By RPS on May 2nd, 2009 at 11:59 am.
After an accidental week’s hiatus, our regular round-up of agreeably-priced videogames to while away a lazy weekend returns. As always, Savygamer‘s marvellous marquis of money-saving LewieP has his hand at the till. This week, a fair few modern classics rethink their pricetags…
Killing Floor – £11.24/€13.49/$14.99
The trailer up on Steam was enough to get my interest. Killing Floor is from the makers of a previous bargain bucket game, Red Orchestra. It certainly doesn’t look all that much like a traditional survival horror game to me, more like a “shootey fun” game, like Serious Sam takes a trip to silent hill. I’m surprised to see any coop horror games turn up on Steam to be honest, going directly up against Left 4 Dead is certainly brave. 25% off when you pre-purchase.
King’s Bounty: The Legend – £17.49/€21.99/$26.99
Not as cheap as it has been, it was £9.29 on GamersGate a while back, but this is still a great price. UK Gamers can get it for £11.99 delivered instead. Alec’s favourite game of last year. RPS Coverage here, and demo here.
Rise of the Triad – £4.01/€4.51/$5.99
Part of Good Old Games Apogee promotion. Use promo code “APOGEE” during checkout to get this price. This game started off life as a sequel to the original Wolfenstein 3D, but ended up becoming something completely different. Probably still worth a look today.
Beyond Good & Evil – £3.99/€4.99/$4.99
A wonderful action/adventure/puzzle/stealth/photo ‘em up game from Michel Ancel. You’ve still got time to play it now before the sequel comes out too. Probably the closest to The Legend of Zelda you’ll get on a PC, this games has a brilliant overworld, great characters and locations, interesting puzzles, and bucketloads of charm.
Deal of the Week
Left 4 Dead – £16.19/€17.99/$23.99
Not only is Valve’s coop zombie video game free to play until 5pm (GMT) on Saturday, it is also on special offer this weekend, with 40% off. Alec’s write up of the new survival mode can be read here. RPS Steam group here.
Very tempted to get Killing Floor as it’s made by Tripwire, the guys behind Red Orchestra, but I really wish they had a demo. :(
report
I bought King’s Bounty a week ago from game.co.uk for 12.5 pounds, and they delivered it from UK all the way to czech republic in two days (along with 3 other games).Funny thing is, game.co.uk just bought the biggest local games retailer, but if I was to bought it from our local game, I would pay twice as much.
report
@Neut:
Well, it’s not a demo of the game Tripwire is about to release, mind you, but to get a taste of what Killing Floor is like, you might try the original free UT2004 mod of the same name, which Tripwire’s upcoming release is a retail-ized remake of (they worked with the original mod team, similar to how Valve has reached out to mod teams in the past to develop their projects into commercial products):
http://www.moddb.com/mods/killing-floor
Again, you can’t form an opinion of the retail version based on this (no more than playing Narbacular Drop alone could allow one to form an opinion of Portal), but it will let you sample the idea.
report
Neut, you could just play the UT2k4 mod that it’s developed from. It’s not really made by Tripwire either, the mod team approached them to see if they’d take it on and make it retail – Tripwire turned around and told them they’d help, but wouldn’t just do all the work.
report
Cedge: The problem with that is that very few people are playing, and even then, you may have difficulty getting into a game. Not to mention, crappy documentation means you’re unlikely to have a fucking clue what’s going on.
report
Four quid for Beyond Good and Evil? For one of the best games of all time?
Fucking sold, isn’t it.
report
Thanks for the tips! I’m still mad at BG&E because it doesn’t play right with my 8800GTS without some tweaking, but that’s what (one of) my older boxes are for, right?
report
@Ging:
Actually, unless I’m mistaken, a lot of the core team from the mod are now employed by Tripwire.
@RabidZombie:
Well, I actually meant to mention the mods flaws, and say that, ya know, it’s better than nothing, for now.
@Meat Circus:
Not bad, but I think it was better when I got Beyond Good and Evil, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Far Cry, and IL-2 Sturmovik 1946 for $10 on Steam a couple weeks ago.
report
@Markoff Chaney
I had a few problems getting BG&E to run but the experience is truly worth the effort. There are a bunch of known issues with running the game on modern hardware but a google search will give you the answer to any of them. Common issues include the game running too fast on multicore cpus (solved by setting core affinity to 1), the water killing framerates (fixed by setting the water quality to lowest) and antialising causing some issue i can’t remember (again, fixed by disabling aa in the settings and forcing it with a tool like nhancer instead).
