There is a very good reason to not consume certain substances, especially not right before going to sleep. Human Resources from Uber Entertainment reminds me of those reasons. I've always had a thing for end of world scenarios – the bigger they are, the more violent they are, the better. Human Resources is a game that brings the best of the worst imaginable to gaming, just like HR brings the best of the worst to the workplace.

After looking over our weekend sales round-up, it occurred to us that we always feature hardware, but that's only half of what this site is about. In light of this, we're going to start featuring games that are currently on unbeatable sales. Some of these will be newer games getting major sales for the first time, others will be older games with great deals that we want to let people know about. One of the major pushes of this is to find deals that are going to be out for a bit, so daily deals will typically not be listed. Let us know what you think of this feature and if there are specific games or genres you want us to keep an eye on. As usual, keep glued to our YouTube, facebook, and Twitter accounts for reviews, sales, and build tips as we release them.

This week, we're featuring Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag for $15, Wolfenstein: The New Order at $30, The Banner Saga for $10, and Sid Meier's Civilization V at only $10.

F2P online games publisher Aeria Games today announced that F.E.A.R. Online has received a Steam release date of October 17. FEAR Online is a follow-up to the existing FEAR franchise – one of the best-known horror shooters (though not particularly scary when compared to the likes of Amnesia) – and ships in the free-to-play variety.

Innovators in wallet abuse by owners, Valve today announced an update to its client that aids in streamlining the discovery of new titles. “Discovery” is one of the more tangible benefits of real-world shopping that has been lost to the sands of time (or EB Games); there’s a very distinct, satisfying experience that accompanies finding a new title, buying it, and taking a chance. Steam hopes to bring eyes to its thousands of titles with greater ease, noting that the company has brought-on more than 1300 games in just nine months.

Raptr has just posted its Most Played PC Games for August 2014, a month that welcomed 3 MOBAs into the top-5 for the first time.

The monthly top dog, League of Legends, hosted its LCS playoffs last month, helping increase its Share by 2.82 percent over July. "Share" represents gameplay time as a percentage of the total time spent on all the PC games played by Raptr members.

Minecraft went from being a very simple indie game to incredibly popular -- almost overnight -- with tons of features in three short years. Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, holds a golden cube of a game, one that has even gotten the attention of Microsoft.

After our “where did RTS go?” discussion with Pat Pannullo, former Tiberian Sun designer and current Grey Goo Lead Designer, we got a hands-on play session with the upcoming RTS. Grey Goo – conveniently “GG” – seeks to bring the genre back to its more “beer and pretzels” origins of the 90s and early 00s.

The game still hosts a very real potential for a competitive scene, but it's specifically built to be an input-simplified RTS; the team wants to avoid the complexity of StarCraft – a game that uses heavy unit abilities, structure abilities, macro, micro, and meta play – and instead bring the focus back to core real-time strategy mechanics, the meta game, and epic battles. The resulting product is a game that scales to high competition just as well as it scales to casual LAN play (and Grey Goo does offer LAN), giving players a clear arc of progression if the desire to compete increases.

Command & Conquer may not have been the definitive “first” game in the RTS genre, but it was a milestone in gameplay and mechanics that paved the way for future titles. The 90s and very early 00s saw the rise of “strategy” as a genre, with RTS championing its market dominance. In a very similar fashion to the present-day flood of MOBAs, early RTS and campaign strategy once comprised what felt like the majority of popular titles.

About 25% of my RTS collection, ordered chronologically and then by series.

Command & Conquer was just a small piece of that. We saw the arrival of Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Empire Earth, Shogun: Total War, Ground Control, and the sleeping giants that spawned a decade of games – Warcraft and StarCraft; campaign games also grew, with large thanks to Civilization, Rise of Nations, Galactic Civilizations, and Hearts of Iron; city builders like Zeus, Poseidon, Caesar, Settlers, and Pharaoh also carved out a niche in the overarching “strategy” marketplace.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor—not Destiny—is my most anticipated game of September. I’m taking the road less traveled in games media by honing in on a game that, rather than offering me a horizontally-expanded refresh of its series, integrates a gameplay-enhancing system for a fresh take. Monolith Productions has prioritized the preservation of hack-and-slash combat with a Nemesis interface and engine that gives more weight to players’ battle decisions and encourages them to keep mixing up how they take control of a territory.

I visited Monolith at their Kirkland, Washington studios and spent the afternoon previewing Shadow of Mordor's gameplay and story.

Double Fine continues to surprise with how they craft their take on various game genres. With Massive Chalice, the company has unified the turn-based strategy of XCOM and Crusader Kings with the long-term strategy elements of Civilization, looking through the genetics lens of Fire Emblem. This complex offspring of those games explores the concept of the smallest action having an impact in the longer term – a terms as long as 350 years.

Massive Chalice Lead Animator Geoff Soulis showed us how all the pieces fit together in a hands-on demo at PAX Prime. We’ll start by overviewing Massive Chalice, then describe its classes, explain Double Fine’s flavor of turn-based combat, and tie together combat with prolonging bloodlines.