The Great Steam Treasure Hunt

Or rather the next Steam holiday sales promotion gimmick/congame.

That I'm going to end up playing anyway because I'm a sucker for discounts.

Well, I'm not that insane. I'm not going to buy games at 33% off unless I really want them -now- now, because they are bound to come down to 50-75% off some day.

And it helps that my secondary hard disk (on which Steam resides) is now more full than the primary one - dang these 10-12 gig games. So I have to brutally ask myself if I am going to install and play =game I want= now, and which game I wish to delete in order to make room.

Let me tell you, between City of Heroes (normal and test servers, beta got deleted), 3 copies of A Tale in the Desert (to manage dual clients and switching between Tale 4 and Tale 5), World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Aion, LOTRO, DDO, Everquest 2 (Vanguard fell by the wayside a while back and got deleted into the big recycling bin in the nether), Global Agenda, Mass Effect 1 & 2, Fallout 3, Dragon Age, Empire: Total War, Warhammer 40K Dawn of War 2, Prototype, Chronicles of Riddick, Saints Row 2...

...and a couple others, but those are the big space eaters that I can remember... it's a rare game that can beat that selection of gamer content and warrant a deletion of one of the above.

So it's easier to resist buying the expensive blockbuster games nowadays.

Not so easy where the small purchases are concerned though.

Looking at today's games, Chime seems like a must-try. Casual puzzle game. With Still Alive as one of the songs? Lol, sold.

Poker Night at the Inventory is a harder sell. I don't really like Team Fortress 2. I loved TFC, but I can't help but feel TF2 sold out some of its soul with no grenades and now...loot, hats, crafting and an item store. So a game whose ultimate premise is 5 TF2 items is not as compelling an argument on me as for other people.

I'm not sure I know how to play poker either - which is a "hmm, maybe I should learn then" argument that is more tempting to my gameplay/design observation collection habit.

Most attractive of all is watching a video of the game (how to get the Iron Curtain for the Steam treasure hunt) and seeing by chance the gameplay. Telltale Games is an adventure game making company. If there's one thing they know how to do successfully, it is write dialogue and narrative and hire decent voice actors to bring it to life.

It is the trappings I find most alluring. The idea of pretending to immerse in a room with these four interesting characters, having a conversational time playing poker. It's like RPing playing poker.

It reminds me of a paragraph I read long ago from a now-defunct geocities website, "Solitaire Roleplaying" by Baron Vega. I've saved it, and I'll quote it in its entirety when I get home and find it...

It is essentially a very clever observation that roleplaying is in the mind, and as such, can be done at any time, in any setting, including being alone. Nor do you need a proper game for it. One can solo roleplay using the card game of Solitaire even. Fer instance, you can imagine yourself to be an Allied prisoner-of-war, shot down by German troops, locked in a prison cell with only a grimy pack of cards that they didn't manage to find. There's nothing to do but await your fate, so what do you do? You play solitaire. You play it with a quiet desperation, hoping the guards will not look in and find you, you play it to try and forget your circumstances, etc.

So maybe Poker Night at the Inventory is less about a disguise for five paid TF2 items, or a rehased poker game, but is more a themepark experience about playing poker with four other very strange guys. Put that way, I might convince myself to fiddle with a poker game after all. Playing with virtual characters and virtual money is surely cheaper than going to the casino or interacting with real people to learn how to play poker.

Ruse is right out. It's not that it isn't attractive. It's just not attractive enough at this stage. It can do with half-off, and me with more space in my hard drive.

Wonder what's coming next. Hopefully games I already own, but haven't played fully, so that I have an excuse to play them.

Hey, it's a break from trying to rush into Cataclysm queues. I'm scared to go home and try this evening. I hear it was terrible US-side. Maybe SEA will be less crazy because all the older folks have outgrown WoW yet again. Or maybe because it is school holidays I am dreaming if I can get in at any time not past 3am.

P.S. What amongst the bloated games list should be the next on the chopping block?

I'm eyeing Mass Effect 1, then 2. I tried to replay the original, but the screen resolution was an eyesore. It seems increasingly unlikely that I'm replaying ME2 again or with additional DLC - not even Liara and the Shadow Broker can tempt me into further participating. I might just wait for ME3, at a discount, to close off the chapter for good.


I'm distressed that I can't find my Fallout 3 DVD. I wanted to play it some time back before I got into the WoW kick. Couldn't find it. Locked out of my game unless I find it or download an iffy no-CD patch which is scary, considering I am currently a WoW player and thus a valid target. I still like it though, just can't play it. Ppft.


I'd be admitting defeat if I kill Dragon Age now. I might though. It still leaves me cold. Maybe I should just push the difficulty to easy and see if I can tolerate it that way. (I'd probably still run 3 alts through WoW first though.)