Jumping in Slow Motion: The Sequel

Recently, I wrote a little about Max Payne, which I'd neglected to play until this winter. Now it's a week later and I've gotten through Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

Again, very enjoyable, and again, occasionally hilarious. In my opinion, it wasn't quite as difficult as the first — or, at least, it seemed to require a bit less of that dreaded trial-and-error save scumming in most levels. This is because fewer of the fights are set up in such a way that you'll be blasted as soon as you enter a room and subsequently die for no good reason other than your failure to predict the future (which, of course, was perfectly fine in the first Max Payne as long as you didn't mind saving often and learning things the hard way).

Regardless, I still progressed through Max Payne 2 at a snail's pace, retrying some fights over and over again before moving on, but that was usually by choice rather than by way of humiliating failure. After getting past a particular room, I'd often decide to see if I could do it again without getting shot, or with as few bullets as possible, or just for the sake of using some grenades (which I have a tendency to hoard until I can't carry any more).

The combat itself seemed a lot more forgiving. Either that, or I've just gotten that much less terrible at third-person shooters in general, and Max Payne in particular. So maybe I'm completely wrong, but I did get the impression that the enemies' reaction times were increased, and that the protagonist is a bit more bulletproof than he was before. Bullet time, also, seems considerably more useful this time around.

Maybe I'd be able to offer a better analysis of the differences between the two games if I were to play them both in the same day, perhaps side-by-side for a careful comparison, but I'm less interested in the details than in the overall experience of playing the game. In short, it was a hell of a good time.

The story, though I'd be lying if I said it were even 10% of my motivation for finishing the game, was a lot better than in the original. Spending some time playing as Max Payne's sidekick, nemesis, and love interest Mona Sax was a nice change, too, even if it was only a superficial one. What I really didn't like about the game was the occasional escort mission, the first of which has a player-controlled Mona Sax defending a nearly-helpless computer-controlled Max Payne.

Escort and defense missions are generally pretty terrible in any game, and I failed plenty of times in this particular level — partly because it was such a drastic change of pace, and partly because I vastly overestimated the protagonist's ability to survive when I wasn't controlling him. With Mona Sax high up in a building and Max Payne down with the bad guys on the ground, this part of the game is essentially an exercise in spotting those bad guys before they can start shooting. If Max is getting shot and you don't see the shooter right away, his health is going to drop very quickly.

By contrast, whenever the player is controlling Max Payne and Mona Sax is nearby, she's invincible and doesn't need to be defended. In these particular fights, if you're feeling lazy, you can even hang back and let her wipe out every enemy in the room. I can't help but wonder if the developers sought intentionally to turn the so-called "damsel in distress" cliché on its head with this rather unusual discrepancy. I almost wonder what Anita Sarkeesian thinks of it, and perhaps we'll find out when she finally releases the long-overdue premier video in her crowd-funded series on sexism in video games, but if she does analyze this game then she'll probably be more interested in the fact that the game's heroine is seen nude or partially undressed on multiple occasions, and might be regarded as little more than an excuse for sex appeal if you can manage to ignore most of the game's plot.

Whatever her purpose in the game, I really started to enjoy Max Payne 2 during the first level in which Mona Sax is the playable character, though I can't say exactly why. Maybe it was the level design. Or maybe it's just that I had finally reached the point where practice pays off and started getting a lot of headshots with the Desert Eagle... which, by the way, might just be the most satisfying weapon in the game. Even blowing up three guys with a grenade isn't nearly as gratifying as efficiently popping each of them in the head as you jump out from cover in slow motion, and even though painting the entire room with bullet holes while wielding dual Ingram machine pistols might be more effective if you're still a beginner, it also gets dull pretty quickly. Part of making an enjoyable shooter is including a selection of weapons that feel powerful (without actually making them so powerful that they break the balance of the game), and this means good sound effects. The Ingram, unfortunately, sounds awful, but the Desert Eagle sounds very nice.

It only does the job when you can manage to hit the bad guys in the face, but that's where you should always be aiming regardless of your weapon of choice. Headshots are everything in Max Payne (which is why I find it so strange that the developer, Remedy Entertainment, went on to create Alan Wake, in which shooting a bad guy in the head is no different from shooting him in the toe... but I guess that's just because Alan Wake really isn't a shooter). Max Payne 2, like its predecessor, very often becomes a game of activating bullet time and then clicking on heads as quickly as you can. Anything else is a waste of bullets.

