And so...the Steam sale begins.

[madcow]

I can't recommend Binding of Isaac enough. Awesome game and a steal for its price.

[BobTheJanitor]

Anno 2070 is good if you like city building sort of games. However, it's not quite as good as Anno 1404/Dawn of Discovery which is sadly still unavailable for Steam purchase. All of the mechanics are similar, and most things are even more streamlined in 2070, but 1404 just had a better all around experience. I'm not sure if it's just the change in setting or what, but building up from thatched peasant cottages to stately patrician homes is just more enjoyable than the near future scenery. But that's just opinion, so your mileage may vary.

[tigersfan]

I can't recommend Binding of Isaac enough. Awesome game and a steal for its price.

Yeah, it's a good game. It's very very dark, but it's a lot of fun.

[Mánagarmr]

I might pick up Binding of Isaac. I just don't have time to play all this crap. xD

As for Grimrock, it's actually awesome for its price. The combat is intense! It takes a whole new way of thinking to make it work properly. Just standing in front of an enemy hammering your melee guys will not work once you get further into the game. For slugs, sure, but anything else? Nu-uh.

Some of the later fights are gruesomely hard, and you will need all four of your characters to make it through those. Can anyone say blue dinos? OH GOD!

[Mánagarmr]

Also got Warlock: Master of the Arcane while it was on one of those flash sales.  In a lot of ways it's another "We wish we had the rights to Master of Magic" game but it's not as good as the original MoM.  It is still fun, though; it does play a lot like Civ5 with some key differences (city improvements are placed on the map, instead of workers, but require 1 pop each) and of course magic.

This one seems to remind me a lot of Age of Wonders 2: Shadow Magic. Did you ever play this and can you say if there anything similar?

[keith.lamothe]

Also got Warlock: Master of the Arcane while it was on one of those flash sales.  In a lot of ways it's another "We wish we had the rights to Master of Magic" game but it's not as good as the original MoM.  It is still fun, though; it does play a lot like Civ5 with some key differences (city improvements are placed on the map, instead of workers, but require 1 pop each) and of course magic.

This one seems to remind me a lot of Age of Wonders 2: Shadow Magic. Did you ever play this and can you say if there anything similar?

Feels very different from AoW.

Frankly, AoW2:SM is probably better than Warlock, but Warlock has a certain appeal too.

I finally bit the bullet and got Anno 2070 because I figured 50% off was the best deal I was going to get until the holiday sales.  The "online services platform" is roughly as hateful as I anticipated: the DRM part is annoying, but fine (in the petulant-child sense of "fine!"), it's basically a one-time activation (with limited activations) and some stuff turns off if you're not online while you play but itlooks fine for offline play.  What concerns me is that even though Process Explorer only shows the Anno5 process as taking a few percent of the cpu when it doesn't have focus, all the input into my 4-core desktop computer (I didn't even try on the craptop) slows to an absolute crawl.  We're talking 2 minutes for a simple alt-tab;tab;tab;tab;tab;release to switch to another window a few down the line (pressing multiple tabs per "screen update" to save a little time).  What on earth is going on in there?

All that said, Anno is a lot of fun   If only they were not putting more man-hours/money into the parts of the product that actively interfere with my enjoyment of it than we have available to put into entire games!

... sigh.  It's the best game I've picked up thus far in the sale, though.

[Mánagarmr]

At least you can play it. I tried one of the Anno games and it absolutely EXPLODED on my machine. For some reason the game decided that I was holding down Escape. All the time. As soon as I launched a game, Esc was active. I didn't even touch it. I googled around and lo and behold, some people with Nvidia cards had this issue, but it was "not a priority fix". Needless to say, with all the DRM and crap in the Anno series, I never touched them again.

