Steam Charts - Blood From A Stone Edition

The games the cool kids bought this week

Feature by John Walker Co-founder

Published on Dec. 17, 2018

Hey, remember the good old days? Those giddy times I like to think of as last week? When the Charts felt fresh and new, filled with potential, as if any interesting game could take a top spot? Well, forget all that because it's all gone to shit again.

But hey, at least the running jokes get to stretch their legs.

10. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands

Tom Clancy's 65% discount is the reason for this one's reappearance in the arse-end of the charts. Which you can still take advantage of until Tom Clancy's 6pm today (17th).

By the way, after I die I give RPS full permission to use my name on absolutely anything they want, no matter how mouldy my corpse at the time of creation. "John Walker's Worst PC Game Endings", that sort of thing.

9. Monster Hunter: World

Last week's guide proved SO popular (one person left a nice comment!). Thus proving that guides are a guaranteed hit. I foresee a future where the internet is more guides than porn. It's a beautiful dream.

Spicklesporn

Defeating Spicklesporn is of course optional. Because it's a game. You don't have to play it. You could go outside and enjoy a walk. What? Is someone making you play it? Then follow our tips.

Spicklesporn's weaknesses

As well as a vulnerable point behind the third horn on her left wing, Spicklesporn suffers from chronic IBS and a severe wheat intolerance. She's also painfully embarrassed about a mole on her left leg, and would rather forget about the time she asked Kulve Taroth if she was pregnant.

How to fight Spicklesporn

Up, up, left, left, right, click, click, up, down, click, right.

8. Kingdom Two Crowns

Well just let me put my snark aside for a moment, upon the plump velvet cushion on which it rests between uses, because here's a game I'm delighted to see chart. Why? Because the screenshots look pretty.

20 years I've been in the biz.

Also it's just rather lovely to see indie games, building on popular sucess, grossing more money in a week than behemoths like Monster Hunter. That's pretty cool!

7. No Man's Sky

A new update (adding in more community-based data collection gubbins, and a few more in-game items) accompanied by a weekend at half price, sees NMS back in our orbit. (Get it?) It'll stay 50% until 6pm today, which is still somehow £20.

I feel like I've completely lost track of this one. Having put in a silly number of hours with the maligned original version, and then trying really hard to get back into it with the first of the big updates, now I just feel like it's become something completely other when I read about the updates. New customisable base plants? Base building feels like such an alien concept to me, in a game that for me was always about constantly travelling somewhere new.

Clearly it's working, as the game is selling well, and its Steam reviews have seen the biggest turnaround of any game I've seen. But I guess the direction it found for success was the opposite of the one I'd wanted it to head in. My NMS would have been a game that gave far more incentive to keep moving on, a deep meaningful narrative purpose to constant exploration, and most of all, a sense that planets were unique, rather than cobbled from a random selection from a limited list.

6. Farming Simulator 19

If anyone has already finished (?) Farming Simulator 19, and is looking for something else to do, our back lawn needs mowing.

5. Stellaris: MegaCorp

An important thing not to think about when playing Stellaris is that, no matter how long humanity has dreamed of the stars, written fiction about our living amongst them (more than you could argue we presently are), we're a species too awful and stupid to actually fund such endeavours. Last year the US spent $610bn on its military, and $19.5bn on NASA. NASA costs 0.47% of the US's annual federal budget, but most Americans think it's vastly more than that. In fact, in 2007 when NASA got 0.58%, a survey showed that Americans estimated it to be closer to 24%.

The population of America thinks a quarter of the government's money is spent on NASA - that would be $995bn in 2017. Which is to say, since there are no riots in the streets nor national campaigns to see this changed, Americans would be cool with a trillion dollars a year going on NASA. 51 times more than is currently being spent. If it were financially possible (which it of course isn't) you could multiply NASA's budget 50 times and no one would, apparently, complain. So double it? Hell, round it up to $50bn? Just imagine the potential. Imagine what they could achieve with two and a half times their current budget, and seemingly with no negative impact from public perception. Heck, anyone with half a brain who's actually paying attention would likely delight in such a move.

Yet, no. We're all probably going to be dead before the first structure is built on Mars, let alone anything extrasolar. So yes, try not to think about this while playing Stellaris.

4. Insurgency: Sandstorm

Adam Smith (sniff) wrote an Insurgency Sandstorm preview at the beginning of this year, in which he wrote:

"It’s one of the most harrowing and thrilling depictions of combat I’ve ever seen, and I think it’s a goddamn work of art."

Which simultaneously makes me want to play it and never ever play it. That said, it's multiplayer only, so I'll definitely never ever play it, because other people are horrid.

3. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six® Siege - Year 4 Pass

I already did Tom Clancy's Running Joke for Wildlands, and now Adam's not here to edit this any more no one removes my awful tasteless jokes about his dead body trying to develop games. What's a man to do?

I don't even want to start to think about how Ubisoft has somehow slipped passed us the notion of subscribing to a shooter for £26 a year on top of the £34 the game costs.

So instead I'm going to tell you that there was a sponge of the species Monorhaphis chuni that lived for 11,000 years.