PC GameSource Blog

Just when I started winding down from the recent onslaught of daily Steam deals, Valve caught me offguard with their latest sale, entitled Perils of Summer. You can find a veritable pant-load of games and even entire publisher collections on sale… many of them even 50-75% off of their regular prices.

Check out just a tiny selection of the deals to be had:

• Got $5? Why not get the entire Overlord Complete Pack–that’s a lot of bang for a few bucks!
• Still haven’t checked out Bioshock 2? It would be a shame not to for $15.
• Find the indie fantasy platforming gem Trine for only $4–you can’t go wrong here.
• DiRT 2, my new favorite racing game on the PC alongside Burnout: Paraside, is only $10. Yes, $10!
• The newly-updated Counter-Strike: Source is going for only $6.80, practically a steal.
• Get (almost) every Unreal game for a total of $13.60 with the Unreal Deal Pack. Yes, this even includes Unreal Tournament III Black Edition!
• Get all of the Call of Duty games up through World At War for $29.99
• Better yet, why not get every 2K game released on Steam (except Civ V) for $89–a 75% discount.
• THQ is also offering their entire collection for only $50, half off an already amazing deal.

This is barely a fraction of the games available in this sale, and many of these are only on sale today (June 24th) other than the publishers collections, which will be available for the duration of the sale.

Don’t miss out, but don’t spend all your hard-earned money today–check back tomorrow to see if Valve has anything else in store during this truly outstanding sale.

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I watched a lot of horror films as a kid. I really enjoyed them–but something little known about me was that some of them also scared the hell out of me. It’s those films which stuck with me the most. But horror concepts are very hit-and-miss. Different people scare differently.

The same is true for games. I, for one, have had a fear of total darkness (or more specifically what could lurk in it)–fortunately for me, that’s an extremely common way many films and games alike create fear. It’s an effective way of making sure the character–or player–doesn’t know what’s waiting for them. In a movie, this is effective because I empathize with the character on the screen, experiencing similar feelings of fear and dread. In a game, I am directly controlling the experience, and it’s so effective because it forces me to willingly advance into something I know I’m going to be afraid of–essentially, to face my fear.

I believe that this is the reason that horror games (or games with horror elements) in general seem to get by with less scary elements and original ideas than horror movies–it’s simply easier to scare people when they are directly involved instead of passively observing. Hollywood needs to think of ways to scare people who are sitting in a chair with no control over what’s happening other than to leave the theater or turn off the television. A gamer has many options, but knows the only way to progress is to cause more scary things to happen–a powerful scare tactic in itself.

I’ve finished every horror movie I’ve started, aside from the few that were simply so bad that I did not want to continue wasting my time watching them. I had no problem getting to the end, regardless of whether or not or to what extent they scared me.

Games, however, are a different story. I am much more of a game buff than a movie buff, but I’ll let you in on a little secret–I could never make it all the way through System Shock 2. I’ve never seen the ending of Doom 3. I played about an hour of Dead Space and have barely touched it since. Hell, I barely made it through the F.E.A.R. games.

Hold on now, I’m not saying every horror game I play simply makes me stop playing. But I can safely say that all of those I’ve listed are some of my favorite games of all-time. They are the ones I remember playing the most, and they have certainly affected me more deeply than almost any other game, because they tap into some primal sense of dread and oppression that I can neither explain nor understand. It would seem so complex, yet most of the games I listed use very simple concepts such as darkness, evil things jumping out at the player, ominous sounds and oppressive atmospheres. Top it off with limited ammunition and other resources, and you’ve got the majority of survival horror games in existence today. Yet–cheap tactics or not, many of them still succeed in scaring me.

But many people are not affected by the same things as me, and do not get scared by cliche things such as monsters in the dark. Others have already learned to overcome those fears and simply push on. The former often do not enjoy many horror games–many reviewers seem to look at horror games in this light, as well (either because the conditions and mindset they are playing the game in is not ideal or simply because they are not scared by the tactics being used). But that’s great, actually–it’s because of these types of people that the horror genre in general must advance–game developers need to think of new and less gimmicky ways to scare their players. And that should make for a continually evolving and ever-more-interesting genre of games.

Recently I have started to revisit many of the titles that I inadvertently abandoned due to never working up the willpower to click on them again. It’s truly satisfying to finish such a title and achieve the real-world benefit (by accident, of course) of pushing myself to overcome my fears.

First up, Dead Space…

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