VGCulture - Steam Thanksgiving Sales

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/

I check Steam generally Tuesdays for Mid-Week Madness, Thursdays for Free weekends and Weekend deals, and on special occasions such as Halloween, Thanksgiving and ESPECIALLY Christmas time.  Steam is known to provide the best deals from 3rd party company games as well as cloud technology so that profile, save data, and preferences are stored online so that you can continue where you were playing from any computer.  Each day, there will be a list of games with really good deals (anywhere from 5%-90% off).  Here are the ones I personally recommend:

-Counter-Strike: Source ($4.99 - 75% off from original) - Counter-Strike (CS) and Counter-Strike Source (CSS) are two of the most play First-Person shooters for the longest time.  It has a good mix of realism with arcade-like game-play with an array of weapons, tons of custom maps and servers, and a strong community that continues to have tournaments, create mods, and provide servers to play one.

-Prototype ($14.99 - 50% off from original) - Prototype is an amazing, open-world Action-Adventure game where you play the role of Alex Mercer, a human with the many capabilities of transforming the body into a dangerous weapon.  Run up buildings, fly around the city, destroy everything around you while following an intriguing story of all the people involved in the "incident" that caused the people of the city to become hostile.  It's a lot of fun, good stress relief, and a variety of ways of playing the game.

-Borderlands ($9.99 - 50% off from original) - If you like the blood-pumping action of a First-Person shooter and like the loot collecting of an Role-Playing game, then you're going to love Borderlands.  It mixes open-world RPG with fast-paced shooting.  Buy new weapons, level up skills, play up to 4-players co-op, and fight humongous monstrosities in this unique Action FPS RPG game.  It was a really fun game to play, be sure to get your friends to join you for the best experience.

-Deus Ex Collection ($4.99 - 75% off from original) - I'm still working on the first game actually since I got it just recently.  I've been told many times over of how Deus Ex is "the" best game created.  I can't say it's "the" best game ever, but I can say it is definitely worth buying and playing through.  The immerse world that the player goes into has such detail (considering it's 10 years old) that it feels more than just a game.  Deus Ex is an experience!  It has the many elements used in current day stealth/action game where the player chooses to play more carefully or more aggressively (I'm playing stealthily).  It's an odd mixture of FPS, RPG, Action, and Adventure.  The entire game is in a FPS format, the level is open ended and has more than one way of completing an objective, has leveling systems like an RPG, an on-going story, and decision making that affects events later in the story.  For Invisible War, I have no idea what it's like.  But the friends that claim the first Deus Ex to be the best game believes that every other Deus Ex did not live up to the original (and that it was terrible).

For me personally, I'm planning on buying the Indie Energy Pack and hopefully enjoy the games as well as learn something about Indie game development.  It's $4.99 compared to its original $49.95 (so 90% off) so I hope I can make those $5 worth it.  In terms of the other games on the list, I am interested in Alpha Protocol, but I don't have time to play it at the moment (since I'm working on finishing other games right now).  RUSE did not capture my interest after participating in the open Beta earlier in the year.  Shank seems interesting, but it also looks like a game I'll play through once and be done with.  And finally Sam & Max...I'm not sure why, but I can't bring myself to buying point-n-click adventure games.  I actually really like them, especially the Ace Attorney series (which I consider to be one of the greatest series in videogames).  That's it for now, enjoy the sales!