The All New Gabriel Newell's Digital Wonder Emporium, aka, The Steam Update Thread

misplacedbravado wrote:

A Steam event that's about playing games you already own? Whoa.

Immediately subverted by having nine simultaneous "Free Weekend" game promotions as part of the event.

(Scroll to the bottom of the Spring Cleaning page.)

The most insane "project" is Blast of the Past, for which you play the very first game you ever bought on Steam. I can choose among Half-Life 1 and variants (OF/BS/DM), Counter-Strike 1, Team Fortress 1, Day of Defeat 1, or Ricochet(!). That is some master-class retro gaming.

My Blast from the Past choice was either Darwinia or Uplink. I was actually thinking about this very topic last week -- what was the first thing I bought on Steam -- and I remembered about Uplink, but forgot that I got it as a bundle with Darwinia on sale. I had been hesitant to give money to a digital storefront that I thought for sure would be just a flash in the pan, and whatever I bought would eventually be lost to the ethers of cyberspace, but eh, it was only a couple of dollars, right?

My Blast from the Past was X3: Terran Conflict. I'd recently gotten back into PC gaming after a long hiatus and discovered X3: Reunion. I was a little annoyed when Egosoft announced that the only way to buy X3TC at launch in the US was through this third-party digital storefront, but I created an account anyway. And now, yeah.

Archangel wrote:

The most insane "project" is Blast of the Past, for which you play the very first game you ever bought on Steam. I can choose among Half-Life 1 and variants (OF/BS/DM), Counter-Strike 1, Team Fortress 1, Day of Defeat 1, or Ricochet(!). That is some master-class retro gaming.

Same. All those. Did HL1 since it was the smallest to download.

misplacedbravado wrote:

A Steam event that's about playing games you already own? Whoa. :D

Pack it in folks, we're through the looking glass now

HL2 was my original purchase. Surprisingly I still had it installed.

misplacedbravado wrote:

A Steam event that's about playing games you already own? Whoa. :D

Correction: A Steam even that's about opening game you already own.

The first couple events were actually about playing games since you had to get specific achievements to get credit. As far as I'm concerned, those were the only events that were any good.

PaladinTom wrote:

Also, I just realized that I could add emulators to the Steam launcher and stream games over in-home streaming! If the iOS app works as expected I might try grabbing one of these for my iPad:

Apple changed their mind and rejected the app, citing business conflicts. Will still work on android phones though.

Sucks when a monopolistic store owner turns around and suddenly out of the blue rejects something they had previously accepted with no problems *cough* isn't it though valve *cough*

I was annoyed at first but then I thought "would Micosoft allow an app that ran Playstation games? Would Sony? " It just makes no sense to allow it really.

farley3k wrote:

I was annoyed at first but then I thought "would Micosoft allow an app that ran Playstation games? Would Sony? " It just makes no sense to allow it really.

I have Spotify and Netflix apps on my iPhone, despite Apple selling music and video content through iTunes. I don't a Steam app being materially different from those, just games instead of music/video.

My Blast from the Past game is Civ IV. An excellent first purchase if I do say so myself.

My Blast from the Past was the original bundle of Valve content like Half-Life,
Counter-Strike, etc. I joined Steam waaay back in 2003 when it first launched. I think we were all a bit skeptical at the time how well this whole Steam thing would work out. My how times have changed...

On the plus side, I have all 6 objectives completed now. Do these refresh every day, or are these objectives just available for the duration of the event?

If I'm reading it correctly, there are six gold-trophy "Projects" to complete over the duration of the event, and three bronze-trophy "Daily Tasks" to be completed, I'm assuming, daily. Every five trophies nets you some goodies.

farley3k wrote:

I was annoyed at first but then I thought "would Micosoft allow an app that ran Playstation games? Would Sony? " It just makes no sense to allow it really.

The social contract that Apple promised was they would keep broken apps and malware apps off their store, so please everyone come into our walled garden and trust us to do the right thing. Rejecting an app for competition or other reasons is a betrayal of the expectations they promoted and will cause people to be angry.

I blinked though 9 games last night and filled the cabinet. My first game was apparently "Hinterland" from Tilted Mill- a hybrid ARPG/builder game. Pretty fun- I think steam is undercounting when it says I only have 3.5 hours in it.

The iOS Steam link thing is annoying- I was looking forward to trying that. I have an actual Steam Link but haven't gotten much use out of it; it doesn't work well with my wifi and my attempt at powerline ethernet failed to help.

The hour tracking only counts from when that feature was first added to Steam (March 2009). Hinterland was out in September 2008, so any playtime from then until March 09 wouldn't show up.

My Blast from the Past was the entire Orange Box, since I had to create my Steam account to register it.

My blast from the past is half life one, which I bought at a GameStop only to find the disc contained nothing but a link to a Steam download.

I remember being quite annoyed at the time. It was years and years before I bought something else on Steam (Plants Vs Zombies, because it was $5 cheaper than getting it direct from popcap)

Now I have over 700 games on the platform.

This is how principles collapse. First gradually, then suddenly.

Convenience > Principles. The same reason you feel bad when local stores go out of business, but you're still buying everything from Amazon.

Mine was Dawn of War. I resisted digital purchases for a long time.

tanstaafl wrote:

Convenience > Principles. The same reason you feel bad when local stores go out of business, but you're still buying everything from Amazon.

*guiltily shuffles out of the room*

Mine was Mass Effect 1. And iirc, I couldn't play it for several years because the laptop I had at the time couldn't run it/I didn't tinker with the settings enough. I actually loved the Mako sections, which maybe made me an outlier.

Eh, everyone knows there's like, a High Street in Glasgow, The Royal Mile in Auld Reeky, and a nice mall in Aberdeen. And Kirkwall is full of boutiques. The rest of Scotland being a howling shoppers wasteland, of course you'd use Amazon...

I actually have found the semi-random game selectors are *great* for my analysis paralysis. Just played some more "To Be or Not To Be", and it was a blast. I'd never have picked it on my own.

Robear wrote:

Eh, everyone knows there's like, a High Street in Glasgow, The Royal Mile in Auld Reeky, and a nice mall in Aberdeen. And Kirkwall is full of boutiques. The rest of Scotland being a howling shoppers wasteland, of course you'd use Amazon... :-)

Hah. Yep.

My very first game was Day of Defeat: Source so we could do LAN parties back in college. Yikes, this takes me back....

I was expecting a few Half-Life 2 as first games, like me, since it was the game that launched the service.

Yeah, it was Half-Life 2 for me. I have no desire to go back and play Half-Life 2, since I just didn't like it very much in the first place.

BadKen wrote:

Yeah, it was Half-Life 2 for me. I have no desire to go back and play Half-Life 2, since I just didn't like it very much in the first place.

Ditto. On all counts.

I just downloaded it, booted it up for a few seconds and then uninstalled it again