.
I really do actually do all this by the way. It's the only way I've been able to get more sensible about the games I buy.
Actually that’s not a bad list at all. But reading this I am asking myself: isn’t that more a list to detain YOURSELF from adding too much on your pile of shame :D
Oh yeah definitely :) Also I've noticed there's kind of a new feeling of satisfaction when a game does somehow make it through this assault course and I buy it finally. It feels like an achievement in itself.
I would throw in isthereanydeals and gg.deals into the mix. Those provide good historical tracking of multiple stores for games, so you can really be sure you are getting the historical low during a sale.
If I spend a fiver on a game and it entertains me for two nights I still consider that fine value to entertainment ratio. If I went out somewhere in real life with the boys I’d be spending a minimum of $50 and that’s for a single night out. So I buy a lot of indie games in the $5-10 range without much guilt over it. Weird single-dev projects with pixel art and a 5 year span in early access are my favorite kind of art.
Now if you’re asking me more than about $20 for your game then yeah the quality control checklist comes out. But my standards are much lower for the $10-tier and I’ve found some really good games in that tier. Not ones that I’m still playing, maybe, but ones that I had a good time with for a few days to a few weeks and that I remember fondly.
I’m more of the just stick to the indie goats type of guy, those which give you unlimited replay ability, but reading your comment made me fondly remember Yes your Grace!
A little game which i got through in two days and probably never touch again but absolutely loved. It made feel more like a King (of a really small realm) than a crusader kings or civilisation.
I pretty much only buy games that are either very well-known to be good (famous on the level of Skyrim, Stardew Valley, etc.), or that I saw a “let’s play” of.
I’ve started just waiting a bit. If a game is actually good, waiting a few months won’t really matter. If the game is dead by then, it was never worth the money in the first place.
Same. I’ve got a huge library of rpg games I can play, don’t really play games that I need to have day 1, I just watch a few hours of someone play it and I’m good.
No man’s sky did make a full 180 recovery though, I bought it after the fix for me, my kid and some friends so we could play together.
Man I really want to get into Mechwarrior but I’m just so ridiculously bad at the game and I have no idea how to get better.
I’ve tried to begin the MW5 campaign three times now and I’ve been priced out of existing every time, I take way too much damage and my repair bills vastly outstrip my income. Combine with having to spend hundreds of thousands of credits in travel fees to get anywhere and I’m very quickly even more broke than I started.
Just for kicks the other day I set up an Instant Action for testing purposes and I brought two Atlases, a Highlander and an Archer to some random backwater mid-difficulty mission and still barely limped out of there alive, with the Highlander and one of the Atlases downed. That’s just shameful.
Play with keyboard and mouse - makes hitting things much easier. Redesign all mechs to have max armour. For most of the campaign bringing as many SRMs to the field as possible is good. Focus fire with your lance mates - makes them much more effective. Remove JJ - useless. LBX10s are great. Remove useless single LRM 5s and 10s from most things - put a lot of lrms on mechs with good quirks - Archer, Longbow. Keep moving, ideally always at least 45 degrees to your target
I only played up to MW3, back then the meta was maxing out on armor and medium range lasers. Go in close , aim for the opponent’s leg, shoot. Your mech powers down from the heat for a couple seconds, but the other mech is out of the action. Proceed to one-shot almost every opponent.
I tried MW3 (I think?) but never figured out ANYTHING. I was young, joystick drivers didn’t work, and I hadn’t the slightest idea how to map out all the functions of a mech suit. Now I have nearly 50 inputs mapped to an Xbox controller for Elite Dangerous fully memorized. What a change in times.
I liked Cauldron Born. I had that and Mad Cat as K’nex models. Hated Orion. Since I never figure out how to do anything, all I can judge them on is their appearance in the build menu. I was also like… 10?
Can’t say I feel guilty about liking these but if we’re talking about mediocre games I love that would be:
Drakengard 3 - simple, repetitive gameplay, huge amount of asset reuse and terrible performance if you’re crazy enough to play it on PS3. It also has a really engaging and tragic story, full of weirdness unique to the series (well, the first game anyway, haven’t played D2 yet).
