How the Steam Summer Sale Changed My Life

There came a point in my life where I just became so consumed with my social life, my school work, admissions and scholarships, brushing up my musicianship and even maintaining my health amongst all of these things. Life can be so overwhelming. Sometimes it just feels that the world is working against you and constantly attempting to inconvenience you. I am right here with you living in the same planet, for some of you the same country, and for those reading, maybe even the same state in the States. All of these complications just seem to make the activities you once loved to do all day you once had as a teenager and kid seem so much more insignificant and less available. I know the feeling. I was once a hardcore video gamer myself.

I used to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on my Xbox 360 up-to 15-20 hours a day as a grade schooler during my summers. During the school year I would play on my first generation DS because of the convenience; I would play an average of 8-12 hours a day of casual games. Since I quit being a competitive gamer a few years in my junior year of high school, my gaming time drastically decreased from an average of an hour to no gameplay at all. Now that I’m at college, my gaming has increased substantially. I now game on my laptop and my iPhone 4 from an average of 2-3 hours a day as a casual gamer. I do wish to see more time increase despite adding an extra factor in my life: a job.

Just to give another look at how huge of a gamer I was, I used the money I won from tournaments and Yu-Gi-Oh! and other means of gathering money (being a child who didn’t had a complicated situation to not get a job,) to buy all of my games and consoles. I started getting good at all of this when I turned 10. In my life I owned (starting from my childhood until now) a GameBoy Color, Nintendo 64, Playstation, GameBoy SP, GameCube, Xbox, Playstation 2, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Playstation 3, a PSP and several Wiis. Those were the solid consoles that I have owned. Of coarse I left out smart phones such as Androids and my current iPhone as well as my laptop-- my laptop is not a truly dedicated gaming system technically…

Now that you know a little about my passion for gaming, let’s talk about life. The more you want the more you have to work to get what you want. The more you try the more obstacles you have to overcome. That’s the basics of what we all have to deal with—the bare minimum to see the fruits of your labor and all of the goodies that come with it.

Where is Super Mario and Master Chief and all-of-the-Touhou*?!?!?! It’s still there, mate. You just don’t get to see it as much anymore. Do you still want to sit on your ass after a long day without having to physically deal with parents or friends’ drama? Use escapism to solve this dilemma! If you’re like me, you get real tired of the mainstream FPS AAA titles and are real fucking burned out on it. So if you’re like me and many others, you go to Indie games like Journey, FEZ, Meatboy, etc; Single-Player adventures that deliver a exquisite experience such as Bioshock, Borderlands 2, Half-Life 2, Portal; and occasionally seek MOBAs like LoL or DOTA 2 to fill the void. I assume some of you can relate to me. Like me, you are tired of the lack of innovation and the lack of quality experiences that you can get from smaller companies like The Behemoth (developers of Castle Crashers). You just want to have…what’s that word again? Shit it slipped out of my mind….oh yeah! Fun.

You want to have fun. I’m talking legitimate, sweet, nostalgic, awesome fun times with your Marios and your zombies and your creepy fetus monsters. Well, you can’t really have fun if you don’t have money. Sorry buddy. With the hot titles like the upcoming Titanfall, Killer Instinct, and the current titles like The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite all being at a whopping $60 each, it sure is a let-down to not play the games you really want to play. So you look at the Indie Markets and grab your FEZ, Journey and Castle Crashers and you see them dirt cheap averaging around $15-$20. You play them and figure out you had fun. What?! You had fun without a big AAA title?! WTF #bitchin

That’s right! You had fun with a video game that is not only cheaper, but simpler and outside-the-box. More innovation is put into Indie games because indie developers have more flexibility than the big boys like EA and Activision do. We know this, Armand, move on. Ok. Enough of the Indie praise. Its time for PC praise.

At the start of this summer, I found myself having more time in my hands than I could help myself with. I have a girlfriend that spends a lot of time with me, I have a sick mother that needs my TLC, I have a 6 year old sister whom I transformed into a gamer to make my time at home easier and I have an asshole of a father that is always on my ass—they always ask me to run shit tons of errands and bug the shit out of me while I’m playing a game and I’m still searching for a job and am in the middle of an admissions process that’s pretty damn important. Despite all of this, I still have time on my hands. How? How the hell do I have time on my hands when I “have a life” (this is debatable in my opinion). What the hell, I really, REALLY want to play some games. So I assess my situation. My parents are hogging up the PS3 and I hate Microsoft and deliberately let the white box of my 360 turn grey from the dust that collects on it in my room. I gave away my PSP to my girlfriend's 13 year old brother who was hospitalized for clinical depression last year (he is now indulging himself with reading the Game of Thrones series as well as several RPGs to help pass the time theough escapism. I have actually noticed he is genuinely happier now that he's gaming again.) All I have are my iPhone 4 and my 5 year-old casual laptop. I do some research on DIY’ing my laptop and turning it into a pseudo-Alienware-ish gaming laptop. Turns out that I’m too scared to screw up a fully functioning device with my inexperience despite the research I’ve done. So I discover that my mom has been collecting coupons among coupons and has stashed up so much store credit at Office Max and Fingerhut, I could just get my gaming laptop that way. Well then, I lucked out. I can now do some serious gaming when I get that laptop. But what about now?!

