Spring Cleaning: Revisiting old purchases

Gaming
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I won’t lie, I am stealing this thread from steamgifts because I wanna hear from all you amazing people as well! So with the Steam Spring Cleaning Event taking place it has caused curiosity and looking back to that first purchase made through Steam itself. What was you first purchase? Any old purchases this event has you wanting to revisit/finally boot up?

I was actually less embarrassed by my purchase than expected. I bought 3 games at once for $22:

Last Dream: an rpgmaker game actually worth the money, lots of effort put into it and a huge world to compulsively explore. It struck that nostalgic chord of the original Final Fantasy style JRPG

FATE: Classic dungeon crawler, oh god the nostalgia of this purchase is too much to handle

Long Live The Queen: One of my favorite buys of all time. One of the hardest games I’ve ever played. You get to repeatedly murder a princess over tiny ass mistakes in talent distribution. I spent a week huddled over it like a crazy person and that pink haired child didn’t live once. RIP Elodie, you live on in my heart. <3

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I bought a bunch of Final Fantasy games when I joined Steam.

I got FFIII through X-2 and The Last Remnant (main character voiced by a power ranger!) in rapid succession, but technically my first purchase was Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster.

Then I bought the Poker Night at the Inventory games.

I’d love to revisit Chroma Squad. It’s been way too long, and Sentai is my thing.

Finally boot up? Dark Souls III. I’ve never played a Dark Souls game.

I’ve also had The Witcher 3 on GOG for a very long time, but I’ve been way too intimidated to start it up because I know it’s huge.

Looks good. Thanks! I just put it on my wishlist.

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I had intentionally avoided Steam for several years because it was pretty bad for a long time. But by the time the Orange Box showed up I thought it was probably time to see if Half life 2 really was as good as everyone made it out to be, it wasn’t. But that’s how I ended up accepting steam, would still take a fair few months before I bought anything else on the platform though.

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aMOCWO0

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Counter strike, on this acc :smirk: -some 13 year ago now
it’s a bit sad for me, because my “first” steam account i lost, and had to make a new one/this one, a year or so later, when i wanted to play condition zero “again”
(can’t even remember if it was something i even paid for at the time because of acc fuckup)
but on my first acc it was counter strike (1.6) too, since we were all playing it like madz, guise and gurls alike going nuts over it, spending much a hard earned coin on “hourly rates” :blush:
(ps, props if you accidentally activated half-life 2 in an internet café) :+1: :man_facepalming: :smile:
so the “Blast from the Past” tasked me to fire up that old Counter-Strike :slight_smile:

anyway, my first first steam game, “voluntary”, is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic back in 2006, and is the game i consider my first steam game (don’t ask me why),
-and it nearly turned me off steam completely :angry:

i had bought the “Limited edition” box retail (think i still have it lying around), and when i went to activate it on steam, it wouldn’t! :triumph:
there was some halted install trouble, like it couldn’t figure out whether steam was active or not, to run the installer from the disc or from steam,
the code wouldn’t work, sort of, at first i got “in” to the game, somehow, and “kicked” when trying to launch it because some error message (the game was one of the earlier steam games separating sp/mp i think). But then the game wasn’t in my account at all, and couldn’t use the code, it kept coming up with another error, until i was told the key was invalid or something…
had to go through steam support for days, firstly trying to detailedly explain the various issues, sending proof i was me, and that i had the game/box
eventually we arrived at a “solution” where they just gave me the game i think, and as such is listed as “complimentary” in account -but ofc this apparently means i don’t get my “limited edition specials” when i launch the game (or so i’m told/read on the forum later)

anyways, the experience and entire ordeal, +getting to wait several days to play a game i “just bought”, was so thoroughly unpleasant and discouraging i didn’t like steam very much and put me off a fair bit. And so it was years before i added another, (mandatory), game to my account, was easily busy playing games without, -before Valve gradually more and more got their hands in “mandatory” retail installations…

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I was the same way, avoided Steam like the plague because it was half-assed always-online DRM that frequently failed to let you play your own games in the beginning. I’d create throwaway accounts to play free games and treated it like a Kongregate or Newgrounds account for years until my brother bought me Civilization 5 for Christmas and it requires a Steam account. So I finally settled on a username (Shalandir) that I’d grown to love and registered with my real email for the first time because I didn’t want to lose access to my precious 4X strategy game. Played the crap outta that, was and still is my most played game for actual hours played (nearly 1000).

