Surprise! Valve has put out another Steam sale, seemingly out of nowhere. I think a Black Friday sale is something that has been expected on Steam for years and every November people swear it’s ‘just around the corner’ only for it to never actually happen. Until now! It’s a good old fashioned Steam Sale! By gar, it’s been… uh, about two months. Valve has decided that 2025 was the right time to lever even more money out of our wallets and who am I kidding, that’s exactly happened. Remember, you’re definitely losing money not buying these bargains that may or may not be on sale several times per year.
I’ve approached this sale a touch differently than the last few, mostly using it as an opportunity to buy up older games I’ve owned in different forms over the years but never owned on Steam. And for absolutely no reason at all, I’ve designated December to be Boomer Shooter month. Deck(heh) the halls with blood and guts, lets fuckin’ go. After adding a few deadset classics to my library, it’s time to lock in and get ready for an excessive amount of pixelated violence and MIDI guitar riffs. If it goes well, I think I’ll make it a yearly uh, thing.
So, what did I spend my hard earned on? Well, I started with Quake and Quake II. The few dollar price tags on both are absurdly good, being that these are the slightly updated Nightdive Studios releases. I’ve already ripped through the original and it holds up almost too well. It still feels just as fast-paced and fun as it did all the way back in the ’90s. Quake II will likely make an appearance later in the month. Somewhere at my parents’ place there’s a dusty bookshelf with my original discs for both. But seeing as though i don’t own a disc drive, let alone anything that could read them, buying them digitally is the sensible grown-up option. Or uh, that’s what I’m telling myself to justify buying them… again.
Along the same lines, I grabbed the Doom Classic Bundle. The original Doom games will never be not good. It’s pretty hard to beat sprinting through demon-infested corridors mowing down anything that moves while the heavy-metal soundtrack absolutely blows your mind. Doom 3 though, it’s been sitting there for years. Watching me from a distance, just waiting… waiting.. When Doom 3 came out I never made it more than 10 or 15 minutes into it. Partly because one of our family’s PCs crashed as soon as as you made it into the game, something about a graphics card not being compatible or something which was the style at the time. Was I just a coward who didn’t enjoy things jumping out of dark corners? No.. shut up, you are. Anyway, I’m finally ready to give it another crack and see if it is the misunderstood gem I’m led to believe it is.
Duke Nukem 3D is one of my favourite first-person shooters of all-time. Hail to the king. It’s probably one of the funniest, dumbest and most self-aware games ever created. Ion Fury is a 2019 release that uses the same engine as the legendary king himself. It features that original Build Engine feeling with chunky sprites, big guns, the whole deal. I’ve only given it a quick test run so far, but I like what I see. The interface is bang-on and it feels great, but I will have to mess with the default controls before going in further. I could still feel that pretty familiar muscle memory kicking in, despite my reflexes being a lot slower than they were in the ’90s. Staying in that retro space, I noticed Raptor: Call of the Shadows for under $1.50 and I honestly could not stop myself from clicking ‘Add to Cart’ quick enough. There’s a special kind of nostalgia tied to those older DOS-era shoot ’em ups. Raptor has those super simple mechanics, crunchy sound effects and loops of gameplay that ooze ‘just one more run.’ At barely $1.30AUD, it almost feels like buying a piece of my childhood back for pocket change. I smiled like an absolute dork seeing it pop up in my library again.
One game I’ve been meaning to look into for a while is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obsucra. I’ve been missing the Fallout games lately and I don’t mean the Bethesda releases. I’m talking about the original late-’90s isometric bangers packed full of dark humour and pop culture references. I’ve heard for years that Arcanum scratches that Fallout-like itch, it is from some of the same developers and features that whole blend of storytelling with janky-but-fun mechanics. I guess it’s similar with Fallout 1 and 2, you have to be in the right mood for them. But when that mood hits, it HITS. I’m looking forward to eventually giving it a go and seeing if it holds up to my unreasonable expectations. And of course, it wouldn’t truly be a Steam sale without me picking up at least one more point-and-click adventure game. I went ahead and burned a couple of bucks on Tony Tough and the Night of the Roasted Moths. This one has been on my radar for a while but I never got around to pulling the trigger. I’ve heard the Steam Version is a bit of a mess, but that’s nothing ScummVM can’t fix. I’m always more than happy to add another adventure game to my backlog and I’ll uh, I’ll get to it...
Well, there we have it. Yet another Steam Sale successfully separating me from my hard-earned dollars. I’ve kind of accepted that when Valve slap a discount tag on something I vaguely remember from the ’90s my self control evaporates almost instantly. But I feel like this haul is pretty decent and I’ll actually get to most of these fairly soon. Some will likely feature in Boomer Shooter December and others I’ll explore in the new year. I think the difference this sale, other than the low amount I spent, is they’re all games I genuinely want to dive into rather than hoard on my digital shelf. Clearly, I should be well and truly occupied heading into 2026. Or uh, you know, until the Winter sale hits and I pretend to be surprised again before repeating this whole process like I learned absolutely nothing..
Dad with a Deck 
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