Steam suddenly launched a summer sale a few days ago, and I’ve been buying too damn much stuff on it. I haven’t spent a lot of time on anything bought in it yet, but there are some initial impressions:

Crash Time III: The hook of this one is that you play as a pair of detectives and chase down crooks in kinda-realistic police chases. Only ‘kinda’ though, since I’m not sure real detectives use robot drones that drive under the criminal’s car and blow it up, or cause horrific chain crashes… It’s better than I thought it would be, but the difficulty is a bit uneven. One of the first missions unlocked is unbeatable with the cars I have now — even accelerating flat-out, the crook can’t be caught up to and gets away.

Hearts of Iron III: Semper Fi: An expansion that supposedly fixes a lot of the problems with the original HoI3. Unfortunately the performance is really uneven, with a lot of sudden long pauses and jerky map scrolling. And some dumb stuff still seems to occur: Japan couldn’t even make it into northern China, it still seems to have trouble with making landings, etc.

Dark Void Zero: A retro-8bit-style platformer game with a jetpack. It’s pretty well-done, but damn, it’s hard. Enemy shots seem really hard to dodge while you’re using the jetpack, and the levels feel huge. I’m not even sure what to do to pass the first one yet, if I can even survive long enough.