It's good, but make sure to pimp it out with mods before even your first playthrough.

Oh really? Is that quite necessary? If so, what would you recommend?

I love the first Crysis game. I didn't use any mods, but the only advice I can give to you for amplifying your enjoyment of the game is that you should probably play on one of the hard difficulties. I did my first playthrough on normal, and while it's kind of fun for a moment to be a superhero annihilating everything in your path, the novelty wears off pretty quickly. On hard, it's one of the few first person shooters I would consider to be properly tactical.

I had something similar to this happen to me. Picked up Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ on Steam with DLC before the winter sale for $15, believing it wouldn't go on sale. LO AND BEHOLD, same shit is $3.74 during the sale less than a week later.

I am so happy that Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes is on Steam. It's a bloody good game.

Great port, I have everything on max and it runs smooth as heck. It's open-ended enough that although the main story is very short, it really doesn't matter a huge amount because you can try so many different methods. I also enjoy Snake's ass rendering, it's proper top-notch and a welcome return in this instalment of the Metal Gear franchise.

Cloak Engaged Crysis has some of the dumbest AI I've seen in FPS. Even on delta difficulty there's hardly any situation that requires tactical planning/maneuvering. I'll admit that it's fun for a few hours (that's how long the campaign lasts) and that it has some neat visuals, and grabbing KPA soldiers by the neck and seeing their hilarious strangled faces (IMPOSSIBRU!) never gets old, but beyond that the game quickly starts to feel stagnant and doesn't offer much in terms of replayability. Good thing that it's short though, I guess. Warhead is even shorter. :/

I know, I was a moron for believing that.

I haven't even had a Steam account for a year (had one since April), didn't know how the winter sale worked

Crysis is terrible. You can't tell me those aliens are fun and that's at least half the game.

Spoilers don't matter because the plot/characters are awful in these. Crysis 2 did away with the jungle / Far Cry islands, but was incredibly forgettable as well.

I don't like the first Far Cry either which these devs handled as well, because HEY mutants. Just like the Crysis aliens, they ruined it.

Style with no substance.

Far Cry 2-4 completely destroy these in my book.

Oh fuck, didn't even realize the winter sale was on. Come onnnn, Borderlands PS for $30!

I'm still laughing at how later EA games like Dead Space 3 and Mass Effect 3 aren't on Steam. lol

Yeah, the lack of Mass Effect 3 is annoying, especially because the Origin launcher is just a pain in the ass.

...it was on sale for $30, did you miss it?

Origin can go die of blood cancer. Steam or GTFO.

Also the new Shadow Warrior is currently on sale for 90% off ($4!). Huzzah.

Yes, because monopolies by industry giants are hugely desirable.

Both Steam(ing pile) and Origin are shit because they employ always-on DRM and make offline mode as tedious as humanly possible. (in a location with sketchy internet but also need to update your game/s? have fun.)

GOG on the other hand... Now THAT'S how you fucking do a distribution platform, not to mention fair pricing for countries with different exchange values. I don't see it catching on, though.

I stick with GOG for that reason but mostly because I have an old laptop and like 90% of those old ass games are guaranteed to run smoothly for me.

Even the DOSBox ones? I thought those were pretty demanding on older tech.

Well to be fair I haven't actually installed any DOS games so I have no idea what would happen if I ever got around to playing Blood, but like, Alpha Centauri and Unreal Tournament run great.

Steam's sure not perfect, but I see a massive gulf of difference between Steam, which makes like 3 games and only rarely, and EA, who are far more deeply entrenched in the publishing business. Sure it's a conflict of interest that you've got a game developer also acting as a game distributor, but the level of shittiness just doesn't even approach EA's as far as I'm concerned. Steam's also simply far less intrusive than Origin and has been a huge boon to the multiplayer aspect of a lot of games. Not to mention how many indie devs have made boatloads of cash off having their stuff available on Steam.