Also, Keith, do try Grimrock, but keep the real time combat aspect in mind and try to embrace it. It involves dodging at the right time, fighting in the right areas and using the proper character synergy (I usually go Dodge Rogue left front, Minotaur armor tank right front, mage (fire) left back and throw rogue back right). That allows everyone to attack at all times. Just don't get cornered. That hurts

The puzzles is the big part of the game, and they're quite enjoyable and mind bendingly frustrating from time to time

[madcow]

I got Indie Game: the Movie. I had been wanting to watch it for awhile and noticed it was half off. Of course, its going to take forever before I get the whole thing downloaded, but I'm looking forward to seeing it.

[BobTheJanitor]

At least you can play it. I tried one of the Anno games and it absolutely EXPLODED on my machine. For some reason the game decided that I was holding down Escape. All the time. As soon as I launched a game, Esc was active. I didn't even touch it. I googled around and lo and behold, some people with Nvidia cards had this issue, but it was "not a priority fix". Needless to say, with all the DRM and crap in the Anno series, I never touched them again.

That's really too bad. The Anno games are all fantastic, especially if you're in the mood for some relaxing conflict-free gameplay just slowly shepherding a city from a pile of sticks up to a continent-spanning metropolis. Sometimes I don't want to shoot men, beasts, or robots and I just want to be calm and ponder the most efficient routes for my cargo ships. That said, I really wish the developer wasn't so tied to Ubisoft and their obsession with crap DRM. I haven't pirated a game since my wild, regrettable youth, but these games sometimes make me want to do it just so I can get a version with all the stupid-ware cracked out of them. Not to mention the fact that Anno 1404 is still not available on Steam since Ubi has for some reason refused to patch out a save-destroying bug from the Steam version. Which is why you can still go see the store page for it (Listed as Dawn of Discovery for us stupid Americans who can't spell or comprehend words like Ahnnoo or numbers like 4041 oops I am so bad at numbers) but it is forever listed as not available at this time. Or at any time for about 2 years now. 

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Despite all the praise Anno is getting, I simply will not touch this game. I'm sorry, but all my games now have no DRM. I am not going to add frustration to my experience when all my other games have no DRM, it is an unacceptable barrier to entry now and if a company still stands behind it, they can go jump in a lake. My money will go to companies who care about their customers, not the ones that care about the pirates.

[Mánagarmr]

Yeah, I'm slightly flustered about the Anno series, because I've heard they're great games. But with the DRM and their, quite frankly, rude treating of customers with issues, it's just not happening. (I don't blame the devs btw. They're probably eager to fix it, but it's UBI pulling the strings.)

[KingIsaacLinksr]

So some good ones I can recommend:

Orcs Must Die: Action Tower Defense game that is the best kind of fun and humor I've ever played. Easily my 2nd favorite TD genre game.
Frozen Synapse. Though I haven't played much out of the game, it was still fun and on my to-do list to get back into.
Plants VS Zombies on the community choice sale. Very well done TD game, though it lacks replayability but the campaign and side games are fun enough.

[BobTheJanitor]

I'd second those recommendations. Especially Frozen Synapse. It is quite likely to appeal to anyone that likes really getting in to the strategy of a game. You basically have infinite time to plan your moves, run simulations of those moves, run simulations on what the enemy troops might do and see how your moves interact with it, tweak tweak tweak and then finally send the move and bite your nails while you watch to see if you out-thought the other guy, or if you just lost half your team in a huge calamity. It's great.

[Mánagarmr]

PvZ is fun, but I'm not a sucked for TD games. Yet I bought it for peanuts a few years back. Frozen Synapse is awesome, and I wish I didn't have a backlog three years long so I could actually play it

[Mánagarmr]

I'd second those recommendations. Especially Frozen Synapse. It is quite likely to appeal to anyone that likes really getting in to the strategy of a game. You basically have infinite time to plan your moves, run simulations of those moves, run simulations on what the enemy troops might do and see how your moves interact with it, tweak tweak tweak and then finally send the move and bite your nails while you watch to see if you out-thought the other guy, or if you just lost half your team in a huge calamity. It's great.

Also this. That was a very good explanation of what makes FS awesome. It's very much a throwback to old golden games such as Laser Squad Nemesis that I literally played until I was broke back in the days