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My first purchase on steam was a bundle of portal 1 and 2.

Not really except it did remind me I should finish pyschonauts.

I didn’t know the Fate games on steam, I still own a bundle of the original and undiscovered realms on disc on the shelf where most of my physical games are.

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Wasn’t a purchase, but the first game added to my account was apb reloaded.

Was curious to see how the game had changed over the years, and while it has had changes. It’s still very hard to get into. Especially now with people having a lot of experience able to kill you with a few shots.

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Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising!\

As for revisiting, this event simply verified my own plans to finish a few games (I keep games labeled with tags like: ‘To Finish’), nothing was really sitting deeply in the backlog.

Unrelatedly it did have me notice that I still hadn’t played Alpha Protocol yet.

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Counter-Strike in '09 was my first purchase, still haven’t played more than 4 hours and I don’t intend to.
I didn’t really get anything interesting in my first quest batch.

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Yea, they pretty much dragged me, kicking and screaming, (DRM and Having to pay for my use of bandwidth)all the way!!!:scream:

I still don’t trust them.

Oh and I had lots of keys from Humble that I had never used until about 2 years ago. But the first game, I actually, bought from Steam was Portal!

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A Christmas gift from one of my best friends: The Wolf Among Us. In return I gifted him Monaco and Dishonored GOTY.

Yes! Kentucky Route Zero. One of my favorites. I played at that same friend’s house and therefore I have few hours on it on steam. I need to play it more. That game changed my life.

I own it and I should def play it! Thanks for reminding me of it.

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My first purchase was Super Meat Boy shortly after its original release.

I had an ultra potato at the time so I ended up playing the whole game at around 25fps. Good times.

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My first purchase was arma 2 so i could play the dayz mod. I totally forgot all about it til now thanks Valve.

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My first purchase was Portal. I remember the moment I bought it at the Target in that thick Orange Box case, I remember opening the box… From there, the memory skips straight to me playing the game for the first time. It was epic.

Portal is why I got my Steam account, and I have never forgotten how much it changed my life. I was in love the moment I took my first, long-fall-booted step and heard GLaDOS over the intercom. I will probably be revisiting it when I get the chance. Since then, I have also gotten the sequel, Portal 2, and it is also one of my favorite games. Of the 100 or so games in my library, I think Portal can be considered the biggest game-changer for me. That’s also why I wrote a recommendation for it.

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Mine is Dota 2, because I won a key for the beta period when I used to frequent PlayDota forums, I don’t play it anymore, and this made me create my steam account, but my real first purchase was Assassin’s Creed Revelations.

I couldn’t get the pirated version to work so I had to buy, hihi

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@GanbaRANGER That is the weirdest coincidence Final Fantasy X is my hubby’s absolute favorite game of all time. I’ve seen him play it more than once and talk about it, spout trivia. Did you enjoy it too? :slight_smile:
And Chroma Squad was the game my late brother was always so hyped to play. I hope he got to play it before he passed. I know he shot me the happiest text ever when he finally purchased it!