Now that I've gotten both of Remedy Entertainment's Max Payne games out of my backlog, I can look forward to (eventually) playing Rockstar Games' Max Payne 3. But, as I've mentioned before, I'm in need of a better computer, and I'd rather wait until after I make that purchase so that I don't have to play the game on minimum graphical settings, or at a mediocre frame rate, or both.

Jumping in Slow Motion: The Game

Last night, I finished Max Payne. (The first one.) It took me a while, because my playing time has been cut drastically by that irritating thing called employment, but I finally finished it.

I'd previously played both games in Remedy Entertainment's newer series, Alan Wake, so I was confident in the developers' ability to create an entertaining third-person shooter. Obviously, though, the two franchises don't really have much in common aside from the presence of firearms, the fact that each game is named after its protagonist, and the amount of time you'll spend looking at the back of each protagonist's head.

Max Payne, for example, is insanely, ludicrously, hilariously violent. It was even a bit awkward, I must admit, to start playing this game less than a week after a particular mass murder which called into question (for some) the effects of violent video games on young people. Personally, I don't think games like this one are harmful at all, but the subject was still on my mind. This is exactly the type of game, I thought to myself, that would start a misinformed media frenzy if it were ever discovered in the bedroom of some kid who had gone and shot a bunch of people.

If someone told me that Max Payne, of all games, might desensitize players to violence and make them more likely to commit violent acts, I'd respond that the game is just too damn silly to have that kind of effect on people. The game doesn't take itself very seriously at all, and while some might say that's part of the problem, there's just no way that anyone could get real ideas about harming people after playing a game in which most of the shooting is done while jumping in slow motion. If a killer in the making were going to get ideas about how to commit a mass murder from a video game (which is unlikely), or if such a person actually wanted to train for such an act using video games (which is extremely unlikely), he or she would probably be found playing a more realistic shooter.

Max Payne has absolutely no respect for the concept of realism, and everything (including the violence and the motivation for violence) is consequently so tongue-in-cheek that, to me, this particular shooter almost seems like a parody of its own genre. (It some parts it even becomes a parody of itself.) Like the gameplay, the story is pretty grim, in a lot of ways — it involves drug use, corruption, government conspiracy, and a ton of murder — but there's enough humor and absurdity in the telling of that story to lighten the mood, just a little, if you're paying attention. More importantly, the ridiculous, contorted expression on Max Payne's unmoving face destroys the serious tone of the opening cinematic. I couldn't hold it in; I had to laugh. In fact, that happened a lot throughout the game, not necessarily because it was meant to be funny but because the stuff happening on my screen was so insane.

The type of carnage that occurs throughout Max Payne is only a couple of steps beyond cartoon violence. There's a bit of blood spray and some flailing when the bad guys fall down, but that's it. They even stay in one piece when they're blown up with grenades, which makes it more hilarious than tragic when a thug tries to toss a grenade at you and ends up killing himself. I should also mention that Max Payne isn't the only one with a goofy face. All of this is due in part to the outdated graphical capabilities of the game, but the developers clearly weren't aiming for realism in any case. The only hint of realism throughout the entire experience is that the protagonist is by no means invincible. If you're playing for the first time, prepare to watch Max Payne die over and over again, sometimes from a single gunshot without any warning.

Part of what made the game interesting for me is that the main character, though certainly a bad ass, is pretty fragile for an action hero. I played through the game on the easiest difficulty setting (because the others are initially locked), and the game still killed me plenty of times. Unlike some other video game protagonists, Max Payne isn't exactly a bullet sponge... and unlike some other video game villains, the ones here aren't always terrible at shooting, so you won't be feeling so great if one of them manages to shoot first. You can fill up your health bar by finding painkillers and eating them like candy — another aspect of the game which is so absurdly unrealistic that it's hard to see it as anything but lighthearted humor — but the painkillers don't work instantaneously. If you start getting hit with bullets, and the guy who fired them isn't already dead, you're in big trouble, and you'll probably be watching your own slow-motion death before you can head for cover.

The reason Max can survive to the end of the game, taking down hundreds of heavily armed bad guys along the way, isn't because he's tougher. It's because of the advantages that you, as a player, have over the game — actual intelligence, the ability to quicksave and try again when you die, and the ability to know what's coming when you do so. The game is very scripted, so it's rather predictable. If you immediately die when you walk into a room because some thug with a shotgun was waiting or you on the left, you'll know to turn left the next time you enter that room. If you get blown up by a grenade that comes flying around the corner as you walk down a hallway, you know that the same grenade will be thrown in the same spot the next time around.