I want to like GOG, and I really do like their overall approach and ethos, but what it really boils down to is that Steam carries like 98% of the games I want to play and GOG doesn't. Having my entire video game library in one convenient location is just the tits.

I mean really is there anything else anyone even needs?

Well maybe the first three Monkey Islands. Then you'd be set for life.

This. Guess I'll just have to be a cock-hungry corporate shill.

You guys just need to accept Gaben as your new Lord. Makes the guilt go away.

You can use Steam offline. Don't know what the hell darkeningday is talking about.

Or DA:I, heh.

Got Max Payne working with a few fixes and I'm getting the hang of Xpadder.

This game seems hilarious so far, in the best ways. Should be fun.

Well, there at least used to be a setting where Steam wouldn't store your credentials locally, but I'm not really sure if that was ever enabled by default.

Of course you can always bypass Steam and just run the games out of the SteamApps folder.

I have both clients; they're virtually identical in form and function. No surprise, really, since Origin was a shameless rip-off of Steam. It's important to note that while Valve technically produced far fewer titles than EA, those few titles are some of the biggest and highest-selling games in history, and you could certainly make the argument that the later games became that way in large part because of Steam (and their shameless self-promotion plastered all over the client).

As I said, I dislike both platforms but competition is something that should be supported, not attacked. Competition is healthy for the consumer; monopolies are not. Valve aren't the little guys here; in fact, their company has a higher equity than even EA. Valve is the giant megachain undercutting the Mom & Pop stores (GOG) wiff doze sweet sweet sales and putting pressure on mainstream competitors (Origin) until they crumble. By defending Valve, you're basically defending Walmart.

Origin also has other benefits: 1) unlike Steam, there's no bullshit "wallet" to keep business within the company (yes, you can still convert the wallet into real-life money but the process is a NIGHTMARE); if you ask for your money back (with due cause, obvz), the money pops straight back into your actual wallet and 2) EA has a pretty amazing refund system: no matter how many hours you've spent in a game of theirs, you can ask for a full refund as long as it's within 24 hours of the purchase; Steam has NOTHING like that.



There is, but you need the prescient knowledge of exactly when to use it; if you don't set the the client to offline before you close it, you will be locked out from all of your games until you have internet access again, even if those games are exclusively single player. And given that the ONLY way Steam updates games is through the client itself (rather than through a downloadable patch that could be put on a flash drive and installed later), it's usually best to leave it online most of the time.


No you can't; the client must be on at all times when playing any game on Steam.

I should have written more. This won't work for every game, presumably any one using Steam Works won't work. It'll still be fine for many other games. I'll admit many of the games are my library are random indie games, but this seemed to be fine for a quick sampling of them (five for five).

Still, I'd just written that as a suggestion if anyone is locked out of their Steam account and wanted to play a game they had installed. Can't hurt to try.

Edit: fairly large image

Not sure how I feel about Crysis so far. It's certainly difficult. I had to drop the difficulty from Delta to hard because of it. Enemies, particularly those fucking boats, do so much damage to you and unless you can get consistent head shots they soak up bullets like a sponge. It's a funny contrast with the opening cutscene where they show the guy running, gunning and kicking all kinds of ass. Try and actually do that in-game and you're dead before you can hit the ground. I like the tension, but I think the enemies can simply be too accurate sometimes. I'm also skeptical on what appears to be a lack of a natural camouflage mechanic. The cloak is pretty cool, but I still think the vegetation should hide you without it. One of those blasted boats saw me while I was prone amidst foliage, and that shouldn't really happen.

That said, the cat and mouse gameplay in the jungle between you and the Korean troops is pretty sweet. Seems cloak is really the only way to play the game. Kill a guy, cloak up, crawl to another position, rinse and repeat. I'm not adverse to that, but I do fear it'll get boring before long.

Ever the champion of ridiculousness, wielding the sword of hyperbole!

