If you haven't noticed already, Steam's Summer Sale is in full swing. From July 11th (which is now in the past) through July 22nd, Steam will have sales on too many games that I kind of want to play but because it's now 75% off and is now $4.99, I have to buy it. Right now. If there ever was an online event where the Shut Up And Take My Money meme was intended for, this surely seems it.
Recently Steam has also introduced a collectable card game-type thing for a select number of games. The cards don't really do anything aside from just being there. Let's take Portal 2 for example. As you play Portal 2, you can randomly acquire cards during "drops," which are then viewed only after you close down the game. You'll be notified that you have something new in you InBox and then you can view your pretties. Each game has about eight available cards and once you have acquired each card, you're able to "craft" them into a badge, something that Steam has already been doing for a while.
For Portal 2, this is what my screen looks like:
Notice the blue typescript "No card drops remaining." So how do I collect the rest of the cards? By trading and/or buying them. You might also notice the "I'm A Potato! 100XP." That's part of the badge system-thing too. Each Steam account has an associated "Experience Points," that. . . um. . . do something? Steam says that "Your Steam Level [XP] is a summary of your badges and participation in Steam events. Each badge earned increases your XP, and earning XP progresses you towards the next Steam level." That's like saying the definition of "Difficult" is saying that, "it's something that difficult." Thanks Steam.
As for the cards themselves, you can acquire more than one of the same card and when/if this happens, you can do a couple of things with your duplicates. 1) Do nothing and just have multiples. 2) Trade them with your Steam friends. 3) Put them up for sale.
A couple of weeks ago, I was able to sell three duplicate cards for a grand total of $0.85, but that was because I was selling the cards for about $0.05 less than the average asking price. That "earned income" then went to whatever it was that I recently purchased during SSS; it might've been BIT.TRIP Presents. . . Runner 2: Legend of Future Alien or the Complete Half-Life collection. The last four days have been a bit of a blur really.
I only have a slight problem/issue with the whole cards thing. It seems/feels kind of gimmicky. Back when Mafia Wars was in it's heyday, there were events/sales/missions where you could acquire a super-special-awesome-weapon with killer stats (pun intended) that you can only acquire if you complete this mission that you can only complete if you have a lot of friends to help out and if you recharge your energy at an exorbitant rate, which you can only do if you spend real money to buy energy refills which you then use up trying to get that one damnable item that works like an untraceable cellphone but is special-event specific and you know that you may not have enough to complete the overall mission before the end of the special event runs out. You know, one of those type of things. Anyway, that's kind of what the cards and badges thing feels like to me. I'm not going to spend real money for these.
Now, I might spend money that I make from selling cards, but that's just real fictional money anyway.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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