Since playing the game for the first time without dying over and over again is virtually impossible, you'll have to rely heavily on quicksaving. In some places, you'll only succeed through trial and error. You can always improve your reflexes and practice your aiming, but you'll win by knowing where the bad guys are and by turning to shoot them before they appear.

The player also has the ability to jump in slow motion, shooting in mid-air, and this is the game's big gimmick. Having trouble with a particular gun fight? Try using bullet time. While it certainly isn't the end-all game-winning move, as the slow-motion feature in F.E.A.R. was, it's still pretty useful. Then again, the game was designed around it, so it's really all but necessary if you don't want to be hopelessly outgunned. Like quicksaving, it's a crutch, but it's a crutch you'll probably need to lean on in order to beat the game. If you refuse to use those crutches, you'll be putting yourself through a lot of unnecessary punishment.

In any case, despite the occasional frustration, Max Payne was a pretty interesting experience. To be perfectly honest, I didn't expect to like it very much, for some of the game's most noticeable attributes are associated today with bad game design — the scripted enemy behavior, the excessive reliance on a single gameplay gimmick, and what might be called artificial difficulty (in the sense that the player will die frequently through no fault of his or her own and must rely on save scumming to progress). But the game is still fun, in its own way. Furthermore, while much of the game is a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek embrace of senseless ultra-violence, Max Payne is still known for its great writing.

The plot isn't the most imaginative, but the protagonist's monologues — though a bit too heavy on the metaphors — are very well done. They affect the mood and the atmosphere of the game in a way not often seen in shooters, and the neo-noir graphic-novel style storytelling makes the game truly unique.

Obviously, the game is pretty outdated now, so I'm not sure how strongly I should recommend it to the average player. You certainly won't see the beauty in this 2001 game's ugly graphics if you can't compare them to the uglier graphics of the late '90s and beyond. But I hope new and future fans of the series will keep returning to this game despite its visual shortcomings. The franchise is still alive with the past year's release of Max Payne 3, and it's always best to play an entire series in order rather than simply skipping to the newest game.

Then again, I haven't yet played either of the Max Payne sequels, and I honestly can't say whether the latest installment bears any resemblance to the original.

We're All Mass Murderers

One week ago, a guy in Connecticut went and killed 20 young children, 6 adults, and himself. If you've been anywhere but under a rock for the past seven days, you've heard all about it, so I won't elaborate. It's a tragedy.

Predictably, in an attempt to make sense of it all, the media and the politicians have come up with a list of scapegoats against which the government is now being pressured to take action. You probably see where I'm going with this. It's the usual list of suspects: gun control, school security, and violence in media — specifically, in video games.

I understand the need to throw the blame around. No one wants to admit that a catastrophe like this one is almost completely unavoidable, so we narrow down the enormous list of contributing factors to an arbitrary few which might, we think, be controlled; we don't even think about the uncontrollable factors because that's just too depressing. So we say, let's tighten security at public schools, and let's tighten restrictions on guns. No one wants to accept that such a mentally disturbed and suicidal person, hell bent on taking people with him when he dies, is going to find a way to do it — even if it's difficult to obtain a firearm, and even if it's not easy to get into the building.

Take a look at this particular shooting, for example. The guy forced his way into a school which had already taken every reasonable security measure. The doors were locked so he shot through a window to get in. Short of multiple armed guards at every entrance (a ridiculously infeasible solution), what were they missing? Metal detectors at the doors, a common placebo in a post-Columbine world, obviously don't help when someone comes in shooting everyone on sight. Maybe bullet-proof glass would have helped, but then he might have crashed his car through the doors, or used a bomb, or waited until the kids went outside for recess. The reality of the situation is that there's no way to make a school impenetrable.

Likewise, there's no realistic way to keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous people. We can try, but there's always going to be another tragedy that occurs despite whatever precautions we take. Bad people are going to get their hands on guns for as long as guns exist — which, by the way, is forever and always, because it's too late to stop them from being invented, manufactured, and sold to millions of people. I could go and steal a gun right now, from a legal gun owner, and kill a guy for no reason, and it will not have mattered what the gun laws were or how the gun's original owner obtained it.

