We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I was playing Metro: Last Light and I was having fun with it up until I hit the swamp section and now I hate it immensely. The area is just a massive equipment vacuum, and you have no idea where to go on top of having a time limit to complete it in. The autosave system can even screw you over, because you might bumble around and use up most of your filters (like I did) and have it autosave, making you waste time with no progress.

I have OS X Mavericks. I can't even play it.

I just played Gone Home and it's incredibly sweet, I love it

Yeah, I just played it earlier today too and I thought it was a pretty decent game. It's basically Dear Esther, if Dear Esther was less horrible in every way and also had a much more interesting story.

I'm glad I waited until it was only $3 on steam though, because it didn't have nearly enough content to warrent the original $20 asking price.

oh yeah i should probably mention momodora 3 released on steam yesterday for 5 bucks
it's the best one in the series thus far, though it's less explorey than momo2 and more level-based, like momo1.
I mean, if you liked the other momodora games, you're probably already sold, so...

Just played a game called Always Sometimes Monsters. It's one o' them RPG Maker games that's on Steam for like $10.

It's actually really good, though, if a bit rough around the edges. I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot. There's multiple endings + the biggest branch is literally right before the end so I'd say make a save and go back to see both.

this is why i don't get involved with molag bal

Everything about that video is delightful.

Oh my god I'm choking myself trying not to laugh uproariously and bother everyone in the house

e: Entirely unrelated but didn't want to doublepost:

Been doing some looking at Steam trading cards and how they drop. Apparently, you earn a certain number of card drops for purchasing the game -after they're used up, you can't drop any more cards from it and have to wait to be randomly dropped a booster pack, which requires you to be the one randomly selected out of all of Steam, making them pretty rare. That sure puts a damper on my vague notion that you can (slowly) make infinite money off the market with trading cards, and makes me vaguely uneasy that I sold a bunch of my cards in that "I'm not getting any more of those" way, since they're honestly not that valuable anyway.

Well you kinda have to look at it like day trading. Cards tend to decrease in value the longer a game's been out, but I think they spike whenever there's a massive update so maybe buy a bunch of em just before an update and then sell em for higher afterwards?

Also there's a certain number of games out there where the cards sell pretty high but the game sells pretty low. Over the sale one of my friends managed to snag a $.75 game and move the cards for like $.87. This probably applies to a bunch of bundle games too so you can likely make dosh by buying a cheap bundle, idling the games and then reselling the new cards.

There's certainly ways to do it, you just need to invest a little capital and research to make it work.

Yeah, one of the things I'm actually doing right now is going through all of the Humble Bundle games in my library that I never planned to play and sorting out which ones have cards and how much those cards are worth. I'm not expecting to make a fortune off this, I'll be clear - mostly I'm just using the proceeds to buy cute steam emotes and such. Might make myself some badges later, too.

That is way too much time and energy investment for 12¢ profits.

It's a good excuse to sort through all the scraps I've accumulated in my Steam account over the years from buying Humble Bundles for one or two of the games in them, though.

Yeah I can definitely see doing something with what you've got, but virtual trading card speculation seems excessive.

on related games that are not only hilarious in their concept but real
Mountain Simulator 2014
You are the mountain
you have all the control over the mountain that a real mountain would have over itself

I kind of feel like that might... stretch the definition of game a bit.

I think steam spawns booster packs to regulate the population of circulating cards, so they're only created when cards are used to create badges

i think steam also gives out event cards for any game badge created during that event, so it drives prices of cheap cards up as they are engulfed in the resulting market swarm

steam trading cards differ from most markets in that most participants sorta don't care or think about it, so you could definitely make infinite money speculating on cards if you planned for events ahead of time
the real question is why devote your life to this

Because INFINITE MONEY!
...actually, your Steam wallet is capped at $500.

I wonder how much it's possible to make quickly if you have the preexisting funds you need and know what you're doing? I'm sure there's someone out there who devotes absurd amounts of time to it.

I'm friends with one of Australias minor Trade Barons.
he devotes.... quite a bit of time and effort to getting free games essentially.

thats mostly hats/cosmetics though. he won't touch trading cards with a 10ft pole

dota 2 cosmetics are Big Money
I haven't sold any myself but the prices for rare drops get legitimately high and there's a lot of fluctuation to speculate on

lets not forget that THIS THING is worth almost $400

Phish no X3

I've gotten several games by selling Dota things + trading cards, unfortunately it didn't work during the summer sale since everything was so underpriced.

The summer event trading cards were where the money was.
At least if you were on Team Red and crafted a badge every day and therefore got a ton of card drops. Also, if you were savvy enough to sell them at the beginning of the event before the price started falling, which I wasn't. Also, if you could get away with crafting a badge every day for less than the cards you got for it would sell for, which I'm not sure if I did or not. Also, if "the money" is allowed to be in the 50c range.