This Bundle has the following games – in order of awesomeness:

Jamestown
Cave Story+
NightSky HD
Shank
Super Meat Boy
Bit.Trip Runner
Gratuitous Space Battles

Disclaimer: Order is of my own personal opinion (aka what I’ll be buying it for).

Steam is still doing their ‘Wishlist Giveaway’ thing. The prices haven’t been spectacular except for VVVVVV – and I seriously can’t recommend that game. It was insanely difficult for no good reason that made any sense. Twitch gaming doesn’t work well on the PC and the default controls were hideous. Methinks that this is just a warmup to some real end-of-year deals to keep people logging into Steam every day.

Fallout 3 GOTY (FINALLY a decent price)
The Last Remnant
Mass Effect 2 (Franchise sale!)
Splinter Cell Franchise

For strategy fans:

Emipre & Napoleon: Total War GOTY

For the uber-cheap indie game fans:

Osmos
Shatter
Zen Bound 2
The Wonderful End of the World
Foreign Legion: Buckets of Blood
Flight Control HD
Penny Arcade Adventures: Precipice of Darkness Pack
VVVVVV

Uber-cheap other games/mods:

The Longest Journey
NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits
Garry’s Mod

And what would this be without free tickets? That’s right – two tickets today are freebies! Build out a wishlist of 10 items…that’s easy to do! And post your own video to Steam by linking a YouTube account to Steam and setting one video to public and embeddable. That one’s harder to do.

Trine
Alpha Protocol
Bionic Commando Franchise (Not the best deal but decent)

If you’ve got nothing better to play, then maybe pick up:

Singularity
R.U.S.E.

There are still five days left, so if that game you are hoping will be on sale hasn’t shown up yet, it still might. Good rewards come to those who are patient. Usually.

Today is also July 4th, aka Independence Day. I generally celebrate by playing video games, hanging out with friends, eating good food, and ritually watching the movie Independence Day. Too bad Aridzona is so dry this year and fireworks are not a good idea. But plenty of fireworks can be seen if you play the right video games. Fireworks are usually used as a mini-victory dance of sorts at the end of something – a sort of mini-reward to the player for their efforts.

Assassin’s Creed Franchise (Assassin Creed II…finally!)
Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition
Transformers: War for Cybertron
Torchlight

For the casual and strategy gamer in you:

Defense Grid: The Awakening
Tropico 3

By the way, yesterday’s Hoard challenge for a paltry ticket was ridiculous: Save 20 princesses in a survival-mode type of game. Wizard towers used to be cool, but now I really don’t like them.

Today’s freebie ticket is to first have a friend in Steam and own one Steam game (Free-to-play games appear to count for this) and then send them a game recommendation from the game’s store page.

I’m mostly excited about Assassin’s Creed II. I was hoping the price would drop to a reasonable level back at Thanksgiving or Christmas. It didn’t happen. Also, I saw Amazon’s ratings and all the DRM nuisance stuff put into it and I said to myself I’d wait for it to come down even further before getting it. I know I’m way behind the latest episodes – ‘Brotherhood’ and ‘Revelations’. But I’ve got so many games to play, it doesn’t really bother me.

The Transformers game is kind of an odd recommendation. It is a third-person shooter and I’m a sucker for those. Third-person shooters ALWAYS get rated badly by game reviewers – in this case, the console port control scheme apparently maps poorly to the PC or some such nonsense. I guess this means that I’m apparently more capable than game reviewers by being willing to adapt to weird control schemes. The user ratings are a little more generous and the gameplay footage I watched was pretty solid-looking, which basically confirms my suspicion that game reviewers don’t know what they are talking about half the time. I probably glanced over it before and said ‘nah’ because it was probably too expensive and Metacritic was getting down on it at the time. At this price point, though, it is probably worth the $7.49. If third-person shooters aren’t your cup o’ tea, then this should probably get a pass.

Half-Life 2 and all “Episodes” (A very nice set of games – if you have never played Half-Life 2, you can’t really call yourself a gamer)
Bioshock series (Woot! Bioshock 2 for $4.99!)
Darksiders
Battlefield Bad Company 2

And, for the casual gamer:

Plants vs. Zombies
Hoard

I’ve found a couple things in this set that I’m picking up. What are you adding to your video game collection as this July 4th weekend kicks off?