So yeah, blame guns... but be aware that blaming guns only works if your solitary goal is to assign blame. If you actually want to get things done and solve problems, it's pointless. To use a classic (or perhaps trite but still valid) argument, even a total ban on guns would only disarm those civilians who obey the law, and murderers typically don't. Obviously, this is just an example to illustrate the futility of trying to place limits on something for which there's already a black market, and I'm aware that the goal here isn't to repeal the second amendment. Nobody whose opinion is worth a nickle actually wants to ban guns altogether, for then we'd truly be at the mercy of the thugs who still manage to get them. The sensible approach, anti-gun folks say, is to take a careful look at gun regulations and see if they need to be adjusted.

There's a lot of talk about smaller magazines, for example, but reloading isn't that hard, especially when the innocent children you're shooting aren't fighting back. In a perfect world, the ultimate goal of gun regulation would not be to make criminals kill us more slowly, but to keep guns only in the hands of law-abiding citizens. In reality, that's a pretty tough job. Everyone's a law-abiding citizen until his or her first crime, and if that first crime is mass murder then we're boned. If only real life were more like The Minority Report. If only we could know who the criminals are in advance and take away their rights accordingly. But there are some realistic precautions we can take. For example, perhaps the shooter's mother, from whom the guns were stolen, should not have been allowed to have firearms in the same house as a person who was known to be mentally ill. Although I suppose one doesn't always know when ones offspring is crazy enough to shoot up a school, dealing with mental health is probably a good place to start.

And that's what matters, really. The guy was crazy, and we might never know for sure why he did it. Yet, in looking for reason where none exists, politicians have been quick to point instead to a culture obsessed with violence — yes, the culture in which nearly all of us live healthy and functional lives without committing mass murder — and this, of course, is where video games are mentioned. After all, the shooter in Connecticut played video games, according to news reports. That's right, he played violent games, with guns in them, and that must have driven him to kill people... because, as we all know, that's a totally normal reaction to violent video games... and it's not like playing video games is totally normal behavior for an entire generation or two. (In case you missed the sarcasm, what I'm saying is that the killer's possession of violent video games is neither significant nor newsworthy, but that doesn't stop a bunch of technophobic old people from directing a large portion of the blame at the one thing they truly don't understand.)

I shouldn't need to point out that life-long exposure to war-themed, assassination-themed, murder-themed video games (and movies and books) has never given me any desire to kill a bunch of people in real life. But why not? Shouldn't I be going on a killing spree right now? I've killed so many virtual people in video games that, if they were real people, I'd be worse than Hitler. I'm a virtual mass murderer, just like everyone who ever played a first-person shooter. I grew up on shooting things. Even so, I turned out just fine, and I know a few million people who can say the same. Maybe it's because I know the difference between reality and fantasy. Maybe it's because I know the difference between right and wrong, even without the help of some religion to continually threaten me with the idea of eternal damnation. Maybe it's because I'm not mentally ill.

But hey, that doesn't really matter now; conservative politicians and sensationalist newscasters know that video games cause violence, because that's the only explanation for what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School, right? A crazy guy played video games, and therefore video games made him crazy? Well, that's what we're supposed to believe, but I don't. If someone is evil enough or crazy enough to actually murder 26 people, he certainly doesn't need to play video games in order to get the idea of using a gun as his instrument of death. Furthermore, it's fairly obvious that people who don't play video games are vastly overestimating a first-person shooter's ability to immerse the player. Contrary to what pundits and crackpot psychologists will claim, players are aware that it's only a game and, in the absence of some crippling mental deficiency, they won't be led to believe that really killing real people with a real gun is just as fun and harmless as competing against friends in some crazy deathmatch-style game with cartoon violence and infinite lives.

The shooter played video games just like every other 20-year-old guy I know. There are reports that he was obsessed with them — that he spent all day in his basement playing Call of Duty — but if he truly had a video game addiction (and if such a thing even exists), that's more likely a symptom of his mental illness than a contributing factor. Surely we should all recognize that the act of playing Call of Duty, one of the most popular video game series of the past few years, is not a warning sign that we should hope to use in order to predict school shootings. At least, I certainly hope not. Call of Duty: Black Ops sold 5.6 million copies worldwide in a single day, and 13.7 million copies to date in the United States alone.

That's a whole lot of potential school shootings. If video games create murderers, we should all be soiling our pants and heading for the bomb shelter. Fortunately, the available data doesn't really support the idea that violent video games cause violent acts. (Some further reading here.)

