Steam has had a fun little promotion going on for the holidays again this year. I didn’t spend much money on games, since I already have most of what I want and far more than I have time for. Still, it was fun to see what they had up for sale, and to try some of their challenges for their promotion. I even wound up tying Sanctum (that I purchased a while back in an Indie Royale sale) to my Steam account to try for that Achievement, hoping for a useful coupon (I got the Solar 2 one that way).
Short story long, I now have a handful of coupons and a pair of games to give away, and nobody obvious to give them to. (I’m keeping the lumps of coal.)
Steam Stuff
For the next few hours, Terraria and the Portal games are on deep discount (and I highly recommend Portal and Portal 2), so those coupons aren’t much use at the moment, but they will be someday.
So… how to decide who to give them to?
Well, for Cogs, a great little sliding tile puzzle game with delightful steampunky overtones, how about this? Whomever makes the gearflake that my panel of elite judges likes the most will win Cogs. Instructions for how to make a gearflake are in my Steampunk Snowflake post from a little while back, but don’t just take that pattern, try something new, a variation on the theme of “gears and snowflake”.
For World of Goo, a fantastic puzzle/building game, I’m looking for a good practical way to make some goo of my own, for some Zomblobs! promotional experiments. The person who finds me the best recipe for homebrew goo suited for my use will win the game. Specifically, I’m looking for some sort of goo that’s partially translucent, mostly gelatinous, but able to hold a shape well enough that it could be used as a board game piece, about the size of a standard chess pawn. Sort of a stronger, more durable JELL-O, nontoxic, of course. I’ll need to be able to put it into a mold for shaping, so it will need to be mostly liquid but be able to “set” and be removed easily from a mold (so the final surface can’t be sticky, and it shouldn’t stick to a plastic or ceramic mold).
As for the coupons, as specific as they are, it’s probably best to just say that whomever speaks up first for a specific coupon will get it.
Entries for the Cogs and World of Goo contest should be sent to my contact email, tishtoshtesh in the gmail system. If you’re the first one to speak up for a coupon (speak up here first, then if you’re first, email me), please send your Steam handle to me at that same email, and I’ll get in touch.
For all of these, it looks like I’ll need to be logged into Steam and so will you to perform the trade (really just me giving you the widget), so it may take a few days or so to get the timing right, just because of scheduling, but I’ll do what I can, again, communicating via that gmail address.
Entries for the game contests have until January 15th, but the coupons are up for grabs immediately.
Happy New Year!
2012 should be a good year. It’s either the end of the world or the release of Zomblobs! and either should prove interesting. (I’m still formatting the rulebook PDFs for the Zomblobs! beta. I meant to have it done last week, but circumstances prevented it.)
Tish Tosh Tesh 
I got a 50% Valve discount and a free HL2 episode 2. Neither is of any use to me. All in all, a very disappointing promotion.
Y’know, I wonder if it was lackluster (I’ve heard that from a few people) because we already have most games we want. They *do* have Arkham City on sale for $25 and they had Arkham Asylum for $5 earlier, so you could have picked both of those up pretty cheap… ditto for the Portal games. Those really are good deals, but if you already have the game, it’s naturally not going to do much for you.
Maybe that’s just part of the curse of the early adopter?
There’s plenty of good games for sale that I don’t have, and I’ve been anything but an early adopter recently. Still, a filter to skip games that you have would be nice.
I enjoyed the promotion from the standpoint of having lots of items on sale that I could pick up cheaply. My Steam library is now groaning under the weight of a huge number of titles that I need to sit down and play through.
From a gifting point of view, I also ended up with a couple of coupons. The whole gift pile thing felt a little lacklustre to me.
But what would I do with MORE unplayed games in my Steam library, besides feel guilty?
You come up with something good for a discount on Bastion, I’m there. I had it in my cart for $5, then wandered off until the sale ended.
Wilhelm, I’ll keep my eyes open.
I’ve been playing games from my library so I could complete them (or as much as I want) and them move on. I just finished Puzzle Agent 2, so it’s on to… SPAZ. I love buying games with a lot of potential gameplay in them, though, so that’s probably not going to be a winning policy; I can’t really “win” them.
[…] Wish List? Oh, and I still have some coupons and COGS and World of Goo if anyone wants them. Nobody took me up on the snowflake contest, so I’ll just throw them to the winds. (Another interesting take on value, perhaps…) […]