Today’s freebie ticket is: “Write a comment on a friend’s Steam Community profile page.” Are you doing the “Achievements 4 Tickets” drawing thing? I still have my “friends” from the last time Steam did this stuff so that makes it easy this time around. Hopefully they won’t get annoyed and cease being my “friend”.

Just 'Cause I can.

Just Cause 2, Braid, Devil May Cry 4, and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic are must-haves. If you are more into casual/thinking puzzles, there are Hamilton’s Great Adventure and SpaceChem. Everything else is a bit pricey. There are still tons of deals to be had over the next eight days, so if you’ve waited this long for some game to come down in price and still isn’t in range, you’ll probably pick up some fun games while you wait a bit longer.

Also, if you haven’t noticed, Team Fortress 2 is free. Actually, there are a number of “free to play” games where the catch is that you might end up buying stuff in-game to pad out your character.

There are also a number of achievements that will give you tickets that enter you into a drawing to win the top 10 items on your wishlist. You have to have a wishlist and have a list of ten games on it. Which is another reason to NOT buy the big expensive games right now – you might get them for free (maybe, probably not)! Fortunately, some of the tickets are easy to get. Today’s freebie tickets are: “Get set on fire and then take a dunk in some water in Team Fortress 2″ and “link your Facebook profile to Steam and lose the last bit of personal privacy you might have been holding onto.”

I’ve been wanting to nuke zombies for a while and Atom Zombie Smasher claims to offer me that chance. It looks fun and appears it will run on pretty much any computer. But you really have to love surf guitar music since this game is chock full of it, which is humorously suitable for an indie title like this. The zombies and other units appear to just be dots on the screen, which probably puts this game into the E10+ (Everyone 10+) category even though there will likely never be an ESRB rating for the game. (After all, ESRB ratings are not exactly cheap.) If the game is purchased through Steam, then there are Steam achievements and the game is available for both the PC and Mac platforms thanks to SteamPlay. And there appears to also be a version for Linux and a demo for each major platform.

This game is actually similar in nature to a video game I dreamed up a couple of years ago. So when this showed up and I saw just the trailer, I naturally fell in love with the concept of the game. Whether or not it plays out somewhat like what I envisioned is another story. But it is hard to go wrong with a game that offers both atomic bombs and zombies in a single package. I’ll be trying out the demo tonight to see what it is like and there is a pretty good chance I’ll pick up the full game while it is on sale.

Fortunately, it looks like there will be additional savings of individual games over the next few days. So, check Steam daily for deals. Maybe that game someone asked for this Christmas will go on sale at a good price and all that “patient waiting” (procrastination) will pay off.

(Some Mac games – via SteamPlay – are on sale too.)

The first four objectives are:

• Self Portrait – Set up an avatar (free)
• Got Tanked? – Become a Desert Fox in R.U.S.E. ($33.49)
• Up the Ante – Unlock The Iron Curtain in Poker Night at the Inventory ($2.99)
• More Cowbell – Set a leaderboard score of at least 1,124,400 in easy mode for the ‘Paul Hartnoll’ level in Chime ($1.99)

So, let’s assume that within each 48 hour period, there is one free item. There are seven 48-hour periods. So, during three of the periods, in order to have a chance at the grand prize, something that costs money will have to be played. It looks like this event is also being bundled with deals.

The correct approach to the treasure hunt is probably to buy games at great prices, have fun playing them, and then possibly win other stuff too. If you buy the game to “win” the treasure hunt, you bought the game for the wrong reason.

Although, it might be tempting to do them all because it says, “Each objective you complete gains you another entry in to this drawing. Unlock all 4 for the best chance to win!”

The Ball
The Orange Box
Street Fighter IV
World Of Goo
Indie Puzzle Pack
Just Cause 2 (8 Pack)
Osmos (12 Pack)

The Ball seems like it could have been an interesting take on combining a puzzler with a FPS where the ball is the only weapon against hordes of enemies. But I have to ask: Mummies spray blood everywhere when they die? And here I thought they were dehydrated so they couldn’t rot. Whatever.

Also, the Indie Puzzle Pack includes a fancy breakout clone. I’m not sure that really qualifies as a “puzzle”.