I’m on the fence about killing floor as well… It certainly sounds interesting but I do feel that it overlaps too much with left 4 dead for me to be instantly sold on it, despite the low price and pre-order discount. I do wish that devs would realize that while pre-order sales are nice, pre-release demos are even better, and combining the two will maximize both profit and exposure for their games.
report
Ahh what do you tempt me when I have no money…
report
If Beyond Good and Evil gives anyone trouble (getting it to run wise) – hard-disabling Anti-aliasing (even if it’s just for that one game) can solve it.
report
A poor week for bargins. Some great grabs on retail though. Gameplay has dawn of war 2 for 15, and a starwars best of pack for 9 with a fair few things.
report
Reinstalled BG&E the other day,had it since 2004/5 I think. Anyway, I’ve found that I get framerate stutter and lip-synch being outof time if I run the game directly. However, if I run “Beyond Good and Evil Settings” first and click the play button there, all the problems go away. Weird, but thought I’d mention it for anyone else.
report
There is also Mirror’s Edge for £14.98 delivered.
I played it on the 360, and absolutely loved it.
report
One thing to note about Killing Floor: As it’s Tripwire, they’ll be providing Valve-level patch and Steam support. You can expect free maps and “Invite to game” support.
report
damn that reminds me i still need to finish BG&E thanks for reminding me
report
Get to it! You’re banned from the interwebs until you’ve finished it! :D
report
Man. You didn’t big up Rise of the Triads enough. That game’s special, genuinely. Definite purchase.
report
Assassin’s Creed is $10 on Direct2Drive.
report
ah, Beyond good and evil, i remember that little gem i could never finish because a stupid bug got a key that was supposed to fall from the ceiling stuck in there and reloading old save game didnt help, maybe i should hit that again
it had a weird disney like yet interesting and refreshing story
report
@Yutt
I thought of including Assassin’s Creed actually, but it seems to only be on the USA site.
report
@JKjoker: If you still have the save games around, and it’s the key I’m thinking of, there are utilities whose sole purpose in life is correcting the absence of that key in the save game. If you don’t still have your save game, apparently this bug only exists if you use the 1.01 patch (which means GOG doesn’t provide the latest version, oddly enough, and I’d imagine GG and Steam don’t either).
report
its a key that falls from a chute in the ceiling after killing some robot thingies, but no i dont have the save game anymore, anyway if i go again after it ill restart
“apparently this bug only exists if you use the 1.01 patch”
i did patch it, does that mean that i should replay it without patching it ?
report
Thanks, I just pre-purchased Killing Floor. Even though I don’t know a whole lot about it, it looks like something I would like.
report
If you don’t own L4D yet, spending your crazy euro money equivalent of $24.99 is probably the best use of that money that has ever existed. Even if you don’t groove on the multiplayer (and if you don’t, you’re dead inside), it’s absolutely worth $25 for the single-player and the cheat codes in console.
report
@JKjoker: I don’t know/remember what the patch does — it’s possible it’s required to allow you to change some of the graphics options necessary to getting BG&E running on modern PCs. I last played it back when then-modern hardware/drivers ran it just fine, but I also used the patch just because it existed (I didn’t know about the central hall key problem until it happened to me).
But there are tools available to fix the key drop bug, and I think BGAEFix might be the one I used, though that BGAE101Patch sounds like it might be even better (you might not have to save the game, quit, run the fixer, load back up, load the game, and now own the key). I’m pretty sure all the talking about “crashing” in the central hall is a euphemism to avoid spoilers, and is actually referring to the exact central hall key drop problem.
@LewieP: ROTT is actually $4.49 for us Americans. $5.99 is the regular, pre-coupon price. Also worth pointing out to my fellow Americans is that RPS-favourite Men of War is $19.90 at GoGamer, which is pretty cheap.
report
I just picked up King’s Bounty at this price, and what a great recommendation! It was 2am before I blinked!
@Derek K: I love Valve, but L4D is vastly overrated. It is a good, shallow, short game. Hardcore players can experience everything in the game in just a few weekends.
report
And if you’re one of those gamers who doesn’t mind going out of doors (unlike LewieP :P ) to a Physical Game Shop™, GAME has Mirror’s Edge on sale for £14.99. Still £4.99 more than I wanted to pay for it, but miles better than £34.99. And since I’ve wanted it since trying it on the 360-with-shitty-gamepad, I bought it. Runs very nicely on my 8800GT.
Make sure you get the official 1.0.1 patch; I also personally recommend the unofficial patch that disables the SecuROM crap.