But I'm not too bothered by the blind insistence (regardless of the absence of any reliable evidence) that violence in media is destroying the moral fabric of our society. That's an opinion you're allowed to have, as far as I'm concerned, though I do strongly disagree. What really bothers me is that the people making these claims just don't know anything about video games. If they had pointed solely to the most gruesomely and graphically violent first-person shooters in their quest to find something to blame, then at least their arguments would be coherent. Instead, intentionally or not, the media is once again portraying all of gaming as an amoral pastime for misanthropes, while failing to realize that some of the most popular games of the past decade — I'm looking at you, Portal — simply aren't violent at all.

Things made some sense when they singled out Call of Duty, a game which does, in fact, put players in the role of a soldier who goes around shooting people (though, more accurately, the soldier shoots enemy soldiers in a time of war). But even if they hit the nail on the head, here, I think it was blind luck, since it's pretty clear that most of the people calling for a boycott or a ban on violent games can't even tell one genre from another. Immediately after the shooting, people were so quick to blame Mass Effect — a role-playing game better known for its sex scenes than its shooting — that a mob-like raid on the game's Facebook page began before the real killer was even identified (and ended shortly thereafter).

The media also pointed to StarCraft II, a real-time strategy game, and I think this is especially ridiculous. Not only is this not a mindless murder game; it's not even a shooter. As a strategy game, it's all about resource management, map control, and positioning of troops. Furthermore, StarCraft is to Chess as Call of Duty is to beating your head against the wall. You could judge StarCraft based on the number of virtual "people" who die in a typical match — surely, that number is well into the hundreds, or even thousands — but the player isn't assuming the role of a guy with a gun. The player is the commander telling all the guys with guns where to go. Since real-time strategy games like StarCraft don't put a gun in the player's hands, the experience absolutely does not bear any resemblance to walking into a school and murdering a bunch of children, not even to the sickest mind.

So yes, the game is violent in the sense that its central theme is armed conflict, but it's an idiotic example to use if you're trying to draw some tenuous connection between a mass murder and the killer's enjoyment of interactive media. To some, I guess, the presence of any violent theme is bad enough. But most of these "violent" games, I think, aren't simply violent for the sake of eroding our children's sense of morality. The typical video game has a story, every story involves some form of conflict, the most dramatic conflicts tend to be violent, and violent conflicts in the modern world begin and end with the pull of a trigger. Want fewer war-themed games? Let's have fewer wars. It's not that we should just give up and blame human nature, but we can't expect every video game to be full of super happy rainbows and sunshine either.

Video games consistently imitate life, so even if life does imitate video games on rare occasions, you can't say that video games are the source of all our problems. And, again, it's nothing if not completely illogical to blame video games for a mass murder just because the murderer was one of a billion people who play them. (I bet he also took history classes in high school, but I'm not blaming those history teachers and their lessons about war, because there's no real correlation, let alone any evidence of causation.) There isn't even a very good reason for the news people and the politicians to pick on video games, in particular, so much more than other forms of media that supposedly glorify violence. What about movies and TV shows?

You could say that video games are special because of the level of interactivity that's missing in other forms of entertainment, but I'm beginning to doubt very much that this has anything to do with it. No, video games are special because they're the "new" thing that too many people still don't understand. Fifteen or twenty years ago, they would have blamed rap music. Fifteen or twenty years before that, they would have blamed comic books.

But why does it matter what the news people think? It's not like they're actually going to persuade the federal government to ban violent video games. What they might do is try to keep violent video games out of the hands of minors, and if they want to do that, they can go right ahead. They've already been trying that for a long time, though. In theory, minors can't actually buy M-rated games from most stores, because these stores voluntarily enforce rules regarding the ESRB ratings, but most minors have these things called parents, and parents invariably buy video games for their children without even looking at the ratings.

If young, impressionable children playing violent games is indeed a problem, then irresponsible parents are the cause. They buy games like Grand Theft Auto for their 10-year-old kids, and then they turn around and complain when they see how violent the games are. If they educated themselves and paid attention to the ratings, there would be no complaints, because the video game industry is already holding up its own end of the deal. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that parents ignore ratings, because most parents are old people, and when I say "old people" I'm not talking about age; I'm talking about the fact that they don't know what's going on because they didn't grow up playing video games. As a result, they think video games are just toys, exclusively for children. So they think every video game is appropriate for children, and they're shocked when they find out the truth.

