Steam Charts: Cephalopodic

Colossal squid

Feature by John Walker Co-founder

Published on July 17, 2017

Sometimes you set out to write a themed entry of the Steam charts around anagrams, and end up posting videos of octopuses. You know how it is.

10. God Eater 2: Rage Burst

This one makes a reappearance after a year or so thanks to a price drop last week (despite still costing more than it did in the Summer Sale the week before.)

You need to know that God Eater: Rage Burst is an anagram of Rare Buggered Toast. The reason I tell you this is because a lifetime of doing cryptic crosswords has taught me to spot awkwardly grouped words that don't quite make sense and assume them to be an anagram. Perhaps the clue would read,

"Unusual cheer delivered from the back, organising God Eater: Rage Burst. (4,8,5)"

Which of course means I now feel obliged to try to do the same for all the rest of this week's entries. But guess what?! I'm not going to. It could have been a whole thing, this week's theme! Except it would have been excruciatingly boring.

9. Friday The 13th: The Game

I wondered if this one had had its day, slipping out of the charts in recent weeks, but nope! Like a joke about about how Jason Voorhees always comes back coming back, it's come back.

8. Stardew Valley

Similarly, Stardew Valley took a single day off being on sale after the big Steam event, and dropped back down about 40% for a good chunk of last week. It's back up to full price now, but that's still only £11.

I can't even begin to imagine wanting to play gardening in a game. We let our back garden turn to meadow this year, which is the extremely trendy way of saying, "Didn't mow it even once." It looks amazing now! Grass plants growing four or five feet high! The cat loves it. As do the butterflies and bees, breaking from their infamous boxing match to have a happy flitter and buzz about our painstakingly uncultivated maelstrom. Which is to say, you wouldn't want to see a Stardew Valley I'd worked on. (An anagram here would have been "Travelled Ways", which would have been nice.)

7. Fire Pro Wrestling World

I never followed wrestling. I remember going over to Mark Arden's house a few times, because he had Sky, and seeing the Undertaker being all cross about something, but never seeing enough to follow the plots. It was only many years later when I was living with Craig Pearson, formerly of this parish, that I learned just how splendid a thing it could be, in amongst its many, many ugly issues. Most of all, Craig was excellent at impressing upon me the athleticism and skill required for anyone who wanted to get big, as well as explaining the intricacies of the soap opera stories. I still never reached a point of ever choosing to keep up, or watch it on my own, but I still look forward to when Craig comes to stay for a weekend and we watch some wrestling madness he'll have brought with him.

So I asked if he'd played Fire Pro Wrestling World and he said, "A tiny bit, but I don't like the controls." Useless.

6. Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor GOTYE

Eurgh, I love this game - it's one of my favourite games - but I've only been writing the charts for a few weeks and I already can't wait for it to go out of favour again so I don't have to try to think of another pithy paragraph about it. Maybe I should have one with the crossword clue idea.

I'll tell you what I have kept meaning to say, actually. I HATE the name. "Shadow Of Mordor" is great. Lovely and looming title. But it's the "Middle-Earth" prefix. It doesn't make sense in the context! I guess they didn't want to go with Lord Of The Rings: Shadow Of Mordor, because the game takes place between the events of the Hobbit book and the later trilogy. But it'd have made a lot more sense, rather than the most innocuous and bland of identifying features. Having to look for the game under "M" instead of "S" drives me potty. Someone change this.

5. Grand Theft Auto V

Please welcome the 436th entry in our ongoing series, What Are Rockstar Spending All The GTA V Money On?

What Are Rockstar Spending All The GTA V Money On?

This week: Chemical weapons

4. PGL 2017 Krakow CS:GO Major Championship Mega Bundle

There are times when, as I get really fucking dangerously close to 40 (three months left), I feel pretty young. And pretty. The job helps! And then all of a sudden, it really, really doesn't. I look at whatever PGL 2017 Krakow Bumper Sticker Collection is, and feel a tiredness that goes deeper than my bones. It's why we confused old fools hired much smarter people like Pip who understand such things.

So far as I can tell, this is a £31 sticker collection, commemorating this year's million dollar CS:GO tournament in Krakow, which started yesterday. Pretend stickers, mind. Half the astronomical cost goes to the teams participating, and half goes directly into Valve's GIANT BABY KILLING MACHINE.

It is also very confusing that an outdoor activity adventure holiday company appears to host gaming tournaments. In other news, my two year old also loves stickers.