I want Half-life and it's two expansions Opposing Force and Blue Shift and am thinking about getting them....only 33% off though and we're talking about 10 year old games!

Also really want Magic The Gathering: Planeswalker, but that ofcourse is NOT discounted!!   Just my luck....

I picked up:

Borderlands

DLC1

DLC2

DLC3

Plugged in my XBOX360 wired controller (didn't have to configure a thing) and presto I have better than XBOX quality without sacraficing anything or paying a monthly fee. Voice over headset, forcefeedback, smooth controls with no drift=priceless. $20US

Knights of Honor:

Probably one of the most underated RTS games ever made. Shipped at around same time as Rome Total War. Excellent 2D graphics for it's time. $6.75 Well worth it IMO. It shows you how realtime can be done in a turn based world when done right. Beautiful lil campaign map with day and night cycle peasants etc. Almost has a city builder feel to it the game has so much personality. Also great voice overs heh.

The Witcher Extended Directors Cut:

Not a bad game but not great either. 16GB for $6.75US heh FOV 90-95 looks like ASS in 16:10 aspect (tweaking required)

Grand Ages Rome:

Very dissapointed being an avid city builder fan this game fails on a few levels. Graphically it's very easy on the eyes but very demanding performance wise. All for nothing as gameplay is very shallow. Tropico 3 is MUCH better in all areas respectively except that it's not Rome. $6.75US

Great deals that ARE worth the hassle of running STEAM in the background. Don't get me wrong... Impulse has the best approach and I love how they promote not having to run Impulse while playing said game. However Impulse NEVER has deals like D2D or STEAM and that is why it will fail as a digital distribution platform. Especially in this economy. Reading above it also has regional locks which I don't know much about but that can't be a good thing for international purchases. I remember the day I downloaded Stardock Central for Galciv or Sins I cant remember. Anyways I was amazed at how streamlined and functional that client was. To me that was the best thing I could have asked for. I don't need all this fancy windows.net crap.

The days of CDKEYS are over it looks like. If Live doesn't take over on the PC it will be STEAM. The future is account driven which stores all of your licenses just like XBOX Live or STEAM or Impulse. I really wish the future was Impulse but it doesn't look like it will go that way. Personally I don't really care about acheivments. Some people live by them but as a developer I think it would be fun to support them and interesting to make them. Occasionally I find myself doing something for an acheivment or one pops up and I think neat but that is about it. Still they have become standard and for any developer looking to add them to a game that isn't for Windows Live or XBOX Live then STEAM is the next best choice UNLESS you develop your own internal system within the game.

If Impulse had some deals or competative prices I would probably use it more as it does have the more practical approach. I hate running 3rd party applications in the background when I game. Also I don't use the STEAM friends list or ANY community features. So for me it's purely about the price and as a gamer that buys too many games this is the hardline that will make or break ya.

I only wish Impulse had the deals as I would much rather support Impulse over Valve. Clearly there is MUCH room for improvement with Impulse and hopefully these posts will help in fixing some of the problems. I hate a monopoly as much as the next guy but the price is right.

oh i remember the game i just hope that wont happen to elemental because of civilization

When I look at Civ 5 I don't really see Elemental. The only simularity I see really is they are turn based. I actually would like to play Elemental more as it's a bit more original for the most part. I did have Civ4 in last month and was doing a lil co-op fest with a friend but I got tired of it very quickly. Then again this will be the first time Civ tries to actually simulate some kind of real battle mechanics with the hexagon and ranged tile combat system. It's like Daisenryaku meets Civ and that is a good thing really. Who knows how it will run or play though. I'm skeptical in some ways. Sid is not as hands on as he used to be and all it takes is 1 gimmick to kill it. As much as Firaxis has set some standards in their games I really don't want to support them. 2K games abandoned Railroads and that game deserved an expansion and some patches to fix it up. Nobody even fought for it.

At this point in time I would much rather have Elemental but you know the hype and drive will push Civ sales right to the top.  I'm not into this pre-order to get a special nation stuff though or beta offers. I really hate pre-order deals. They REALLY want the money up front these days so much that they are will to sacrafice the quality of the game. Transformers War for Cybertron is a good example. I wanted to buy it ay 39.99 but you needed a pre-order to get Sound Wave chasis. Well that is my favorite chasis and since I can't use it why even buy the game? This has become a very bad trend in the industry these last few years. Especially with Gamestop/EB games. More often then not it pisses me off they try and force a pre-order with some gimmicks and if you don't pre-order you miss out on content. Garbage...

It's getting so bad that I just like buying old games they are so cheap and 90% aren't worth the money. I would never pay to get into a beta either but that is just me. Exceptions can be made but that is generally how I feel. I will probably be logged into XBOX Live playing NHL 11 on launch day but Starcraft 2 forget it.

My guess would be that it's because Steam/Valve is much bigger. For one thing, that means they have a lot more people who can negotiate deals with publishers. AFAIK, Stardock has like two people doing that, while Valve I'm sure has a lot more (although I don't know for sure). And because Steam is bigger, they have more barginning power. If they say to the publisher "we won't sell your game on Steam unless you let us sell it worldwide," that is a much bigger deal than if Impulse said that. The publisher would just laugh at Impulse, but would be more willing to give in to Steam.

And it is true that publishers only have rights to certain areas. If you remember, Demigod was only published by Stardock in North America, although it also handled the digital stuff. Kalypso (I'm pretty sure it was them) published Demigod everywhere else. And look at the EA page on Wikipedia, specifically the "Studios and subsidiaries" section. They have seperate divisions in the UK, Canada, France, China, Indonesia, Korea, India, Brazil, Singapore, etc, etc.

Or look at Squar Enix: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Enix They have Japan, North America, Europe, and China. The same with Ubisoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft, Take-Two http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take-Two_Interactive, THQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THQ, and pretty much every other major publisher. It's one reason why many games (although this is more common on consoles) have different release dates for different parts of the world.

Its even "worse" for me

http://www.steamcalculator.com/id/rebel44/eu