I also second all the recommendations for Beyond Good & Evil. It’s a really great game, easily worth the $9.99 that GoG asks, so anything less than that is a steal!
report
@JKJoker: There is a utility available that fixes that precise bug. (I might remember wrong, by the way, but doesn’t the bug only occur on pirated copies? It’s possible I’m thinking of another bug in another game, of course, so apologies if that’s the case ;))
If anyone is tempted to buy BG&E btw, I’d encourage you to spend a two dollars more and get it on GoG, since they’ve got a fix for the audio sync bug that you get on some systems otherwise.
report
the audio sync bug (i.e. game/video running too fast for the audio stream) is fixed by setting core affinity to 1, as i mentioned above. the problem is also fixed by an automatic windows update for xp/vista that you can get from the windows update site. I don’t mean to bash on gog.com as i love their service but in this particular case, they have a pretty ugly hack to get the audio working in sync (it basically involves running a secondary process designed to use up cpu cycles).
report
I thought of including Assassin’s Creed actually, but it seems to only be on the USA site.
Are the current 25 to 50% off deals on GamersGate not available in the UK?
report
Another good deal that missed out on being in the bargain bucket because A) I have not played it, and B) I have heard some terrible things about it:
Two Worlds: Epic Edition – £3.99
Seems to be UK exclusive too.
@Francis L
Cheers for the heads up on that.
@VelvetFistIronGlove
I’ll have you know I left the house this very morning ;D
@bansama
Yeah, they are international deals, the BG&E one is from that offer. However, Ubisoft’s European pricing on GamersGate (and in general) seems to be pretty terrible on the whole, even with the current sale, a lot of their games are way cheaper at retail. Also, I don’t really like Assassin’s Creed.
report
How is that BG&E offer a deal, though? It’s always that price on Steam.
report
The GBP and the USD price for BG&E is a saving compared to the GBP/USD price for it on Steam. In Euros, it’s the same whether you get it from Steam or GamersGate.
report
jalf: well i was using a nocd crack, who the hell wants to have the cd in the drive ?
report
I just bought Beyond Good and Evil because I keep hearing awesome things about it and have been meaning to get it for ages (yes shock horror I haven’t actually played it yet) thanks for the tip.
report
Rise of the Triads was so freaking epic… I think I shall buy.
DOG mode here I come :D
report
L4D RPS server NOW!!!
report
I would buy Rise of the Triads but I still have my floppies and I put the files on my DS to play the homebrew version.
I already bought Killing floor can’t wait for that and the fact it’s still in the Steam best seller list means I should have plenty of people to play with.
report
nope, I first got that bug on my old singlecore system. So it’s not just that. And while GoG’s workaround isn’t the most elegant, I have yet to hear of any reports of it not working. It’s a supported fix, and GoG will look into it if it doesn’t work for you.
Setting core affinity isn’t guaranteed to fix the problem (like I said, it occurs on singlecore systems as well), and if it doesn’t, you have no one to complain to.
@JKjoker: Yeah, that *might* be what’s triggering it (I can’t remember, it’s been a few years since I ran into that bug, I just have a vague memory that it was related to pirated copies or no-cd cracks. If that’s the case, of course, buying it from GoG or other digital distribution services should solve the problem since they remove the cd checks entirely, but the bgaefix utilities should work too, without requiring you to buy the game again. ;)
report
I can’t believe I missed out on the Orange box for 6 quid.
I feel like a fool!
report
A few more bargs, although probably old news: Gamesplanet have the sublime Outrun 2006 for £4.88 europe-wide.
EDIT: I was about to mention the ea store (of all bloody places) had mirror’s edge and burnout paradise for €19.99 in europe, but it looks like that offer’s ended as of yesterday. Boo.
report
Setting core affinity isn’t guaranteed to fix the problem (like I said, it occurs on singlecore systems as well), and if it doesn’t, you have no one to complain to.
I guess it varies on a case by case basis then. It worked for me when i had the problem running the steam version I bought during the Ubisoft sale. Since then I reinstalled Windows XP all the way upto SP3 with all updates and the game runs fine without changing the CPU affinity. I believe the link to the Windows fix is – http://support.microsoft.com//kb/896256 – although I can’t confirm this is it (I just read it on the Steam forums).
report
I got the 4 games for €10 including Beyond good & evil. Really great game. And as has been noticed, it’s up for €5 at steam all the time.
