That 59 up there really doesn't help my OCD.

One thing you can be pretty sure of is that Valve already made a note reading “great success” the minute after the Great Gift Pile holiday sale event was over. Hell, they probably made that note a minute after it started, considering how little they had to risk for massive rewards. Of course, nobody would have even remotely considered Valve being a charity, but seriously, most of the “gifts” that were handed out here went into Valve’s direction. Not that I should be the one to complain, since I followed the event from start to end, buying a lot of games on the way.. At the beginning, it was simply for fun and because I had some money to burn, but after a few days, I became more and more curious how many “gifts” I’d actually get, and how many of these would actually be decent. At the very least, I’d probably end up with some decent games at discount prices, so what’s to lose?

I only bought games at prices up to €5, which were probably the majority, and used package deals as much as possible (including the Humble Indie Bundle 4, which I had already purchased ahead of the event). Starting on the 26th, I also avoided to buy games with huge download sizes since my internet connection was barely able to keep up with all the downloads. Seriously, having to download almost 13 gigabytes for Wings of Prey really sucked on a 1mbit connection. Of course, I also played all of the eligible “free-to-play” games – but wasn’t able to get two of the associated achievements due to difficulty and/or bugs – and did all the tasks on Steam.

Sure, the job description asked to be "flexible", but this is taking it too far. Also, nice shoes.

While there were quite some games among the objectives that were either not that good (The Polynomial, Guardians of Graxia) or just really confusing (AI War, Fate of the World, also The Polynomial), definitely the worst offender was CrimeCraft: GangWars, and certainly not because it was confusing. Instead, it was a laggy, boring and ugly mess of a MMOFPS, which also stands for everything F2P games are loathed for, as you’ll get bombarded with advertisements for the in-game store from the point you log in the first time. While the requirements for unlocking the Winter achievement looked easy enough (get a total of 200 points in Snowball Brawls), getting there was an exercise in masochism. With the amount of lag going on in simple 3vs3 matches (or actually with any amount of players), throwing, let alone aiming the snow balls was pretty much impossible. That the snow balls often “missed” even when they clearly shouldn’t have was another issue, but at least that also affected the other players. Adding insult to injury, every time I died – and I died often – I had to sit through 20+ seconds of respawn time. I used to be a major achievement whore on the Xbox360, but even for the special Steam event, having to play utter dreck like CrimeCraft made me feel slightly dirty.

You can probably understand my relief when finally the following text appeared after a match …

… but guess what, the Steam achievement didn’t unlock. Given the overall performance of CrimeCraft, that was almost to be expected. I never tried again.

This must be the entrance to the Canals! What else could possibly be behind this giant portal?

Clear runners up in the “terrible game is terrible” department can be awarded to yet another free-to-play MMO: Rusty Hearts. Although the achievement was actually obtainable, the game crashed just when I had completed the quest that unlocked it. Fortunately, I was still able to turn it in after logging back in, but that should just not happen. Crashes aside, Rusty Hearts is an online hack-and-slash with a progression that basically defines the term “generic”: your first quest is to “clear Canals B3 Normal”. The second quest is “clear Canals B3 Hard”, which is exactly the same as Normal, just for 2-3 players, even though it wasn’t any more difficult alone. And the third quest, you guessed it, would be “clear Canals B3 Very Hard”, tuned for 3-4 people. While this time around the monster’s health was noticeably increased, it was still pretty easy alone, and of course, neither the environment nor the enemies changed between quests. In any case, the “gameplay” consisted of killing a group of monsters, collecting meaningless stuff from the floor, getting annoyed about the randomly disappearing skill icons on the hot bar, killing the next group of enemies, and so on, until a boss had to be defeated, after which the game either crashed or not. Definitely exciting stuff, although I didn’t stick around to see if quest 4, presumably “clear Sewers B2 Normal”, would be even more riveting. It’s actually the second game of this nature I had the “pleasure” of playing – the first being the equally bad Vindictus – and I just don’t get who’s actually playing this kind of garbage for more than a few minutes.

Something I also don’t understand is why Steam’s service is so unstable, given the shitloads of money Valve must make from it. At times, the download servers didn’t respond for hours, and the inventory system also crashed more than just once. The Steam client also liked to freeze on starting games quite often, a testament of the instability of the entire platform under heavy load. This is something Valve really should have fixed by now, considering how many years Steam is on the market. It’s also a damn shame the Steam client doesn’t allow the user to limit parallel downloads or set priorities to specific games, but I guess that’s just relevant to people with slow connections (which, at least to Valve, obviously don’t exist).

After spending quite a good amount of money, it was almost ironic that I had the most fun with a free-to-play title: Champions Online. I had never even looked at it before since the whole super hero vibe didn’t appeal to me, but it’s a decent little MMORPG with some fun ideas. For the few hours I needed to complete the achievement, I felt at least entertained and might indeed give it another go later.

With all the achievements I had to complete, of course something else got the short end of the stick: finally finishing Skyrim, let alone touching any other of the games in my ever-growing backlog. Thanks to Christmas, the list only became longer as I was gifted Saints Row 3 and Batman Arkham City; in other words, two more major games that take a bit longer to complete than your average Call of Duty campaign. Oh well, maybe I’ll get to them before the summer sale …

The not-so-glorious final result with 59 objectives completed, minus 7 coal I wasted on crafting. In total, I got 42 coal, a good amount of totally useless vouchers, and two old (but good) games.

Today, I still have some objectives left to complete, but I just can’t be bothered anymore. I quickly finished Magicka, Hoard and BIT.TRIP BEAT (which was totally worth the time!), but after two weeks of playing tons of different games, I am just terribly exhausted. Also, I doubt it would help my chances on winning the big prize anyway. I’ll see tomorrow!

My thanks go to the helpful people of SteamCheeves.com and the Great Gift Pile Wiki, which I also worked on for a while, until some vandals messed things up.