Skyrim sure looks awesome but I haven't played any of the prior games yet. I've got the first 2 for freebie download somewhere I think which I'd like to try sometime, and then would like to do Morrowind and Oblivion first. I figure by the time I get through those and the zillion other RPGs in my backlog though Skyrim Legendary Deluxe Director's Cut Boxed Set Custom Limited Enhanced Edition will be out and I can pick it up for $5 in a Steam holiday sale hehehe.

Tomb Raider? Now what is not to love about this all time classic franchise eh? Putting aside the boob factor always associated with these games, the games themselves are just fun as hell and addictive, making it one of the top selling franchises of all time. I played the first 2 games as they came out way back in the day, and then maybe caught a glimpse of the 3rd one or so, but never saw any advertising or had any friends that had any of the other ones after that so they came and went and while I knew they were there and maybe saw a trailer here or there, never got to really see or play them over time. But there was always that "crap, I'd like to grab all of those one of these days" factor going on over time. Another issue which was sadly all too common to me over time with gaming was that I'm usually a bit of a minimalist with my hardware and I'll use hardware until it literally falls apart without upgrading (mainly being frugal by choice for the mostpart rather than by budgetary limits), so my computers have generally been underpowered compared to the norm and get outdated and stay that way for *eons*, and so many games coming out are basically "can't play enjoyably without a major hardware upgrade" and over time I just slowly tuned out of what games were current and exciting, eye popping etc. including the Tomb Raider franchise.

But... last year when I finally got off my arse and built a new PC from hell and went a bit overboard on the hardware - putting myself ahead of the game for once - the new video card came with a free Steam key for the new Tomb Raider. I didn't think much of it and hadn't seen the trailers. Then... a week or so before the game was released I saw the trailer for it and my eyes popped out of my head at the awesome factor. Playing the new game was such a gaming time warp for me in graphics quality etc. My brain was affixed in the year 2005 or so and I pretty much think anything made since then looks amazingly awesome, so the new boob raider blew my mind in that regard. Then I saw a Tomb Raider collection including all of the prior games in the series that I didn't already have on sale for $10 and well... I just had to do it. Who could possibly pass up such a great deal on 10'ish of the best selling game franchise ever?

Gotta love these games eh? :) So I wrangled my way through the first game earlier this year including finding all secrets etc. and in super high resolution (1920x1200 with some tips from online) and had a blast doing so. I gave each of the other games 1 hour or so of test-run just to see the game series progression over time, and there is an aweful lot of great gaming in that series and countless hundreds of hours of enjoyment to be had. I'm looking forward to completing at least one or two more of the games (2 and 3) before the end of the year hopefully along with their freely available expansions online.

Hopefully they'll come out with a GOTY of the separate Lara Croft game also soon. One more note - both Tomb Raider and the Lara Croft series have sequels planned for the future also.

Soooo many games... so little time. Hopefully they'll come up with some drug or whatever to extend human life and they could sell it in the GOG/Steam stores or grant small amounts of it for in-game achievements which would help us all to have a chance at completing all of the games we've bought. LOL

Because Valve and BethSoft were hoping that people would panick-buy the vanilla game so that they can be railroaded into buying the DLC at a later with the vague feeling that the game is "incomplete". It's a fairly common tactic now - sell the base game for a pittance and try and recoup the losses through overpriced DLC.

Due to I wrongly understood how works steam bundle, bought Skyrim instead Skyrim Legendary. My mistake, shame on me. But never mind. Maybe next year I'll buy full Skyrim with all DLCs for cheaper price ^^.

If I'm honest, there are games with much worse DLC policies. At least Dawnguard and Dragonborn are something resembling proper expansion packs, and the game doesn't go out of its way to make it perfectly clear to you that something is missing like EA's games do.

Skyrim vanilla is still a decent game.

Thanks for moral support :)
I believe that will not be disappointed with vanilla game. Even without knowledge of Oblivion. Expecting many hours of enjoyable entertainment anyway.

Or get the SuperBox (the physical box is DRM free). Especially the first game (X: Beyond the Frontier) is fun. It gives you the "X feeling" without beating you to death with overwhelming possibilities. X2 is great as well. It's not as complex as X3, but you can do lots of things (bigger ships, fleets, proper station building and management) and it's learnable.

X3 Terran Conflict is for freaks only. You'll still be learning new things after hundreds of hours of gameplay... HUB, Player-HQ, reverse engineering and blueprints, ... I've sunk more than a thousand hours into this game... I think you either love or hate it. There's not much in between. The game is finished when your CPU can't handle it anymore (can't use more than one core) :P

Cummingtonite?

I was kind of interested in Nether, but it has SO many negative reviews that i won't even bother with it.

lol yeah

The Mortal Kombat Collection is on sale, but still contains the GFWL DRM that will be discontinued in a week.

Microsoft announced GfWL isn't yet being discontinued for games that already use it. However, Microsoft haven't said how long they will be supported for.

EDIT See here: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2014/06/19/games-for-windows-live-exodus-continues.aspx

ny biggest profit so far from this sale are crafting badge......

Well, for those who were looking for it (like I was), the Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition is on sale for the next 2 hours at 75% off, i.e. $4.99. I almost missed it myself because it wasn't specifically listed in any of the flash sales. It had been only 40% off for the entire sale until now. Thankfully I checked the price after seeing that Fallout: New Vegas was in the "Community Choice" sale. It wasn't there earlier when I bought it, but it's now on the Top Seller list as well.

I have to agree what somebody said about Valve being genius. This little contest is seriously a side market to make some money, especially is you have a decent amount of games that have trading cards. In most cases the cards for these other games are priced real low (CS: GO for example), craft the badge and you're gaining at least two summer cards, one for the craft and then one at the end of the day (2 if your team wins). Then resell the summer cards for almost always profit since those sell much higher.