Holiday Gift Guide: five awesome Steam games that make great gifts

With Halloween out of the way, it's now officially time to look towards CHRISTMAS!

Stop right there! Let me turn those groans of yours -- those Scroogeish grunts of displeasure -- into smiles and laughter! For this year, how about giving the gift of game with Valve's Steam? OK, so they might not be your smiles nor your laughter, but what feeling of joy is greater than seeing someone's face light up with happiness and the glow of a widescreen TV)?

For $10 to $20 you can give someone a game that will provide hours and hours of pleasure and fun this festive season. Think about how much your son would love you if you gave him an excuse to leave the dinner table early, to play with his new toy? Or if your wife could bus virtual tables, rather than real ones? Perhaps you just want to treat yourself to some brain-scratching, finger-contorting goodness. Any way you want it, the best Christmas presents this year will be video games.

Read on for the five best games currently available on Steam. They're all cheap. They're all fun. They're all a complete steal.

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1. Machinarium (watch the trailer)
No comprehensive review of Steam games would be complete without its current poster child. Machinarium is a puzzle and adventure game, made by the same guys that brought us Samorost (a great browser game in its own right) -- and you can see the continued theme and art direction, that's for sure!


In Machinarium you play a robotic protagonist that must battle against corruption and evil to ultimately save his robotic girlfriend. Think of Wall-E but... er... darker. Twisted. Crowbars. Daydreams. And it's non-linear to boot too (though some people might prefer a game with more direction).

Machinarium is so popular that it's currently out-selling Batman: Arkham Asylum (another great game), at least on Steam. You should seriously consider adding it to your Christmas stocking -- or just cave and buy it now.

2. Braid (watch the trailer)
Now Braid is an interesting one. Like Machinarium it's a puzzle game, and a hard one at that, but... that's where the list of similarities end. In fact, that's the only similarity Braid has with any game out there. Braid has puzzles, and platforms, and you jump between them, and onto enemies to stun them. There are keys too -- but there is no normal progression between levels. Let me explain.


If you can't do something now, you just move on to the next level. You can play through a large section of the game without ever finishing a level. It's more of an experience and less of a game. You see, in Braid, you gain the ability to control time itself. You can move it forwards and backwards, stop and start it, rewind -- and all of these temporal wibbles must be utilized in solving the puzzles. And these puzzles get hard -- really damn hard. In fact, most people can't complete Braid. But that's OK, because this one's more about the journey than the actual finishing.

3. World of Goo (watch the trailer)
I want to include this one as my 'family gaming' choice, though it's not immediately recognizable as something you'd gift to a child or loved one. Well, OK, the little 'goos' (as in... little blobs of goo) are very cute, and make dorky and delicious squealing noises, but other than that... this game is quite dark!

World of Goo is, quite simply, a physics game. Your job is to build bridges and towers to reach an end point -- the story basically has you playing the role of 'savior of the goo'. As you progress through the levels, a fun story unfolds. The game doesn't really get very hard, at least if you're an experienced gamer (or bridge builder!) -- but the learning curve is just right for a kid's first game. Words can't really describe how fun this game is. It's probably the most fun game I've played since Portal.



And for the competitive types out there, there's even a worldwide online leaderboard -- compete with your fellow Goo Masters to create the best bridges and towers! And don't be too shocked when you find out just how far you have to go to become a true Goodi Master (Jedi... Goodi... get it? No? I guess that was pretty bad...)

4. Plants vs. Zombies (watch the trailer)
50 levels! 26 types of zombies!! 49 powerful perennials!!! SPECIAL PLANTS! Battle through day, night -- and FOG!

That's how Plants vs. Zombies advertises itself. And man, this latest creation from PopCap, the makers of Bejeweled, Peggle, Zuma -- the list goes on and on -- is amazing. I love it when old PC genres make it to the forefront of casual gaming, because this here is a tower-defense game. Not that 90% of those that play this game know that it originates from a Warcraft 3 mod, but they don't care either -- all they care about is how damn fun Plants vs. Zombies is.



This is an action-strategy game with a plethora of game modes. There's something for every kind of gamer here, and for short or long play sessions. At the end of the day... you get to shoot down zombies with plant cannons and potato mines. What more could you possibly want? (And seriously, who came up with the idea of plants versus zombies? What a genius.)

5. Trine (watch the trailer)
There's a lot to be said for Trine -- it deserves a lot more than a brief mention at the bottom of a 5-game round-up. But I'll try to do it justice: Trine is an action and adventure game. It's beautiful (as you can see in the video, and in the screenshot below). It's complicated in that there are multiple solutions to almost every problem, but not necessarily hard -- and it feels awfully like this thing is a labor of love, as if the developers have play-tested the entire thing, every permutation, every possibility to death. This thing is smooth!

Tags: adventure, casual, games, hgg, holiday gift guide, HolidayGiftGuide, puzzle, steam, valve