Sure, they're both digital distributors, and obviously Origin is a Steam clone, but the actual content differences couldn't be more vast. Origin has a total of 222 games in its library, and strangely enough all of them are EA products. In the end I don't really give two shits about preserving good ol' "mom and pop" distributors like GOG for any fundamental reason - GOG wins points with me for the DRM-free attitude and the fact that they put so much work into making old games playable on new systems, but if Valve started doing those same things I'd throw my support behind them. Valve has obviously, OBVIOUSLY done a hell of a lot more than Origin for the "mom and pop" industry that actually matters: game developers. It's time to worry when (or, rather, if) Valve starts buying up all the indie devs whose games they distribute and rebranding them "Valve New Brunswick" and shit like that, but so far I've seen nothing of that sort of tendency.

If Wal-Mart carried virtually every single mom-and-pop, craft, artisinal, small-batch thingamajig on earth rather than stocking their shelves with Wal-Mart Brand Sweatshop Crap(TM) then you're damn right I'd defend them, too.

Also I'm totally sure that Valve's games only sell super well because it gets promoted in Steam's client. That's surely the reason!

C'mon, man. You're grasping at straws with a single well-oiled chopstick.

I never set the client to offline before closing and I've never had problems starting Steam and playing games without a connection. Never works with Origin.

I dunno, I'm pretty bad at first-person twitch shooters, so that probably contributes to my perception...

Yeah, it definitely depends on the game. A few years back I went through a rough patch and lost access to the internet. Good thing I had my Steam collection to keep my off time occupied, right? Wrong. I'd say probably 95 percent of my games just plain did not work. Offline mode will work for a period, after I think a week of playing in Offline mode, Steam requires you to log back in to "reconfirm" your credentials, otherwise most of your games will not work. Alpha Protocol was one of the only games I had installed at the time that would actually launch from the SteamApps folder. Not the best game in the world, lol, but it allowed me to appreciate it for what it was.

That being said, as long as you have access to the internet (and if you are a functional adult with a job, I really don't see why you wouldn't) Steam works amazingly well. Sure, competition is great and I'd love to see a competitor, but someone's gotta step up to the plate and create a viable alternative. I haven't used Origin so I really couldn't say, but I haven't heard good things. I think the idea of supporting Origin simply because it's competition to Steam is retarded, and even though that's not what you said to do, it feels like that's what you are implying. I guess what I'm saying is: what's wrong with shopping at WalMart when it's the only viable option available to you?

Which, to make your implied point explicit for the dense, is exactly what EA did. They wrecked a lot of great franchises that way, like Command & Conquer. Competition is great and all, but not when the biggest real competitor is a known scummy megacorporation that directly fucked over a lot of smaller developers. Fuck EA, and fuck Origin.

Nuts to Command & Conquer (well not really, I still like the non-EA CC games), the true victim of buying out Westwood was Nox! Zo Zo Ein!

Nonsense, it boils down to this:

The MO of Origin: here's a way to get our (and only our) products
The MO of Steam: conform to us or die; your technological intelligence will be added to our own

You may not agree with the Walmart (or Borg haha) analogy, but surely you can see that Valve and iTunes are not only on the same coin but occupy the same side as well.

Also, how many EA games are on GOG.com again, and how many Valve games are there (feel free to compute in percentages since obvz EA has far more games than Valve)? Valve despises GOG because of their staunch anti-DRM stance which Steam subsists on; EA doesn't really seem to give a fuck either way, especially ever since they loosened their reigns a bit after being voted The Evilest Company in the World or whatever (which was fucking idiotic, btw).

Fallout 3 (and NV again) is on sale on GMG for $2.50. Despite my criticisms I do find a lot to enjoy in NV, especially for that price. How does Fallout 3 compare? I hear that Bethesda's writing is not nearly as good as Obsidian's, any truth to that?

Fallout 3 has a better setting and Liam motherfucking Neeson. That's basically it.

Ehhh, the writing isn't as good and the mechanics aren't as good. The only upside really is the location is more engaging, there's less empty space with nothing to do. If you like NV though it's hard to argue with a $2.50 price tag.