Welcome to the Steam Winter Sale 2016 Giveaways! Each giveaway has a simple challenge for you to complete by posting in the corresponding thread. Upon doing so, you're automatically entered for the giveaway. Once the giveaway ends, I'll randomly select a winner from those who posted!

If you're like me, your digital libraries are really starting to pile up these days. Whether it be from picking games up on sale, purchasing bundles, etc., it's amazing how fast you can acquire a large digital library, especially on PC. Every now and then, I'll stumble upon a game in my library that I've never even heard of and I find it interesting to load those up just to see what they are.

For this challenge, you'll need to find a random game in your collection (digital or physical) and try it out. Although it's not required, I recommend picking a game you've never heard of or know very little about (if you have one)! once you've tried it out, post what game you played here in this thread and let us know what you thought about it. You have until 11:59PM EST on 1/1/17 to post!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/264710/

Great challenge, I'll edit this once Steam is back up and I have a chance to play something. Always good to have an excuse to pull up a totally random unknown game and give it a shot :D

EDIT: Alright played a couple levels of Nova-111. From what I remember it came on a Humble Monthly. Knew nothing about it. Interesting little puzzle-ish game.

Not exactly random, but it's something I haven't played yet so this was as good excuse as any!

Pony Island: Knew nothing going into this other than "best played by going in completely blind." All I can say about the game is that I wholeheartedly agree that it should be played with zero advance knowledge. It was a lot of fun and I literally laughed out loud a number of times from some of the cleverness within.

I'll have to go back and play some more though, I only found about half of the tickets and definitely missed some secret stuff. What a fun couple of hours though!

Going to give this one a whirl:

http://www.completionator.com/Game/Details/16011

It's a humble bundle special I believe.

EDIT:

Thoughts after about 45 minutes or so (first world beaten):

It's OK. There's nothing ground breaking or must see here. It's a run of the mill platformer whose sole differentiator is the fact that you're a T-Rex with rocket boosters on your feet. Gameplay is fun, just been done a million times over. If there was some sort of story or humorous elements that might have helped it out a bit. I'll probably leave it installed and play it here and there when I have 10 or 15 minutes to kill.

Through 'Random Steam Game Picker' I was able to pull a random game from my Steam Library that I have never launched.
That game is: Race The Sun
http://www.completionator.com/Collection/Details/590065

EDIT:

I think I have a feel for what the game is like though I only played it for 30 minutes.. This isn't a long time but for how repetitive the game is it felt like an eternity for me.

From what I can only assume, the game was released first as a flash game then got released on to mobile devices then it got ported to PC.
With all of the 'runner' type games out there Race The Sun felt like a new take on the genre. Instead of running side-scroller style you're set flying a solar powered ship towards the sun. At first your only task is to move left or right and survive as long as you can while dodging a ton of 3D shapes. Seems easy enough. Eventually you crash or your ship will run out of energy. At the 'death' screen you see your score and some missions that you can complete to unlock upgrades that will make your life much easier. I got my ship to level 8 out of 25 and decided to call it quits there.

What's nice is this game has a leaderboard that tracks daily scores globally and that whilst the map is the same on playthroughs it gets randomized every 24 hours.

How's the difficulty in JumpJet Rex? It looked like it'd be a tough one...despite having such "cute" graphics.

I thought Race the Sun was a pretty fun game, though I'm terrible at endless runners (not to mention flying games). It's a nice game in short bursts though.

I totally agree with you. I'm not too skilled at endless runners as well but with some practice I'm sure anyone could soar through the leaderboards.
I just get tilted after repeated deaths so that tends to make me just rage quit xD

JumpJet Rex definitely has the potential to get pretty tough - so far the levels I've run through haven't been too tough to simply get through, but trying to get 3/3 stars on each level is definitely a challenge.

EDIT

So... after playing a few more levels in the second world the difficulty has ramped up significantly. I anticipate it getting pretty damn tough.

Also just realized it has 4 player local co-op which nets this bonus points in my book.

This is the first games I have tried during the missions on the website and I must say that I had a lot of fun

Scrolled through and spotted Cosmic DJ. What? Played it a little while. If you ever liked playing on a sequencer, this game will entertain you at least for a few minutes. You are guided through the game by a computer voice that says things like "Sweet Jam" and "Rad". Your task is to rebuild his music collection by creating your own sequenced jams and restore music to the universe. There is even an album art generator where you can make awful 80's-style monstrosities to display with your totally tubular jams.

Maybe it's cheating for this one, but it came up in the "What Should I Play?" dealiebob and was the first one I hadn't heard of.

I got Double Dunk for the Atari 2600 as emulated by the Atari Vault on Steam.

It's kind of a mess. It's a 2 on 2 half court basketball game, but with only one button, it was hard to figure out how to shoot as opposed to pass, and when you did jump up to shoot, how to do so before you land and get called for traveling. The computer was constantly stealing the ball from me and getting baskets without having to clear the ball first. Lost the first game 24-0.

Probably would have had to read the manual a lot back in the day to get this one.

Wanted to play a racing game and a Steam friend recommended Riff Racer, a car racing game centered on music. You choose a song track either from your computer or from the songs provided and race against a ghost or by yourself to the beat of the chosen song.
I played a decent amount of songs from my computer, which were entertaining, but it's not something I would spend a whole lot of time playing, since there is a lack of diversity in the tracks, even with very different songs. It's hard to see the effect the song has on the game besides the speed, which isn't only effected by song, but also boosts and obstacles you hit. It's one of those games that throws you in without explaining or giving some sort of tutorial or instructions. Some of the songs I chose from my music library were never played before by anyone else so I earned points for that, but had no score to beat, and I didn't want to listen to the same song over and over again.
The game isn't really bad, but not really that good either.

Just loaded up Critical Mass for the first time. Got it years ago, but it never ran correctly so I forgot about it. Now that I have finally played it, I am ready to forget about it again.

SuperChief I just played Cosmic DJ for the past hour. I beat it. Just beat it, beat it, beat it, beat it. No one wants to be defeated.
I showed 'em how funky and strong was my fight!

Last night I rung in the new year with an adventurous dive into short indie games from my backlog. Two highlights stuck out from either end of the spectrum.

The bad first: Rituals. http://store.steampowered.com/app/359190/

A short adventure game with a basic polygonal artstyle. It has a mouse driven click the arrows navigation system and simple puzzles. I have no idea what was supposed to be going on. What truly makes it stand out is that it has the distinction of being the first point-and-click adventure game to make me feel physically ill. I've gotten motion sickness from some FPSs in the past, notably Far Cry 2 and old Doom style games, but this was a first for the point and click genre. So yea, didn't get too far.

The good was Another Perspective. http://store.steampowered.com/app/305920/

This indie puzzle-platformer centers around a mechanic of switching between "minds" that see the level different and using the different perspectives and multiple iterations of the main character to collect keys and navigate to doors. The controls were precise and comfortable. The story was told in speech text between the minds as you're playing and was suitably entertaining. The puzzles got decently challenging and the main campaign was short enough to not outstay its welcome. Overall, I quite enjoyed my time with it.

And the winner is....

@Soulintha

Feel free to add me as a friend on Steam and I can send your gift directly, otherwise I can email it to you.

Thanks for the participation everyone and let's have a great 2017 here on Completionator!

Thanks! I am looking forward to playing.
Happy New Year!

Woo hoo! Starting the new year off right, thanks!
Sent a Steam friend request :D