Kane & Lynch (both games) - they’re rough, gritty and don’t pull any punches. Pretty divisive in terms of gameplay though I personally think it’s thematically consistent and adds a lot to the atmosphere. My favourite games from IOI despite not being as well designed or polished as the Hitman series.
Oni - 2001 action game by Bungie. Really cool hand-to-hand combat system, huge empty levels, simple story with wannabe Ghost in the Shell elements.
Starbound - lots of hype about Terraria in space, lots of wasted potential and cool features that didn’t make to the final release. I tend to prefer beta versions (mainly “Glad Giraffe” beta) but the final one also seemed alright based on what little I played of it. Definitely not as good as it had chance to be during development.
Scarface: The World is Yours - budget GTA clone based on the 1983 movie with Al Pacino (it’s actually a sequel). It looks bad even for the time but it plays well enough and has some neat mechanics which made it stand out, if only a little.
Tresspasser - the infamous Jurassic Park game with full control of your arm and focus on physical interactions with the environment. It’s a bit clunky and far from polished but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless.
That’s all that comes to mind for now, I might update the post if I remember anything else.
Dude, I loved Kane and Lynch! I co-op both of them with a buddy of mine. The jank was real but added charm to it. People complained about the violence but that shit was great. Also might be bias because IO Interactive made Hitman and that’s one of my all time favorite series.
It was also an unfortunate victim of the time when IOI struggled with figuring out how to transition from “classic” way of making games to the modern, high budget approach. I’m glad they managed to get back into the rhythm with new Hitman games but it’s still a little disappointing K&L had to serve as a stepping stone towards better times.
Beta Starbound was the shit. Release was just shit, with no “the”. They took a great game of endless discovery and procedural generation with a gameplay loop that just worked out of beta and filled it with completely predictable set pieces and juvenile hard-coded nonsense. They literally added a poop emoji monster FFS.
The worst part is there’s no “full” version since each beta added new features and removed other ones. I’d give a lot for a build which combines all of the lost mechanics into a single package.
I don’t think the final release was “shit” per se, but I was super confused when I played it and expected cool features from the beta. The beta was also very beta and not all of the features were actually good, but I feel like they ran out of time/money/patience and just cut down a ton of stuff to ship it.
When it comes to games, I have no guilt anymore. I enjoy some games and despise others. I think the only one that comes to mind for this category is E.V.O. The Search For Eden (SNES). I prefer it with a patch to improve the translation.
A classic. I loved how in the last phase you could make the right combination of nonsensical choices and end up with human and do really well. Not as well as my hyper-evolved Rhino-montser, but really well.
I guess it depends on why you think it’s bad, so for me it’s Wuthering Waves. I absolutely love that game, but it’s “bad” because it’s a gacha game and that monetization scheme is absolutely fucking disgusting.
The game itself is actually really good and the story/side stories had me cry like 4 times already lol
On the gacha front, I play Zenless Zone Zero. Parry mechanics are nothing new, but I love both the way they have you parry by swapping in an agent to take the blow, and the very detailed effects and animations they have for each attack.
It’s still a gacha, and I remind myself to stop playing anytime it bores me; but it manages to hold my attention decently.
I play that as well as genshin… I have a problem lol
ZZZ got me to stop spending money though, they’re way too fucking greedy. I went full pity and lost every single 50/50 in that game and almost all of them were nekomata… Hoyo can go to hell lol
Yeah…a long time ago I learned lessons about patience, delayed satisfaction, and ended up building a large roster in that game without giving them a dime. I could afford their packs, but it seems like a bad price ratio especially when acknowledging the low chances.
For me it’s Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. It would be super easy to whale out and spend a bunch of money to get the characters and weapons I want, but I (almost 100%) limit myself to the basically fixed monthly costs.
I was surprised how super in on hoyo stuff I was until I started doing the dailies and the checklists on the regular. I kinda ruined my approach into Honkai because by the time I got into it, I learned from genshin I needed to do those dailies to get a decent shot at getting characters I actually cared about. And then I didn’t make any progress, and didn’t get in like I did for genshin
Does the story actually get good? I tried it out around launch but when they introduced a knockoff Paimon I noped out. I was there for a dark post-apocalypse story, not Sunday morning cartoon. Not that there is anything wrong with it but just not for me. I felt a little mislead.
