merry xmas (GOG/Steam direct download weekly specials)

Don't buy games you won't play immediately. They'll be cheaper the next sale in a few months.

lol can't even get onto it right now. fuck that.

http://www.cheapshark.com/

i think i won't buy individual games i won't play, i'm gonna wait for bundles and not play those instead

anyone with thoughts on Antichamber, Don't Starve or CS:GO?

Antichamber: do not miss this game. Absolute sleeper and going to be on my C&P 2013 list, fairly high. Fantastic FP Puzzler.

Don't Starve: yet ot play but a lot of peopel at work are excited about it. Might pick up

CS:GO: Meh

I have probably asked this before BUT

aside from the promised steam box, is there right now a good way to play pc games on an hdtv? would love to play strategy games, tbh civ 5, without sitting in front of a pc. I don't currently have a pc to experiment with this but if it were easy, pcs are so cheap, & then I would just fuck off the next gen consoles (as I'm gonna do anyway)

should also try playing ipad games on my hdtv but maybe that would just feel weird, looking at the screen to move but seeing the motion also on the tv, dunno

I've been playing a lot on my mid-spec laptop hooked up to my HTDV via HDMI and it's been great - super-easy to set up and games generally look way better than they do on my 360 or PS3. The Big Picture mode in Steam is a really good-looking way to sift through your library on an HDTV, too.

so it's no biggie? do you need a really souped up video card to drive the hdtv? does it matter how big the hdtv is?

A 720p TV is 1280x720, so a mid-range video card should work fine.

It's no biggie for me! My video card is a GeForce 650M IIRC, which was maybe higher-middle-of-the-road when I bought my laptop, and it can handle everything I want to play at reasonable frame rates at most resolutions. All I had to do when I plugged the laptop into my TV for the first time was a bit of fiddling with bundled video card software to ensure the borders of the picture were correct.

Don't think it would matter how big the TV is, unless you're sitting 40 feet away from an 18-inch TV or three feet from a 56-inch TV...

Unless you go 1080p. That'll get more taxing on a card. But 720p on reasonable video settings should work great. My old roomie had no monitor, only a TV for his big PC and would just plug in a 360 controller and basically play 360 games that looked better than 360 games. Skyrim looked crazy.

good tip on 720p vs 1080p, it's a huge differencing in video card effort but visually on a TV, eh

Oh good, Anno is on sale.

Also, Blood Dragon is $7, get that.

woo, xcom + anno on sale.

LOL, Walking Dead got trading cards.

anno is good is it?

I enjoyed it for a while (after a false start due to a buggy tutorial), but it got repetitive. Too much shipping lane-protecting and not enough strategy. Worth a go for cheaps, though, certainly.

Anno 1404 ran on my work laptop, so I played that for months from hotel rooms and airports.

Will, you sold me on Antichamber. hopefully i play it by C&P 2013

sadly i am below spec for Blood Dragon. maybe by xmas i'll be ready

Novalogic Everything.

lol.. just my Delta Force nostalgia getting the better of me!

Oh man, Anno is scratching my Alpha Centauri itch. The voice acting is worse/not as much fun or as appropriately designed as SMAC, tho.

Still, I'll take what I can get.

Has anybody else played The Secret Workd? I'm not a MMO guy, but the Cthulhu stuff and this pretty much being a Delta Green game intrigues me, and its only fifteen bucks.

Sleeping Dogs is $6 on steam at the moment. fetch!

i've probably played over a thousand of hours of civ 2, civ 3 and civ 4. should i buy civ 5 gold during steam sale? i heard disappointing things about it, but it is probably my most played franchise of all time

I broke down and bought it because of all the hours I've put in past versions. Haven't fired it up yet though.

i even own the board game

I started with the old Avalon Hill game before the computer ones existed. Good times. Took a whole damn weekend to play if you had six or seven people.

who are you kidding man, just get it

okay i got it. i need new advice. tropico 4 is $6 atm. the only thing stopping me from getting it is that it's pc only. however acc to: http://www.feralinteractive.com/en/news/377/ it's going mac on july 25th --> which means maybe i should buy it now on steam for $6 so i can get the mac version at that price for free when it eventually (maybe) shows up on steam for mac???

You can do that?

Tropico 4 is good but it's more like Tropico 3B than a new deal.

Nah, because Tropico goes on sale all the time. You can wait until the Mac port gets released and goes Steamplay, if it does. Feral's kind of inconsistent about this too, understandably as Steamplay takes away sales of pure Mac versions at the higher markup. but eventually their ports seem to make it over after a while (see Civ 4, Borderlands 2, XCOM finally a couple weeks ago). I would just wait until the next holiday sale, hopefully it will be Steamplay by then.

thanks - that seems like good advice

As far as Civ 5 is concerned, I've heard that the new DLC "Brave New World" is very good.

Is it bad that I'm tempted to get that Star Trek game because of that hilarious "we broke" video?

Also tempted to get in on the hype for Monaco or Trials Evolution, though I'm guessing Trials will be more fun on console. Maybe an Awesomenauts gift to push myself into playing it...

Alll of the advance word I've heard about the Star Trek game is basically "gives terrible a bad name".

Yeah, I've already done enough damage on this sale, to be real

Gunpoint is fun and clever! Get it!

Just looked at the cheevos for Gunpoint. Some of them are pretty good:

Acknowledged Ludonarrative Dissonance
-Notice the story doesn't necessarily gel with the mechanics. Become qualified games journalist.

Title Finally Relevant
-Help justify my early, not entirely wise choice of game name by holding someone at gunpoint with the Resolver.

Might As Well Have An Achievement For That Too
-Use the Gatecrashers to kick a door through a window.

I Am Better At This Than Tom Francis
-Complete a mission faster than I can.

LOL, nice

Gunpoint reminds me of a cross between these two games

http://pyskool.ca/disassemblies/contact_sam_cruise/images/play_area/displaced_dude.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9d/C64_Impossible_Mission.png

Kentucky Route Zero is half-price

shadowrun returns comes out tmmrw

xp Anyone here actually played it? Looks cool, but I'm leery of buying these episodic games before they finish; the game's at two episodes of five. That said, that's a good price. You can always get it directly from the dev w/Steam key: http://kentuckyroutezero.com/

eh i gave in to weakness. gotta support the indies *shrug*

I've played it. I got in on the ground level at full price and feel a little hard done by in terms of content/buck but it's an engaging 'game' - I almost feel like it's a minimal as a game can be while still being a game though. Kinda wish I'd waited til they were done with all the episodes, as I can see myself forgetting about it by episode 5, but if I'd waited I'd probably have forgotten all about it by the time even 2 episodes were out. As long as they don't pull a 'it was a dream/they were dead all along' at the end...

I'm still not sure if it's lazier to just shout out for an email here, but I'll give this a try. Free Super Hexagon to anyone in our Steam group:
http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/2vo1j/super-hexagon/signature.png

and brilliam is the lucky winner! well, lucky in the sense that he was the only entrant. but still! enjoy!

All right, thanks!

Not sure how it works exactly: you "donate" a game to the group, and people enter a draw to have it?

yeah, the site automatically picks a winner at random, the gift still has to be sent/acknowledged manually though

nice feature of that site is that you can restrict the drawing to one of your Steam groups. I set this one up so that only members of the ILG group could join, in this case. Otherwise, typically there are hundreds to thousands of entries for the open giveaways