Steam is celebrating the 10 year anniversary of Half-Life by reducing the price of Half-Life 1 to just $0.98. As someone who absolutely loved the original Half-Life but for some reason never finished it, I'll be snatching up this deal! UPDATE: The deal has ended.. Sorry if you missed out!

Here's an excerpt from my review from The Best Games You've Never Played thread:

Half-Life 1 was incredible to me because it was the first FPS game (I know of) that actually had a real story about why you were going around killing things. It was the total opposite of the macho FPS "Bad Dude" games of the day like Doom, Quake, or Duke Nukem 3D. You weren't there because you were a tough mofo and the world/universe relied on you for its survival. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and you're just trying to get out alive. You don't even start out with a weapon. When you first encounter the enemies, you've got to RUN! Plus, the way it loaded sections of the game kept you interested in the story because you were always trying to survive one disaster after another. There was no transition between levels where you could look at your statistics and save and rest and relax. It would have made a great sci-fi book (or dare I say movie?) if properly adapted.

-https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=11606.msg104034#msg104034

Why are you still reading this? Hurry up and buy it!

For what is probably the first time in my life, I just saw an ad banner that interested me enough to find out more information about the product being advertised. The "product" is called Swoopo, and it is an online auction site unlike any other I've seen before.

From staring at it for the past 10 minutes trying to understand how it works, this is my observation:

Auctions have a continuous countdown timer to when the auction will end. However, this is actually the part that is vastly different from traditional auction websites. The timers are relatively short, and are based on the current bid for the item. So for instance, I'm looking at a Nintendo Wii that is currently going for $0.60. That's right. 60 cents. And the countdown timer appears to be 30 minutes until the end of the auction.

But here's the thing: Each time someone bids, it resets the timer. And actually, someone just bid on the Wii, and now it is going for $0.75 and the timer is now 15 minutes until the end of the auction. And it continues like this. As the bid increases, the time on the countdown timer decreases, until some of the auctions are down to 10 or 15 seconds for each bid.

And to prevent an auction lasting forever, there is a final ending time for the auction. This Wii auction is scheduled to end, at the latest, on December 2nd, if people keep bidding until then.



So it actually sounded fun and unique enough that I decided to sign up and try it out. And that's when I learned about the one "feature" that, to me, makes it sound too much like a scam than a real auction site.

You see, in order to place any bid on any item, you need to pay $1 for each bid. (Basically, you buy bids in advance.) That, to me, brings up too many questions about whether these other bidders are even real people, or just auto-bots made by Swoopo to artificially inflate the bid price and make you pay another $1 to bid again.

I can tell by some strange English sentences on the site that it's based in a foreign country. (Looks like Germany, after some research.) Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. It's just a side-effect of being inundated with spam that I'm always a little wary of professional looking sites with strange English translations.

Looks too much like a scam when their main source of revenue is to have people buy lots of bids instead of buying lots of products. Too much of a conflict of interests for it to seem ethical to me. I suggest you take a look at it if you want to just see what I'm talking about, but don't say I didn't warn you if you try to buy something and end up paying more on your bids than what you actually paid for the item.

In conclusion: Avoid it! :down: :down:


P.S. They also operate under http://www.swoopo.co.uk, http://www.swoopo.de, http://www.swoopo.es, and http://www.swoopo.at