It all depends on what you like. It’s a good mix of dark and light and the paimon knock off is pretty chill, they really only pop up at important times in the story they aren’t the constant annoyance always speaking for the player like paimon is.
The 2.0 arc goes through a fantasy like land that leads to a gladiator/rome themed area so not sure how you feel about that but it gets dark all throughout that. The next area we’re going to is kinda unknown but it seems like it’s going to be much heavier in the “tech” vibe and should give a lot of backstory to the main character since they seem to have some connection to this new place.
I feel like they cheat by keeping their regular price high.
Back in the day, a game was $60 new and $20 without sale after a few years.
IMO that’s still better than keeping your prices high and doing crazy sales. This way it gets lots of people to buy it out of impulse hence the popularity of the unplayed library meme.
Its almost like gambling and the gamification of a sale brings out the gamers who feel savvy by buying a cheap game instead of quality releases, not saying thats every game on sale
Not much these days with sites like isthereanydeals providing historical price data. Might be in the old days where retailers could say something is on sale, and consumers being in the dark on if it really was a discounted price and they weren’t overpaying compared to buying from another store.
Now consumers know what the usual sales price is and can wait for it when it comes to games of interest. And with many different storefronts sales are frequent enough now you can wait until the next sale pops up without waiting too long.
One area though that has been like gambling though has been pc parts. With sudden events causing parts like ram to suddenly sky rocket.
I’m pretty sure there’s actually an EU law that says that you’re not allowed to do that. If a product is on discount more or less forever then it’s not in fact on discount.
There is a maximum amount of time a product can be on sale before that becomes just what price is now.
I remember those days.
Release at $60, lower to $20 after a few years, $5 on sale with “only” 75% off.
Though I’ve noticed that every major steam sale has 10 selected deep discount games that are at least 90% off. The prices for these select 10 feel like steam sales we used to have 15 years ago.
Another option is to just price it respectfully. I picked up Silksong on release. I have one day of play time because I’m not into the genre at the moment.
There are plenty of games I would purchase if they were priced low enough from genres I would not normally play just out of popularity and curiosity. I have a lot of them on the Steam backlog that I haven’t even touched just because they were on discount. Some devs do it for mansions, other devs do it for love. Both end up shorting themselves, and the ones probably winning out in terms of profit are the ones selling on a time discount curve somewhere along the middle.
That’s what they are doing with the pricing: They start up way to high, to catch those who will pay that price. Once they reach the point where sales are stalling at that price point, they lower it, so that more price-sensitive players will buy. That cycle continues until they get a deal from Epic or Amazon to give the game away for free, because that way the publisher still gets more money than from pirates.
Supergiant Games are worth a dozen run-of-the-mill “AAA” games but they’re always cheaper. They used to make relatively short games but Hades I & II are playable for hundreds of hours with new things still coming your way and they’re still cheaper and better.
As weird as it sounds: Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (The OG one).
On the surface, it’s a shit platformer game for kids, but what makes it interesting is the ways you can break the game and the lively speedrunning community. If you just try to play the game by following its rules, you’re going to have a bad time.
However, if you use cool speedrunning glitches and exploits, it becomes much more fun to break the game in ways the developers didn’t intend. I tend to play from time to time 100%ing it using exploits to reach locked areas earlier, skip entire sections, and play some levels backwards.
I don’t play them anymore these days, but for me it used to be the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors series. Dunno what it was with younger me but they just hit for some reason
You may want to check out the new “One Piece” game on the same engine. It has the same game play loop, interrupted by a surprisingly nicely animated story line.
Nahhh this mf had a whole ass PHD while I am STILL struggling with ONE college degree that was supposed to take six semesters since 2017!! Altho I had 3 whole years where classes were suspended (thanks to the Plague 19000), so technically I’ve only been at it for five years… BUT STILL!!
GORDON GIVE ME SOME OF YOUR LEARNING POWERS! I BEG OF YOU! I CAN’T POSSIBLY BE THIS WASHED AT STUDYING!!
Then coming across a knee high wall or something you can easily just walk over blocking progression but, nope, can’t jump and the game isn’t treating it like stairs.
It’s such a small thing but can completely take the wind out of your sails when playing.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne