Now it's hard to reccomend something because there are too many games on sale!

I am curious about MOO 3. Is it really that bad? Or did people hate it because it wasn't like the first two in the series? I've read many of the reviews, and it seems that people reacted negatively because it was different. What makes it so terrible?

That's why we should try to recommend things -- with 900+ games/DLC on sale, it's nice to help people narrow their choices down a little. ("Anti-recommendations" -- e.g., "Don't buy that, the A.I.'s terrible, and there's tons of bugs!" -- can also be useful, too...assuming the OP's okay with it.) : )

Sure, why not.

The Last Tinker: City of Colors has gone on sale for 85%, and IMO that's a very good price for it. Don't expect it to be a game like Jak & Dexter or Psychonauts, it's much simpler and hardly challenging at all, but it's quite beautiful; maybe also a good choice if you're looking for a game to play with your kids.

It seemed a bit...kiddish...the characters, the story, I felt like it was made for 10 year olds. I really didn't like the voice-acting at all and found the side-kick thingy really annoying (and even more childish than the rest of it.) I don't like hard platformers at all, but it was also a little easy, kind of couldn't go wrong with just button-mashing to victory, and with nothing else compelling me, it got repetitive and I was bored. :þ
can you elaborate? Messy how? Outdated in what way? The combat and strategy in UnderRail is excellent, imo.

I didn't find it any more childish than the next game, just more..."anime-ish" (though not particularly Japanese, obviously -- in fact, I remember reading that the dev was influenced by Korean animation).
I can see being put off by some of the voice acting (especially Fidget's) -- though I don't think it's any worse than what's in a lot of anime/Japanese games -- but, at any rate, it's infrequent enough that it didn't bother me.
Dust can be a little on the easy side (even for me, and I'm not great at platformers), but, then, I'm playing on the default difficulty; plus, I'm exploring pretty thoroughly as I go (it is a metroidvania, after all), so I'm getting tons of XP from fighting the same groups of enemies over and over again. If I cranked it up to a harder difficulty, and just plowed through the parts that I had to, skipping all the optional hard-to-reach treasure chests (which, as far as I can tell, don't contain anything essential anyway) and such, I'd probably be having a much harder time. But maybe that's just 'cause I suck, and am playing with just the keyboard. :)
Honestly, the biggest complaint that I can muster about the game is that there's an experience/level up mechanic at all. It's not that it's poorly-implemented, it's just that I've grown tired of devs shoving "RPG elements" into every game, no matter how little sense it makes, just to pad out play time and increase players' sense of achievement. On the other hand, in this case (since enemy difficulty is static), the experience level mechanic allows people who might otherwise suck (>this guy<) to gradually make things easier for themselves by leveling up. So...eh.
I did really dig that there's one particularly poignant quest that the game has you fail (not by making you do or say something stupid so the game can then punish you for it, as some games do, but by simply having you arrive too late), which leads to some nice introspection on the part of the protagonist.

What modern (read: not fueled by "old-school/retro" nostalgia) side-scrolling platformers would you recommend?

:)

If you don't see this, then there is little to discuss :)
I guess, you are fan of Xcom Apocalypse :)

I would like Stasis design put inside Fallout boots.

All of the BoUT games have a superb soundtracks. That said, I wouldn't really listen to them on their own, but they suit the game perfectly. *shrug* Don't know about the rest.

As for HuniePop, I doubt the Deluxe version is worth it. The music is passable for the game, but most certainly not anything anyone would listen to otherwise. I ended up listening to online radio like Pandora instead while playing. Regarding the 'art collection', It doesn't feature any of the explicit pictures - "Think of the children!" ;) I wouldn't exactly call it worth it as it's mainly going to be just higher res pictures of the ones you earn when playing the game.

It's hard to recommend this pseudo-datesim because it looks like another indie-game that was made just for money.

The match 3 gameplay was fun.

Thank you.
I checked the OST on Youtube and it seems indeed good.
I'll probably buy the special version, because it's still quite cheap and there's no upgrade DLC afterwards.

The moment you buy the game, the children are already out of the equation XD
I didn't expect a completely SFW collection, though.

It's silly and surely not my main genre, but I bought it cheap and could be funny ; )
I was just wondering about the DLC.

That was quite a post you made 5 days ago :)

AI War has been on my wishlist for a while and judging from your post, it looks like there's a lot of fun to be had here.

Just wondering though, how long does a play through usually take? Is it one of those games that has a campaign mode where you go from scenario to scenario or is it like Master of Orion where you have your galaxy map and go at it until you win (or get overwhelmed)? Or is it a mix between the two like Star Wars: Empire at War where as you gain control of more planets, more of the galaxy opens up to you?

I haven't picked up anything from the summer sale yet but your post bumped AI War to the top of the priority list. It's just that this week, I have final exams (one tomorrow, two on Thursday) so I'm not sure if it's a good idea to pick this game up right now ;)

Good luck with your exams!

The game looks like this: at the beginning you can set-up how big the galaxy is, how difficult AIs are and number of other settings. There is no mission based campaign or anything. Beating a small galaxy with medium AIs can be rather short (several hours). My longest game with pretty aggresive AIs took me 33h to complete. It might be advisible to switch off DLCs at your first playthroughs to get the idea hiw things work and switcxh them on leter on to fully enjoy the complexity of the game.