Every year I have a tradition that I buy some "funny" and heavily discounted games for a few friends and they gift me back similarly funny and cheap games. So I bought Garfield Kart for one friend and Sonic CD for another and in turn I got Doom 64 and some other weird game - but one friend actually got me something real which was Disc Elysium so I'll probably get into that one around Jan-Feb!

Myself I've bought myself Kane and Lynch 2 because I remember it being such a weird game at the time of launch (I had bought and beaten it then) and really wanted to experience it sometimes in 2021.

Thats about it.

Huh, I think Doom 64 is genuinely great. Like, maybe top three Doom game material even. It just goes for a completely different thing than the most recent games' macho power fantasies, instead focusing on the puzzle solving in the first two games, along with a bit more of a horror theme that you could kinda sense in some of the original Doom episodes (the ending on episode 1 in particular), and of course Doom 3.

@humanity: Just a heads up there is a "final cut" expansion/free update coming to Disco Elysium in March so you may be better off waiting until then to see the extra content they're adding.

@fisk0: Vicious shade against Sonic CD, which is very good! Funny and cheap doesn't mean bad.

i picked up gorogoa on a whim the other night. lovely couple-hour puzzle game.

@fisk0: I never said it was bad, just that it's one of those games thats like $5 on sale and very old which is the typical type of games we trade in. I'll probably give it a shot but personally despite actually growing up on Doom as one of the first PC games I played on my older brothers 66mhz computer I nevr had much reverence for it. I have this bad memory associated with Doom (that doesn't impact my enjoyment of the game itself) where I excitedly bought the Shareware version of it at a supermarket back when they just had racks of diskettes with Shareware games.. not knowing what Shareware was. Boy when that glorified demo ended the 4th grade me was pretty crushed.

@bigsocrates I have nothing against Sonic CD specifically - all Sonic games are bad to play so it's nothing personal.

Nothing on my wish-list was on a particularly amazing sale this time around, so I've wound up trying to think back on games from previous years that I forgot / never picked up.

Wound up getting the Carpe Fulgur collection (I went in for Recettear, but decided "Well, it's like two more dollars for two more games might as well."), as well as that 3D Yume Nikki thing that came out a while back and the new Umurangi Generation DLC, but haven't had a chance yet to get around to any of them.

Also grabbed Audiosurf 2, which I was not expecting to be $3, and having played some of it I definitely think that's too low. I was never especially in love with Audiosurf, but the original was a pretty alright way to have something to do while listening to tunes. I avoided the second one mainly because every steam review I had seen before the other day was just people complaining about "Youtube integration got taken out", which is a damn shame because this game is a massive improvement in every way. The new modes and visual styles really add a lot compared to the original, and the tweaks they've made to controls and game speed make it way more engaging while still being a fun casual experience. Absolute shame it doesn't get more recognition.

Also a friend gifted me Unexplored, which isn't on sale but I've been having a pretty good time with it. Like most roguelikes its a little hard to get into at first, between trying to figure out systems and learn how to read the important information on the screen, but after playing it for a bit I've come to really like the combat system it has. The other details are fairly generic (but enjoyable) roguelike tropes, but the combat is focused heavily around spacing and timing, and paying attention to what the enemy is wielding so you can figure out how to counter it.

I'm a bit sad the sale "gimmick" this time around is continuing their trend of just having Steam Awards voting, mostly because Steam Awards never really did anything for me, but I can't say I'm surprised, especially considering how much work and coordination it probably took for the more memorable sales of yesteryear.