And that's why we have this funny situation in which video games are, according to gaming-illiterate folks, appropriate for no one. If you're an adult and you play video games, they say "you're too old for that!" If you're a kid and you play video games, they say "you're too young for that!" What's the appropriate age?

I say it's any age. There's a video game for everyone.

I think the average adult's completely inadequate understanding of video games is the source of a lot of confusion. They see that Black Ops is the most popular game, so they assume that every game is like Black Ops. But this is just so far from the truth that I don't even know where to start. So I won't start. I'm not even going to waste my time suggesting a list of wholesome and non-violent games for old farts to play in order to broaden their understanding of video games both as an entertainment medium and as a form of artistic expression. They should sit down and find their own way like the rest of us did. It's not hard. All you have to do is look past the mainstream garbage for one second.

Until they do, I'm going to disregard everything they say. Honestly, would you listen to a guy's proposal for a ban on violence in movies if you found out he had never watched a movie in his entire life? Of course not. So why would you listen to a guy talk about violent video games when you know he's never played a video game? I wouldn't, and you really shouldn't.

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Update: December 31, 2012

I haven't written anything new on this stupid blog for the past ten days, so instead I'll just post some additional reading here. Though I don't agree with everything contained within the following articles, I found them somewhat interesting:

Senator Calls for a Study of Video Game Violence
Violence and Video Games in America
The Numbers Behind Video Games and Gun Deaths in America
'Halo 4' Won't Make Your Kids Violent: Why Parents Should Play Video Games With Their Kids

(Wait a minute... why is the best gaming-related journalism coming from a site like Forbes?)

How To: Steam Sales

Note: It seems that daily deals and flash sales are no longer a regular part of major Steam events. Unless things go back to the way they were before, this guide is obsolete. It is being kept online for historical purposes only.

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Steam has been going a bit crazy with sales lately. They haven't all been mind-blowing but it seems like there's a new one every time I check the store. There was that three-day Halloween Sale, then a week-long Autumn Sale for Thanksgiving and Black Friday... and I guess this is pretty normal, so far, but there was also the recent week-long sale of controller-compatible games to celebrate the Big Picture feature coming out of beta, and that particular event ended only a week ago.

Now, with only a week before Christmas Eve, it's just about time for the highly anticipated 2012 Winter Sale, which will run through the holidays. I'm not exactly sure when it will start, but it should be sometime in the next few days. (Last year, it began on Monday, December 19; the year before that, it began on Monday, December 20; and the year before that, it began on Monday, December 21. Since today is a Monday with no sale, and the event is unlikely to start as late as December 24, we can be pretty sure that the Monday pattern won't hold; instead, I'm betting on a start date of Thursday, December 20, give or take a day.)

The Winter Sale is typically the best sale of the year on Steam, rivaled only by the Summer Sale. In other words, it's kind of a big deal. The holiday season, of course, is the best time to buy video games anywhere — GOG, for example, is having a sale right now — but Steam is so well known for its discounts that other distributors get mad and pretend that sales are a bad thing even though developers completely disagree. And yes, this particular sale is a biggie.

So if you're planning to do some video game shopping on Steam in the coming days, it helps to be prepared. Unfortunately, some people don't really understand how Steam sales work, either because they've never seen one or because they don't pay attention. They buy a game on the first day of the sale when it's 50% off, and then they get mad when the game's price is bumped to 75% off just a couple of days later. This is great for the people who made the game, I guess — so go ahead and pay more than necessary in order to support the industry if you want to — but as long as developers are willing to apply deep discounts to their games during daily deals and flash sales, you might as well take advantage of it.

With that goal in mind, I've created a helpful flow chart, seen below.

The same rules certainly might apply to other online stores whose holiday sales have a similar format of long-lasting (mediocre) discounts punctuated by short-lived (much better) deals. In any case, you really shouldn't buy a game from any online store, especially Steam, if it's not on sale and there's likely to be a sale just around the corner... that is, I mean, unless you like paying four times as much as everyone else. There's no reason to be in such a rush that you buy something too early. Since digitally distributed goods are delivered instantaneously, you'd be a fool not to wait until the last minute.

I just wish I could buy video games for everyone I know. Picking out gifts for younger people is so easy. The older people in my family, on the other hand... well, if they don't start giving me hints really soon, it's gift cards for all of them.

Happy Holidays!

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Update (December 20, 2012):

My estimate for the start of the Steam sale was dead-on. I feel so special.