I then discover Steam at the start of the summer and keep my eye on it for a while. I then hear about Valve’s summer sale. It was like God split the heavens and made the Steam logo gracefully descend in a flaming chariot with all of its blessed games with a whopping 75% discount tag on front of some games. This was a lightbulb moment for me. I had the revelation I needed to get back into gaming, serious gaming. I end up spending $86 USD on games to fill up my library. God bless you, Valve, you business geniuses.


Here I am now, having the time of my life with at least 30 games in my library (some are F2P which I am slowly picking off…I’ll talk about that some other time…) There were 3 particular sales that made me a very happy gamer. Those 3 sales were on the new Tomb Raider, Fallout 3, and the Basement Collection. I saw a $60 game equipped with a $12 price tag. I had to get it. Then there was Fallout 3 for $5, yet another good buy. Then I discovered this Indie game that was already at $5 being sold for $1. I took a good look at it and found the infamous Meat Boy in its description. I thought to myself: “Why should I buy a game collection that is already free on Newgrounds?” I then noticed the good ol’ “Steam Play” logo on it. That was good enough for me to get curious about the game. I browsed through the Steam forums and found that each game made by the developers are all neatly organized in one compact space, each have bonus content, and the Steam Play means that you are awarded achievements for playing these obscure games. I was convinced why it was $5, but not why it was $1. It was a must-have.

I quickly dive into my portal games like Bioshock and learn the faults of Steam, which are certain bugs for games that are unsupported by the Steam Cloud. I quickly learned how to fix that bug myself and continued onwards through my gameplay in Bioshock. I played my first playthrough with an Xbox controller and the second with WASD setup. I used the WASD setup instead of the controller purely because I know that a lot of PC games do not support Microsoft’s Xbox controller. So, why not get used to the universal controls for PC? I pushed my arrogance aside and tried something new. What did I learn? I learned that there is a convenience factor with WASD when it comes to PC gaming. It’s very niche and it’s very comfortable. It made sense.

I am told that I will have the time to game during college. I know I will and I intend to do so. I am now able to share my games with my loved ones by simply letting them try out my games to let them see how much fun I am having. Every single one of them found the “portal games” that they played to be very entertaining and had me install Steam on their laptops for them (I will make an article of said portal games if you guys want me to and how to get others into PC gaming.) I am currently happy with what I have and am very blessed to live in an age and environment where I am able to access an unlimited amount of games from the Chrome Store to Steam, from local retailers to iOS App Store and even flash game sites. There are so many places where you can have fun. This is the internet for Christ’s sakes. Take advantage of it if you already haven't. Treasure it and enjoy it while we all have it.

My new means for gaming is through Steam on Windows OS. I honestly love it and find it very convenient due to being tech savvy now. I am happier and more satisfied with having standards with the games I play without criticizing the hell out of everything ‘til the point where I can’t have fun with it. The only issue I have with PC gaming so far is the absolute need for good graphics cards. I’ve always known that a great graphics card is a must for quality visuals. I want pretty, I desire aesthetics. I will one day get there, just not now. I’m on a budget and I’m focused on having just pure, raw fun. That’s what gaming is supposed to be at its core, right?

If you have your own story that you would like to share about your gaming life in retrospect or have questions for me (always wanted to do an IAMA,) please be free to ask them if and only if they are relevant. Thank you for your time.

*Touhou shout-out to EW

Unfortunately, in Egypt, PC Gaming is poor. No one sells legitimate PC games, everyone tells you to pirate it instead. It's because of that, anyone willing to go hardcore in PC games will find it troublesome. That is, without Steam of course.

Steam has made hundreds of thousands of video-games available for me to purchase which previously were impossible to get in a country like this, including some of the decent F2P games out there. Not only that, but many games that were originally made for PSN or Xbox Live Arcade and some of the really old but excellent games, which are already dead, being remade for Steam (Sonic Adventure 2 and Final Fantasy VII anyone?)

I think the biggest advantage to Steam are the Summer and Christmas sales (there was also a third one during August, but I forgot the name). Game prices drop like rocks in water. What was once impossible is made possible. Money isn't that easy in Egypt, I mean if $60 is expensive for your casual American or European, it could count as one's monthly salary back here (no joke), so for a game to drop to say $15, or even $5, is just a response from the heavens.

Steam hasn't become a facility to buy video-games. It's become an addiction.

I fully support PC gaming, here's how I got into it. You see, I always played flash games at school with my friends and what not and we enjoyed it thoroughly, well, to be honest, ever since I was in like 1st or 2nd grade, I've found a passion for PC, I had all sorts of fun on a program called kid pix and I loved it. So last year, I came back from Egypt and my best friend told me about a game called League of Legends, I knew about it and seen some friends play it. He told me that he plays and he told me I should give it a shot, so I said, why not, even though my laptop is a piece of crap that's resting in a scrapyard by now, I decided to play even on lowest graphics, at first, it was only me and my best friend, and then his cousin who was already playing joined us, and then his friend's cousin which made the 4 of us, we'd hop onto skype and we just joke around and laugh like maniacs all while having fun both in game and on skype. Since my laptop sucks, I couldn't play any of the good games, but, I'm building a new computer which costs around 800 dollars ish, and would love it if you would post all these awesome games you got me excited about so that the things I do on PC would be much more fun!

Gamers 4 lyfe. #VGHS