Those precious pennies you need for food and soap? There are better destinies for them. Specifically, this slew of flashing-pixel-based bargains compiled for us by Savygamer’s patriarch of the piggybank, LewieP. Management, army-smashing and face-pounding take the spotlight this week…
Kudos 2 – £5.99/€5.99/$5.99
RPS comment-regular Cliffski’s life-simulation strategy game. You get to manage the life of a single character from the age of 20 to 30. Think The Sims, but turn based, and a bit more like a proper game. It has low system requirements, a pretty cool 2D interface, and NO DRM WHATSOEVER AT ALL. Demo here.
Football Manager 2009 – £14.99/€30/$14.99 (Wow, Europe are really getting screwed there)
A successful combination of both the tedium of football and the monotony of databases. A hell of a lot of people like this game – in fact, for a large number of my mates this is the only game worth playing. It apparently has “Uniloc 5 machine activation limit”, bad Sega! When was the last time you remember a game having “3D!” written on the box as a selling point? Well, it is a weekend special, and a fairly good price, I guess. Demo here.
Immortal Defense – £3.50/$4.99 (Sorry Euro folk, it seems Direct2Drive do not want your money)
Pretty indie Tower Defence game. It has bright lights, a story, an enjoyable soundtrack, and a level editor. If you’ve played Defense Grid to death, maybe give this a go next.
Stronghold Bundle – £8.11/€9.17/$11.98
Never played these castle-centric strategy/management games, but they are apparently good, old and cheap, which works for me. Also, they’ve been known to outsell GTA games in germany. FACT.
Deal of the week
Zeno Clash – £6.95/$9.95 (Sorry Euro folk, it seems Direct2Drive do not want your money)
I really hope this game plays as good as it looks. Although this is bought from Direct2Drive, they will give you a serial number for you to plug into Steam. Great for anyone (like me) who missed out on the Steam 50% off deal. It’s a first person shooter that looks nothing like any other first person shooters. It looks like Dr Seuss on a bad trip meets The Neverhood. With fish guns. I’ll be severely disappointed if it is all style and no substance. Trailer here and RPS coverage here. [We'll have exciting, opinion-based coverage of ZC within the next few days, by the way.]
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Er, actually nowadays Gametap wants 10$ a month for access to their entire catalog, so if they don’t have something else you want that’d be a terrible way to get Stronghold.
Bugger Gamersgate price for Kane & Lynch – only £3.95 @ Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000NG1KOG?tag=pa0a-21&camp=2902&creative=19466&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B000NG1KOG&adid=1W79MBHESD4EJ12ZJMFK&
Nice finds there chaps. I’ll throw one into the mix for you Foot-to-ball fans:
http://www.tescoentertainment.com/tesco/8525615.product
Championship Manager 2006 for £1.96 including P&P
@Mac
That is an Amazon marketplace seller, so you have to pay P&P on top of that (£1.85), and they only have 2 in stock.
Amazon themselves are selling it for £6.42, however.
Thanks for the praise of my game, guys. I this this is actually the first mention of it in this blog I’ve seen, which is nice since I’m a regular reader of it.
I’ve just been reading up on the PC version of Kane & Lynch – don’t buy it if you use a USB keyboard – it apparently freezes for 2 seconds every 4 … It’s a shame that reviewers don’t notice these things !!!
@Paul: Your game is amazingly addictive and fun. Once the double paths set in it slows down a little bit (around level 60, I think), but then picks right back up in a few levels! Anyway, my point is that you should be very proud and I found your game much more deserving of my money than most others out this year.
@Mac: That doesn’t sounds right. I’ve got a USB wireless keyboard here, and it worked perfectly with the game.
@Mac: No, it’s only certain keyboards. I have a USB Saitek Eclipse II, and yes, it freezes (for more like 0.5 second every 2 seconds, which makes it playable but not worth playing because it’s so annoying). But if I replace my keyboard with a Logitech USB keyboard I borrowed, or a cheapo Deal Extreme no-name USB mini keyboard (or just unplug my keyboard, but…), it runs just fine. I don’t even know if it’s all Saitek Eclipse IIs, or just some combination of my keyboard, and motherboard, and etc…
The Saitek Eclipse II isn’t really a very good keyboard though, so I’m no sure who to blame. It cost about the same as a Logitech G15, but has uneven backlighting, can’t register very many simultaneous key presses, and after less than a year several of the keys started failing. Not often enough to make me want to bother sending it in when it started, since it would always right itself after a couple of presses of the key in question. But right after the no-trouble newegg 1-year warranty ended, many of the keys now require me to go back and re-type them 3-4 times since they miss when I hit them (sorry if I missed any ‘u’s or ‘t’s in this comment, they tend to miss the most).
Football manager “deal” at half price (€22)?
Play.com is selling Football Manager 2009 at €19.50 without a discount…
@Paul Eres
Yes, I searched around a bit and found no previous mention of Immortal Defense on RPS. Perhaps that will be rectified!
Your game is a lot of fun, and does a great job of making the player emotionally involved, which is quite an achievement considering that it’s also very abstract. It is also another shining example of how effective a great soundtrack is. I’m actually not really a fan of the ‘tower defense’ genre, but your game tosses the concept on its head, and expands the urgency through a great story, turning it personal. It goes beyond mere ‘tower defense’ the way Braid is beyond ‘just a platformer’. I’m really glad I bought it, though I feel a little jerky that it was only the other day that I did so.