I’ll think about getting Assassins creed for €10, looks like a fun game.
report
Yeah, core affinity was what I first tried for the lip-synch problem. Didn’t help. HOwever, seeing as my solution is if anything easier to follow, I can’t say I’ve found it a problem.
report
Cool. I haven’t heard of that one working before though. But sometimes, disabling hardware vertex processing in the settings applications solves the issue. Sometimes disabling AA does the trick.
report
Rock Paper Shotgun finally getting some where. The quote for kings bounty on steam is from here… anyway I still think i’ll wait for Kings bounty to be cheaper
report
Hmm, some nice deals here, it’s a shame I already own everything listed except Killing Floor, which I’m loathe to preorder without more information.
report
I played Killing Floor back in its mod days, and despite being a fan of the concept found it badly documented and painfully hostile to newcomers. I really hope they nail it with the new release, as there’s something about squaddies with SA-80s holding back the hordes that appeals to me. I suppose it’s like 28 days later syndrome, it really hits home more when they’re hiding from infected in corner shops and the like. Cautiously optimistic then.
report
Is RPS going to do a pre-release feature on Killing Floor? The Tripwire devs have mentioned (on the Steam forums) that they will not create a demo or even gameplay trailers before the release of the game. So, basically, gamers are dependent on gaming sites to get information about the game to decide whether to buy or not.
report
@Bigfoot_King: I just bought King’s Bounty at this price. It is definitely worth it. It’s a long game, and the game play is a nicely unique take on the action-RPG genre.
Was anyone else disappointed with Zeno Clash? For me, it was one of those games that, more than being awesome in itself, is a warmup for the sequel, which will be a zillion times better (see Diablo 1, or about a million other games). The setting, characters and the art were amazing, but the gameplay was clumsy.
report
@PaulMorel: uh, i thought Diablo 1 was pretty much self contained other than not “really” killing Diablo (the game wasn’t really about a story, they did that with D2, which i felt was a bad choice that took some of the randomy goodness out of it)
But yeah, i agree, way too many games are leaving waaaay too many lose ends for the “sequels” (aka the trilogy stiffy) that might never get done, is it that difficult to finish a story and then start a new one with the same character or side ones ?
I can understand episodic gaming doing it (i guessed that release method would end in stories that never get finished from the beginning), but full games are doing the same freaking thing, Mass effect had enough plot for about 3 pages in a novel but hey, its a “trilogy*
Even episodic games like the Sam&Max can do standalone episodes (with a few nods to old ones), publishers,devs : follow their example
report
A new deal if you’re interested: Stardock’s offering a buy one get one half off sale for Demigod as part of their “relaunch” efforts:
All people who have bought Demigod at retail or direct up [until] May 10th (and didn’t return the game obviously) will be getting a coupon that will let them purchase a second copy of Demigod for 50% off for a limited time as a way for us to show appreciation for this community that has put their faith and trust in us.
report
they should show appreciation for “the community” by releasing more content, i’ve played demos with more content than Demigod
report
In a somewhat suicidal move, I have to admit that Beyond Good and Evil isn’t doing it for me. I totally get where all the love is coming from, but since I’m expecting this masterpiece of sheer brilliance, a lot of the issues I’d have been prepared to suck up, such as the camera, controls and general appalling interface, are really bugging me, and my progress through the game is a slow crawl. I had far more fun playing Psychonauts on the keyboard than I’ve had playing BG&E with a controller.
report
@Janto: Yeah, it takes some getting used to on PC. The controls and interface are pretty weird. I got used to it after a while though. Out of curiosity, how far into the game are you?
report
Anyone notice that ‘Men of War’ is on major sale at D2D right now? I can’t buy it because I want to physically murder all World War II games, but after all the hype here I’m sure many would be interested by this!
report
Oddly enough, I recommend the same thing for BG&E and Psychonauts (and the first 3-D Prince of Persia too) – Pinnacle Game Profiler if you have a 360 controller. X-Padder works wonders too, but you have to make those yourself usually.
Also, thanks for the advice on getting it to run. This is the first time I’ve seen it not flicker since I played it on my Game Cube. Cheers!
report
BG&E is available through gog.com as well. and then you have it DRM free !!!!! just sayin……
report
Radiant says:
I can’t believe I missed out on the Orange box for 6 quid.
I feel like a fool!
May 2nd, 2009 at 5:49 pm
————————–
Me too………gutted Absolute bargain……..damn Ebay for emptying the coffers first!
Great deal but wasnt worth £50 unauthorised overdraft…Double damn you FirstDirect….lol
report
@jalf I’m somewhere in the Slaughterhouse, taking photographs.
report
yeah, i popped in to mention what matzerath already has. men of war (and cryostasis – which i’ve been curious about) are both half-off right now @ d2d.
i THINK the deal applies to whatever prices normally are in your region, but obviously cant be sure.
report