That time of year again. The Steam Summer sale is here! Now through July 5th grab the goods while you can.
Once again the fanfare is kept to a minimum and the so are the deals. A sign of the times with free games like Path of Exile, DOTA 2 and Warframe pushing the modern gamer to ask if it's really worth it to drop 3 bills on a game just to watch it collect dust a month later.
Still, if you know what you want and the price hits your sweet spot then why not! Me? I picked up Saint's Row: Gat out of Hell for just under $4. It's the standalone companion game to Saints Row 4 and something I've had my eye on for a couple of years. It's been cheaper before but it's been awhile since I threw Steam a few bucks and I spend more time in Steam than anything else so might as well give the Devil his due.
There's a few constants in the life of a serious gamer. One is that gaming is more lifestyle than pastime. We can remember an epic victory in our favorite game just as vividly as any sports fan remembers the year their team, "took it all!"
It can bring a chill to your spine, a smile to your face and cement itself permanently in your psyche. Analogies will spring from the experience. Equivalencies will be made no matter how false... :p
But serious gamers know that it can be years between those moments. Which makes the decision of WHAT game you chose to play all the more important.
The sad fact of modern video games is that you rarely get a big payoff when you finish a game. It's about the journey not the destination so you better enjoy the trip or you're just wasting your time.
I've played a lot of games over the years. Some so familiar that they've entered my own personal vernacular others were discarded after a few hours. All that experience has afforded me the ability to judge the merits of a title pretty quickly.
If I'm pissed off in the first hour I'm not going to bother with it. Game developers set a tone early in a game and rarely divert from it. If I feel like I'm beating my head against the wall I'm not going to bother. If you've watched any of my YouTube videos you can tell I've hit that point when I start calling the experience, "stupid."
Not "stupid" as in sour grapes but STUPID as in unnecessary complexity or difficulty to cover up a weak story or bad game mechanic.
In my own gaming it seems I go through "gaming seasons" Right now I'm back into the season of Path of Exile to the exclusion of most everything else. Before that it was Project Cars, Star Wars Battlefront ( 2015), GTA 5 and a brief stint with WatchDogs 2.
I keep coming back to Path of Exile after 3 years of off and on playing. Watchdogs 2? I haven't touched it in 4 months. GTA 5 I was addicted to for over a year....haven't played it in 6 months.
So I'm back to Path of Exile. It's my "Go To" game. It annoys me, can be horribly unbalanced and sometimes unfair but there's something that keeps bringing me back. That's a good game.
Which is a good segue into the videos below. I have a great time with the game and run the gamut of emotions when I play it. Which to me is the only REAL criteria for calling a video game...Good...