@Gnuffi I still think I’m the only person alive that has never dropped in on the Counter Strike games. Watched numerous friends spend endless hours playing/talking about it but have never tried it. It took me till 2014 to finally give into all the people I knew using Steam and I’ve had mostly good experiences since by them they were very well-established already. That Half-Life 2 story hurts my heart honestly. My hubby wants me to start with them to give shooters a chance since I avoid that genre pretty heavily and always have. I’m tempted for sure! They really look fun. :smiley:

@Shalandir I finally gave Civ a chance with 4 I think. My late brother had followed them from 1-5 and told me millions of stories I didn’t care about until years later when I was obsessed with it, weirdly enough over a Christmas break too. It’s made me wonder if i"d actually like more 4x & Grand Strategy type games but I haven’t tried too many others ever.

@acb234 Ayyo Portal has always interested me but I’ve never had a copy to play through, still years later. :frowning: I honestly miss having physical games around. I love Steam but I want a library I can hold in my hands.

@coralinecastell Kentucky Route Zero looks awesome really. I spent last summer in Kentucky and I wanna go back more than anything.

@Enki You into the Assassins Creed games? I’ve never really tried them and have no clue where to start of if it’d be worth it.

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If you want to try out more 4x games then Galactic Civilizations 2 is still free to grab right now. It is one of the old great ones. As for shooters, maybe Half-life 2 is a good first game to try, it’s very linear and hand-holdy, painfully scripted and as such I found it kind of boring and uninspired. But these qualities also makes it kind of safe so I’d suspect anyone can pick it up and play, probably why it garnered so much praise.

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I’ve found there to be a pretty large gap between 4X and Grand Strategy, at least in my own personal definition and the gross perversion of the phrase by Paradox. In Paradox’s view, “Grand Strategy” has come to mean a 4X strategy game that allows the micromanagement of every aspect. This is in no way an insult to Paradox games, most are pretty good (although the amount DLC can be excessive), but that definition seems counterintuitive to what Grand Strategy was originally intended to refer to: Strategy games with massive scopes as opposed to smaller campaigns.

To detail that further: having a massive scope with an overarching plan to execute is pretty much the definition of strategy with the only form of flexibility and adaptability coming in the formation of lots of different strategies since you don’t know which one you’ll have to execute (until you slam into an obstacle, be it an enemy army, natural disaster, or some other hurdle). Tactics is from the bottom-up method of engagement that tries to implement the top-down strategy while directly reacting to an enemy. A good example of tactical+strategy are the modern XCOMs or Total War franchises, pairing a [fairly static] overall strategic plan with [very dynamic] tactical battlefield operations that are constantly having to change on the fly. Just because it’s turn-based at the tactical level doesn’t make it not dynamic, it’s just the developers choice for implementation since gamers seem to still love turn-based tactical games that give them time to think carefully about their choices.

TL;DR - just because you fell in love with 4X doesn’t mean you’ll love Grand Strategy. It can be daunting (yet rewarding). But as suggested GalCiv2 is free right now and the Endless franchise became my favorite 4X games until Stellaris debuted (which is Paradox’s attempt at less micromanagement in their games). All great, I can recommend many others too. :smile:

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The first time I read about Assassin’s Creed was an article in a magazine about the first game on the series, the setting and history was very interesting to me and I love stealth gameplay. So it did caught my attention at the time but unfortunatelly I couldn’t play because I didn’t have any of the platforms that were able to run it.

It was one of the first things I did when I got my gaming PC, it was expensive so I had nothing left to buy games and I really wanted to play Assassin’s Creed, there were five of them already at the time! I’ve played most of their titles, but stopped after Black Flag, which is a great one if you’re like me and enjoy pirate stuff, I spent hours and hours just sailing and singing sea shanties with my crew.

If you ever want to play, I recommend you playing at least the first one, with the first assassin Altaïr, and the Ezio saga (II, Brotherhood and Revelations) which is the most acclaimed of the series, even the books are a fun read, me and my sister enjoyed them. Action is a big part of these games, but there are many times that you can instead approach with strategy and stealth. A lot of interesting places to explore, huge amount of real world history to learn from the period of which each game passes, just keep in mind that some stuff is altered to fit the games’ own story. I got to be friends with Leonardo da Vinci! :laughing:

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