Steam Summer Sale - Anyone got anything good?
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When I was an active gamer, I was doing what this guy was doing every Steam sale. I'd use some third-party site which brought up the Steam specials, I'd sort them by discount percentage and look closely at what was 80%+ off. Consequently, I amassed hundreds of games for very little money, the vast majority of which I'll probably never play.
Looking at this list:
Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition is 85% off and gets my general approval. I have completed this game. I can't remember whether it took dozens or over a hundred hours, however.
The others I either don't know or don't see as worthwhile, i.e. I probably wouldn't buy them with the benefit of foresight. So as for those I know but don't see as worthwhile (regarding the time to finish let alone complete them, that is, not the price):
The BioShock games I view as generic slop. I finished the second one, gave up on the first part way, and never bothered to complete any of them. Avoid.
The Mass Effect games are just 'whatever'. I finished the first game, completed and actually liked the second game (I'm far from the only one who thinks that the second game is a cut above the rest), and gave up quickly on the third. However, since the player character is carried over between games along with the results of certain decisions (e.g. I chose to save Kaidan over Ashley in ME1, which determines which of the two is in the subsequent games), you really want to commit to finishing or completing them in order. It's all or nothing. Today, I'd say it's too time-consuming to be worthwhile. (If you play them out of order, the game assumes a canonical decision, e.g. if you don't use an ME1 player character in ME2, ME2 will always assume that Kaidan is the surviving character of the two: replacing Kaidan with Ashley in the later games requires an ME1 game save in which Ashley was spared.)
The Metro games are very average, run-of-the-mill linear first-person shooters. I completed the first two but do not really have remarks to make on them. They are the closest thing that I'd make to a second recommendation.
The first Mass Effect was amazing. There's so much detail and thought put into the worldbuilding it could be its own 'cinematic universe'. Story has timeless themes even more relevant today. The gameplay was quirky and frustrating, but also charming and immersive. Everybody hates driving the Mako, but because of its physics which puts them more into the world (and also they secretly miss it).
The sequel Mass Effect 2 suffers from fixing things that weren't broken, no real worldbuilding, design by committee, weak proto-woke story. It's simply a mediocre game set in the amazing ME universe. The annoying parts are purposely added just to irritate you, like ammo or fuel to move around a star system, or the stupid planet-probe that people install a mod to bypass.
Mass Effect 3 is another 2, but with more proto-woke garbage.
I sometimes put on a blind lets-play in the background and in the first one everyone is talking about ideas and are interested and surprised by the plot turns. None of that in the sequels. They're not worth playing.
If anyone here hasn't, play the first one and stop. Use your imagination about what comes next after the story.
As me's progressed the action got better but the story got only worse.